About

Karen Jansen is a professor and department head in management, innovation and entrepreneurship at Poole College of Business at NC State University. Her research broadly examines dynamic processes that evolve over time, including how person-environment fit evolves into misfit, and how to sustain engagement and energy over the course of strategic and transformational change. She is also interested in temporal dynamics, the impact of events, and social change. In addition to her active research agenda, Professor Jansen serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management and the Academy of Management Review, where she is currently guest editing a special issue on time in organizations. She has helped military, manufacturing, financial, and professional service organizations to successfully navigate strategic change and transformation. She has developed practical tools such as Momentum Mapping to help organizations manage change-related energy during transformational change, and FitID to identify individual motives for fitting in at work, thereby improving recruitment and reducing costly turnover. Her educational background includes a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science, a master's degree in education, and a Ph.D. in organizational change and strategic human resource management from Texas A&M University. Prior to her academic career, she spent nine years at IBM as a systems engineer.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Knowledge management
• Epistemology
• Management
• Public relations
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Library science
• Business
• Cognitive psychology
• Engineering ethics
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Pathways Through the Labyrinth: Narratives of Learned Resilience from Senior IT Women Leaders

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Theorizing Time in Management and Organizations

  Academy of Management Review · 2024 · 37 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Library science
  PublisherDOI

• The incongruity of misfit: A systematic literature review and research agenda

  Human Relations · 2023 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Knowledge management

  For decades, research on person–environment (P-E) fit has been a prevalent topic, emphasizing alignment between employees and the work environment and the accompanying positive consequences that flow from good fit. However, given the frequency of change and volatility experienced in organizations, it is far more likely that individuals, work groups, and organizations will sporadically experience misfit with various aspects of the environment. This recognition has led to steady growth in misfit research, but this literature lacks conceptual clarity, provides differing views on the interplay between fit and misfit, and as a result, insights on the consequences of misfit are fragmented. To address these shortcomings, we conducted a systematic review of the misfit literature and analyzed 106 scholarly articles published between 1981 and 2021. Our review offers three key contributions. First, we identify four distinct conceptualizations of misfit from the literature and then offer an integrative definition of misfit. Second, we provide a multi-level synthesis of the antecedents and outcomes of misfit that highlights the need for more cross-level and multi-level research. Third, we lay out a rich and detailed agenda of future research to further enhance our knowledge of misfit as a concept distinct from its P-E fit roots.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The incongruity of misfit: A systematic literature review and research agenda

  2023-12-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  For decades, research on person–environment (P-E) fit has been a prevalent topic, emphasizing alignment between employees and the work environment and the accompanying positive consequences that flow from good fit. However, given the frequency of change and volatility experienced in organizations, it is far more likely that individuals, work groups, and organizations will sporadically experience misfit with various aspects of the environment. This recognition has led to steady growth in misfit research, but this literature lacks conceptual clarity, provides differing views on the interplay between fit and misfit, and as a result, insights on the consequences of misfit are fragmented. To address these shortcomings, we conducted a systematic review of the misfit literature and analyzed 106 scholarly articles published between 1981 and 2021. Our review offers three key contributions. First, we identify four distinct conceptualizations of misfit from the literature and then offer an integrative definition of misfit. Second, we provide a multi-level synthesis of the antecedents and outcomes of misfit that highlights the need for more cross-level and multi-level research. Third, we lay out a rich and detailed agenda of future research to further enhance our knowledge of misfit as a concept distinct from its P-E fit roots.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Engagement or Depletion: The Relationship between Change and Work Engagement

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2021-07-26 · 1 citations

  article

  As organizations undertake significant transformation to compete and survive in today’s dynamic business environment, employees are required to engage their personal energies, not only in their day-to-day work but also in one or more change initiatives within their organization. Yet, we know little about how individuals devote energy to both the demands of change and to day-to-day work. Drawing on the job demands-resources model (JD-R), we develop and test theory that explains how employees direct and invest energy toward the pursuit of organizational change goals and how this engagement in change may affect subsequent engagement in work role activities. Results of a three-wave study conducted in a sample of 144 employees undergoing a significant organizational transformation revealed a positive relationship between work engagement and change engagement, which is particularly strong when employees experience the key resources of value congruence and perceived organizational support. Similarly, the relationship between change engagement and subsequent work engagement is also positive overall but strongest when employees are highly engaged in the change and highly involved in the transformation.

