Organizational research has long been interested in crises and crisis management. Whether focused on crisis antecedents, outcomes, or managing a crisis, research has revealed a number of important findings. However, research in this space remains fragmented, making it difficult for scholars to understand the literature’s core conclusions, recognize unsolved problems, and navigate paths forward. To address these issues, we propose an integrative framework of crises and crisis management that draws from research in strategy, organizational theory, and organizational behavior as well as from research in public relations and corporate communication. We identify two primary perspectives in the literature, one focused on the internal dynamics of a crisis and one focused on managing external stakeholders. We review core concepts from each perspective and highlight the commonalities that exist between them. Finally, we use our integrative framework to propose future research directions for scholars interested in crises and crisis management.
The effectiveness of monitoring and incentive alignment as mechanisms for controlling agency costs have been explored separately and in combination, with monitoring substituting for weaknesses in incentive alignment and vice versa; this equates to positive substitution when describing how monitoring and incentive alignment interact to influence shareholder agency costs. We draw upon behavioral agency theory and findings from finance research to offer further theoretical insight into how these mechanisms interact to influence agency costs. Our results suggest that CEO earnings management aimed at preserving their equity wealth (an incentive alignment mechanism) is accentuated by higher levels of concentrated institutional ownership, thereby imposing agency costs on less informed investors. Thus, in addition to being substitutes in controlling agency costs, as previously suggested, monitoring may accentuate the perverse effects of incentive alignment, equating to negative reinforcement, rather than positive substitution. Yet this effect is negated in the absence of CEO power due to dual occupation of the board and CEO roles. We discuss implications of these findings for theory and practice.
Proactivity is vital to innovative changes in the workplace. However, existing research on proactivity has rarely addressed how human resources management (HRM) systems induce proactive behavior and influence group innovation. Indeed, HRM systems are considered primary tools that organizations utilize to derive specific behaviors from their employees. Thus, examining the relationship between HRM systems and proactivity and its link to subsequent outcomes is a worthwhile pursuit. To examine how HRM systems influence proactive behavior, we investigated the effects of HRM systems on three psychological states, namely, role breadth self-efficacy, felt responsibility for change, and trust in management. Furthermore, we suggested that, facilitated by members’ proactive behaviors, group creative processes can spur group innovation. We conducted two multilevel studies to test our hypotheses, and the results generally supported our theoretical arguments. Exploring the process through which HRM influences proactive behavior and subsequent innovation outcomes, this study contributes to the literatures on HRM, proactivity, and innovation by elucidating the HRM–innovation relationship and suggesting HRM systems as meaningful antecedents to proactivity.
Proxy advisors are information intermediaries that enable shareholders to exercise their voting rights. While proxy advisors’ influence is documented in market-based corporate governance systems, we know little about the corporate governance role of proxy advice in relationship-based governance systems. Drawing on agency theory and the comparative corporate governance literature, we theorize that shareholders are sensitive to the costs and benefits of monitoring by considering internal monitoring capabilities. We also theorize that relative to market-based corporate governance systems, proxy advice is both less influential and has lower predictive quality in relationship-based governance systems. We test our multilevel model using 13,497 voting results from 613 firms in 16 Western European countries and generally find support for our predictions.
Over the last 15 years, business model innovation (BMI) has gained an increasing amount of attention in management research and among practitioners. The emerging BMI literature addresses an important phenomenon but lacks theoretical underpinning, and empirical inquiry is not cumulative. Thus, a concerted research effort seems warranted. Accordingly, we take stock of the extant literature on BMI. We identify and analyze 150 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on BMI published between 2000 and 2015. We provide the first comprehensive systematic review of the BMI literature, include a critical assessment of these research efforts, and offer suggestions for future research. We argue that the literature faces problems with respect to construct clarity and has gaps with respect to the identification of antecedent conditions, contingencies, and outcomes. We identify important avenues for future research and show how the complexity theory, innovation, and other streams of literature can help overcome many of the gaps in the BMI literature.
Over the past 20 years, the term "ecosystem" has become pervasive in discussions of strategy, both scholarly and applied. Its rise has mirrored an increasing interest and concern among both researchers and managers with interdependence across organizations and activities. This article presents a structuralist approach to conceptualizing the ecosystem construct. It presents a clear definition of the ecosystem construct, a grammar for characterizing ecosystem structure, and a characterization of the distinctive aspects of ecosystem strategy. This approach offers an explicit examination of the relationship among ecosystems and a host of alternative constructs (business models, platforms, coopetition, multisided markets, networks, technology systems, supply chains, value networks) that helps characterize where the ecosystem construct adds, and does not add, insight for the strategy literature.
We examine how controlling owners’ family considerations affect their new industry entry decisions in family business groups in emerging economies. Drawing on the socioemotional wealth (SEW) approach, we conceive the new industry entry decision as controlling owners’ response to pursue various family interests. In particular, we distinguish two aspects of SEW, focused SEW and broad SEW, and theorize their opposing effects on the new industry entry decision. We propose that controlling owners’ likelihood to pursue new industry entry is negatively influenced by the exercise of family influence (a representative of the focused SEW) but is positively associated with the succession of family dynasty (a typical form of the broad SEW). Furthermore, we argue that the effects of SEW preservation on such decisions are contingent on controlling owners’ generation, with the effects to be stronger when the founder generation is in control. We test these hypotheses with a sample of Taiwanese family business groups and find general support for our predictions.
We examine, in hypercompetitive environments, why some firms fail to benefit from competitive aggressiveness while others experience superior profits. We explore the relationship between competitive aggressiveness and performance in a sample of 141 firms from three hypercompetitive industries—personal computers, computer-aided software engineering, and semiconductors—from 1995 to 2006. Contrary to the predominant view within competitive dynamics research, we find that competitive aggressiveness is not a universally effective strategy. For some firms, excessive competitive aggressiveness can escalate costs and diminish performance. Using polynomial regression analysis and response surface methodology, we identify the conditions under which competitive aggressiveness enhances firm performance. Our findings reveal that firms benefit from competitive aggressiveness when they have specialized technological resources and support from a dense network of alliance partners.
Causal complexity has long been recognized as a ubiquitous feature underlying organizational phenomena, yet current theories and methodologies in management are for the most part not well-suited to its direct study. The introduction of the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) configurational approach has led to a reinvigoration of configurational theory that embraces causal complexity explicitly. We argue that the burgeoning research using QCA represents more than a novel methodology; it constitutes the emergence of a neo-configurational perspective to the study of management and organizations that enables a fine-grained conceptualization and empirical investigation of causal complexity through the logic of set theory. In this article, we identify four foundational elements that characterize this emerging neo-configurational perspective: (a) conceptualizing cases as set theoretic configurations, (b) calibrating cases’ memberships into sets, (c) viewing causality in terms of necessity and sufficiency relations between sets, and (d) conducting counterfactual analysis of unobserved configurations. We then present a comprehensive review of the use of QCA in management studies that aims to capture the evolution of the neo-configurational perspective among management scholars. We close with a discussion of a research agenda that can further this neo-configurational approach and thereby shift the attention of management research away from a focus on net effects and towards examining causal complexity.
The authors provide a systematic evaluation of the emerging multilevel paradigm in human resource management (HRM) research focusing, in particular, on multilevel mediation analyses of the HRM-outcomes relationship. They first distinguish different types of multilevel models and then identify a number of best practice theoretical and methodological criteria for the conduct of multilevel research derived from the literature. These criteria are used to analyze and evaluate all multilevel mediation studies ( N = 46) of the HRM-outcomes relationship published in 11 core management and HRM journals in the 2000 to 2016 period. The results suggest that progress in the application of the multilevel paradigm has been slow and uneven and that the new paradigm has not as yet taken firm root in the field of HRM. On the basis of this evaluation, the authors identify key areas for improvement in the application of the multilevel approach to the analysis of the HRM-outcomes relationship. In the process, they highlight important ways in which the further development of a multilevel perspective can enhance both strategic and employee-centered HRM research by contributing to a fuller substantive understanding of the processes and mechanisms through which HRM systems affect outcomes of interest at different levels of analysis.
This paper integrates the rapidly growing literatures on the individual and organizational factors that contribute to women’s career equality. We organize studies into three research perspectives: career preference, gender bias, and work-family explanations. These literatures diverge on whether women "opt out" or are "pushed out" of leadership positions in organizations. Further, the interconnectedness of these "pushes" and "pulls" and micro-macro linkages are not well-integrated. This creates a lack of clarity about what scholars should study and what practices organizations should implement. We define women’s career equality as an individual and organizational phenomenon involving the degree to which women (a) have equal access to and participation in career opportunities, and (b) experience equal intrinsic and extrinsic work and nonwork outcomes compared to men. We bridge the interdisciplinary divides by developing an integrative multi-level model of women’s career equality. We propose that individuals’ career perceptions and experiences are embedded in social contexts reflecting the climate for gender inclusion and interact with these contexts to shape women’s career equality outcomes. The climate for gender inclusion has three dimensions: fairness, leveraging talent, and workplace support. We identify coalescing themes to stimulate future research, including attention to national socio-economic influences, improving metrics and measurement of gender inclusion climate, multi-level career equality outcomes, a joint focus on implicit and explicit bias, and designing cross-disciplinary interventions for experiments. In order to foster theory-based research that is linked to practice, we suggest implementing and scientifically evaluating comprehensive workplace interventions that integrate perspectives and levels.
Managerial risk taking is a critical aspect of strategic management. To improve competitive advantage and performance, managers need to take risks, often in an uncertain environment. Formal economic assumptions of risk taking suggest that if the expected values for two strategies are similar but one is a greater gamble (uncertain), managers will choose the strategy with a more certain outcome. Based on these assumptions, agency theory assumes that top managers should be compensated or monitored to achieve better outcomes. We review the theory and research on agency theory and managerial risk taking along with theories that challenge this basic assumption about risk taking: the behavioral theory of the firm, prospect theory, the behavioral agency model and the related socioemotional wealth perspective, and upper echelons theory. We contribute to the literature by reviewing and suggesting research opportunities within and across these theories to develop a comprehensive research agenda on managerial risk taking.
The state creates and changes rules that coerce firms, but firms can delay or decouple responses to rule changes to manage the cost of demands. Theory of compliance to the state has not yet considered the degree to which the firm can delay adoption because of low exposure to rules and state links that allow cooptation, but both of these relations between state power and firm ability to counteract it can affect the adoption decision. This makes the response to state rule changes a more strategic outcome than the theory of coercive isomorphism implies. We develop a relational theory of delayed firm compliance to a state rule change that considers firm exposure due to discrepancy from the rule and firm cooptation of the state due to state links, and we test the theory by examining the adoption of the split-share structure reform, a state-mandated corporate governance reform among listed firms in China. We find that exposure and cooptation influenced the speed of adoption and the decoupling from reform intentions. We also found that their effects on firm response to coercion weaken when the new rule becomes institutionalized. Our theory of delayed compliance is also likely to apply to coercive pressure from other powerful organizations than the state.
Organizations today have to change constantly. Although both practitioners and scientists agree that organizational change communication is the most effective strategy to improve employee adjustment to change, little is known about how change communication enhances more proactive employee reactions to change. The present study addresses employee job crafting behaviors (i.e., seeking job resources, seeking job challenges, and reducing job demands) as a tool used by employees in order to respond to and cope with implemented organizational change. Using regulatory focus theory, we propose that on the basis of their promotion or prevention regulatory focus, employees respond to organizational change communication via job crafting behaviors that further enhance or hinder their adjustment to change (i.e., work engagement and adaptivity). Hypotheses are tested with a latent change score analytical approach via a three-wave longitudinal design among 368 police officers. Findings reveal that while adequate change communication is linked to increased job crafting behaviors for promotion focused employees, inadequate change communication is linked to increased job crafting behaviors for prevention focused employees. Furthermore, seeking resources is positively associated with employee work engagement, seeking challenges is positively associated with adaptivity, and reducing demands is negatively associated with work engagement. These findings bring together three different streams of literature (i.e., organizational change, regulatory focus, and job crafting). Implications for management are outlined, and they are, thereafter, translated to a specific workplace intervention, which is proposed to organizations and managers.
Drawing on self-determination theory, we proposed and tested a cross-level model of how perceived creativity-oriented high-performance work systems (HPWS) influence customer satisfaction. Data were obtained from frontline employees (FLEs), their managers, and branch records of two organizations (retail bank and cosmetics) in Lithuania. Results of multilevel structural equation modeling analyses revealed partial support for our model. Although perceived creativity-oriented HPWS related to creative performance at the individual level, this effect was mediated solely by need satisfaction and not by creative process engagement nor by a serial mediation of both variables as we hypothesized. However, as we did hypothesize, average branch creative performance related to branch customer satisfaction. We interpret our findings as underscoring the utility of perceived creativity-oriented HPWS in fostering FLEs’ creative performance and ultimately, customer satisfaction.
Ensuring that managers engage in fair behaviors is critical for the effective functioning of organizations. Previous research has focused on increasing the enactment of interactional justice (i.e., justice as a dependent variable) by enhancing managers’ willingness to be fair. Drawing upon the limited strength model of self-regulation, we argue that the enactment of interactional justice may not depend solely on managers’ willingness or motivation but also on the extent to which managers have the self-regulatory resources required to engage in these behaviors. Using four experimental studies, our results indicate that the depletion of self-regulatory resources is negatively associated with the enactment of interactional justice. Furthermore, we argue that depletion can give rise to self-appraisal gaps (i.e., individuals’ ability to accurately appraise the fairness of their behavior is hampered), which can diminish the impetus to regulate fair behaviors (i.e., diminish interactional justice). Results provide support for self-appraisal gaps as an underlying explanation for why depletion can negatively affect the enactment of interactional justice. Moreover, the negative effects of depletion can be overcome by increasing managers’ awareness that they may be overestimating the fairness of their behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
According to uncertainty management theory (UMT), organizational justice helps individuals to cope with uncertainty. Employees will thus respond stronger to organizational justice when uncertainty is high. We contribute to UMT by highlighting poor socioeconomic conditions, specifically, weak rule of law, low human development, and high income inequality, as salient sources of uncertainty. We argue that when these conditions are unfavorable, the effects of organizational justice on employee reactions will be stronger than when they are more favorable. We test our arguments using a meta-analysis of 279 studies involving 315 samples from 31 countries. Our findings suggest that poor socioeconomic conditions raise the strength of the relationship between organizational justice on the one hand and task performance and organizational citizenship behavior on the other but not the relationship between organizational justice and counterproductive work behaviors. Our study responds to recent calls to place greater emphasis on contextual factors and to close the macro–micro gap in the literature on organizational justice.
