WS
wei shi
State University of New York at Farmingdale
Farmingdale, United States
About this Research Topic
Manuscript Submission Deadline 14 May 2027
This Research Topic is currently accepting articles
Background
Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on knowledge workers whose contributions extend well beyond formal job descriptions. Research on organizational citizenship behavior (Chan & Lai, 2017; Dekas et al., 2013; Podsakoff et al., 2000, Wang 2015) has long demonstrated the importance of discretionary employee contributions to organizational effectiveness. In digitally connected and highly collaborative environments, employees routinely engage in extra-role behaviors such as knowledge sharing, mentoring, peer support, innovation advocacy, digital community stewardship, emotional labor, informal coordination, and collaborative problem-solving across organizational boundaries. Although these contributions are often voluntary, difficult to measure, and only partially recognized through formal evaluation systems, they remain critical to organizational resilience, learning, and collective performance.
These dynamics are particularly significant within contemporary digital and hybrid organizations, where communication, coordination, and collaboration occur across interconnected physical and virtual environments. Work is accomplished through communication platforms, distributed teams, flexible work arrangements, and networked organizational structures that rely heavily on ongoing interaction and knowledge exchange. As a result, communicative practices that foster trust, participation, collaboration, and mutual support have become increasingly important for organizational functioning.
Organizational communication scholarship has extensively examined leadership communication, sensemaking, employee voice, organizational culture, and digital workplace interaction. At the same time, research on communicative organizing and the communicative constitution of organizations has emphasized that organizations are produced and sustained through everyday communication processes. Yet comparatively little attention has been devoted to understanding extra-role behaviors as communicative practices that emerge through informal interactions, collaborative networks, and digital communication infrastructures.
As digital workplaces continue to evolve, communication technologies increasingly shape how employees coordinate work, share knowledge, and participate in organizational life. The growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI systems, and intelligent workplace technologies represent a further extension of these communication infrastructures. AI is becoming embedded within everyday organizational communication processes, influencing not only how employees access information and collaborate but also how work is allocated, monitored, evaluated, and rendered visible. Emerging forms of human–AI collaboration may generate new expectations for discretionary work, prompting, verification, emotional support, and coordination, raising important questions regarding labor, agency, inequality, professional autonomy, and recognition.
This Research Topic invite contributions that explore how employees contribute beyond formal role requirements in increasingly digital, networked, and AI-enabled organizational environments. We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, comparative and interdisciplinary contributions from organizational communication, management studies, organizational psychology, information systems, sociology of work, media studies, labor studies, human-computer interaction, and related fields.
Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:
• extra-role communication behaviors and organizational citizenship in digital, hybrid, and remote work environments
• knowledge sharing, expertise exchange, collaborative learning, and community-building in knowledge-intensive organizations
• informal communication networks, peer support, mentoring, and coordination practices beyond formal organizational structures
• leadership communication, organizational culture, trust, and the communicative conditions that enable discretionary participation
• employee voice, engagement, participation, and organizational commitment as communicative and relational processes
• recognition, visibility, and valuation of voluntary contributions and extra-role workplace behaviors
• invisible labor, emotional labor, care work, unpaid labor, and other under-recognized forms of organizational participation
• digital workplace communication and the role of collaboration platforms in shaping interaction, coordination, and engagement
• platform affordances, algorithmic infrastructures, and sociomaterial perspectives on communication and organizing
• human–AI collaboration and its implications for communication, coordination, and knowledge production in organizations
• generative AI tools, AI-enabled workflows, and emerging forms of discretionary labor (e.g., prompting, AI mediation, AI support work)
• algorithmic management, datafication of work, workplace surveillance, and implications for employee agency, autonomy, and inequality
• innovation, creativity, collective intelligence, and collaborative problem-solving in digitally transforming organizations.
• cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives in global, multinational, and diverse organizational contexts
• gendered, classed, racialized, and intersectional dimensions of extra-role communication, invisible labor, organizational participation, and AI-enabled work.
References
Chan, S. H. J. and Lai, H. Y. I. (2017) Understanding the link between communication satisfaction, perceived justice and organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Business Research, 70, pp. 214-223. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.08.017
Dekas, K. H., Bauer, T. N., Welle, B., Kurkoski, J. and Sullivan, S. (2013) Organizational citizenship behavior, version 2.0: A review and qualitative investigation of OCBs for knowledge workers at Google and beyond. Academy of Management Perspectives, 27(3), pp. 219-237. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2011.0097
Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Paine, J. B. and Bachrach, D. G. (2000) Organizational citizenship behaviors: A critical review of the theoretical and empirical literature and suggestions for future research. Journal of Management, 26(3), pp. 513-563. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/014920630002600307
Wang, Y. (2015) Examining organizational citizenship behavior of Japanese employees: A multidimensional analysis of the relationship to organizational commitment. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 26(4), pp. 425-444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2011.560882
Information and Instructions for Authors
Manuscript summaries
Manuscript summaries (Frontiers' name for abstracts) of up to 500 words will be considered until 4 December, 2026. Authors are encouraged to submit a manuscript summary before submitting a full manuscript.
Article types
This Research Topic accepts the following article types only: Original Research, Perspective, Systematic Review, Brief Research Report, Case Study
Article types and fees
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
- Brief Research Report
- Case Report
- Community Case Study
- Conceptual Analysis
- Data Report
- Editorial
- FAIR² Data
- General Commentary
- Hypothesis and Theory
Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.
Keywords: organizational communication, extra-role behaviors, knowledge work, digital workplace communication, human-AI collaboration, employee participation
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