  PublisherDOI

• The Incongruity of Misfit: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2021-07-26

  articleSenior author

  For decades, person-environment fit research has been a prevalent and complex topic of research, as evidenced by multiple reviews. Inherent in person-environment fit theorizing is the notion that its absence, i.e. misfit, is accompanied by negative consequences. Until recently, this simplistic view of fit and misfit predominated, resulting in a shallow understanding of the mean-ing and experience of misfit. It was just over 10 years ago that researchers began to recognize misfit as a distinct construct worthy of closer attention. Still, this research is diverse, fragmented, and partly inconsistent. Thus, we offer a systematic review of existing misfit literature. We review and systematically analyze 94 scholarly articles published between 1981 and 2020. We synthesize the prevalent knowledge on misfit and outline promising research avenues following a multi-level approach. The results provide valuable insights for future research on misfit and offer three main contributions. First, we offer conceptual clarity for a fuzzy and eclectic phenomenon. Second, we provide a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms and dynamics of individual misfit episodes. Third, we contribute to an understanding of the diverse consequences of individual misfit. Based upon our results we provide an extensive research agenda.

  PublisherDOI

• Teaching-practice as a critical bridge for narrowing the research-practice gap

  Industrial Marketing Management · 2020 · 28 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The “Other” Time: A Review of the Subjective Experience of Time in Organizations

  Academy of Management Annals · 2020 · 186 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  Time—whether objective (“clock”) time or the subjective experience of time—is an essential concept for understanding how individuals, teams, and organizations evolve, grow, learn, and change. Yet most management research and literature reviews have typically emphasized objective time to the exclusion of subjective time. Our review focuses on this lesser studied “other” time, beginning with a review of how seminal articles on time have historically conceptualized subjective time. From this initial review, we offer an integrative and multilevel definition of subjective time as the experience of the past, present, and future, which occurs as individuals and collectives mentally travel through, perceive, and interpret time. Then, using this new definition to frame the remainder of the review, we examine the literature employing subjective time concepts to address three key questions: what is subjective time, how does it operate, and why does it matter? Our analysis provides new ways to understand subjective time and the important role it plays in organizational phenomena. We conclude by challenging management scholars to consider three priorities for future research: the fundamental relationship between subjective time and meaning, the unclear nature of event time, and the ways in which objective time is dependent upon subjective time.

  PublisherDOI

• Fitting as a temporal sensemaking process: Shifting trajectories and stable themes

  Human Relations · 2018-10-23 · 58 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This study identifies several mechanisms and the overall process by which individuals understand their evolving fit with their work environment. Prior person‒environment research has emphasized one-time quantitative assessments of fit, primarily as new entrants enter their work environment. In this study, we employed a qualitative approach to investigate the following question: how do long-tenured professionals make sense of fit over time? Three key findings emerged from the fit-related histories we collected. First, we discovered four prototypical fit trajectories, which were constructed from temporal comparisons with past, present and future fit, and employed to make momentary sense of events occurring in the work environment. Second, we identified two fit processes that played out over time: a slow accumulation journey and a sudden identity-threat journey. Third, we found that individuals’ set of fit experiences was explained by one of four enduring fit themes, explaining their pattern of fit experiences over time and their reaction to misfit. Most surprising was the significant turnover among our long-tenured participants in the year or so following our interviews. Our findings break from traditional thinking about fit as predicting outcomes in the moment, to fitting as both a journey and a retrospective and prospective process of sensemaking.

  PublisherDOI

• Co-creating Impactful Qualitative Change Research: A Dialogue Between Authors and Editors

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2018-07-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This panel symposium provides a peek into the processes that go on behind the scenes during the publication process. The authors and editors of three published papers reflect on how they worked together in a collaborative and co-creating manner to construct theoretically strong academic publications based on qualitative and inductive research on organizational change.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Manfred Kunde

  Masaryk University

  25 shared

• Matthias Jantzen

  25 shared

• Felice Fernau

  Karlsruhe University of Education

  25 shared

• M Kudlek

  Heidelberg (Poland)

  25 shared

• Paul B. Gastin

  La Trobe University

  25 shared

• Marco Margara

  Karlsruhe University of Education

  25 shared

• Manfred Droste

  25 shared

• Serge Grigorieff

  25 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Management

  Australian National University

• M.S., Management

  Henley Business School