The Why and How of the Integrative Review

An effective integrative review can provide important insight into the current state of research on a topic and can recommend future research directions. This article discusses different types of reviews and outlines an approach to writing an integrative review. It includes guidance regarding challenges encountered when composing integrative reviews, such as fair representation of different perspectives and synthesizing that knowledge to yield new insights. An integrative review is of unique value among other types of knowledge-synthesis vehicles, such as narrative or systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Because each has distinctive but important approaches to synthesizing empirical knowledge, our protocol for writing integrative reviews is designed to complement these other knowledge-synthesis vehicles to best advance organization science.