CORR – Center of Organizational Realities and Renewal
About CORR
CORR – Center of Organizational Realities and Renewal is an interdisciplinary research centre at Corvinus University of Budapest focusing on hidden dimensions of organizational phenomena that are important, consequential, yet often underexplored in mainstream management research.
CORR advances rigorous and internationally visible research at the frontiers of leadership, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship and organizational studies by examining how enterprises and organizational actors actually behave under recurring disruptions, institutional constraints and geopolitical instability, and by making visible the less visible dynamics through which organizations deteriorate, adapt, act responsibly, or renew.
The Centre examines how leaders, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and organizational life unfold under conditions of constraint, disruption, and moral ambiguity, where hidden tensions, moral processes, dark-side dynamics, and latent capacities for resilience may become visible. Rather than assuming rational, ethical, or resilient responses, the Centre investigates how often hidden forms of responsible alignment between actors, actions, and organizational contexts are constructed, contested, or break down when organizations confront crises, moral dilemmas, social taboos, and the dark sides of organizational life, including misconduct, ethical compromise, and failure.
The Centre prioritizes empirically grounded investigation of real organizational phenomena, including failure, misconduct, ethical compromise, taboo behaviors, and breakdowns in decision-making that emerge under pressure or remain difficult to recognize until pressure makes them consequential. These phenomena are examined through multiple theoretical lenses in management and organizational research, including strategic management, governance theory, and behavioral approaches.
CORR focuses on underexplored, controversial, and often avoided phenomena, including workplace taboos, extreme events, ethical misconduct, leadership failure, geopolitical disruption, and morally ambiguous decision-making. Many of these challenges remain poorly understood precisely because they are controversial, sensitive, or difficult to study systematically, or hidden beneath formal organizational structures, everyday routines, ownership arrangements, and taken-for-granted assumptions about resilience and responsibility.
Through systematic, phenomenon-driven research across organizational forms and contexts, CORR aims to generate empirically grounded, conceptually robust insights that contribute to a realistic understanding of how meaningful enterprises emerge, persist, erode, or renew themselves in complex, volatile environments.
Research Focus
CORR focuses on interdisciplinary, phenomenon-driven research on the hidden dimensions of organizational phenomena that are often difficult to capture through conventional management frameworks. By making these less visible dimensions of organizational phenomena researchable, CORR seeks to build a conceptual vocabulary and scholarly platform for studying how hidden organizational dynamics shape deterioration, responsibility, resilience, and renewal. Our research agenda connects strategic management, entrepreneurship, family business research, governance studies, organizational behaviour, and related social sciences to examine how organizations and their actors respond to disruption, constraint, uncertainty, and moral complexity.
This research stream examines how organizational actors respond when facing geopolitical shocks, institutional instability, technological disruption, and polycrisis, political pressures, regulatory ambiguity, legitimacy concerns, and other extreme situations. Emphasis is placed on how foresight, sensemaking, and judgment operate under pressure, including instances where leadership fails, becomes dysfunctional, or produces unintended consequences. The stream is especially interested in how extreme disruption makes hidden organizational processes, vulnerabilities, moral tensions, and latent qualities of resilience visible.
This research stream examines leaders, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and entrepreneurial and organizational responses in transitional, emerging, and resource-constrained contexts. Rather than treating resilience as an assumed capability, CORR studies how resilience is constructed, contested, or undermined through everyday practices, moral trade-offs, and strategic compromises. This stream also engages with capability-based perspectives by examining how organizations develop, lose, or fail to renew adaptive capacities under pressure, including capacities that remain hidden until disruption, constraint, or moral complexity brings them to the surface.
This research stream examines how artificial intelligence, digital technologies, and technological transformation reshape organizational realities beyond their intended and formally designed effects. Particular attention is given to hidden and unintended consequences of technology adoption, including informal and unauthorized AI use, shadow AI practices, changing knowledge flows, information asymmetries, governance gaps, and the reconfiguration of decision-making and organizational hierarchies. The stream investigates how technological change may simultaneously enable organizational renewal while creating new vulnerabilities, dependencies, ethical tensions, and forms of organizational opacity.