When service providers regulate their moods and expressions (i.e., deep acting and surface acting), are they better performers? Drawing on the framework of activation-inhibition regulatory systems and regulatory fit, we propose (a) that deep acting represents an activation-oriented regulation strategy and surface acting, an inhibition-oriented regulation strategy; (b) that these strategies have separate pathways to desirable performance (i.e., affective delivery) and counterproductive performance (i.e., service sabotage), respectively; and (c) that performance is optimized when momentary regulation strategies are aligned with activation- and inhibition-oriented traits. Empirically, across two studies, we employ a multilevel approach (i.e., within- and between-person), a multisource approach (i.e., self, coworker, customer), and a multicontext approach (i.e., banks and restaurants) to test regulatory fit as applied to emotional labor. In two studies, we support separate activation and inhibition pathways, plus regulatory fit, in that deep acting is beneficial to affective delivery for those higher in two activation traits—namely, extraversion and openness—and that surface acting predicts service sabotage for those lower in an inhibition trait: conscientiousness. We empirically rule out mood as the explanation for these effects, propose future research to apply regulatory fit to other outcomes and contexts, and suggest practical implications for services.
Empowering leadership and laissez-faire leadership are generally thought to represent quite different leadership styles—the former more active and directed in follower development and the latter more passive and dismissive of followers’ needs. The present study questions this sharp differentiation. Building on leader categorization theory, we suggest that empowering leadership can be perceived by followers as laissez-faire depending on followers’ empowerment expectations. Specifically, we propose that when leaders’ behaviors are not aligned with followers’ expectations (either higher or lower), followers may evaluate them as being laissez-faire. A two-stage field study of 150 leader-follower dyads employing a cross-level polynomial regression analysis supported our expectation-match hypotheses. Furthermore, followers’ perceptions of laissez-faire leadership as a mediator subsequently lead to lower leader effectiveness evaluation. Consequently, our results indicate that empowering and laissez-faire leadership in the perceptions of followers are closer to each other than researchers previously thought.
This paper reviews several streams of research on market category formation. Most past research has largely focused on established category systems and the antecedents and consequences of categorical positioning (i.e., categorical purity vs. spanning; combination vs. replacement) but relatively ignored the formative processes leading to new categories. In this review, we address this lacuna to posit that scholarship would benefit from clearly disentangling category emergence from category creation. We analytically describe the differences between the two and elaborate the boundary conditions that guide and define which process is more likely to occur in a given market. Our review contributes to illuminating the role of organizational agency and strategic actions in market categories and their formation, which deserve greater attention as a result of their theoretical and practical implications.
Theories of perceived overqualification have tended to focus on employees’ job-related responses to account for effects on performance. We offer an alternative perspective and theorize that perceived overqualification could influence work performance through a relational mechanism. We propose that relational skills, in the form of interpersonal influence of overqualified employees, determine their tendency to experience social acceptance and, thus, engage in positive work-related behaviors. We tested this relational model across two studies using time-lagged, multisource data. In Study 1, the results indicated that for employees high on interpersonal influence, perceived overqualification was positively related to self-reported social acceptance, whereas for employees low on interpersonal influence, the relationship was negative. Social acceptance, in turn, was positively related to in-role job performance, interpersonal altruism, and team member proactivity evaluated by supervisors. In Study 2, we focused on peer-reported social acceptance and found that the indirect relationships between perceived overqualification and supervisor-reported behavioral outcomes via social acceptance were negative when interpersonal influence was low and nonsignificant when interpersonal influence was high. The implications of the general findings are discussed.
Since its introduction to the social psychology literature 60 years ago, Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) has been frequently applied to the management literature to explain and predict the motivational nature of dissonance in producing attitude and behavior change in managerial decision making and the broader organizational context. Yet many of the popular constructs that stem from CDT have since lost touch with more recent developments in the field of origin. In this paper, we provide a review of the key constructs and predictions associated with CDT from Festinger’s early work to the latest developments. We then review key management research that has incorporated CDT. Drawing from the latest refinements to CDT, we describe how future management studies could benefit by integrating these refinements into their theoretical frameworks, rather than simply relying on Festinger’s seminal work on the 60th anniversary of its publication (1957).
This study compares three emerging forms of positive leadership that emphasize ethical and moral behavior (i.e., authentic leadership, ethical leadership, and servant leadership) with transformational leadership in their associations with a wide range of organizationally relevant measures. While scholars have noted conceptual overlap between transformational leadership and these newer leadership forms, there has been inadequate investigation of the empirical relationships with transformational leadership and the ability (or lack thereof) of these leadership forms to explain incremental variance beyond transformational leadership. In response, we conducted a series of meta-analyses to provide a comprehensive assessment of these emerging leadership forms’ relationships with variables evaluated in the extant literature. Second, we tested the relative performance of each of these leadership forms in explaining incremental variance, beyond transformational leadership, in nine outcomes. We also provide relative weights analyses to further evaluate the relative contributions of the emerging leadership forms versus transformational leadership. The high correlations between both authentic leadership and ethical leadership with transformational leadership coupled with their low amounts of incremental variance suggest that their utility is low unless they are being used to explore very specific outcomes. Servant leadership, however, showed more promise as a stand-alone leadership approach that is capable of helping leadership researchers and practitioners better explain a wide range of outcomes. Guidance regarding future research and the utility of these three ethical/moral values–based leadership forms is provided.
This study introduces the concept of pre-quitting behaviors (PQBs), which employees in the process of leaving an organization may unknowingly "leak" and others can observe and use to identify those at risk of turnover. We develop a theoretical framework that explains how and why turnover proclivity can be encoded into observable PQBs. Then, on the basis of input from employees who voluntarily left and their managers, we identify a range of PQBs that served as the basis for an initial measure of the behaviors. Analysis of data to assess the validity of inferences based on the measure revealed that PQBs predicted future voluntary turnover over and above established antecedents of this outcome. Overall, this study suggests that the psychological and behavioral processes that activate and facilitate voluntary turnover are manifest in observable behaviors and thus opens a new line of inquiry into the process of employee turnover.
The issue of a published literature not representative of the population of research is most often discussed in terms of entire studies being suppressed. However, alternative sources of publication bias are questionable research practices (QRPs) that entail post hoc alterations of hypotheses to support data or post hoc alterations of data to support hypotheses. Using general strain theory as an explanatory framework, we outline the means, motives, and opportunities for researchers to better their chances of publication independent of rigor and relevance. We then assess the frequency of QRPs in management research by tracking differences between dissertations and their resulting journal publications. Our primary finding is that from dissertation to journal article, the ratio of supported to unsupported hypotheses more than doubled (0.82 to 1.00 versus 1.94 to 1.00). The rise in predictive accuracy resulted from the dropping of statistically nonsignificant hypotheses, the addition of statistically significant hypotheses, the reversing of predicted direction of hypotheses, and alterations to data. We conclude with recommendations to help mitigate the problem of an unrepresentative literature that we label the "Chrysalis Effect."
This study proposes an anchoring perspective on international equity ownership decisions. Given the complex, uncertain nature of such decisions, we recognize the potential for heuristics such as anchoring to replace time-consuming and information-intensive analyses; specifically, top managers might draw on the recent international equity ownership decisions of others to determine how much equity stake to purchase in foreign target firms. Drawing on standard regression methods and more recently developed hedonic regression techniques, this study reveals some systematic effects of anchoring in international equity ownership decisions. Anchoring is more likely when international acquisitions occur under informational deficiencies in genuinely uncertain settings but less likely when the acquiring firms are managed by overconfident CEOs.
Interorganizational scholars have long thought about how firms learn through buyer relationships. However, it is not clear whether dyadic learning gains are susceptible to imitation or are only inherited and whether these gains decay over time or are of an enduring nature. In this paper, I import ideas from the organizational imprinting literature into the interorganizational literature and apply the knowledge-based and learning views of the firm to examine how suppliers with differing initial endowments learn to work together with a buyer. The findings from an inductive multiple case study of spinoff and nonspinoff suppliers of an automotive manufacturer parent in Turkey reveal the following three learning mechanisms: informal relationships and social capital, transfer of routines, and shared identity. Although nonspinoff suppliers also exhibit evidence of several learning processes to a certain extent, spinoff suppliers’ deeper relationship, in particular their shared identity, with their parent based on their direct parental heritage tends to be more difficult for them to copy. No matter how hard nonspinoff suppliers try, they have "one hand tied behind their back," they remain stepchildren, and they never truly become a biological child. By providing a novel setting and a rich set of qualitative data on the learning behaviors of these two types of suppliers, this study teases apart the knowledge and resources that can be "learned from external sources" versus those that can "only be inherited."
The current study extends prior research on emotional dynamics within the workplace by examining workplace correlates of within-person affect spin—a form of variability in affect states. Drawing from affective events theory, the current study tests both concurrent and lagged associations between work events, daily affect spin, mood, and daily voluntary workplace behaviors in a 2-week daily diary study of 114 working adults. Multilevel analyses demonstrated that levels of daily affect spin were higher on days in which employees experienced mixed work events (i.e., both positive and negative work events on the same day) compared to days with only positive work events or no work events. Results revealed that daily affect spin was indirectly related to daily organizational citizenship behavior through lower pleasant mood. Lagged analyses suggest the effects of daily spin on mood and voluntary work behaviors may not carry over to the next day. Our findings build upon prior between-person research on affect spin by providing evidence that affect spin can be meaningfully assessed at the within-person level of analysis. Moreover, this article extends prior research and theory by showing that affect spin is an important correlate of workplace events, mood, and voluntary work behavior at the within-person level.
This study investigated the relationships among company average age, company work ability, and company performance by examining (a) the effects of employee average use of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) personal strategies and high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) on employee work ability; (b) the buffering effects of both employee average use of SOC and HIWPs on the negative relationship between company-level average age of employees and employee work ability; and (c) the link between company average age and company performance as mediated by company work ability. Analysis was conducted on data from 70 Finnish companies in the retail and metal industries and their 889 employees. Results showed that company average age was negatively related to company work ability, which in turn was positively related to company performance assessed by company managers. HIWPs were positively related to company work ability. Employee average use of SOC strategies buffered the negative effect of company average age on company work ability. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Drawing on the resource orchestration literature, we explore the processes by which transnational entrepreneurs offset the liabilities of outsidership they face in their host country. We show how these entrepreneurs’ outsidership with respect to domestic business networks of the host country is compensated by their involvement in diaspora networks. Our second contribution lies in an extension of the resource orchestration framework, as we show that sequencing of resource orchestration processes is important for the implementation of the entrepreneurs’ strategy for using their embeddedness within the diaspora network for enhancing their competitiveness and can lead to groupings of activities that differ from the groupings found in the original version of the framework.
Creativity of employees is a major focus of research in the organization sciences. In this study we examine the relationships between both micro (intrinsic and extrinsic motivation) and molar (team climate) variables with manager-rated creativity of R&D employees. Specifically, we hypothesize that (a) extrinsic motivation has a direct relationship with creativity, (b) intrinsic motivation is more strongly related to creativity when extrinsic motivation is low compared to when it is high, (c) team collaborative and competitive climates have direct effects on creativity as well as indirect effects through individual motivation, and (d) intrinsic motivation mediates relationships of the climate variables with creativity, which in turn is moderated by extrinsic motivation. Data were collected from R&D engineers and their managers at a large high-tech company headquartered in Taiwan. Results indicate that a collaborative team climate has a direct positive relationship with creativity as well as one that operates through intrinsic motivation, which in turn was moderated by employee’s extrinsic motivation level. A competitive team climate positively related to extrinsic motivation, but extrinsic motivation did not directly relate to creativity. However, extrinsic motivation did have strong relationships with creativity when intrinsic motivation was low. Results suggest that perhaps the different types of motivation relate to different types of creativity (incremental versus radical). Managerial and theoretical implications of results are discussed as are the study’s limitations.
Self-regulation seems crucial to understanding how employees perform under stress because employees must regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behavior to deal effectively with work stress. Integrating regulatory focus theory and the challenge–hindrance stressor framework, we theorized that the effects of regulatory focus on job performance would vary as a function of the level of stress employees experience. Specifically, we contend that employees are more efficacious and motivated (and thus perform better) when they have established goal and coping strategies that allow them to cope with the stress they face; those lacking in these strategies are likely to find the stress overwhelming and taxing (and perform worse). Using multisource data of 160 salespersons, we investigated this relationship with two measures of job performance. We found that challenge stress moderates the relationship between promotion focus and job performance: When challenge stress is high, promotion focus is positively related to job performance; when low, promotion focus is negatively or not significantly related to job performance. We also found that hindrance stress moderates the relationship between prevention focus and job performance: When hindrance stress is low, prevention focus is negatively related to job performance, but when high, prevention focus is positively related to job performance. Moreover, we find some support for three-way interactions suggesting that using mismatched goal and coping strategies is especially harmful. Our results explain performance differences in high-stress situations and highlight the important role of self-regulation when employees are in stressful conditions.
This study develops a combined agency–resource dependence perspective and applies it to the study of interlocking directorates. It suggests that interlocking directorates may exert either a positive or a negative effect on subsequent firm performance, depending on the firm’s relative resources, power imbalance, ownership concentration, and CEO ownership. A test on a sample of 145 Italian companies provides support for hypothesized effects. This study suggests that integrating agency and resource dependence theories provides a higher-order explanation of firm performance and helps advance both agency and resource dependence theories.
While researchers have been increasingly interested in the notion of category stigma, they have largely focused on stigmatized industry categories. Because products serve as a key interface between producers and consumers, we suggest that product categories should play a prominent role in the stigmatization process. Product category stigma occurs when a product category is seen as violating the expectations of its audience members. We argue that when an organization offers a product from a stigmatized category, it is subject to lower evaluations and higher penalties from the stigmatizing audience, regardless of its true underlying quality. Further, when an organization is perceived as increasing its engagement in a stigmatized category, the lower evaluations transfer to the organization’s other products. Finally, we argue that an organization’s reputation for quality actually amplifies this stigma penalty. We find support for our hypotheses in a sample of online reviews for the U.S. craft brewing industry.
We conducted two studies on workaholism to address three identified gaps in the literature, namely, the job-related affective experiences of workaholics, the relationship between workaholism and job demands, and the long-term mental health effects of workaholism. We also examined gender as a moderator of the relationship between workaholism and its outcomes. In Study 1 (N = 311), focused on a heterogeneous sample of workers, we found that workaholism was positively related to the experience of observer-reported, as well as self-reported, job-related negative affect and that this relationship was stronger among female workers. Furthermore, in a subsample of participants (n = 189) for whom we had available blood pressure data, we found that workaholism was positively related to systolic blood pressure. In Study 2 (N = 235), based on a sample of health-sector employees in which we adopted a full, two-wave panel design including workaholism, job demands, and mental distress, we found that the baseline levels of job demands impacted the follow-up levels of workaholism, while the reverse was not the case. We also found that the baseline levels of workaholism positively affected the levels of mental distress reported after 1 year. These results add to the existing literature on the job-related affective correlates and psychophysical costs of workaholism and shed further light on work environmental factors that may contribute to its genesis.
Third-party accreditations and certifications can provide legitimacy or signal trustworthiness about an organization and its products or services, and with very little exception, the vast majority of research on these labels focuses on their benefits. Yet the value of becoming accredited may change dramatically over time. Little research, if any, has examined the processes through which this occurs. Here, I develop theory about three mechanisms that could each tarnish the value of accreditation and reduce its performance impact. First, "quality patching" occurs when organizations are penalized if they seek accreditation shortly after problems occur, as observers believe such pursuits reflect superficial impression-management efforts. Second, "legitimacy dilution" occurs when the value of third-party accreditations becomes diluted as third parties certify more and more businesses. Finally, "stigma transfer" occurs when a newly accredited organization experiences spillover from quality problems at other accredited organizations. Empirical tests provide support for quality patching and legitimacy dilution but not for stigma transfer. Results suggest that organizations gaining new accreditations under some circumstances may benefit much less than organizations that gain those same accreditations under different circumstances.
