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Dear colleagues,

It is with great excitement and pride that we publish this special issue to celebrate the 50 years of organizational behavior and decision making research in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP)! 

In the past half century, as a prominent journal that bridges behavioral research and organizational practice, OBHDP has published numerous highly influential papers that pioneered certain fields of studies and sparked great long-term interests from scholars who followed and continued these streams of research.  Examples of papers that have had a huge impact on the study of organizational behavior and human decision making include early papers on work motivation, leadership, and decision making, including Hackman and Oldham's (1976) job design model, Dansereau, Graen, and Haga's (1975) work on vertical dyad linkage approach to leadership, Staw's (1976) work on escalation of commitment, Locke's (1968) goal-setting theory, as well as later papers on individual behavior and group dynamics such as Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior, Argote and Ingram's (2000) work on knowledge transfer, Bandura's (1991) social cognitive theory of self-regulation, and Arkes and Blumer's work (1985) on the psychology of sunk cost. 

To celebrate OBHDP's fifty years of great contribution to advance our knowledge and understanding of organizational behavior and decision making, we invited distinguished scholars in the areas of organizational justice, leadership, negotiation, affect/emotion, motivation, diversity, job design, knowledge transfer, group dynamics, behavioral ethics, and regulatory focus to write review articles in these fields. Former editor-in-chief Daniel Ilgen wrote a brief review of the history of OBHDP, and twelve distinguished scholars contributed their great work to the special issue: Linda Argote (with Erin Fahrenkopf), Max Bazerman (with Ovul Sezer), Jeanne Brett (with Leigh Thompson), Joel Brockner (with Batia Wiesenfeld), Jennifer George (with Erik Dane), Tory Higgins (with James Cornwell), Ruth Kanfer (with Gilad Chen), Robert Lord (with Paola Gatti and Susanna Chui), Keith Murnighan (with Long Wang), Greg Oldham (with Yitzhak Fried), Daan van Knippenberg (with Julija Mell), and Frank Yates (with Stephanie de Oliveira). It is evident that this special issue represents a wonderful collection of some of the best works in the field, and is a feast for scholars in organizational behavior and decision making research.

The articles published in the special issue not only provide a brief summary of the most representative original articles written on a topic, the development following the initial ideas in expanding the scope or deepening the understanding of the topic, but also discuss the current state of research on the topic and the limitations or problems with the current research. More importantly, they discuss ways of addressing the limitations and point out future research directions. With the expertise and scholarship possessed by this group of highly achieved scholars, their judgments and insights may well predict where the research is advancing in the next decade or beyond.

We are grateful for the reviewers who provide thoughtful and constructive comments to help improve the papers. We are also grateful for the time and effort committed by the authors to revise their papers to reach very high standards. We are happy that we are able to get the special issue published timely to celebrate OBHDP's 50-year anniversary!  We hope that you will experience tremendous joy when reading these articles!

Finally, we would like to dedicate this special issue to Keith Murnighan, who was a long-term contributor to OBHDP, as an author, a reviewer, or an editorial board member. His departure is a huge loss to our field. We express our deepest gratitude to his dedication to OBHDP and strongly believe that he would feel great pride when opening this special issue in heaven.

Xiao-Ping Chen, Editor-in-Chief

with Associate Editors

Douglas Brown, Hui Liao, Bernard Nijstad, Madan Pillutla, Stefan Thau, Linn Van Dyne, and Chenbo Zhong