The Oxford Handbook of Uncertainty Management in Work Organizations

Uncertainty is a defining feature of organizational and human experience. The COVID-19 pandemic generated uncertainty on a global scale, while a decade earlier the global financial crisis increased uncertainty for people and markets across the world. In The Oxford Handbook of Uncertainty Management in Work Organizations, leading researchers in their respective research domains, ranging from creativity to strategy management, provide a comprehensive overview of the role of uncertainty in work organizations and examine how organizations, teams, and individuals approach and manage uncertainty. To date, uncertainty has primarily been studied as a powerful external force, driving organizational actors to adapt. The handbook extends this view by highlighting a more generative role of uncertainty, where organizational actors may even deliberately create uncertainty to spur learning and innovation. The chapters present new insights on the role of uncertainty in organizations and discusses topics such as the neuroscience of decision-making, workplace uncertainty and employee proactivity, the implications of uncertainty for fairness, uncertainty in human-AI interaction, and uncertainty in safety management. This handbook will help to answer pressing questions on how individuals, decision makers in organizations, and policy makers can confront and even take advantage of uncertainty.