Transitioning the study of role transitions: from an attribute-based to an experience-based approach

Movement between sequentially-held roles-role transition-has long attracted scholars' attention for its ubiquity and importance in people's work- and non-work lives. In our integrative review of 313 cross-discipline empirical articles, we find that the transitions attributes defined by Ebaugh (1988) and Ashforth (2001), the field's seminal works, have been largely left unintegrated and unmeasured. Rather, while scholars may refer to attributes, they in fact study people's lived transition experiences. To bring coherence and relevance to a fragmented field, we leverage the literature to propose a field-level shift to an experience-based framework. We organize our review around three vistas that undergird the transition experience we see studied in the research. These include four transition-related movements (psychological, physical, behavioral, and relational); the whole person in transition (interrelated non-work and work life spheres); and the person-in-network transitioning (transitions impacting and impacted by one's social entourage). We mark a pathway toward this experience-based view, issuing three challenges for management researchers: broadening the study of movements beyond the psychological (first challenge), examining work and non-work transitions' effects on organization-relevant outcomes (second challenge), and charting how individuals' transitions impact their entourage and vice versa (third challenge).