Research demonstrates that situational uncertainty or crisis strongly influences the endorsement of the more charismatic or decisive leadership styles and that inspirational communication is at the heart of these styles. However, there is currently little understanding of what leaders should convey through their communication to be endorsed in crisis. Based on regulatory focus theory, we argue that times of crisis make leaders who use more promotion-oriented communication more likely to be endorsed and leaders who use more prevention-oriented communication less likely to be endorsed. Results of Study 1, an archival study of U.S. presidents, show that presidents who use more promotion-oriented communication are more endorsed but only if economic growth is low or if inflation is high, while no effects of the use of prevention orientation of communication surfaces. Results of Study 2, a laboratory experiment, show that leaders who communicate a promotion orientation, as compared to a prevention orientation, motivate higher performance in participants in a crisis condition, but that there is no difference in a no-crisis (i.e. control) condition. Finally, results of Study 3, a scenario experiment, demonstrate that organizational leaders that communicate more promotion-oriented (as opposed to more prevention-oriented) have a higher chance of being endorsed but only in times of crisis and that this effect is mediated by followers’ motivation to realize the plans of the leader.
Despite substantial scholarly interest in the role of contracts in alliances, few studies have analyzed the mechanisms and conditions relevant to their influence on alliance performance. In this paper, we build on the information-processing view of the firm to study contracts as framing devices. We suggest that the effects of contracts depend on the types of provisions included and differentiate between the consequences of control and coordination provisions. Specifically, control provisions will increase the level of conflict between alliance partners, whereas coordination provisions will decrease such conflict. Conflict, in turn, reduces alliance performance, suggesting a mediated relationship between alliance contracts and performance. We also contribute to a better understanding of contextual influences on the consequences of contracts and investigate the interactions of each contractual function with both internal and external uncertainties. Key informant survey data on 171 alliances largely support our conceptual model.
Next-generation technology provides users with new, advanced functionality that often renders the past technology obsolete, opening a window of opportunity for challengers. Major benefits can accrue to technology leaders, but for platform technologies that require complementary innovation from external complementors to create value for users, those benefits are limited by the difficulty of securing complements. The focus of this article is on the value users derive from the variety and quality of platform complements and its impact on leaders’ performance over time relative to followers. The article shows that next-generation platform leaders that build in-house complements and encourage broader participation by external complementors can enhance platform value to users at early market stages. Yet, later on, when the market has taken off, continuing to leverage these strategies will negatively affect the variety and quality of their complements, constraining their growth capacity and performance relative to followers. Leaders may thus lock themselves into suboptimal performance patterns and eventually fall behind their followers. The analysis provided herein offers new insights about what drives platform competition by highlighting the challenges platform leaders face, particularly in the growth stage of a platform’s market evolution, and the critical role played by complement quality in shaping platform competition over time.
High-involvement management was introduced as a means of overcoming economic crises, but it has been argued that the inevitability of cost-cutting measures when organizations face such crises would undermine its efficacy. This article first presents theories of why tensions may exist between high-involvement management and actions typically taken by management during recessions, such as wage and employment freezes. It then reports research aimed at testing whether the performance effects of high-involvement management were lower in organizations where management took such actions to combat the post-2008 recession, due to their adverse effects on employees’ job satisfaction and well-being—and even whether high-involvement management still had a performance premium after the recession. Using data from Britain’s Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2011, the research shows that both dimensions of high-involvement management—role- and organizational-involvement management—continued to be positively associated with economic performance as the economy came out of recession. Recessionary actions were negatively related to both employee job satisfaction and well-being, while job satisfaction mediated the relationship between role-involvement management and economic performance, which is consistent with mutual-gains theory. However, recessionary action reduced the positive effect that role-involvement management had on job satisfaction and well-being and thus may have reduced its positive performance effects. In the case of organizational-involvement management, it reduced the level of job dissatisfaction and ill-being, suggesting that it may provide workers with more information and greater certainty about the future.
Computer-aided text analysis (CATA) is a form of content analysis that enables the measurement of constructs by processing text into quantitative data based on the frequency of words. CATA has been proposed as a useful measurement approach with the potential to lead to important theoretical advancements. Ironically, while CATA has been offered to overcome some of the known deficiencies in existing measurement approaches, we have lagged behind in regard to assessing the technique’s measurement rigor. Our article addresses this knowledge gap and describes important implications for past as well as future research using CATA. First, we describe three sources of measurement error variance that are particularly relevant to studies using CATA: transient error, specific factor error, and algorithm error. Second, we describe and demonstrate how to calculate measurement error variance with the entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, and organizational ambidexterity constructs, offering evidence that past substantive conclusions have been underestimated. Third, we offer best-practice recommendations and demonstrate how to reduce measurement error variance by refining existing CATA measures. In short, we demonstrate that although measurement error variance in CATA has not been measured thus far, it does exist and it affects substantive conclusions. Consequently, our article has implications for theory and practice, as well as how to assess and minimize measurement error in future CATA research with the goal of improving the accuracy of substantive conclusions.
Despite frequent references to "the changing nature of work," little empirical research has investigated proposed changes in work context perceptions. To address this gap, this study uses a cross-temporal meta-analysis to examine changes in five core job characteristics (e.g., task identity, task significance, skill variety, autonomy, and feedback from the job) as well as changes in the relationship between job characteristics and job satisfaction. An additional analysis of primary data is used to examine changes in two items related to interdependence. On average, workers perceived greater levels of skill variety and autonomy since 1975 and interdependence since 1985. In contrast, the results of a supplemental meta-analysis did not support significant changes in the association between the five core job characteristics and satisfaction over time. Thus, although there is some evidence for change in job characteristics, the findings do not support a change in the value placed on enriched work. Implications for researchers and organizations navigating the modern world of work are highlighted.
Increasing attention is being paid to the impacts of country-level contexts on the work-life interface. However, lack of theoretical clarity as well as operationalization challenges are significant roadblocks for comparative work-life research. This article provides guidance for cross-national work-life research by conducting a systematic interdisciplinary review of conceptual and empirical work on the country-level cultural impacts (i.e., the values, assumptions, and beliefs shared by individuals with common historical experience) and structural impacts (i.e., the rules and constraints produced by legal, economic, and social structures) on individual experiences of the work-life interface and organizational support for nonwork. Regarding culture, we offer an organized review of work-life research drawing on cultural dimensions, from the most researched dimensions, such as individualism-collectivism and gender egalitarianism, to the least researched. We also point to ways to locate scales and country scores. Concerning structure, we explain how legal (e.g., public policies), economic (e.g., industrialization), and social (e.g., actual gender equality) factors are operationalized with indicators or typologies and review the related work-life research. We carve out a research agenda pointing out untapped cultural dimensions and structural factors and underresearched work-life constructs and calling for more systemic and integrative cross-national work-life research.
We report an experience-sampling study examining the spillover of workplace incivility on employees’ home lives. Specifically, we test a moderated mediation model whereby discrete emotions transmit the effects of workplace incivility to specific family behaviors at home. Fifty full-time employees from southeast Asia provided 363 observations over a 10-day period on workplace incivility and various emotional states. Daily reports of employees’ marital behaviors were provided by the spouses each evening. Results showed that state hostility mediated the link from workplace incivility to increased angry and withdrawn marital behaviors at home. Also, trait hostility served as a moderator such that the relationship between workplace incivility and hostile emotions was stronger for employees with high trait hostility.
While we would typically expect poor performers to elicit abusive responses from their supervisors, we theorize that high performers may also be victims of abusive supervision. Specifically, we draw on social dominance theory to hypothesize and demonstrate that subordinate performance can have a positive, indirect effect on abusive supervision through the mediator of perceived threat to hierarchy. And this positive indirect effect prevails when the supervisor’s social dominance orientation is high. We found support for our theoretical model using data collected from supervisor–subordinate dyads.
Extreme teams complete their tasks in unconventional performance environments and have serious consequences associated with failure. Examples include disaster relief teams, special operations teams, and astronaut crews. The unconventional performance environments within which these teams operate require researchers to carefully consider the context during the research process. These environments may also create formidable challenges to the research process, including constraining data collection and sample sizes. Given the serious consequences associated with failure, however, the challenges must be navigated so that the management of extreme teams can be evidence based. We present an approach for conducting actionable research on extreme teams. Our approach is an extension of mixed-methods research that is particularly well suited for emphasizing context. The approach guides researchers on how to integrate the local context into the research process, which allows for actionable recommendations. At the same time, our approach applies an intentionally broad framework for organizing context, which can serve as a mechanism through which the results of research on extreme teams can be meaningfully accumulated and integrated across teams. Finally, our approach and description of steps address the unique challenges common in extreme-team research. While developed with extreme teams in mind, we view our general approach as applicable to more traditional teams when the features of the context that impinge on team functioning are not adequately represented by typical descriptions of context in the literature and the goal is actionable research for the teams in question.
Management researchers have investigated how corporate governance mechanisms influence corporate social responsibility (CSR). The previous literature has been largely based on agency theory, which emphasizes the roles of effective monitoring and incentive alignment, but the empirical evidence has been mixed. This inconsistency may result from the assumption that each governance mechanism functions independently, even though they interact with one another to affect CSR. On the basis of a perspective of bundle of governance mechanisms, we examined whether multiple governance mechanisms act as complements or substitutes for each other in promoting CSR. Using a panel sample of U.S. firms for the years 2004 to 2010, we found that multiple governance mechanisms mainly act as substitutes to promote CSR. Our findings suggest that a similar level of CSR can be achieved with different combinations of governance mechanisms. Our study contributes to the fields of both corporate governance and CSR in theory and practice.
An urgent issue for new ventures is how firms can effectively use human resource policies to promote growth and employee productivity. In this study, we propose a model of how three motivation-enhancing human resource (MHR) practices relate to firms’ subsequent growth and productivity. In addition, we demonstrate how two temporal factors influence the relationship of MHR practices with subsequent growth and productivity. Specifically, we assess how the initial implementation of MHR practices creates short-term costs and long-term benefits, and we assess how firm developmental stage influences the relationship of MHR practices with subsequent growth and productivity. We test our model by using random coefficient growth modeling with a sample of 677 firms tracked for 6 years. We found that MHR practices are related to subsequent firm growth and productivity. In addition, we show that the initial use of MHR practices creates inefficiencies that, in the short-term, slow growth and productivity but have positive long-term effects of subsequent growth and productivity. Finally, we show that the relationships of MHR practices with growth and productivity are much stronger when firms are in a postrevenue, growth goal stage. We conclude with a research agenda and recommendations for how new ventures can make effective use of MHR practices to promote performance.
We investigated the status of leadership theory integration by reviewing 14 years of published research (2000 through 2013) in 10 top journals (864 articles). The authors of these articles examined 49 leadership approaches/theories, and in 293 articles, 3 or more of these leadership approaches were included in their investigations. Focusing on these articles that reflected relatively extensive integration, we applied an inductive approach and used graphic network analysis as a guide for drawing conclusions about the status of leadership theory integration. All 293 articles included in the analysis identified 1 focal theory that was integrated with 2 or more supporting leadership theories. The 6 leadership approaches most often appearing as the focal theory were transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, strategic leadership, leadership and diversity, participative/shared leadership, and the trait approach to leadership. On the basis of inductive reflections on our analysis, we make two key observations. First, the 49 focal leadership theories qualify as middle-range theories that are ripe for integration. Second, drawing from social network theory, we introduce the term "theoretical neighborhood" to describe the focal theoretical networks. Our graphical inductive analyses reveal potential connections among neighboring middle-range leadership theories that merit investigation and, hence, identify promising future directions for achieving greater theoretical integration. We provide an online supplement with 10 additional leadership theory graphs and analyses: leadership in teams and decision groups, ethical leadership, leader and follower cognitions, leadership emergence, leadership development, emotions and leadership, implicit leadership, leader-member exchange, authentic leadership, and identity and identification process theories of leadership.
Recently, capturing within-organization variability during the implementation of high performance work systems (HPWS) has received considerable attention; however, the source of such variability has rarely been considered. If the utilization of HPWS is positively related to performance outcomes, examining factors contributing to an effective implementation may yield significant theoretical and practical implications. For this purpose, this study extends the extant HPWS literature in two ways. First, we attempt to conceptualize team-level HPWS intensity and identify antecedents of variance across teams. Specifically, we regard the visible role of team managers in the process of HPWS implementation as a primary interpretive filter that makes team members perceive differences in HPWS intensity, which in turn affects team performance. Second, we posit that if human resources (HR) policies are viewed as an exchange agreement between the organization and its employees, then a team manager more actively enforcing espoused HR practices may positively influence the sense of human resource management (HRM)–induced psychological contract fulfillment of team members, which in turn influences individual in-role performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Our hypotheses are tested with data from 183 matched responses from 51 teams, and the results generally support both the team-level and multilevel hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our study.
Building theories is important for advancing knowledge of management. But it is also a highly challenging task. Although there is a burgeoning literature that offers many theorizing tools, we lack a coherent understanding of how these tools fit together—when to use a particular tool and which combination of tools can be used in the theorizing process. In this article, we organize a systematic review of the literature on theory building in management around the five key elements of a good story: conflict, character, setting, sequence, and plot and arc. In doing so, we hope to provide a richer understanding of how specific theorizing tools facilitate aspects of the theorizing process and offer a clearer big picture of the process of building important theories. We also offer pragmatic empirical theorizing as an approach that uses quantitative empirical findings to stimulate theorizing.
This study examines if the effort of financially linked independent (FLI) directors enable firms to reemerge from bankruptcy, a major organizational crisis. Using a sample of 307 bankrupt U.S. firms with instrumental variables regression methodology, I find that the efforts of these directors are critical for firm reemergence. FLI directors’ efforts increase the likelihood of reemergence as well as improve access to financial resources. In contrast, I do not find any evidence that non-FLI directors’ efforts are associated with reemergence. I also find that resourceful but uninvolved directors are not helpful for firms trying to navigate their way out of bankruptcy. My study highlights (a) the changing nature of roles played by directors in various lifecycle stages, (b) the greater importance of resource provisioning over monitoring during reemergence, and (c) that efforts of FLI directors, and not others director categories, matter for reemergence. Overall, my study extends research that suggests directors’ motivation may cause differential firm outcomes and provides evidence that directors do not always put in their best effort on behalf of their firms. This, I suggest, has profound implications for corporate governance research and practice.