This research stream explores governance, ownership, and family enterprise by examining how organizations navigate governance instability, and institutional fragmentation. Attention is also given to owner-led and owner-controlled firms, family enterprises, long-horizon, legacy-driven enterprises, and ownership-linked governance bodies that shape strategic adaptability and dynamic capabilities. This stream focuses on how family presence, ownership arrangements, and governance structures may reveal or suppress hidden sources of resilience, responsibility, conflict, and renewal.
A key pillar of CORR focuses on ethically sensitive, controversial, and underexplored phenomena, including misconduct, moral disengagement, toxicity at work, dysfunctional communication, and taboo workplace behaviors. By examining how these dynamics emerge, persist, and are normalized, the Centre contributes to the definition of new constructs, the clarification of boundary conditions, and the advancement of theory on the moral realities of organizing. This stream makes visible dark-side dynamics that often remain hidden beneath formal roles, everyday routines, organizational silence, and taken-for-granted assumptions about ethical or responsible behaviour. Particular attention is also given to technology-enabled hidden behaviours, including unauthorized or undisclosed AI use, shadow AI practices, knowledge hiding, algorithmically mediated decision-making, and the emergence of new forms of organizational silence and information asymmetry.
Current Projects
Governance, Strategic Adaptability, and Dynamic Capabilities
CORR develops research on how ownership-linked governance bodies shape strategic adaptability and dynamic capabilities, and how this strategic adaptability affects a company’s performance in large, domestically embedded enterprises. The research focuses on how governance structures, ownership arrangements, and family or owner involvement influence the ways organizations sense, interpret, and respond to environmental change. Particular attention is given to the role of ownership competence and specific governance structures, such as family councils, family constitutions, and ownership forums in supporting or inhibiting strategic renewal within the family, ownership, and organizational system.
Dark Sides of Organizational and Family Business Life
This research stream explores organizational phenomena that are consequential but often avoided in mainstream management research because they are sensitive, morally complex, or difficult to study. It investigates misconduct, unethical or dysfunctional relationships and communication, taboo behaviours, failure, and breakdown in organizational and family business settings. The aim is to develop more precise concepts and theoretical explanations for how dark-side dynamics emerge, become normalized, and affect organizational functioning and renewal, especially when these dynamics remain hidden beneath formal structures, everyday routines, family relationships, organizational silence, and taken-for-granted assumptions about responsible conduct.
Organizational Response Under Disruption and Constraint
This project area studies how organizations and their actors respond to crises, institutional constraints, technological disruption, geopolitical shocks, extreme situations, and other forms of uncertainty. The aim of the project is to investigate how adaptive responses are constructed, contested, or undermined in real organizational contexts.
Hidden Knowledge Flows, Strategy Translation, and Organizational Hierarchies
This project examines how strategic knowledge, organizational priorities, and sustainability ambitions are transformed as they move across hierarchical levels and functional boundaries. The research focuses on hidden mechanisms of information loss, reinterpretation, selective translation, and knowledge asymmetry that may create gaps between strategic intent and organizational action. Particular attention is given to the role of middle managers, governance structures, artificial intelligence, and cross-functional interfaces in shaping how organizations interpret and implement strategic change.
Emerging Collaborations and Developing Research
CORR also serves as a platform for developing new international collaborations, grant proposals, working papers, doctoral projects, workshops, and special issue initiatives. These developing projects will be gradually integrated into the Centre’s research portfolio as they mature into funded research, conference papers, journal articles, or collaborative academic events.
Publications
Selected recent publications by core members of the Center reflecting CORR’s focus on underexplored, controversial and interdisciplinary topics in leadership, entrepreneurship and family business, strategic resilience, renewal, governance, moral ambiguity, and the less visible dynamics of organizational life.
