Editorial: The new organizational landscape: technology, leadership, and the human experience at work

The landscape of organizational life is undergoing a transformation that is as profound, as it is rapid. Technologies that were, until recently, the stuff of speculative fiction (artificial intelligence AI capable of screening and selecting talent, immersive virtual environments that dissolve the walls of the classroom, algorithmic systems that reshape the contours of work itself) are no longer on the horizon. They are here, and their implications ripple outward through every domain of management scholarship. At the same time, the human questions that have always animated our field, including how leaders foster well-being, what makes work meaningful and why talented people stay or leave, have not been superseded by these technological developments. If anything, they have become more urgent.The challenge for management scholarship is to resist the temptation to address these forces in isolation. It is relatively straightforward to study AI as a technical phenomenon, or leadership as a behavioral one, or employee retention as a function of compensation and benefits. It is considerably more difficult, but considerably more important, to understand how these phenomena interact, how the introduction of a new technology reshapes the demands placed on leaders, how leadership quality shapes the experience of technological change for employees and how that experience in turn determines whether an organization can attract and retain the talent it needs to compete. The connective tissue between these phenomena is where the most important questions reside.This issue of the Organization Management Journal takes up the challenge of understanding these converging forces. The five articles assembled here do not, individually, set out to provide a grand unified theory of the contemporary workplace. Taken together, however, they map a terrain that management scholars and practitioners must learn to traverse: the terrain where technological adoption, leadership practice and the everyday human experience of work intersect. The editorial that follows offers a reading of these contributions in light of that broader landscape, beginning with a general discussion of the theme before turning to each article in sequence.It has become commonplace to observe that organizations operate in an era of unprecedented disruption. The observation is no less true for being familiar. What distinguishes the present moment is not the mere presence of change (organizations have always changed) but the simultaneity and interconnectedness of the forces at work. Digital transformation, the globalization of talent markets, the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, shifting employee expectations around purpose and flexibility and the accelerating capabilities of AI are not discrete challenges to be addressed in isolation (Yawson, 2020). They form a system of mutually reinforcing pressures that demand integrative thinking from scholars and practitioners alike.Consider, for instance, the relationship between technology and leadership. The introduction of AI-driven tools into human resource management does not merely pose a technical question about which tasks can be automated. It poses a leadership question: how should managers position themselves in relation to systems that can, in some cases, outperform human judgment on narrow tasks while lacking the contextual sensitivity, ethical reasoning and relational capacity that effective management requires? Similarly, the rise of hybrid and remote work arrangements does not merely pose a logistical question about scheduling and communication platforms. It raises questions about the nature of organizational community and the capacity of leaders to sustain employee well-being when the traditional structures of co-located work have been loosened or dissolved.The same interconnectedness applies to the relationship between organizational climate and individual behavior. When organizations invest in creating climates that foster psychological safety, meaningfulness and innovation, they do not merely improve discrete performance metrics. They create the conditions under which talented knowledge workers choose to remain, under which innovative behaviors emerge spontaneously rather than being extracted through coercion, and under which the introduction of new technologies is experienced as an opportunity rather than a threat. The articles in this issue, read together, illuminate these connections.A further dimension of the contemporary landscape deserves emphasis: the global character of organizational challenges. The management problems facing a university in the USA experimenting with immersive virtual reality, a manufacturing firm in Thailand adapting to hybrid work arrangements and a multinational corporation managing human resources across national boundaries are, at one level, quite different. At another level, they share a common structure. In each case, leaders must balance the imperative to innovate with the imperative to attend to the well-being and development of the people who make innovation possible. In each case, the local context shapes but does not determine the range of viable responses. The articles in this issue, drawn from diverse empirical and conceptual settings, reflect this productive tension between the universal and the particular.We open this issue with Theodorsson & Dosanjh (2026) systematic review, “Augmentative or Autonomous? Reframing Artificial Intelligence in Talent Management through a Systematic Review.” The contribution of this article lies not merely in its synthesis of a rapidly growing literature but in the conceptual reframing it proposes. Rather than treating AI as a monolithic force that either assists or replaces human decision-making in talent management, Theodorsson & Dosanjh (2026) offer a spectrum, ranging from augmentative applications, in which AI supports and extends human judgment, to autonomous applications, in which AI operates with minimal human oversight. This spectrum is analytically productive because it resists the temptation to reduce the question of AI in talent management to a binary: human versus machine.The implications of this reframing are considerable. If AI’s role in talent management is best understood as a spectrum, then the critical managerial questions are not whether to adopt AI but where on the spectrum any given application should sit, and how that positioning should evolve over time as the technology matures and as organizational learning accumulates. The review reveals that much of the existing