Do managers behave territorially toward their employees? Despite accumulating evidence demonstrating the prevalence of territoriality over nonagentic organizational resources, key questions remain regarding the extent to which psychological ownership and territorial behavior occur within supervisor-subordinate relationships. To explore this question, we drew on territoriality and mate-guarding theory to ascertain how and why managers might utilize one form of territoriality, anticipatory defenses, toward their employees. In a four-study investigation, we find that managers consistently engage in two forms of anticipatory defense tactics, persuasion and nurturing, that are intended to defend ownership claims over their employees and limit employee defection. Our results demonstrate a positive relationship between psychological ownership of subordinates and employee guarding directed toward those subordinates. We also find that managers engage in employee guarding more when they anticipate an employee is likely to defect, and they adapt guarding tactics in response to the subordinate’s general mental ability. Collectively, our results identify the motivations and conditions under which supervisors act territorially toward agentic subordinates, contributing to theory in territoriality and downward social influence.
This paper proposes an agency model for headquarters-subsidiary relationships in multinational organizations with headquarters as the principal and the subsidiary as the agent. As a departure from classical agency theory, our model is developed for the unit level of analysis and considers two root causes of the agency problem—self-interest and bounded rationality. We argue that in the organizational setting, one cannot assume absolute self-interest and perfect rationality of agents (subsidiaries) but should allow them to vary. We explain subsidiary-level variation through a set of internal organizational and external social conditions in which the headquarters-subsidiary agency dyad is embedded. We then discuss several agency scenarios reflecting various levels of self-interest and rationality that lead to different manifestations of the agency problem. The proposed framework can inform more relevant applications of the agency perspective in organizational studies and motivate future research.
We present and test a self-consistency theory framework for gossip: that perceived negative workplace gossip influences our self-perceptions and, in turn, this influences our behaviors. Using supervisor-subordinate dyadic time-lagged data (n = 403), we demonstrated that perceived negative workplace gossip adversely influenced target employees’ organization-based self-esteem, which, in turn, influenced their citizenship behavior directed at the organization and at its members. Moreover, by integrating victimization theory into our framework, we further demonstrated that negative affectivity, an individual’s dispositional tendency, not only moderated the self-consistency process but also predicted perceived negative workplace gossip. Our study therefore shifts attention to the target of negative workplace gossip and in doing so offers a promising new direction for future research. Implications to theory and practice are discussed.
This paper explores the nature of workplace motivation by testing the continuum structure of motivation proposed by self-determination theory through the application of relatively new and advanced methodological techniques. Specifically, we demonstrate the usefulness of the overarching bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling framework in organizational psychology and discuss implications of such models over more traditional confirmatory factor analyses. This framework is applied to responses obtained from 1,124 Canadian employees who completed a multidimensional measure of workplace motivation. The results support a continuum of self-regulation and illustrate the importance of accounting for quality of motivation in addition to its global quantity. Indeed, the results showed that specific types of motivation explained variance in covariates over and above the variance already explained by the global quantity of self-determination. The current study further demonstrates the limitation of the commonly used relative autonomy index and offers alternate conceptualizations of human motivation.
Socially oriented shareholder activism is an increasingly important mechanism through which social movement organizations seek to influence the private sector by exerting pressure on corporate activities in areas such as human rights, environmental protection, and labor policies. This activism challenges the status quo of targeted firms and potentially their institutional field, disrupting "business as usual" and often drawing negative attention to the firms. We theorize that some firms might use corporate political activity (CPA) as an indirect, nonmarket strategy aimed at regulatory capture to reduce the impact of such disruptions. We focus on one popular avenue of shareholder activism—the proxy proposal mechanism—and the role the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plays in allowing omission of socially oriented shareholder proposals from the proxy ballot. Using two distinct data sources, we find evidence that for S&P 500 firms, the SEC allows for the omission of the proposals from proxy ballots more frequently for those firms more active in CPA. These findings inform the growing scholarship on socially oriented activism as well as suggest the indirect influence of CPA on government agency decision making.
A unique survey archive of U.S. Army officers’ affective commitment and continuance commitment over a 4-year time period presents an opportunity to test multiple research questions about the extent to which organizational commitment profiles change and their relationship with the occurrence and timing of turnover. These results begin to reconcile competing theories about the stability of commitment and complement theories of organizational attachment, withdrawal, and turnover. First, multigroup latent profile analyses revealed the structure of commitment profiles was relatively consistent across five samples from the same organization. Second, latent transition analysis revealed more within-sample and within-person temporal stability of commitment profiles over a 4-year time period than less stability. Third, value-based profiles assessed at one time period were associated with lower turnover rates and higher organizational tenure compared to weak commitment profiles. Likewise, when predicting the timing of turnover with survival analysis, value-based profiles had a lower turnover hazard and higher survival probabilities over time relative to weak commitment profiles. Additionally, employees who transitioned from a value-based profile to a weak commitment profile had a higher turnover hazard and lower survival probabilities compared to employees who moved in the opposite direction. These findings have implications for turnover theories, as well as applied implications for the timing of interventions designed to enhance organizational commitment and reduce turnover.
Adopting a signaling theory perspective, we argue that politician stock ownership sends signals of positive predispositions to firms, thereby alleviating some necessity for firms to emphasize lobbying expenditures to influence political action. Using data on congressional stock ownership, we find support for our arguments. We find that as the proportion of Congress owning stock in a firm increases, the firm decreases the intensity of lobbying. Furthermore, we find that the signals associated with stock-holding politicians with greater ability to affect the legislative agenda (i.e., affiliation with the majority party) relates to lobbying intensity. Our findings add to the literature on lobbying while also offering implications for practice and avenues for future research.
Considerable research has been devoted to examining the factors that influence postacquisition performance. Yet the empirical evidence remains inconclusive as to the extent to which these factors affect postacquisition performance. Building on the theory of relative standing, we propose turnover of acquired firm CEO and top management team (TMT) as an important mechanism through which commonly examined firm and deal characteristics influence postacquisition performance. Specifically, the examined antecedents represent conditions that create perceptions of diminished relative standing among acquired firm executives postacquisition. First, we conduct a meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize existing empirical research on the effect of the specified antecedents on executive turnover and on postacquisition performance. Then, we combine meta-analysis with structural equation modeling to examine the links between four antecedents, executive turnover, and postacquisition performance in a mediation model. Meta-analytic results (based on 112 studies and 399 effect sizes) reveal that the most significant factors affecting postacquisition performance are executive turnover and the level of integration of the acquired firm. However, TMT and CEO turnover have opposite effects on postacquisition performance. Our results also show that sample and measurement characteristics of primary studies moderate the identified relations. As expected, we find that CEO and TMT turnover mediate relations between three of the four examined antecedents and postacquisition performance. We discuss theoretical contributions and provide directions for future research.
Errors are a recurring fact of organizational life and can potentially yield either adverse or positive consequences. Organizational researchers and practitioners alike have become increasingly interested in understanding the causes of errors and the coping strategies that foster organizational success. Although we have learned much about errors in specific research areas across specific organizational contexts, we know little about how multifaceted forces in organizations, especially when they contradict each other, might affect the pathways of errors in organizations. This review strives to integrate the literature on errors, not only by summarizing conceptual foundations and empirical findings, but also by discussing discrepancies, inconsistencies, and opportunities for research synthesis via level of analysis, temporal dynamism, and priority lenses. At the core of this integrative review is a call for future research to explain how to reduce the underlying causes and negative consequences of errors while promoting positive outcomes and learning benefits in organizations. We close this review by offering suggestions that help develop an integrative, rather than isolated, investigation of errors in organizations.
The staged internationalization model posits that firms internationalize incrementally over time. However, born-globals are less likely to follow a more gradual model of staged internationalization, and they must decide on the scope of internationalization at their founding to exploit entrepreneurial opportunities on a global scale. Because returns from international expansion must be considered along with the risk of failure, we propose that born-globals’ local industry conditions moderate the relationship between the scope of intraregional diversification (geographic diversification within a region) or interregional diversification (geographic diversification across different regions) and survival. Using a sample of 680 Swedish born-globals founded in 2002, 2003, or 2004 and followed until 2010; data from Swedish Customs; and archival performance data, we find that interregional geographic diversification increases—and that intraregional diversification decreases—the likelihood of failure, which declines further when born-globals undertake intraregional geographic diversification under higher environmental dynamism in the home country industry. Conversely, undertaking interregional geographic diversification even when the home country industry is munificent increases the likelihood of failure (marginally significant). The findings are robust to several alternative specifications.
Drawing on social learning theory, this research examined the role of ethical leadership in conflict situations. Specifically, ethical leadership was predicted to build employees’ resolution efficacy and subsequently increase employees’ ability to deal with conflict situations in the workplace (i.e., relationship, task, and process conflict). A multisource study in Europe and a two-wave design study in Africa showed support for our mediation model. These findings expand and unite existing theory on conflict and ethical leadership.
The ownership of corporations has been studied in multiple disciplines and using diverse theoretical frameworks for several decades. Despite a wealth of research, both research gaps and contradictory findings are common. This is partly due to the fragmentation of the foci of individual studies. We synthesize the work done to date through a content analysis of 145 articles and 523 effect size estimates. On the basis of this review, we develop an integrated perspective to understand how institutional, government, family, executive, and board ownership affect a variety of firm outcomes. We conclude by offering new theoretical and contextual directions to better understand the role of ownership in shaping firm outcomes.
Signaling theory suggests that firms send signals to stakeholders to reduce information asymmetry. Research, however, has rarely examined how investors interpret signals that are equivocal. We suggest that sensemaking serves as an important process by which investors interpret firm signals, and salient contextual cues influence the sensemaking process. We examine an equivocal signal, the adoption of a poison pill, as a means of examining investor interpretation of the signal and the role of contextual cues in influencing interpretation. Using a sample of 578 poison pill adoptions and controlling for self-selection, we find that investors react negatively to poison pills adopted to protect net operating losses (NOL poison pills) but positively to poison pills adopted when the firm is in receipt of a takeover offer (in-play poison pills). Assessing the role of contextual cues, our results suggest that CEO duality, the proportion of inside directors on the firm’s board, the firm’s R&D investments, and industry concentration also condition investor response to specific-purpose poison pill adoption. Our study contributes to research on signaling theory, sensemaking, and corporate governance by examining how investors interpret a firm’s equivocal governance decisions.
Individuals with visible disabilities can acknowledge their disabilities in different ways, which may differ in effectiveness. Across four studies, we investigate whether individuals with visible disabilities engage in different acknowledgment strategies (claiming, downplaying) and how and why these different strategies affect evaluations from others. Specifically, we draw from the Stereotype Content Model and Stereotype-Fit Theory to articulate a process whereby claiming and downplaying differentially affect others’ perceptions of competence and warmth, which subsequently affect overall evaluations of the individual with a disability. We found that individuals with visible disabilities intentionally manage others’ impressions by engaging in claiming and downplaying. Claiming strategies (relative to downplaying or not acknowledging) resulted in higher evaluations because they activated perceptions of competence and warmth and the benefits of claiming were stronger for jobs higher in interpersonal demands. We discuss the implications of these results for individuals with disabilities and for organizations.
Social influence is one of the oldest and most researched constructs in organizational behavior. Most research has examined the "what" and "who" of social influence behavior, but it was not until recently that scholars began examining the "how," or the operation, of social influence techniques and behaviors. Social effectiveness constructs, such as political skill, have been the primary focus of this research effort. However, despite these constructs illuminating social influence processes, little is known about the actual operation of the social effectiveness constructs themselves. Thus, to develop a more complete understanding of social influence effectiveness, this article develops a theoretical framework by synthesizing several literatures and explaining how the individual dimensions of political skill affect the social influence process. Specifically, the authors (a) review and integrate research and theory in social influence and political skill; (b) develop an opportunity recognition, evaluation, and capitalization model to provide a theoretical framework for the dimensional dynamics of political skill; and (c) provide suggestions for how this framework informs future political skill research.
Corporate investment inherently relies on time horizon, as profits result from acquiring assets or developing capabilities that yield future benefits that exceed upfront costs. Despite the importance of time horizon to understanding resource allocation, knowledge about the subject has accumulated slowly. Our review therefore encompasses insights from several research streams that partially address the subject even though time horizon is not the central construct in any of them. We aim to clarify key constructs related to time horizon, organize prior research about the antecedents of time horizon, explain the implications of several theoretical traditions for time horizon, and detail the range of measures that have been used to capture time horizon empirically. By focusing narrowly on this topic but searching broadly for references, we provide integrative summaries of existing research and identify opportunities for new and unique research.
We provide a theory-driven review of empirical research in diversity climate to identify a number of problems with the current state of the science as well as a research agenda to move the field forward. The core issues we identify include (a) the fact that diversity climate is typically treated as unidimensional, whereas diversity research would suggest that there are two major perspectives that could be reflected in diversity climate—efforts to ensure equal employment opportunity and the absence of discrimination versus efforts to create synergy from diversity; (b) a tendency to let the level of analysis (individual psychological climate or shared team or organizational climate) be dictated by convenience rather than by careful theoretical consideration, thus sidestepping key issues for research concerning the causes and consequences of the sharedness, or lack thereof, of diversity climate perceptions; and (c) the tendency to include diversity attitudes and other nonclimate elements in climate measures even though they are different from climate both conceptually and in their antecedents and consequences. The research agenda we advance suggests a need both for different operationalizations and for new research questions in diversity climate, diversity, and relational demography research.
Self-determination theory (SDT) conceptualizes basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness as innate and essential for ongoing psychological growth, internalization, and well-being. We broadly review the literature on basic psychological need satisfaction at work with three more specific aims: to test SDT’s requirement that each basic psychological need should uniquely predict psychological growth, internalization, and well-being; to test whether use of an overall need satisfaction measure is appropriate; and to test whether the scale used to assess basic psychological needs influenced our results. To this end, we conducted a meta-analytic review of 99 studies with 119 distinct samples examining the antecedents and consequences of basic need satisfaction. We conclude with recommendations for addressing issues arising from our review and also identify points for future research, including the study of need frustration and culture, integrating the basic needs with other motivation theories, and a caution regarding the measures and methods used.
Since the 1990s, a growing body of research has sought to quantify the relationship between women’s representation in leadership positions and organizational financial performance. Commonly known as the "business case" for women’s leadership, the idea is that having more women leaders is good for business. Through meta-analysis (k = 78, n = 117,639 organizations) of the direct effects of women’s representation in leadership (as CEOs, on top management teams, and on boards of directors) on financial performance, and tests that proxy theoretical arguments for moderated relationships, we call attention to equivocal findings. Our results suggest women’s leadership may affect firm performance in general and sales performance in particular. And women’s leadership—overall and, specifically, the presence of a female CEO—is more likely to positively relate to firms’ financial performance in more gender egalitarian cultures. Yet taking our findings as a whole, we argue that commonly used methods of testing the business case for women leaders may limit our ability as scholars to understand the value that women bring to leadership positions. We do not advocate that the business case be abandoned altogether but, rather, improved and refined. We name exemplary research studies to show how different perspectives on gender, alternative conceptualizations of value, and the specification of underlying mechanisms linking leadership to performance can generate changes in both the dominant ontology and the epistemology underlying this body of research.
