Researchers of organizational routines have begun to examine the “microfoundations” of routines, paying much closer attention to the role of individual participants in routines. These investigations have brought to light specific behaviors that introduce change or promote stability in routines, but because these behaviors are so specific to their context, it is difficult to find common threads between the papers. In this paper, we examine research focused on how employee behaviors bring about change and stability in routines and identify unifying characteristics. We find that, although the contexts of extant routines research vary wildly, employees in all of these settings enact “prescriber” or “performer” roles in the context of their focal routines and engage in proactive, adaptive, and proficient behaviors. By introducing a common language to describe employee behaviors in these various studies, we hope to build connections between them as a gateway to open new research opportunities.

Introduction

The behaviors of individual employees are the fundamental, pervasive acts of organizational life (Selznick, 1957). As Felin and Foss (2005) argue, “organizations are made up of individuals, and there is no organization without individuals.” Because of the importance of individuals in understanding organizational functioning, scholars examining organizational routines have increasingly focused on the role of employee behaviors in bringing change and stability to routines (Feldman, Pentland, D’Adderio, & Lazaric, 2016). Organizational routines, those “repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions carried out by multiple actors” (Feldman & Pentland, 2003: 95), are ubiquitous in organizations (Becker, 2008). Scholars who adopt a practice perspective of routines, in which the internal workings of routines are of keen interest, have conducted a number of case studies that describe examples of employee behaviors leading to change and stability in routines, in specific contexts (Canales, 2014; Feldman, 2000; Hong, Stanley Snell, & Mak, 2016; HowardGrenville, 2005; Pentland & Feldman, 2008; Sonenshein, 2016; Turner & Rindova, 2012). Studies like these have identified specific actions in specific contexts that affect the specific routine in which the actor was engaged.