Signaling theory is about decision-making and communication. It describes scenarios where signalers send observable signals that carry credible information about unobservable qualities. When decision-makers have incomplete or imperfect information, signals can help them make better decisions. The power of a signal, though, lies in its cost, with the best signals being highly costly for low-quality signalers and less costly for high-quality signalers. Given the centrality of these ideas in the organizational sciences, we examine management studies that use signaling theory to help explain phenomena that occur within and among organizations. Our review draws attention to how signaling theorists have introduced important complexities to the signaling process, uncovered theoretical boundary conditions of signaling, described new actors within signaling systems, and demonstrated novel ways to apply signaling theory to understand behavior in an array of research contexts involving a wide range of organizational stakeholders. We also offer ideas about how scholars can account for costs when they apply the theory, extend the theory in more organizational settings, and create abstract extensions of the theory’s major concepts. Our intent is to provide researchers with a panoramic perspective on the state of signaling theory and inspire further development so that we can collectively advance signaling theory as much in the next decade as it has advanced in the last.

中文翻译：

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信号理论：理论现状及其未来


信号理论是关于决策和沟通的。它描述了信号发送者发送可观测信号的场景，这些信号携带有关不可观测质量的可靠信息。当决策者掌握的信息不完整或不完善时，信号可以帮助他们做出更好的决策。然而，信号的力量在于其成本，最好的信号对于低质量信号器来说成本很高，而对于高质量信号器来说成本较低。鉴于这些思想在组织科学中的中心地位，我们研究了使用信号理论来帮助解释组织内部和组织之间发生的现象的管理研究。我们的评论引起人们的注意，信号理论家如何将重要的复杂性引入信号过程，揭示信号的理论边界条件，描述信号系统中的新参与者，并展示应用信号理论来理解涉及一系列研究背景中的行为的新方法。广泛的组织利益相关者。我们还提供了关于学者在应用该理论时如何考虑成本、在更多组织环境中扩展该理论以及创建该理论主要概念的抽象扩展的想法。我们的目的是为研究人员提供关于信号传导理论现状的全景视角，并激发进一步的发展，以便我们能够在未来十年共同推进信号传导理论的发展，就像它在过去十年中取得的进步一样。