literature clusters at the augmentative end of the spectrum, exploring how AI can improve the efficiency and accuracy of tasks such as résumé screening, candidate matching and performance prediction. Less attention has been paid to the autonomous end, where AI might, for example, make hiring decisions or allocate developmental opportunities with little or no human intervention. Theodorsson & Dosanjh (2026) rightly note that this gap is not merely an empirical lacuna but a normative one: the question of how much autonomy to grant AI in decisions that profoundly affect people’s careers and livelihoods is ultimately a question about organizational values and ethical commitments, not merely about technical capability.The article also highlights the importance of trust, both employee trust in AI-driven systems and managerial trust in the outputs those systems produce. As Glikson & Woolley (2020) demonstrated, the success of integrating AI into organizations critically depends on workers’ trust in AI technology, which is shaped by factors such as transparency, reliability and the system’s perceived intelligence. This resonates with a broader theme in this issue: the recognition that organizational phenomena cannot be understood through purely structural or technological lenses but must attend to the relational and psychological dynamics that mediate between systems and outcomes.Kucinski et al. (2026) continue the theme of technology as a transformative force with their conceptual paper, “A New Frontier for Higher Education: Exploring the Metaversity and Immersive Virtual Reality for Online Education.” If Theodorsson & Dosanjh (2026) explore how AI is reshaping talent management, Kucinski et al. (2026) explore how immersive virtual reality may reshape the institutional foundations of talent development itself.The concept of metaversity, a university-level educational environment built within immersive virtual reality, is ambitious, and the authors do not shy away from its scale. Their paper charts the technological, pedagogical and organizational dimensions of creating educational experiences that go beyond the flat, asynchronous modalities that came to dominate online education during and after the pandemic. The argument is not merely that virtual reality offers a more engaging medium for content delivery, but that immersion fundamentally alters the learning process by enabling embodied interaction, spatial cognition and collaborative presence in ways that conventional online platforms cannot replicate.For readers of the Organization Management Journal, the significance of this paper extends beyond its immediate contribution to educational technology. The metaversity concept raises questions that are central to organizational theory and design. How should educational institutions restructure themselves to support immersive modalities? What new competencies do instructors need, and how should they be developed? How does the shift from physical to virtual presence affect the social and relational dynamics that underpin effective learning communities? These are questions of organizational architecture, human capital development and culture, and they are questions that management scholars are well-positioned to address. By introducing the metaversity concept to the OMJ readership, Kucinski and colleagues open a conversation that we expect to develop in future issues as immersive technologies mature and their organizational implications become clearer.From the technological frontier, we turn to the human center of organizational life: leadership and employee well-being. Suengkamolpisut & Singhatong (2025) research article, “Leading Across Boundaries: Adaptive Leadership and Employee Well-Being in Thailand’s Hybrid Workplace,” offers an empirically grounded account of how leaders in one national context are responding to the challenges of hybrid work. Adaptive leadership is a framework that equips people to confront complex, systemic problems by cultivating innovation and adaptive capacity, with particular attention to the diagnostic, emotional and collectively shared dimensions of the leadership process (Werner & Yawson, 2025). It is precisely these dimensions that Suengkamolpisut & Singhatong (2025) bring into empirical focus.The hybrid workplace, which became ubiquitous during the pandemic and has persisted in various forms since, poses distinctive leadership challenges. When employees are distributed across physical and virtual spaces, the informal mechanisms through which leaders have traditionally built trust, communicated expectations and monitored well-being (hallway conversations, body language and the ambient social life of the office) are attenuated or absent. Suengkamolpisut & Singhatong (2025) draw on the concept of adaptive leadership to argue that effective leadership in hybrid settings requires a willingness to move beyond established routines and experiment with new ways to connect with, support and guide employees.The Thai context is significant here. Much of the literature on hybrid work and remote leadership has been produced in North American and European settings, and the implicit assumptions of that literature, about individualism, communication norms, hierarchical expectations and the role of the organization in employees’ lives, do not necessarily transfer to other cultural contexts. By situating their study in Thailand, Suengkamolpisut & Singhatong (2025) enrich the conversation about adaptive leadership with a perspective that foregrounds the relational, collectivist and hierarchically sensitive dimensions of the leader-employee relationship. Their findings suggest that adaptive leadership is not merely a matter of individual flexibility but of culturally attuned responsiveness, that is, a capacity to read and respond to the specific needs and expectations of employees in a given social and organizational context.The article’s focus on well-being is also important. In the broader conversation about hybrid work, much of the attention has focused on productivity, coordination, and performance. Suengkamolpisut & Singhatong (2025) remind us that the ultimate test of any work arrangement is its effect on the people who live within it. A hybrid model that optimizes scheduling efficiency but erodes employee well-being is, by any meaningful measure, a failure.Singh et al.’s (2026) research article, “Innovative Work Behaviors: Role of Climate, Meaningfulness, and Employee Status,” shifts the focus from leadership to the organizational conditions that enable or constrain individual innovation. The article examines how organizational climate, the experience of meaningful