Consent is central to many organizational interactions and obligations. Employees consent to various terms of employment, both formal (contractual obligations) and informal (extra-role responsibilities, interpersonal requests). Yet consent has traditionally been considered a legal matter, unrelated to organizational behavior. In this article, we make a case for why, and how, organizational behavior scholars should undertake the study of consent. We first review scholarship on the legal understanding of consent. We argue that the traditional legal understanding is an incomplete way to think about consent in organizations, and we call for a more nuanced understanding that incorporates psychological and philosophical insights about consent—particularly consent in employer-employee relationships. We then connect this understanding of consent to traditional organizational behavior topics (autonomy, fairness, and trust) and examine these connections within three organizational domains (employee surveillance, excessive work demands, and sexual harassment). We conclude with future directions for research on consent in organizations.

同意是许多组织互动和义务的核心。员工同意各种雇佣条款，包括正式（合同义务）和非正式（额外职责、人际关系要求）。然而，同意传统上被认为是一个法律问题，与组织行为无关。在本文中，我们为组织行为学者为什么以及如何进行同意研究提供了一个案例。我们首先回顾关于同意的法律理解的奖学金。我们认为，传统的法律理解是在组织中考虑同意的不完整方式，我们呼吁更细致地理解，其中包含关于同意的心理学和哲学见解，尤其是雇主-雇员关系中的同意。然后，我们将这种对同意的理解与传统的组织行为主题（自主、公平和信任）联系起来，并在三个组织领域（员工监督、过度工作需求和性骚扰）内检查这些联系。我们总结了组织中同意研究的未来方向。