Synthesize
Bring together relevant knowledge from research traditions that examine related mechanisms at different levels of analysis.
Research agenda · Relational Management
Research with discipline.
What does established research support, how does Relational Management interpret it, and what still needs to be investigated?
Knowledge statusRelational Management is a developing, research-informed perspective. It has not yet been empirically validated as an integrated framework. This page distinguishes established knowledge from interpretation, working propositions, and future research directions.
01
A research agenda, not a finished answer.
The purpose of this work is not to assemble supportive quotations around a predetermined conclusion. It is to examine whether, how, and under what conditions relationships contribute to organisational capability, responsible action, and competitive advantage.
Distinguish
Separate what established research supports from how Relational Management interprets and connects that knowledge.
Specify
Translate broad relational claims into constructs, mechanisms, boundary conditions, and propositions that can be examined critically.
Investigate
Develop research designs capable of examining potential value, alternative explanations, and relational liabilities across different organisational settings.
02
Established research informs the inquiry.
Relational Management does not reproduce one existing theory under a new name. It asks whether insights from several bodies of research can be connected into a coherent and testable account of relational value.
Resources, relationships, and renewal
Resource-Based View, relational view, and dynamic capabilities provide concepts for examining value, complementarity, coordination, imitation, adaptation, and renewal.
Barney, 1991 · Dyer and Singh, 1998 · Teece, 2007
Does not establish: that relationships generally create advantage or that Relational Management explains performance better than alternative perspectives.
From distributed expertise to coordinated action
Research on knowledge integration, organisational learning, social capital, and psychological safety helps explain how knowledge may be surfaced, challenged, combined, retained, and applied.
Grant, 1996 · March, 1991 · Edmondson, 1999
Does not establish: one universal set of relational conditions that produces learning across teams, organisations, and human-AI work systems.
The social organisation of economic action
Trust research, relational contracting, stakeholder theory, embeddedness, and relational sociology examine expectations, dependence, power, repeated interaction, and formal and informal governance.
Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, 1995 · Granovetter, 1985
Does not establish: that stronger, closer, or denser relationships are always preferable.
Technology changes relationships too
Research on automation, augmentation, appropriate reliance, hybrid teamwork, and responsible AI raises questions about task allocation, authority, learning, oversight, and accountability.
Lee and See, 2004 · Seeber et al., 2020 · Raisch and Krakowski, 2021
Does not establish: a universal model of effective human-AI collaboration or automatic performance gains from introducing AI.
03
What the literature supports, and what remains open.
Existing research provides credible foundations for inquiry. It does not yet validate Relational Management as an integrated framework or a universal account of competitive advantage.
| Research area | Established research | Relational Management interpretation | What remains open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strategic resources and capabilities | Resources and capabilities may contribute to sustained advantage when they are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate or substitute. Barney, 1991 | Some relational resources may meet these conditions because they develop through history, mutual adjustment, shared experience, and context-specific routines. | How should relational resources be defined, measured, and compared with technological, structural, human, or market-based sources of advantage? |
| Interorganisational value | Interorganisational research identifies relation-specific assets, knowledge-sharing routines, complementary resources, and governance as potential sources of jointly created value. Dyer and Singh, 1998 | The relevant unit of strategic analysis may sometimes be a relationship, partnership, network, or ecosystem rather than an isolated organisation. | How is jointly created value generated, distributed, protected, renewed, or appropriated by different participants? |
| Knowledge, trust, and learning | Research examines how knowledge integration and social capital support knowledge creation and exchange. Team-level research also associates psychological safety with interpersonal risk-taking and learning behaviour. Grant, 1996 · Edmondson, 1999 | Relational Management interprets trust and psychological safety as potentially supportive of learning when combined with evidence, challenge, proportionate verification, and clear governance. | When does trust become excessive, misplaced, exclusionary, or resistant to corrective information? |
| Human-AI work systems | Human-AI research examines automation and augmentation, appropriate reliance, task allocation, hybrid teamwork, and the governance of trustworthy AI. Lee and See, 2004 · Tabassi, 2023 | The organisational value of AI may depend partly on the relationships, work practices, and governance arrangements into which a system is introduced. | Which configurations improve decisions and learning over time, and which produce deskilling, overreliance, exclusion, or blurred responsibility? |
The literature supports investigating relational mechanisms. It does not remove the need to define constructs, compare explanations, examine boundary conditions, and test the integrated framework.
04
Questions before conclusions.
The research agenda begins with questions, not finished answers. Each asks what relationships enable, for whom, under what conditions, at which level of analysis, and at what cost.
Capability formation
How do relational resources become repeatable organisational capabilities rather than remaining dependent on particular individuals?
Strategic value
Under what conditions can relational resources contribute to differentiated and sustained value, and how can that contribution be identified and measured?
Knowledge and learning
Which relational conditions enable knowledge to be surfaced, challenged, combined, retained, and translated into coordinated action?
Human-AI collaboration
How does AI change coordination, professional judgement, learning, decision rights, and accountability within organisations?
Distribution and power
Who gains access, influence, recognition, and value through a relational arrangement? Who carries its risks or remains excluded?
Relational liabilities
When do trust, commitment, network closure, or interdependence create conformity, dependency, lock-in, vulnerability, or a reduced capacity to challenge?
05
Claims made explicit enough to be tested.
These propositions make the developing argument explicit enough to be criticized, refined, compared with alternative explanations, and investigated empirically.
RM-P01 · Foundational working proposition
Relational differentiation
As AI-enabled and other technological capabilities become more widely accessible, the relational conditions and organisational capabilities through which they are used may become increasingly important sources of differentiation and competitive advantage.