work and employee status interact to shape innovative work behaviors. In doing so, it builds on a rich tradition of research linking work environment to creative output, most notably Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron (1996) foundational work, which demonstrated that perceived encouragement, autonomy and resource availability within the organizational environment are among the strongest predictors of creative performance.The conceptual architecture of this article is noteworthy. Rather than treating innovation as a function of individual traits or isolated organizational policies, Singh, Solansky, Stringer, & Singh (2026) model it as an emergent property of the interaction between contextual factors (climate and meaningfulness) and positional factors (employee status). This multilevel approach yields insights that simpler models would miss. For example, the finding that the relationship between organizational climate and innovative behavior is mediated by the experience of meaningfulness suggests that it is not enough for organizations to declare themselves “innovative” or to implement formal innovation programs. What matters is whether employees experience their work as meaningful within the broader organizational climate, whether they feel that their contributions matter, that the problems they are asked to solve are worth solving and that the organizational environment supports creative risk-taking rather than punishing it.The inclusion of employee status as a variable adds a further layer of nuance. Innovation does not occur on a level playing field. Employees’ position within the organizational hierarchy, including their access to resources, information and decision-making authority, shapes both their capacity and their motivation to engage in innovative behaviors. By attending to status differences, Singh et al. (2026) connect the micro-level psychology of meaningful work to the meso-level structures of organizational power and inequality, a connection that is too often overlooked in innovation research.The article’s contribution is clear: the organizations that will thrive in an era of technological and environmental turbulence are not those that merely invest in innovation as a strategic priority, but those that create the day-to-day conditions (climatic, relational and structural) under which innovation becomes a natural expression of engaged, meaningful work.Joo, Xu, Forrest, & Solano (2026) research article, “Staying Power: Factors Influencing Knowledge Worker Retention,” completes the arc of this issue by addressing a question that is both perennial and newly urgent: why do talented knowledge workers stay with their organizations, and what can leaders do to retain them? As Hom, Lee, Shaw, & Hausknecht (2017) observed in their sweeping centennial review of turnover research, scholarly interest has increasingly shifted from understanding why employees leave to understanding why they stay, a reorientation that places constructs such as job embeddedness, organizational commitment and person-organization fit at the center of the conversation.The urgency of this question has intensified in recent years. The post-pandemic labor market has been characterized by historically high rates of voluntary turnover, intensified competition for specialized talent and shifting employee expectations around flexibility, purpose and career development. Knowledge workers, whose primary contribution is the creation, application and communication of specialized knowledge, are particularly mobile, and the costs of their departure are particularly high. The loss of a knowledge worker represents not only the loss of an individual’s productive capacity but the loss of organizational memory, relational capital and often of the tacit knowledge that cannot be codified and transferred.Joo et al. (2026) identify a constellation of factors that influence knowledge worker retention, spanning individual, relational and organizational levels. Their findings underscore the importance of person-organization fit, perceived organizational support and developmental opportunities, all factors that connect directly to the themes explored elsewhere in this issue. A knowledge worker who experiences organizational climate as supportive of innovation, who finds their work meaningful and who is led by a leader capable of adapting to their needs is, all else being equal, a knowledge worker who stays. A knowledge worker whose experience is characterized by misalignment between their values and the organization’s practices, by a lack of developmental investment or by leadership that is rigid and inattentive to their well-being is already, psychologically if not yet physically, on the way out the door. The practical implications of this research are significant.In a competitive talent market, retention is not merely a human resource function but a strategic imperative, and the levers of retention (organizational culture, leadership quality, meaningful work and developmental investment) are the same levers that drive innovation, performance and organizational resilience.The five articles in this issue, taken individually, make substantial contributions to their respective literatures. Taken together, they issue a collective challenge to management scholars: to develop more integrative frameworks capable of connecting the technological, the relational and the experiential dimensions of organizational life.The integrative challenge is not merely academic. Practitioners in the contemporary organizational landscape do not experience technology, leadership and employee experience as separate domains. A chief human resource officer evaluating an AI-driven talent management platform is simultaneously making decisions about leadership development, organizational culture, employee well-being and retention. A university administrator exploring immersive virtual reality for online education is simultaneously confronting questions about faculty development, institutional identity and the student experience. The compartmentalization of these concerns into separate research streams, while analytically useful, risks producing knowledge that is insufficiently connected to the integrative character of managerial practice.We do not, of course, suggest that every study should attempt to address every dimension of this landscape. Focused, rigorous work on specific of the by the articles in this issue, the of our field. What we suggest is that the editorial and architecture of Organization Management Journal can make readers to the and among that be read in isolation. 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