We conducted two studies to explore integrative, knowledge-centered team mechanisms through which transformational leadership affects team innovative performance. In the first study, using temporarily assembled project teams working on knowledge-intensive tasks, we found that transformational leadership promoted within-team knowledge sharing and team innovative performance through an integration mechanism manifest as team cooperative norms, and such a mediation process was significant even after controlling for another mediation process of team autonomy. In the second study, using permanent work teams in various functional areas, we replicated the integrative mechanism and associated transformational leadership with external team knowledge acquisition, which further moderated the relationship between knowledge sharing and innovation. Our findings point to the importance of the integration function of transformational leadership in enhancing collective innovation.
Alliances are often formed as a response to challenges from both market and social forces. Although the resource dependence logic posits that firms enter into alliances to stabilize resource flows between different markets and also to increase market power in their primary industry, it remains unclear whether the social power of firms, generated from alliance networks, may motivate firms to respond differently to the dependence logic of alliance formation. By incorporating social network theory, we argue that a firm’s social network advantages in the primary industry may serve as critical contingency conditions of the dependence logic. Analyses of firms in the U.S. computer industry from 1994 to 2007 suggest that a firm’s centrality advantage marginally reduces the positive effects of market dependencies on alliance formation, whereas a firm’s brokerage advantage enhances the market dependence effect.
Academic and practitioner interest in how market-based organizations can drive positive social change (PSC) is steadily growing. This paper helps to recast how organizations relate to society. It integrates research on projects stimulating PSC—the transformational processes to advance societal well-being—that is fragmented across different streams of research in management and related disciplines. Focusing on the mechanisms at play in how organizations and their projects affect change in targets outside of organizational boundaries, we (1) clarify the nature of PSC as a process, (2) develop an integrative framework that specifies two distinct PSC strategies, (3) take stock of and offer a categorization scheme for change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices, and (4) outline opportunities for future research. Our conceptual framework differentiates between surface- and deep-level PSC strategies understood as distinct combinations of change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices. These strategies differ in the nature and speed of transformation experienced by the targets of change projects and the resulting quality (pervasiveness and durability), timing, and reach of social impact. Our findings provide a solid base for integrating and advancing knowledge across the largely disparate streams of management research on corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, and base of the pyramid and open up important new avenues for future research on organizing for PSC and on unpacking PSC processes.
In this study, we draw upon a social movement perspective to examine how movements and institutional opportunity (political and cultural) influenced a sample of Fortune 500 corporations’ adoption of a controversial organizational practice—same-sex partner health benefits. Our results show that while corporations’ gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) employee resource groups increased the rate of the corporations’ benefits adoption, the effect of the GLBT employee resource groups became weaker when the degree of resource concentration of local GLBT advocacy organizations was high. Political opportunity derived from state legal environments and cultural opportunity derived from the tenor of moral legitimacy in leading national press coverage had little influence on the rate of benefits adoption. Furthermore, the influence of a GLBT employee resource group on the rate of benefits adoption by its corporation became weaker when cultural opportunity, derived from increases in positive tenor of pragmatic legitimacy discourse used by movement and countermovement organizations in the press, was present. Accordingly, our study shows the complicated effects of movements within and outside corporations and cultural opportunity on the adoption of a controversial practice and reveals the importance of mobilizing structure (both internal and external movements) and cultural opportunity in the adoption.
We propose that the mixed findings of research on the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship reflect its failure to adequately consider the moderating role of firms’ home country formal and informal institutions. This general hypothesis is supported in a meta-analysis of the firm-, industry-, home country–, and host country–level factors driving the I-P relationship across 32 countries between 1972 and 2012 from 359 primary studies—the largest sample of primary studies of any meta-analysis on this topic to date. We make three main contributions to the I-P and global strategy literatures. First, we develop a novel integration of the theoretical logics from the I-P research and the institution-based view of strategy to explain how embeddedness in home country institutions affects the strength of the I-P relationship. Second, we show the importance of including both formal and informal institutions in analyses of firms’ institutional embeddedness, thereby extending our knowledge of the effects of institutional complexity. Our third contribution is methodological and reflects our use of advanced meta-analytical techniques based on both product-moment and partial correlations as effect sizes, which allow us to address unresolved debates about the sign and shape of the I-P relationship. Our results show that the I-P relationship is positive, although the overall effect is small and varies greatly across firms’ home countries. We conclude by discussing the findings’ relevance and promising future research avenues, including novel research questions, multilevel theoretical and empirical frameworks, and improvements in methodological rigor.
The extant literature tends to frame mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and postmerger integration (PMI) as strategies and outcomes, but this framing often leaves their underlying processes underexplored. We address this gap by redirecting attention to the view that M&As are largely embedded in social and human practices. Our conceptual study identifies three generic M&A strategies—annex & assimilate, harvest & protect, and link & promote—and matches them with three well-known PMI outcomes (i.e., absorption, preservation, and symbiosis, respectively). Using a configurational perspective and drawing upon the ability-motivation-opportunity (AMO) model, we develop a conceptual framework that reveals why and how AMO-enhancing human resource management (HRM) practices can link M&A strategies and PMI outcomes. Finally, we elaborate on the theoretical and practical contributions and chart a course for future inquiry and research applications for the M&A-HRM-PMI triad and its processes.
This study argues and shows that the extent to which high-technology firms focus efforts by outsourcing production, assembly, and logistics activities enhances the extent of technological knowledge exploration. This occurs through three modalities: (1) intensifying the effect of internal R&D efforts on exploration; (2) intensifying the effect of learning from competing partners, through R&D alliances, on exploration; and (3) intensifying the effect of learning from customers on exploration. Empirical analysis of a panel data set of Israeli high-technology firms supports the view that the combination of these three modalities is associated with greater exploration of new technological knowledge.
This article presents two studies that examine the moderated multiple mediation model between Family Supportive Supervisors Behaviors (FSSB) and individual’s thriving at work through psychological availability and work–family enrichment at conditional levels of need for caring. Drawing on the Resource-Gain-Development framework and self-determination theory, the results of the 6-month time-lagged data demonstrate, in Study 1 (Italian sample = 156), that FSSB is associated with greater individual thriving at work via work–family enrichment and that this indirect relationship is significant exclusively for those who perceive a higher need for caring. In Study 2 (Chinese sample = 356), the results demonstrate the relationship between FSSB and thriving at work is serially mediated by both psychological availability and work–family enrichment at the conditional level of need for caring. In particular, the results demonstrate that individuals with a higher need for caring responded more favorably to the presence of a family supportive supervisor than those experiencing a lower need for caring. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Nonverbal behavior is a hot topic in the popular management press. However, management scholars have lagged behind in understanding this important form of communication. Although some theories discuss limited aspects of nonverbal behavior, there has yet to be a comprehensive review of nonverbal behavior geared toward organizational scholars. Furthermore, the extant literature is scattered across several areas of inquiry, making the field appear disjointed and challenging to access. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on nonverbal behavior with an eye towards applying it to organizational phenomena. We begin by defining nonverbal behavior and its components. We review and discuss several areas in the organizational sciences that are ripe for further explorations of nonverbal behavior. Throughout the paper, we offer ideas for future research as well as information on methods to study nonverbal behavior in lab and field contexts. We hope our review will encourage organizational scholars to develop a deeper understanding of how nonverbal behavior influences the social world of organizations.
We develop a new typology of star employees, wherein we identify three types of stars—universal stars, performance stars, and status stars—on the basis of stars’ unique combinations of task performance and external status. By classifying stars in this way and disentangling task performance and external status as unique and simultaneously important qualities underlying the distinct contributions of different types of stars, we provide a basis for more accurately identifying the full range of individuals who create exceptional value, and we offer novel insights into stars’ various influences in organizations. With this foundation, we explore how different types of stars’ distinct qualities and bases of value creation affect both the security of their star standing and their relative abilities to appropriate value. We then expand our focus to consider stars in the broader organizational contexts in which they exist, discussing the implications of stars’ distinct attributes for patterns of value creation, value capture, and value preservation associated with stars’ complementarities and redundancies with other organizational resources. Finally, we propose several lines of inquiry through which future research may leverage the proposed typology to address issues related to the management of different types of stars in the broader organizational contexts in which they are embedded.
In this article, we theoretically develop and test the temporal intricacies of job engagement. Drawing on the attention view of social cognition, we examine the interplay of employees’ temporally relevant perspectives of fit (i.e., retrospected, current, and anticipated) within their ongoing membership to the organization. Utilizing field data gathered from a large multinational company over multiple time periods, we found support for a conditional indirect effect model. Specifically, our findings showed that current needs-supply (NS) fit accounted for two of the previously investigated antecedents of job engagement (i.e., psychological meaningfulness and safety), especially when organizational identification was low. Moreover, anticipated perceptions of NS fit fully mediated the influences of psychological meaningfulness and availability on job engagement. The mediating effect relating to psychological availability was also especially pronounced when organizational identification was low. By shedding light on employees’ temporally constructed psychological experiences, our research suggests that job engagement is not only affected by employees’ contemporaneous understandings of their jobs but also influenced by their perceptions of anticipated opportunities.
Building on the institutional perspective on capital markets, we examine the process of legitimation that underpins investor valuation of initial public offerings in the context of institutional polycentricism. We focus on the impact of board interlocks of the CEO and internal and external board members on investor perceptions of initial public offering firms in the United States and United Kingdom. We find that the extent of board members’ interlocks relates positively to the extent of the CEO’s interlocks, but this relationship is stronger in the United Kingdom than in the United States. More extensive interlocks lead to higher valuations in the United Kingdom than in the United States. This is the result of differences in institutional confluences that underpin corporate governance in the two culturally related countries.
The relationship between job satisfaction and time is a fundamental question in organizational behavior. Yet given inconsistent results in the literature, the nature of this relationship has remained unresolved. Scholars’ understanding of this relationship has been limited because studies have generally not simultaneously considered the two primary time metrics in job satisfaction research—age and tenure—and have instead relied on cross-sectional research designs. In this study, we develop and test an empirical model to provide a more definitive answer to the question of how age and tenure relate to job satisfaction. Our analyses draw on longitudinal data from 21,670 participants spanning a total of 34 waves of data collection across 40 years in two nationally representative samples. Multilevel analyses indicate that people became less satisfied as their tenure within a given organization increased, yet as people aged—and transitioned from organization to organization—their satisfaction increased. We also found that job rewards, as exemplified by pay, mediated these relationships. We discuss empirical, theoretical, and practical implications of our findings.
Similar to other identities, disability identity can be complex and exist at varying levels of integration with other identities, including an occupational identity. Yet existing empirical research in the management and social science literature on disability in the workplace reveals a lack of appreciation for the complexity of disability identity. In the following review, we move toward a broader conceptualization of disability identity in the workplace by integrating theoretical perspectives on disability identity across disciplines with existing research on disability-related experiences in the workplace. We propose that a worker’s decision to adopt a disability identity in the workplace depends on various factors that function at the intraindividual, interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels. We then draw on a more complex conceptualization of disability identity to inform existing research on disclosure and requests for accommodations, worker safety and well-being, and understanding responses to employment opportunities among workers with disabilities. Finally, we recommend several new avenues of research incorporating a broader view of disability identity and recommend organizational practices that are informed by a dynamic identity perspective.
The innovations of creative individuals are regarded as vital for business functioning and survival. To this end, efforts have been made to design measures of creative personality in hopes of predicting creative performance. Current measures of creative personality all reside at the explicit level, yet theory and research both suggest that a large proportion of personality can also be conceptualized at the implicit level. We address this issue by presenting a theoretical basis for creative personality that operates on an implicit level. Using conditional reasoning methodology, we describe five cognitive biases that serve as justification mechanisms for creative personality. Next, we link implicit creative personality to creative abilities through a developmental process. We then test this model and our new measure of creative personality in five different studies. Our results provide evidence in support of an implicit component of creative personality and suggest that it is a substantial predictor of creative performance. Finally, we describe the management and human resources implications of the conceptualization of creative personality as an implicit construct.
We posit that family firms often face a dilemma in their strategic decision making: whether to maintain current socioemotional wealth or pursue prospective financial wealth. Applying such a mixed gamble perspective to acquisitions, family owners assess potential acquisitions with regard to their impact on both wealth dimensions. In line with this reasoning, our results show that family control implies a general reluctance to acquire and, when an acquisition happens, a preference for related targets. Because financial and socioemotional viewpoints lead to largely incompatible predictions about the occurrence and relatedness of acquisitions, family firm owners use their firm’s vulnerability as a signal. Increased vulnerability leads to a heightened propensity to prioritize financial over socioemotional wealth problem framing, which is reflected in the acquisition of unrelated targets. Empirical results are supportive of these predictions.
Management innovation entails the introduction of new-to-the-firm changes in management structures, processes, and practices intended to improve organizational functioning. We draw on relational demography theory to elucidate how behavioral dispositions stemming from top management and middle management similarity in professional characteristics (functional background and educational level) and biodemographic characteristics (age and gender) may facilitate management innovation. We argue that while a throughput functional orientation of top management can be expected to stimulate management innovation, greater similarity between top and middle management will strengthen the association between top management throughput orientation and management innovation by (1) engendering consistency in behavioral expectations between the managerial echelons and (2) motivating middle management to engage in extrarole behaviors. We test our theory on a sample of more than 8,000 top and middle managers in a cross-section of 33 organizations from 2000 to 2008 and adopt a novel content analysis-based measure of management innovation. We find compelling support for the moderating influence of professional similarity between top and middle management but uncover more complex patterns for cross-echelon similarity in biodemographic characteristics. We discuss implications for understanding the role of managers in management innovation, joint consideration of top and middle management characteristics in organizational change processes, the interplay between various types of innovation, and the measurement of management innovation. Promising future research directions are suggested.
Compensation systems, such as individualized pay-for-performance (I-PFP) schemes for employees, represent an important approach to aligning employer-employee interests. However, the adoption of I-PFP is much less common in many countries than in the United States. Employing a multilevel analysis of over 4,000 firms in 26 countries, we explore determinants of its adoption. At the country level, we distinguish between cultural and institutional (labor regulation institutions) influences. At the firm level, we distinguish firms that view human resources as strategically important and firms that are foreign owned. On the one hand, our findings indicate that both cultural and institutional effects at the country level significantly influence the adoption of I-PFP. On the other hand, senior managers’ agency counts. We find the effect of labor regulation on I-PFP to be mediated by its effects on labor union influence, and we find the effects of culture on I-PFP to be entirely mediated by labor regulation and (country-level) union influence.
Drawing from strategic human resource management and organizational theory, this article develops an integrated typology of employee governance. This typology is based on the dimensions of eliciting employees’ commitment to the organization (commitment-eliciting) and achieving employees’ compliance to rules (compliance-achieving), which yields four approaches to governing employees: disciplined governance, bonded governance, hybrid governance, and unstructured governance. Results from 337 firms show that the hybrid governance approach is linked with significantly higher organizational performance than alternative approaches in the Chinese context. In addition, both commitment-based practices and compliance-based practices are positively related to organizational performance, and their interaction produces additional positive effects.