Requires: conceptual refinement, defined levels of analysis, explicit boundary conditions, comparison with alternative explanations, and empirical investigation.
From relational resource to capability
Relational resources are more likely to become organisational capabilities when their value-creating mechanisms are supported by repeatable practices and sustained beyond particular individuals.
Requires: construct definition, organisational-level operationalisation, and longitudinal investigation.
Knowledge activation
The contribution of distributed knowledge to decision quality and adaptation is likely to depend partly on conditions that enable people to surface, translate, challenge, combine, and apply it across boundaries.
Requires: measures of conditions, processes, outcomes, and plausible alternative explanations.
Governed trust
Trust is more likely to support sustainable cooperation when combined with proportionate verification, clear decision rights, credible conflict resolution, and accountability.
Requires: comparative research across different conditions of risk, dependence, and governance.
Relational AI integration
The organisational value of AI is likely to depend partly on how tasks, knowledge, judgement, authority, review, and accountability are arranged among responsible people.
Requires: field research in real work systems and investigation of learning effects over time.
Relational renewal
Relational advantage is more likely to persist when organisations can renew relationships, routines, and expectations as participants, technologies, and conditions change.
Requires: longitudinal evidence and clearer boundary conditions for renewal.
Relational liabilities
Mechanisms that support value creation can also create liabilities when they suppress challenge, concentrate power, exclude participants, or increase dependence and switching costs.
Requires: symmetrical measurement of potential value and harm, including distributional effects.
06
From conceptual development to empirical investigation.
The following directions describe work that still needs to be undertaken. They do not imply that the integrated framework has already been tested.
Construct clarity
Define relational resources, mechanisms, capabilities, governance, advantage, and liabilities with sufficient precision to distinguish them from adjacent concepts.
Levels and mechanisms
Specify how individual, dyadic, team, organisational, interorganisational, and ecosystem processes relate without treating them as interchangeable.
Measurement
Develop measures for relational conditions, activation processes, capabilities, outcomes, and liabilities using behavioural, perceptual, and organisational indicators.
Comparative investigation
Compare relational explanations with technological, structural, human capital, market, and institutional explanations across different settings.
Longitudinal investigation
Examine how relationships form, become embedded in routines, create or lose value, and respond to changes in participants, technologies, and context.
Human-AI field research
Investigate task allocation, review, disagreement, escalation, learning, accountability, and stakeholder effects in real human-AI work systems.
07
Work in development.
The research base and publication programme are being developed alongside the framework. Materials are identified according to their actual status and are not presented as completed studies or confirmed publications before their bibliographic details are available.
Framework development
Refining the conceptual architecture, constructs, mechanisms, levels of analysis, boundary conditions, and working propositions of Relational Management.
Literature synthesis
Developing a structured synthesis across strategic management, knowledge and learning, trust and governance, relational sociology, and human-AI collaboration.
Research and writing
Preparing articles, research notes, and educational materials that make the development process visible and open to critical engagement.
Explore Insights
08
Selected reference base.
This reference base identifies the works used to develop the arguments presented on this page. It is selective rather than exhaustive and will be expanded as the conceptual and empirical programme develops.
- Baker, G., Gibbons, R., & Murphy, K. J. (2002). Relational contracts and the theory of the firm. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(1), 39-84. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355302753399445
- Barney, J. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1), 99-120. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639101700108
- Dyer, J. H., & Singh, H. (1998). The relational view: Cooperative strategy and sources of interorganizational competitive advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(4), 660-679. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1998.1255632
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Emerson, R. M. (1962). Power-dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27(1), 31-41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089716
- Freeman, R. E. (2010). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1984). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139192675
- Gargiulo, M., & Benassi, M. (2000). Trapped in your own net? Network cohesion, structural holes, and the adaptation of social capital. Organisation Science, 11(2), 183-196. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.11.2.183.12514
- Grant, R. M. (1996). Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17(S2), 109-122. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250171110
- Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3), 481-510. https://doi.org/10.1086/228311
- Lee, J. D., & See, K. A. (2004). Trust in automation: Designing for appropriate reliance. Human Factors, 46(1), 50-80. https://doi.org/10.1518/hfes.46.1.50_30392
- March, J. G. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organisational learning. Organisation Science, 2(1), 71-87. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2.1.71
- Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organisational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709-734. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1995.9508080335
- Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organisational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1998.533225
- OECD. (2024). Recommendation of the Council on Artificial Intelligence (OECD/LEGAL/0449). Original recommendation adopted in 2019, amended in 2024. OECD Legal Instruments.
- Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.1
- Raisch, S., & Krakowski, S. (2021). Artificial intelligence and management: The automation-augmentation paradox. Academy of Management Review, 46(1), 192-210. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2018.0072
- Seeber, I., Bittner, E., Briggs, R. O., de Vreede, T., de Vreede, G.-J., Elkins, A., Maier, R., Merz, A. B., Oeste-Reiß, S., Randrup, N., Schwabe, G., & Söllner, M. (2020). Machines as teammates: A research agenda on AI in team collaboration. Information & Management, 57(2), Article 103174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2019.103174
- Tabassi, E. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) (NIST AI 100-1). National Institute of Standards and Technology. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.100-1
- Teece, D. J. (2007). Explicating dynamic capabilities: The nature and microfoundations of sustainable enterprise performance. Strategic Management Journal, 28(13), 1319-1350. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.640
NIST AI RMF 1.0 is cited as the 2023 publication. It should not be described as a final or permanently current standard because NIST is revising the framework.
Continue the inquiry
From a framework to a testable research agenda.
The next stage is to refine constructs, verify the literature base, develop appropriate measures, compare alternative explanations, and investigate relational mechanisms across different organisational and technological contexts.