The Research Venation Analysis and Future Prospects of Organizational Slack

Sulu Zhu, Pengqun Gao (), Zhen Tang and Ming Tian
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Sulu Zhu: Business School, Hohai University, No. 8 Focheng West Road, Jiangning District, Nanjing 211100, China
Pengqun Gao: Business School, Hohai University, No. 8 Focheng West Road, Jiangning District, Nanjing 211100, China
Zhen Tang: Business School, Hohai University, No. 8 Focheng West Road, Jiangning District, Nanjing 211100, China
Ming Tian: Business School, Hohai University, No. 8 Focheng West Road, Jiangning District, Nanjing 211100, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 19, 1-23

Abstract: At present, the external environment is full of crises and challenges. The practice of firms deploying slack resources in advance and actively coping with external disturbances has achieved good effect. But, the theoretical research process of organizational slack is relatively slow compared with practice. Therefore, this paper comprehensively applied a bibliometric method and traditional literature review method to carry out scientific econometric analysis on 958 papers from the WoS database. We visualized the results as knowledge maps and analyzed papers with the help of the knowledge graph. The research venation and evolution trend of organizational slack are sorted out from a longitudinal perspective. On this basis, we put forward the future development direction of organizational slack in line with emerging phenomena, mainly including: ① Clarifying the sources of organizational slack; ② Two new dimensions of defensiveness slack and strategic slack are proposed from functional attributes; ③ Based on the perspective of active response, we expand the research depth of firms to construct organizational resilience through organization slack to adapt to uncertain environments. The purpose of this paper is to provide new ideas for firms to make plans before turbulence occurs in highly uncertain environments. It provides a useful reference for the future development of organizational slack research and promotes the formation of a virtuous cycle of mutual promotion between theory and practice.

Keywords: organizational slack; research venation; knowledge graph; Citespace (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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