This study examines the role of team political skill in predicting team effectiveness. Extending the current paradigm of individual political skill and contributing to the team effectiveness literature, we offer a theoretical framework for team political skill composition and test a model whereby task and social cohesion mediate the relationship between team political skill and team performance. On the basis of the results obtained from 189 student project teams and 28 business work teams, we demonstrate that team political skill benefits extend to groups. In both samples, team political skill directly related to subjective and objective team performance. Among several team political skill composition models, the interaction between the group skill mean and standard deviation ("skill strength") was found to be the best predictor of team emergent states and outcomes. Team political skill was related to objective team performance via social and task cohesion in the student teams and via task cohesion in the work teams. Finally, we investigated the potential dark side of high team political skill but failed to support the too-much-of-a-good-thing hypothesis. Given the social focus of the construct, an aim for future research is to further understand how the composition of individual political skill influences team dynamics and outcomes. Multiple organizational implications extend to recruitment, training, development, and team building.
This paper contributes to the leadership identity development literature by examining role identity shift from individual contributor to leader in organizations that expect and reward innovation. The challenge for new leaders is to shift their role identity from innovative individual contributor to leader and for the organization to provide the support and reward structures to develop leaders of innovation. Degrees of role identity shift range from incremental shift (remaining an individual contributor through technical updating and employee development) through substantial shift (adding elements of leadership to one’s role and identity) to radical shift (complete transformation into becoming a leader in behavior and identity). As part of this approach, we apply the idea of creative destruction to leader development and, consistent with identity literature, argue that the idea of identity destruction is sometimes a legitimate part of leader development. In a process model, we predict the degree of leader role identity shift depends on, and is influenced by, organizational policies and resources. Also, we illustrate how some efforts by organizations to enhance technical innovation and individual development may have the effect of inhibiting leader identity development.
Prior research has identified two different sources of strategic imitation—through perceived organizational cluster similarity (cluster effects) and direct social connections (tied-to effects). In the research on tied-to effects, top executives’ social ties, such as outside directorships, have long been studied as a mechanism through which strategic imitation develops. However, are all ties the same? There has been little examination of whether some social ties have more influence than others. Using the attention-based view of the firm, we argue that certain social ties garner more attention by being salient to top executives. We empirically test this assertion by examining the effects of CEO outside directorships on R&D spending. Using panel data from large U.S. manufacturing firms, we find that CEOs imitate the R&D intensity of tied-to firms (i.e., a firm in which the CEO serves as an outside board member) in their own firm’s R&D decisions. Consistent with attention-based arguments, our results show evidence of selective imitation, as imitating relationships are stronger when the CEO has longer tenure as a director of a tied-to firm and the tied-to firm is performing well. In contrast to conventional institutional theory, our findings also show that CEOs imitate relatively smaller tied-to firms when they make R&D investment decisions. Not all social ties have equal influence on imitative strategic decision making; thus, they have different strategic implications.
Research on multimarket contact and firm performance has produced mixed results. To reconcile this discrepancy, we theorize how varying levels of multimarket contact may generate mutual forbearance that influences firm performance. We also examine how strategic alliances moderate the relationship between levels of multimarket contact and firm performance. Our analysis of 233 semiconductor firms across 52 markets reveals that multimarket contact has an inverted U-shaped relationship with a multimarket firm’s market share. The number of strategic alliances that a firm has helps to further extend the positive effect of multimarket contact and mitigate its negative effect on the firm’s market share. Accordingly, our study contributes to the literature on multimarket competition by shedding light on the conditions under which multimarket contact may increase/decrease firm performance.
Perhaps because self-estrangement is inherently dysfunctional, empirical research has primarily sought to understand its antecedents but not its consequences. As a result, despite its ubiquity in the workplace, self-estrangement’s insidious effects are not well understood. In this paper, because coworkers frequently bear the brunt of interactions with self-estranged workers, we sought to understand how the behavior of self-estranged workers corrodes their social exchange relationships with coworkers. In particular, we focus on how increasing self-estrangement, through its dysfunctional influence on the quality of social exchange relationships with coworkers, can exact a toll on estranged workers’ job performance. To provide greater insight into their relationships, we extend social exchange theory by specifying three behavioral outcomes that underlie the quality of ongoing, reciprocal exchanges, including the level of trustworthiness, accessibility, and peer citizenship behavior. To test our model, we gathered matching survey data in a large corporation from three sources, including 346 professional employees, a knowledgeable coworker, and their supervisor. Results show that self-estrangement indirectly impacts job performance and damages relationships with coworkers by reducing the estranged workers’ level of trustworthiness, accessibility, and peer citizen behavior. We also found that each of these behavioral outcomes served as a significant intervening mechanism separately, as well as when they were combined as a set, suggesting that coworker social exchange quality should be viewed as multidimensional.
How does organizational identity affect team functioning? We articulate and test an identity instrumentality hypothesis that suggests that organizational identity (1) directly predicts those aspects of team functioning that enable, and are instrumental in, employees’ fulfillment of their identity with the organization; and (2) indirectly predicts other aspects of team functioning not instrumental to organizational identity fulfillment. Underlying this hypothesis is the idea that some aspects of team functioning, such as team performance and cooperative team behaviors, are important to individuals’ fulfillment of their organizational identity because the implications of these behaviors extend beyond the immediacy of the team, whereas other aspects of team functioning (e.g., team affect) are not instrumental to organizational identity fulfillment because they are relevant mainly within the team context. We test the identity instrumentality hypothesis by using meta-analytic path analysis conducted on effect estimates obtained from 132 independent studies (total N = 28,024) of organizational and team identity. As hypothesized, we find that whereas team identity fully mediates the relationship between organizational identity and team affective constructs (i.e., aspects of team functioning not instrumental to the fulfillment of organizational identity), organizational identity uniquely and directly affects cooperative team behavior and team performance, which are those aspects of team functioning that are instrumental to the fulfillment of organizational identity.
Many of the most pivotal mechanisms of team success are emergent phenomena—constructs with conceptual origins at the individual level that coalesce over time through members’ interactions to characterize a team as a whole. Typically, empirical research on teams represents emergent mechanisms as the aggregate of members’ self-report perceptions of the team. This dominant approach assumes members have developed a perception of the emergent property and are able to respond accurately to survey items. Yet emergent phenomena require sufficient time and team interaction before coalescing as perceptible team properties. Attempting to measure an emergent property before it is perceptible can result in inaccurate assessments and substantive conclusions. Therefore, a key purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of the underlying characteristics of emergent team phenomena that give rise to their emergence as perceptible and, thus, accurately measurable team characteristics. We advance a conceptual framework that classifies emergent team properties on the basis of the degree to which the construct manifests in overtly observable behaviors, positing that more observable emergent team phenomena require less interaction before emerging as ratable team properties compared to constructs that are less easily observed. Leveraging advances in measurement modeling, we test our conceptual framework in a laboratory sample and a quasi–field study sample, demonstrating a multilevel measurement approach that evaluates the emergence of shared team properties across measurement occasions. Results suggest the observability of emergent team properties is a crucial determinant of the relative speed at which constructs emerge as recognizable, ratable properties of the team.
Together, Penrosean and Barnean resource-based logic make up the dominant theoretical approach to understanding firm growth. While extant literature focuses on a common lineage between Penrosean theory and the resource-based view (RBV), we explicate divergence at these origins of resource-based theorizing and subject the growth implications of each to meta-analytic testing. RBV’s central tenets concern resources that meet valuable, rare, inimitable, and nonsubstitutable (VRIN) criteria, while Penrose’s theory discusses the versatility of resources. Theoretically, VRIN resources allow firms to exploit unique opportunities, while versatile resources allow firms to recombine resources in novel ways to create growth. Using meta-analytic techniques, we find that versatile resources are associated with higher levels of growth, whereas VRIN resources are not. We offer novel insights into alternative characteristics of resources derived from the same conceptualization of the firm, add greater specificity to the performance construct, and open up avenues for new theorizing on firm growth that is more closely aligned with Penrose’s theory.
Team turnover can be harmful to a team in many ways. This study examined whether a team’s collective experience (team organizational tenure) attenuates the association between team turnover and task conflict changes. Differing from prior research, our study used a longitudinal design to assess the effects of team turnover, accounting for the competence of those leaving the team. We built on context-emergent turnover theory and tested a random coefficient growth model by utilizing data from 74 health-care teams. We found support for the hypothesized interaction: The more collective experience the team had, the less likely it was that team turnover associated with increases in task conflict. We discuss implications for theory and practice.
The purpose of this study was to examine the relations of two facets of psychopathic personality (i.e., self-centered impulsivity and fearless dominance) with interpersonally directed counterproductive work behavior (CWB-I) and contextual performance (CP). Consistent with research on psychopathy, our hypothesis suggested that self-centered impulsivity (i.e., behavioral impulsivity characterized by disregard for rules and responsibilities) would be positively related to CWB-I and negatively related to CP. Using socioanalytic theory, we further suggested that fearless dominance (i.e., an egotistical personal style characterized by self-promotion and prioritization of one’s own needs before those of others) would be negatively associated with interpersonal performance (i.e., high CWB-I and low CP) only when individuals indicated low levels of interpersonal influence (i.e., a dimension of political skill reflecting an ability to adapt one’s behavior in subtle, sophisticated, and situationally effective ways). Results provided strong support for the differential relations of the psychopathic personality dimensions with the criteria of interest. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are provided in light of a number of notable strengths and limitations.
We propose a mediation model to explain the relationship between CEO humility and firm performance. Building on upper echelons, power, and paradox theories, we hypothesize that when a more humble CEO leads a firm, its top management team (TMT) is more likely to collaborate, share information, jointly make decisions, and possess a shared vision. The firm will also tend to have lower pay disparity between the CEO and the TMT. The humble CEO and TMT, in turn, will be more likely to adopt an ambidextrous strategic orientation, which will be associated with stronger firm performance. We tested the model by using both survey and archival data that were collected at multiple time points from 105 small-to-medium-sized firms in the computer software and hardware industry in the United States. Findings largely support our theoretical assertions, suggesting that CEO humility has important implications for firm processes and outcomes.
The current study examined employee outcomes associated with customer mistreatment, conceptualizing customer mistreatment as signaling failure regarding employees’ pursuit of task and social goals at work. We argue that employees make internal attributions when experiencing customer mistreatment and are likely to engage in rumination because of this perceived goal failure. The goal of this article was to test this conceptualization and examine the outcomes of customer mistreatment–induced rumination as well as emotional labor strategies as potential protective mechanisms against customer mistreatment. Findings from time-lagged data collected from 737 call-center customer representatives indicated that cognitive rumination mediated the relationship between customer mistreatment and supervisor-rated job performance, customer-directed sabotage, employee well-being, and emotional exhaustion. The second mediator, social sharing of negative events, mediated the relationship between customer mistreatment and emotional exhaustion only. As expected, cognitive rumination was positively related to customer sabotage and emotional exhaustion and negatively related to job performance and well-being. Social sharing of negative events was positively related to both well-being and emotional exhaustion. Finally, we found that deep acting, but not surface acting, buffered the effects of customer mistreatment on cognitive rumination and social sharing. Limitations, future research directions, and managerial implications are discussed.
Compared to macro-organizational researchers, micro-organizational researchers have generally eschewed archival sources of data as a means of advancing knowledge. The goal of this paper is to discuss emerging opportunities to use archival research for the purposes of advancing and testing theory in micro-organizational research. We discuss eight specific strengths common to archival micro-organizational research and how they differ from other traditional methods. We further discuss limitations of archival research, as well as strategies for mitigating these limitations. Taken together, we provide a toolkit to encourage micro-organizational researchers to capitalize on archival data.
We attempt to provide a more nuanced view of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm financial performance using a competitive-action perspective. We argue that competitive action should be considered as an important contingency that determines the effects of CSR activities on firm financial performance. Using data for 113 publicly listed U.S. firms in the software industry between 2000 and 2005, we found that socially responsible activities (positive CSR) enhance firm financial performance when the firm’s competitive-action level is high, whereas socially irresponsible activities (negative CSR) actually improve firm financial performance when the competitive-action level is low. By introducing competitive action as an important contingency, this study contributes to the literature on CSR and strategic management.
A growing body of evidence has linked proactivity at work to positive outcomes. Yet little research to date has investigated whether employees’ proactive behavior in organizations can be facilitated through training and development. Nor has research considered which variables shape employees’ responses to such interventions. We investigate the effects on proactivity of two theoretically distinct training and development interventions in a randomized field experiment with police officers and police support staff (N = 112). We hypothesized that a problem-focused intervention, which made discrepancies between the status quo and the ideal present more salient, would lead to increases in individual task proactivity, whereas a vision-focused intervention, which made discrepancies between the status quo and an ideal future more salient, would increase organization member proactivity. Intervention effects were moderated by role overload and future orientation, respectively. Only individuals with high levels of role overload increased their individual task proactivity as a result of the problem-focused intervention, and only individuals high in future orientation increased their organization member proactivity as a result of the vision-focused intervention. Our study integrates different cybernetic perspectives on how proactivity is motivated and provides novel insights into moderators of interventions designed to capture these different mechanisms. From a practical perspective, our study supports organizations seeking to implement training and development interventions and helps them to determine who might benefit most from interventions.
Research has suggested that firms engage in a number of different patent strategies to protect and even gain competitive advantage. However, we know less about the strategies firms employ when engaging in patent litigation. Using proprietary and defensive generic patent strategies as a starting point, this paper describes two types of patent litigation strategies, the types of institutional contexts that would be expected to motivate firms to engage in each, and the performance outcomes of firms undertaking such strategies. Analyzing patent litigation activity between 2002 and 2008 in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries, we find that firms in the pharmaceutical industry are more likely to follow a proactive proprietary patent litigation strategy, while firms in the semiconductor industry are more likely to engage in a proactive defensive patent litigation strategy. Furthermore, firms in the semiconductor industry that followed a proactive defensive patent litigation strategy enjoyed better performance than firms that did not engage in this strategy.
Diversity in social networks is often linked to enhanced creativity. Emerging research on exposure to diverse informational resources (e.g., ideas and knowledge), however, has painted a more complex picture regarding its effect on individuals’ creative performance. This research examines the effects of culturally diverse networks on the flow of ideas and individuals’ creativity. Combining social network analysis with experimental methods, two studies using different samples found that a culturally diverse network increases the likelihood of receiving culture-related novel ideas (but not other types of novel ideas) from network contacts, whether or not these contacts share one’s own culture of origin. Additionally, the creativity effect of network diversity depends on the type of tasks. Networks’ degree of cultural diversity increases creativity on tasks that draw on varied cultural-knowledge resources but not on other types of tasks. These findings highlight that network diversity provides access to specific forms of knowledge and has a domain-specific effect on creativity. Theoretical and practical implications for creativity and social network research are discussed.
Commitments to organizations and professions have important implications for behavior in the workplace, but little is known about how these dual commitments combine to affect organizational outcomes. We present a model proposing that commitment to professions influences productivity through a positive effect on intrinsic motivation and a negative effect on extrinsic motivation. Commitment to organizations, conversely, is hypothesized to have a negative effect on intrinsic motivation and a positive effect on extrinsic motivation. We tested the model with a sample of 237 tenured management professors and, overall, the model fit the data well and better than less parsimonious models or ones positing reverse causality. Commitment to the profession was positively related to intrinsic motivation to engage in research and, through this effect, resulted in more challenging research goals, increased commitment to those goals, more hours spent on research, and greater research productivity. Commitment to the organization (university) was positively related to extrinsic motivation and negatively related to intrinsic motivation and was unrelated to goal level, goal commitment, hours spent on research, and research productivity. Our model makes a unique theoretical contribution by revealing the differing paths by which commitments to organizations and professions affect work outcomes, and our results support and extend commitment theory and offer unique insights into posttenure productivity.