- Anand, A., Wieszt, A., & Vajda, É. (2025). Decoding the dark sides of family business: a synthesis, and future research agenda. Review of Managerial Science, 1-44. (D1)
- Anand, A., Kohli, K., Branzei, O., Spivack, A. J., & Rottig, D. (2025). The Role of Mindfulness in Entrepreneurship: An Ethical Perspective Through the Phronesis framework. Journal of Business Ethics, 1-23. (D1, FT 50)
- Spivack, A. J., Anand, A., Örtenblad, A., Bögenhold, D., Theodoraki, C., & Branzei, O. (2025). From flashlight to spotlight: Illuminating gray shadows that shape entrepreneurship’s dark sides. Small Business Economics, 1-13. (D1)
- Xia, Q., Cheng, J., Jiang, C., Anand, A., & He, P. (2025). A causal configurational analysis of knowledge hiding from a conversational constraint perspective: evidence from China. Journal of Knowledge Management. (Q1)
- Šimáček, P., Král, P., Anand, A., & Golotovskiy, R. (2025). Reap what you sow: the impact of negative workplace gossip sent by supervisors on quiet quitting through psychological safety and quiescent silence. International Journal of Conflict Management, 1-26. (Q1)
- Aleksandrova, T., Anand, A., Pelsőci, B. L., & Ciszewska-Mlinarič, M. (2025). Global perspectives on strategic change: unpacking the managerial cognition. Review of International Business and Strategy, 35(2/3), 260-303. (Q2)
- He, P., Zhou, H., Jiang, C., Anand, A., & Zhou, Q. (2025). Responsible leadership and deceptive knowledge hiding: the mediating role of moral reflectiveness and the moderating role of leader-follower value congruence. Journal of Knowledge Management, 29(1), 49-71. (Q1)
- Anand, A., Sinitsyna, E., Takács, S., & Kazakov, S. (2025). Conversing in the shadow of echoes–a scale development and validation of the dark side of organizational internal communication. European Business Review, 37(1), 82-115. (Q1)
- Wieszt, A., Rónaföldi-Széll, G., Vajda, É., & Anand, A. (2025). From many to one – the impact of the establishment of a family constitution on the strategic planning of the company. Journal of Family Business Management. (D1)
- Anand, A., James, L., Varma, A., & Dhal, M. (2024). Age is just a number, but with a number comes prejudice: exploring workplace ageism and charting directions. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 32(10), 2436-2467. (Q1)
- Vajda, É., Wieszt, A., & Anand, A. (2024). Fair play in family firms: examining the perceived justice of performance management systems. Journal of Family Business Management, 14(6), 1065-1083. (D1)
- Sinitsyna, E., Anand, A., & Stocker, M. (2024). The role of internal communication on employee loyalty–a theoretical synthesis. Journal of Asia Business Studies, 18(2), 367-384.(Q1)
- Albuquerque Pai, A., Anand, A., Pazhoothundathil, N., & Ashok, L. (2024). Leadership perspectives on resilience capabilities for navigating disruption. Journal of Asia Business Studies, 18(1), 103-123. (Q1)
- Fu, P., Fu, G., Anand, A., Sinitsyna, E., & Dumazert, J. P. (2024). Linking proactive and reactive helping behaviour to knowledge hiding: the moral licencing perspective from China. Asia Pacific Business Review, 1-25. (Q1)
- Anand, A., Singh, S. K., Bowen, M., & Rangarajan, D. (2024). Strategic renewal during crises-A pragmatist proposition for multinational enterprises in a globalized world. Journal of International Management, 30(3), 101134. (D1)
- Sallay, V., Wieszt, A., Varga, S., & Martos, T. (2024). Balancing identity, construction, and rules: Family relationship negotiations during first-generation succession in family businesses. Journal of Business Research, 174, 114483. (D1)
People
Dr. Amitabh Anand, Professor
Dr. Attila Wieszt, Associate Professor
- Éva Vajda, Assistant Professor, Department of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Development, Institute of Strategy & Management
- Noémi Lőrincz, Assistant Lecturer, Department of Strategy and Management, Institute of Strategy & Management
- Attila Jámbor, Professor, Head of the Institute of Sustainable Development
- Miklós Rosta, Associate Professor, Institute of Economics
- Nuno Morgado, Research Professor, Corvinus Institute of Advanced Studies
- Nikolett Deutsch, Habilitated Associate Professor, Head of the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation
- Dr Helena Naffa, Associate Professor, Institute of Finance (Associate member)
Contacts
CORR welcomes inquiries related to international collaborative research projects, competitive grants, scholarly events, visiting scholar activities, doctoral engagement, and broader societal involvement.
Attila Wieszt – attila.wieszt@uni-corvinus.hu
General contact
Center of Organizational Realities and Renewal – CORR@uni-corvinus.hu, Room E109 (Corvinus University of Budapest, Fővám tér 8., Budapest, 1093