Interorganizational Spillover: A Review and a Proposal for Future Research

Interorganizational spillover refers to the unintended impact of a focal organization’s event on the perceptions and decisions of peer organizations and their stakeholders. Research on interorganizational spillover has escalated in recent years when the academic community has drawn upon different theoretical perspectives and assumptions to understand (a) the types of events that can trigger interorganizational spillover, (b) the content of interorganizational spillover, and (c) the consequences of interorganizational spillover. Although scholars from different disciplines have generated a patchwork of studies that are insightful independently, we have not yet developed a comprehensive understanding into interorganizational spillover. Therefore, we systematically review and synthesize findings from leading business journals over the past three decades with a view toward identifying what we know and what we need to know about interorganizational spillover.