It has been over a decade since organizational researchers began seriously grappling with the phenomenon of multiteam systems (MTSs) as an organizational form spanning traditional team and organizational boundaries. The MTS concept has been met with great enthusiasm as an organizational form that solves both theoretical and practical challenges. However, the development of the MTS domain has been stifled by the absence of theory that clearly delineates the core dimensions influencing the interactions between the individuals and teams operating within them. We contribute to such theory building by creating a multidimensional framework that centers on two key structural features of MTSs—differentiation and dynamism—that create distinct forces affecting individual and team behavior within the system. Differentiation characterizes the degree of difference and separation between MTS component teams at a particular point in time, whereas dynamism describes the variability and instability of the system over time. For each dimension, we discuss the underlying subdimensions that explain how structural features generate boundary-enhancing and disruptive forces in MTSs. We then advance a mesolevel theory of MTS functioning that associates those forces with individuals’ needs and motives, which, in turn, compile upward to form team and MTS emergent states. Finally, we discuss coordination mechanisms that offset or compensate for the structural effects and serve to cohere the MTS component teams. The theoretical and practical implications of our work and an agenda for future research are then discussed.
In this study, we conceptualized four types of feedback seeking about self and others (i.e., self-positive, self-negative, other-positive, and other-negative) based on their foci (i.e., self or peers) and nature (i.e., positive or negative), as derived from goal orientation theory. In a series of field studies, we found that these four types of feedback seeking were distinct from each other. A learning orientation was positively related to self-negative, self-positive, and other-positive feedback seeking. A performance-approach orientation was positively related to self-positive and other-negative feedback seeking. On further examining the performance impacts of the four types of feedback-seeking, we found that self-negative feedback seeking was positively related to job performance, role clarity, and social integration. Self-positive feedback seeking was negatively related, whereas other-positive feedback seeking was positively related to job performance.
This study integrates two disparate genres within tie-strength literature into one model to investigate the mechanisms for value creation in the buyer-supplier context. This research brings together the opposite ends of the tie-strength continuum: the "weak ties," which are instrumental in tapping into novel ideas and emerging technologies, and the "strong ties," which promote joint resource investments and capability development. By doing so, we bring salience to the existence of "intermediate ties" (i.e., the ties of moderate strength) and their implications for value creation. Even though the intermediate ties are likely most common in the buyer-supplier context, they have been given short shrift in the literature. We predict a U-shaped relation, where weak ties and strong ties are more effective than intermediate ties in value creation. Furthermore, we explore the moderating role of dependence asymmetry. Our hypotheses are tested using survey data from a major global automaker and its North American suppliers. The results demonstrate that both the weak and strong buyer-supplier ties lead to higher value creation, whereas intermediate ties do not increase value creation. Also, the study illustrates that, overall, asymmetric buyer-supplier ties show diminished value creation, and this moderating effect is particularly pronounced for intermediate ties.
In this paper, we identify the basis of leader–member exchange (LMX) differentiation as a crucial factor influencing the relationship between LMX differentiation and work group outcomes. Drawing from the relational theories of procedural justice, we theorize members’ task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) as the two main bases of LMX differentiation. We hypothesize that LMX differentiation will be less negatively related to intragroup relational quality and group proactivity when there is more task performance–based and/or OCB-based LMX differentiation within the group. Data from two field studies provide consistent evidence for the moderating effects of these two bases of LMX differentiation. In addition, the results of Study 2 show that the task performance–based LMX differentiation moderates the cross-level relationship between LMX differentiation and members’ procedural justice perceptions. At the group level, the procedural justice climate mediates the interactive effects of LMX differentiation and task performance–based LMX differentiation on group proactivity but not on intragroup relational quality. We discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of these findings in the organizational context.
This study analyzes differential appointments by gender to the rank of named professorship based on a sample of 511 management professors. This sample represents approximately 90% of our original survey sample of faculty at Tier 1 American research universities, with 10 or more years of experience since receiving their PhD, and whose contact information we could obtain online. Contrary to the tenets of the meritocratic evaluation model, we find that, after controlling for research performance and other factors, women are less likely to be awarded named professorships, particularly when the endowed chair is awarded to an internal candidate. Furthermore, we find that women derive lower returns from their scholarly achievements when it comes to appointments to endowed chairs. Our study suggests that a masculine-gendered environment dominates management departments, leading to shifting standards when it comes to the highest senior appointments in academe.
We employed an instrumental case study of a multisystem hydroelectric power producer, a high-reliability organization (HRO), to explore how new knowledge is created in a context in which errors may result in destruction, catastrophic consequences, and even loss of human life. The findings indicate that knowledge creation is multilevel, nested within three levels of paradox: paradox of knowing, paradox of practice, and paradox of organizing. The combination of the lack of opportunity for errors with the dynamism of the HRO context necessitates that individuals work through multiple paradoxes to generate and formalize new knowledge. The findings contribute to the literature on knowledge creation in context by explicating the work practices associated with issue recognition, resolution, and refinement, and the formalization of knowledge in failure-intolerant organizations.
In response to calls for multilevel research examining individual and meso-level processes to understand how exploitation and exploration dynamics play out in teams, we propose that individual in-role performance (cf. exploitation) and creativity (cf. exploration) are associated with team exploitation and exploration climate respectively, and this influence is moderated by domain specific performance and creative self-efficacy respectively. Studying 317 engineers in 70 teams across three national regions, we theorize and find domain-specific evidence that when individual self-efficacy is high, team climate has diminishing performance (exploitation climate x performance self-efficacy) and creative (exploration climate x creative self-efficacy) benefits. By simultaneously studying creativity and performance, our study helps understand the differences and communalities in the drivers of those outcomes in identifying both the domain-specific character of these influences and the similarity in how these influences play out.
Trust is an important factor for managing transaction costs within interorganizational relationships (IORs). Research on trust indicates that separate dimensions of trust arise from a partner’s competence (i.e., technical skills, experience, and reliability) and integrity (i.e., motives, honesty, and character), and that these dimensions have potentially unique effects. Because scholars rarely apply this distinction within IOR research, past studies may have masked important relationships involving competence- and integrity-based trust. In response, we build and test theory that explains how competence- and integrity-based trust have asymmetric effects on different kinds of transaction costs. In particular, we build on theory that describes how parties process positive and negative information about others’ behavior to predict that integrity-based trust in IORs is more potent for reducing transaction costs than is competence-based trust. We also theorize that building strong IORs requires more up-front investment with competence-based but not with integrity-based trust. By applying meta-analytic structural equation modeling to data on 37,366 IORs drawn from 150 samples, we find that integrity-based trust is about 10 times more effective at reducing these costs. A key implication is that managers seeking to improve the efficiency of their IORs may do well by performing competently, but they can do even better by building perceptions of integrity.
Agency theory foments the expectation that corporate criminal prosecutions mitigate crime by inducing firms to self-regulate. Whether this bears out in reality remains a topic of contentious debate. Although the U.S. government began prosecuting firms over a century ago, insufficient empirical evidence exists to determine how the costs of prosecutions actually affect firms. Moreover, the limited empirical record tells a surprising and somewhat confusing story. Scholars of management and related disciplines have consistently found that criminal convictions have negligible impacts on shareholder wealth despite theoretical expectations to the contrary. To explain these surprising findings and better understand how firms experience the costs of prosecutions, I apply agency theory to the criminal prosecution process and propose that each legally defined action in that process communicates unique information regarding potential and actual agency costs (i.e., sanctions). I also propose that formal convictions appear to elicit no reaction from principals because firm responses to early events in the prosecution process, what I call "conviction harbingers," foretell unfavorable verdicts and sanctions well before courts make them official. Findings derived from a sample of 177 cases largely confirm my expectations by showing that prosecutions cause firm value to decline nearly 11%. In addition to exceeding previous estimates by a factor of three, this amount exceeds direct fines by a factor of five (i.e., shareholders lost more than $5 of wealth for each dollar of sanctions). I conclude by outlining implications of these findings for agency theory, corporate governance, policy, and practice.
Product innovation is conventionally treated as a mechanism for organizations to renew their product portfolios. In this paper, we suggest that product innovation not only enables organizations to introduce new products to the market but also challenges organizations to renew their technological capabilities. Capability stretching is the degree to which an organization extends its technological capabilities to bridge the gap between what it has already known and what the development of a new product requires it to know. Capability stretching can be challenging because it involves the acquisition and assimilation of new and distant knowledge. Drawing on a longitudinal study of product introductions in the workstation industry, we find that capability stretching reduces the chance of new product survival. Furthermore, we also find that organizational boundaries moderate the negative relationship between capability stretching and product survival: Vertical integration exacerbates this negative relationship, whereas horizontal boundary mitigates this negative relationship. However, capability stretching can also be rewarding, as it renews technological capabilities and therefore facilitates adaptation to technological changes. We draw implications for the linkages between product innovation and capability development.
In this article, we examine how the multinational enterprise (MNE) develops the ability to function as a multilingual entity in order to facilitate communication, knowledge transfer, and absorptive capacity. While we acknowledge the role played by the adoption of a common corporate language, we argue that this response alone is insufficient to cope with the diverse foreign language demands that accompany global expansion. MNEs need what we conceptualize as language operative capacity (LOC): language resources that have been assembled and deployed in a context-relevant and timely manner throughout the MNE’s global network. Language resources are mainly derived from human and social capital, and their interaction, to form what is termed language capital. Managerial motivation and a preparedness to act are necessary to ensure that language capital is converted into LOC. Our theoretical explanation of LOC derivation is multilevel, incorporating two interacting processes: individuals develop, maintain, and contribute their own foreign language resources, but the MNE also plays a key role. It can influence individual behavior and, at the organizational level, provide its own language resources through the provision of computerized translation software and the like. The interaction between these two processes is seen to be critical in the formation and use of LOC. This multilevel explanation contributes to the growing body of literature that considers how human capital resources in general can be converted for productive purposes.
Extant research on the management of time shows that the speed of undertaking new strategic moves has negative consequences for firm profitability. However, the literature has not distinguished whether this outcome results from the effects of speed on firms’ revenues or from the effects of speed on firms’ costs, or examined how firms can become more profitable by reducing the negative consequences of speed. We address these gaps for a specific strategic move: alliance portfolio expansion. We show that the speed at which firms expand their alliance portfolios increases managerial costs disproportionately relative to revenues, leading to an overall negative effect on firm profitability. However, a more regular rhythm of expansion and a longer duration of existing alliances reduce the negative profitability consequences of expansion speed by moderating the increase in managerial costs. These findings suggest that firms that make strategic moves, such as alliances, may reduce the negative profitability consequences of speed when they maintain a regular expansion rhythm and when their existing strategic engagements require modest managerial resources.
Applying arguments from social exchange theory, we theoretically derive and empirically test a multilevel model that informs theory on leadership, cynicism, and deviant withdrawal. Namely, we examine the moderating effect of the upward exchange relationship of a leader on empowering leadership behaviors as they affect subordinate psychological empowerment, cynicism, and time theft. In a sample of 161 employees across 37 direct supervisors, empowering leadership was associated with reduced employee cynicism both directly and indirectly through employee psychological empowerment. The positive relationship between empowering leadership and employee psychological empowerment, however, was significant only when the leader enjoyed a high-quality relationship with his or her own boss. In turn, cynicism was associated with increased time theft, suggesting that employees may reciprocate frustrating experiences by withdrawing in minor, yet impactful and deviant, ways in efforts to balance their exchange with the organization.
Team conflict types include task conflict, relationship conflict, and process conflict. Whereas differences in views about the task (task conflict) are often argued to be beneficial, incompatibilities involving personal issues (relationship conflict) and execution issues (process conflict) are often argued to be harmful. However, previous empirical research has tended to treat team conflict types as independent from each other despite their natural coexistence in teams. In two separate studies and one replication study, we identified latent patterns of team conflict, in the form of conflict profiles, that were defined by distinct levels of task conflict, relationship conflict, and process conflict. In Study 1, we investigated whether the conflict profiles had implications for team conflict management and team potency. In Study 2, we examined the generalizability of the conflict profiles to teams with longer life cycles, and we investigated the implications of conflict profiles for team performance. Findings indicated that teams can be reliably assigned to particular profiles of team conflict and that these profiles replicate well. The results also indicate that the implications of a particular type of conflict depend on the pattern of the team’s conflict profile as a whole. Drawing from information processing theory, we found that teams with high task conflict and low relationship and process conflict tend to have more effective interactions and achieve superior outcomes. This "team-centric" approach appears to provide promising new avenues for advancing current theories of conflict in organizational work teams.
Social network scholarship emphasizes that receiving resources from others in a network can benefit an individual’s job performance. Yet this paradigm rarely considers the effects on the provider of assistance. Outside the networks literature, scholars have been increasingly attentive to factors that affect motivations to provide help (i.e., prosocial motivation). However, the performance effects associated with providing help have been mixed. We concentrate specifically upon assistance that has the potential to enhance the providers’ learning and knowledge base and, hence, their performance. Using a bounded-network survey in a large consulting firm, we show that providing problem-solving assistance to many others on task-related matters increases the provider’s own work performance. We then consider how this learning may be affected by other relational and contextual factors. In so doing, we shift the predominant network perspective that people accrue performance advantages from receiving assistance to show that such advantages also occur—under the right circumstances—from providing it.
In this paper, we study to what extent inconsistent feedback signals about performance affect firm adaptive behavior in terms of changes made to research-and-development (R&D) investments. We argue that inconsistency in performance feedback—based on discrepancies between two distinct performance signals—affects the degree to which such investments will be changed. Our aim is to show that accounting for inconsistent performance feedback is necessary as predictions for the direction of change in R&D investments based on the individual performance feedback signals are contradictory. Furthermore, we contribute by proposing a holistic consideration mechanism as an alternative to the selective attention mechanism previously applied to inconsistent performance feedback. Our findings show that the impact of inconsistency depends on the exact configuration of the underlying performance feedback signal discrepancies. While consistently negative performance feedback signals would amplify their impact in stimulating increased R&D investments, inconsistent performance feedback signals created more nuanced effects. Having lower performance compared to an industry-based peer group—despite doing well compared to the previous year—made firms decrease their R&D investments. For the opposite case of inconsistent performance feedback, we did not find an effect on change in R&D investments. These findings support to a degree our contention that explaining the effects of inconsistent performance feedback requires a holistic consideration theoretical mechanism instead of one involving selective attention. In sum, these findings suggest future research should take into account the differences between distinct instances of inconsistent performance feedback.
