Employee surveys are often used to support organizational development (OD), and particularly the follow-up process after surveys, including action planning, is important. Nevertheless, this process is oftentimes neglected in practice, and research on it is limited as well. In this article, we first define the employee survey follow-up process and differentiate it from other common feedback practices. Second, we develop a comprehensive conceptual framework that integrates the relevant variables of this process. Third, we describe the methods and results of a systematic review that synthesizes the literature on the follow-up process based on the conceptual framework with the purpose of discussing remaining research gaps. Overall, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the organizational and human factors that affect this process. This is useful for practitioners, as it provides guidance for the successful implementation of this human resource practice. For example, research suggests that it is important to enable managers as change agents and to provide them with sufficient resources.

This dissertation aims to apply the configurational perspective to organizational surveys. The studies included in this dissertation demonstrate that an increasingly popular configurational method can be applied to large dataset sizes similar to organizational surveys. This method is called fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Additionally, the incremental insights of fsQCA are illustrated by taking traditional methods into comparison. At the same time, the presented research addresses current methodological challenges to fsQCA in order to shed light on its application in the context of organizational surveys and to reduce reasons inhibiting researchers to use this method. The first study conceptualized and empirically investigated differently complex interplays of core manageable factors predicting and influencing high levels of affective commitment. Specifically, the results indicate that job design, organizational treatment, leadership, and recognition were consistently found to be essential in terms of incremental, relative, and configurational importance for the management of affective commitment. The second study aims to deepen the understanding of the formation of change-supportive intentions by adopting a configurational perspective. Investigating the theory of planned behavior in a longitudinal setting, the results suggest the combination of high change-related attitude and high change-related perceived behavioral control as the most consistent and reliable solution for fostering high change-supportive intentions. Both the first and second study addressed methodological challenges by adopting robustness tests for large-N fsQCA to increase trustworthiness and reduce sensitivity of the results. Additionally, as required for fsQCA data preparation, recommendations for thresholds were made and different calibration techniques investigated. The third study connects these two studies by performing a simulation on artificial small-N and large-N datasets comparing regression analysis, fsQCA, and its different calibration techniques. In particular, new insights on the joint use of both methods and methodological recommendations on the calibration of fsQCA could be given. In sum, the presented research highlights the applicability of fsQCA to organizational surveys and that a configurational approach can further enrich the understanding of organizations and organizational life.