Abstract

Gaslighting is increasingly discussed in organizational contexts, yet its meaning, boundaries, and process remain unclear within management and organizational scholarship. Although research on gaslighting has expanded across multiple disciplines, existing work is conceptually fragmented and difficult to integrate, limiting cumulative theory development and empirical progress. In this review, we synthesize 56 years of gaslighting research (1969-2025; 266 articles) to clarify how gaslighting has been defined, studied, and applied, with particular attention paid to its relevance for work and organizational settings. We identify four recurring ways gaslighting has been conceptualized and show how variation across these approaches has contributed to inconsistent definitions, measurement dispersion, and limited theorizing. Building on this synthesis, we advance a management-oriented definition of gaslighting and introduce an organizing framework that depicts gaslighting as a process unfolding overtime, linking antecedent conditions to interactional dynamics and downstream individual and organizational consequences. Finally, we review methodological patterns in the literature and outline a focused agenda for future research aimed at strengthening conceptual clarity, theory development, and empirical rigor in the study of gaslighting in organizations.

Description

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2026 The Author(s). Journal of Organizational Behavior published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Publisher

Wiley

Date of publication

5-2026

Language

english

Persistent identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10950/5193

Document Type

Article

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