Feedback is information made available to employees in their work environment, whereas feedback-seeking behaviors (FSBs) help employees to evaluate proactively whether their work has met performance standards and their behavior is considered appropriate. Prior studies have provided a perspective on how the feedback-seeking contexts affect the emergence and development of FSBs. In this study, we extend that perspective by investigating when FSBs affect job performance so that we can understand whether more feedback seeking is always better. Adopting the relational view of leadership, we hypothesize that the FSB-performance relationship should be stronger for employees with low leader-member exchange (LMX) and in groups with low aggregate LMX and low LMX differentiation. Using a multilevel research design and a sample of 379 teachers in 25 groups, we find support for most of our hypotheses. We discuss the implications of the study for the FSB and the proactive behavior literature and suggest avenues for future research.
We introduce the racial diversity congruence concept to examine how matching levels of racial diversity between store-unit employees and community members relate to store-unit sales performance. In a field study of 220 retail store units, we found evidence supporting social identity theory and information-based perspectives on the racial diversity congruence–sales performance relationship. Specifically, results show that a match between store-unit racial diversity and community racial diversity positively related to store-unit sales performance. In addition, superior store-unit performance emerged when store units and communities had congruent levels of diversity at high (i.e., high-high racial diversity congruence) rather than low (i.e., low-low racial diversity congruence) levels. Moreover, we found asymmetrical incongruence effects whereby racially diverse store units in less-diverse communities outperformed store units with lower levels of racial diversity operating in diverse communities. The implications of our results are discussed in light of study limitations and future research needs.
Drawing from corporate governance research and social identity theory, the authors argue that the relationship between outside directors’ time in office and outside director task involvement is more complex than generally anticipated. By using a unique multisource data set composed of peer ratings provided by fellow outside directors rating a focal director’s task involvement, this study analyzes director task involvement at the individual director level of analysis. The authors propose and empirically demonstrate that outside director tenure has an inverted U-shaped relationship with outside director task involvement that is moderated by a director’s social identification with the organization. As such, the authors demonstrate that social identification with the organization provides a critical contingency for the curvilinear relationship between outside director tenure and outside director task involvement. Findings suggest that outside directors who socially identify with the organization are more likely to grow "stale in the saddle" at lower levels of tenure. These findings provide support for the merit of analyzing outside directors at the individual level of analysis and suggest that a "one-size-fits-all" approach may not be most appropriate in assessing the effects of tenure on outside director functioning.
Given that many employees use e-mail for work communication on a daily basis, this study examined within-person relationships between day-level incivility via work e-mail (cyber incivility) and employee outcomes. Using resource-based theories, we examined two resources (i.e., job control, psychological detachment from work) that may alleviate the effects of cyber incivility on distress. Daily survey data collected over 4 consecutive workdays from 96 employees were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. Results showed that on days when employees experienced cyber incivility, they reported higher affective and physical distress at the end of the workday that, in turn, was associated with higher distress the next morning. Job control attenuated the concurrent relationships between cyber incivility and both types of distress at work, while psychological detachment from work in the evening weakened the lagged relationships between end-of-workday distress and distress the following morning. These findings shed light on cyber incivility as a daily stressor and on the importance of resources in both the work and home domains that can help reduce the incivility-related stress process. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
We examine how formal interlocking political ties between business leaders and political actors affect sell-off strategy of firms in emerging markets. We propose that political ties substitute for underdeveloped institutions and provide firms with market intermediation, influence over political actors, and access to resources. These benefits increase the likelihood that firms with political ties will exit through sell-offs, which is an adaptation strategy in emerging markets. We propose that the effectiveness of political ties in facilitating sell-offs is contingent on the type of political ties and the state of institutional development. Empirically, we evaluate 280 television manufacturers in China between 1993 and 2003. Results show that political ties can help firms exit through sell-offs but that these effects are primarily from ties to actors with executive authority rather than legislative authority. The value of executive ties declines with capital market development, while that of legislative ties increases with legal system development. We show that political ties help firms exit an industry, clarify the conditions under which they are valuable during institutional transition, and improve understanding of the seller’s perspective in acquisitions.
Although a significant corpus of work focuses on the impact of search strategies on product innovations, we have a limited understanding of search strategies for process innovations, including the potential role of the industry environment. Process innovations are central to improving a firm’s productivity and contributing to efficiency and gross domestic product growth. As a result of the complexity of identifying, developing, and implementing process innovations, firms increasingly draw on external sources of knowledge. Building on key tenets in the knowledge search, innovation, and industry environment literatures, we investigate search strategies, process innovations, and industry dynamics in a sample of 505 firms spanning 23 manufacturing industries. We find that search breadth is negatively related to process innovation outcomes and that search depth is positively related to process innovation outcomes. Furthermore, high industry process heterogeneity mitigates the negative impact of search breadth on process innovation such that firms employing broad search strategies in highly process heterogeneous industries are more likely to introduce process innovations. In industries with greater productivity growth, the positive relationship between search depth and process innovation is stronger.
Organizational support theory (OST) proposes that employees form a generalized perception concerning the extent to which the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being (perceived organizational support, or POS). Based on hypotheses involving social exchange, attribution, and self-enhancement, we carried out a meta-analytic assessment of OST using results from 558 studies. OST was generally successful in its predictions concerning both the antecedents of POS (leadership, employee–organization context, human resource practices, and working conditions) and its consequences (employee’s orientation toward the organization and work, employee performance, and well-being). Notably, OST successfully predicted the relative magnitudes of different relationships, influences of process variables, and mediational effects. General implications of the findings for OST and research on POS are discussed.
Training engagement theory provides a multilevel depiction of the antecedents of training effectiveness. By multilevel, we are referring both to the hierarchical nature of constructs—such that employees are embedded in organizations and workgroups—and the temporal nature of processes—emphasizing that macro and within-person processes are not static phenomena. The hierarchical nature of training engagement theory provides a broad account of how processes at various levels in the organizational hierarchy influence one another and contribute to the success or failure of training programs. The temporal nature of the theory advocates for examining the processes that occur from before training is conceptualized until the completion of training when examining the antecedents of training effectiveness. Thus, training engagement theory proposes a sequence model of the independent and joint effects of establishing training goals, prioritizing those goals, and persisting during goal striving on training effectiveness. Finally, we propose testable multilevel propositions to spur future research.
We conducted a meta-analysis and empirical review of abusive supervision research in order to derive meta-analytic population estimates for the relationships between perceptions of abusive supervision and numerous demographic, justice, individual difference, leadership, and outcome variables. The use of psychometric correction enabled us to provide weighted mean correlations and population correlation estimates that accounted for attenuation due to measurement error and sampling error variance. Also, we conducted sensitivity analyses that removed the effects of large samples from analyses. Then, we conducted subgroup analyses using samples drawn from the United States to provide population correlation estimates that corrected for attenuation due to measurement error, sampling error variance, and indirect range restriction. Finally, we examined measurement artifacts resulting from various adaptations of Tepper’s abusive supervision measure. The results reveal that although the associations between perceptions of abusive supervision and outcome variables appear to be universally negative, the magnitude of the relationships between perceptions of abusive supervision and antecedent and outcome variables varies according to the design features of studies. Contributions to theory and practice, strengths and limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.
This paper "opens a black box" in examining how and under what conditions do firms achieve productivity gains by exporting, conventionally known as the learning-by-exporting (LBE) effect. We extend the current theoretical paradigm by proposing that exporters utilize strategic decisions pertinent to innovativeness, production capability, and human capital so as to leverage knowledge and resources obtained from exporting in order to achieve productivity gains. We test and validate our hypotheses with panelized data of roughly 250,000 Chinese firms over a 7-year period (2001-2007). We also show that the salience of these mediation mechanisms is contingent upon ownership structure and industry characteristics: Non-state-owned enterprises and firms in industries with medium export intensity or medium and high new product development intensity effectuate more learning through these conduits than their counterparts. The multimediation mechanism LBE model offers useful implications for academia, practitioners, and policy makers.
Theory suggests that thriving, the feeling of vitality and experience of learning, is in large part determined by the social environment of employees’ workplace. One important aspect of this social environment is the position of an individual in the communication network. Individuals who are sources of communication for many colleagues often receive benefits because other employees depend heavily on these individuals for information; however, there may also be drawbacks to this dependence. In particular, employees who are central in the communication network may experience more role overload and role ambiguity and, in turn, lower levels of workplace thriving. Individual differences are also likely to explain why some individuals are more likely to thrive. Relying on research that views organizations as political arenas, we identify political skill as an individual difference that is likely to enhance workplace thriving. Using a moderated-mediation analysis, we find support for the indirect cost of communication centrality on workplace thriving through role overload and role ambiguity. Furthermore, we identify both direct and moderating effects of political skill. Specifically, political skill mitigates the extent to which employees experience role ambiguity, but not role overload, associated with their position in the communication network, and these effects carry through to affect thriving. Star employees are often central in communication networks; with this in mind, we discuss the implications of our findings for employees and organizations.
Explanations of turnover from extant management research focus on the what (content) and how (process) of turnover. This study engages a sensemaking framework to explore the why (meaning) for employees of quitting or staying at an employing organization, in order to add a new layer to our understanding of retention and turnover. Analysis of data from in-depth interviews with leavers and stayers, both post hoc and in situ, using grounded theory methods, reveals identity and well-being assessment sensemaking cycles, which occur periodically or when threat to core elements of identity and well-being across life domains is perceived. Core elements of identity and well-being include purpose, trajectory, relatedness, expression, acceptance, and differentiation. Perceived threat to identity and well-being across life domains leads to varying levels of psychophysiological strain, coping with threat and strain, and reassessment, often in escalating cycles resulting in turnover and continuing into new jobs. Lack of threat to, or facilitation of, identity and well-being, and successful coping result in retention. Overall, these findings suggest that from the perspective of the actors "being retained" or "turning over," these phenomena are part of a deeply felt quest for positive, congruent identity and psychological well-being across life domains. Along with other research, these findings suggest that when people consider leaving jobs, it may invoke a liminal identity stage, which makes family and other life domains salient to turnover decisions. Implications for research on retention, turnover, identity, well-being, work-life, and psychophysiological health in organizations, as well as practical implications, are discussed.
Recent research on the microfoundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has highlighted the need for improved measures to evaluate how stakeholders perceive and subsequently react to CSR initiatives. Drawing on stakeholder theory and data from five samples of employees (N = 3,772), the authors develop and validate a new measure of corporate stakeholder responsibility (CStR), which refers to an organization’s context-specific actions and policies designed to enhance the welfare of various stakeholder groups by accounting for the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental performance; it is conceptualized as a superordinate, multidimensional construct. Results from exploratory factor analyses, first- and second-order confirmatory factor analyses, and structural equation modeling provide strong evidence of the convergent, discriminant, incremental, and criterion-related validities of the proposed CStR scale. Two-wave longitudinal studies further extend prior theory by demonstrating that the higher-order CStR construct relates positively and directly to organizational pride and perceived organizational support, as well as positively and indirectly to organizational identification, job satisfaction, and affective commitment, beyond the contribution of overall organizational justice, ethical climate, and prior measures of perceived CSR.
A pressing but understudied issue is the high incidence of new venture failure. We propose a model of how motivation-enhancing human resource (MHR) practices mediate the effects of initial human and financial resources of a founding team on firms’ decisions to remain in operation. In this model, we also propose that MHR practices have effects on firm survival that change over time. We test our model with a sample of 1,100 firms tracked for 7 years. We found support for a model where MHR practices partially mediate the effects of initial firm resources and human capital on firm survival. We also found that the effects of MHR practices change over time such that their positive effects on survival become stronger. We conclude with a research agenda and recommendations for how nascent firms can promote survival.
Performance feedback research addresses how firms respond to performance that diverges from their aspirations. Whereas the majority of research in this vein involves financial performance, we apply this framework to product quality performance, arguing that when performance diverges either below or above aspirations, firms will pursue a slower subsequent product introduction rate, either to identify the cause of the underperformance or to incorporate the successful product characteristics in the case of overperformance. We also investigate whether our predictions hold when two boundary conditions are applied. Since product quality aspirations are derived from the "reputations for quality" of the firm and its peers, we argue that the stability of these reputations will amplify the delaying effects of below- and above-aspiration performance. Consistent with research on firm responses to financial performance, we also predict that greater sales revenues relative to sales aspirations will attenuate the delaying effects of aspiration-relative performance divergence. Our analysis of 1,332 video games released by 48 publishers from 2006 to 2009 is largely consistent with these predictions.
We examined the conditions under which workplace ostracism promotes prosocial reactions (i.e., helping behavior) and deters antisocial behavior (i.e., social loafing). Using data from 213 employees and their direct supervisors, we found that when group identification is strong, workplace ostracism increases the helping behavior and decreases the social loafing of employees. Moreover, we found that employees’ tenure further moderates this effect; for those employees who have a strong group identification and long tenure, the positive association of ostracism and helping behavior is the strongest.
Political will is widely recognized as an important, yet profoundly underinvestigated, construct that lacks conceptual clarity and valid measurement. To address this lack, we conducted four studies encompassing six samples (N = 925) from three countries (United States, Greece, and United Kingdom) that establish the psychometric properties and nomological network of the Political Will Scale. We demonstrate that the scale exhibits both convergent and discriminant validity with several conceptually related constructs while also determining that political will positively relates to influence and work-related behaviors. As an extension of our findings, political will seems to explain variance over and above political skill in relation to influence tactics, status, and career growth potential. The theoretical implications of this new scale are discussed in relation to organizational politics, leadership, and social change.
This research considers two theoretical perspectives on employees’ motivation associated with diminished self-esteem from abusive supervision. The self-defense view of diminished self-esteem suggests that abusive supervision motivates destructive behavior in an attempt to reassert personal control and protect victims’ self-image. The self-presentational view of diminished self-esteem suggests abusive supervision motivates behavior that attempts to signal fit with and value to the workgroup and organization. On the basis of these two theoretical perspectives, we examine how employees’ diminished self-esteem from abusive supervision can motivate destructive work behavior (i.e., supervisor-directed deviance, organizational deviance) and self-presentational behavior (i.e., putting on a façade, ingratiation). Additionally, employees’ turnover intentions, which are an indicator of employees’ psychological detachment from the organization, are considered a moderator of the effects of abusive supervision on diminished self-esteem and associated behavior such that high turnover intentions attenuate the effects. Results of two field studies and a daily diary study support the hypothesized model and show that abusive supervision indirectly influences employees’ workplace deviance and self-presentational behavior via diminished self-esteem. As predicted, the effects are stronger for employees with lower versus higher turnover intentions.
In this study, we investigated and clarified aspects of the multilevel nature of authentic leadership (AL) and its effects on followers. Specifically, we hypothesized that AL would have distinct effects through both personalized AL, which is a leader’s direct effect on a follower, and through generalized AL, which is a leader’s indirect or group-based effect on a follower as a result of leadership effects among the follower’s coworkers. These hypotheses were consistent with a complete review of the empirical literature on AL’s effects and the results from a sample of leaders and followers working in a large multinational company. The data showed that the two paths of AL’s influence had distinct relationships with follower responses. We discuss the implications of these results, particularly those concerning how to study the multilevel effects of AL.
This research speaks to the ongoing debate regarding the role of self-efficacy in self-regulation. Specifically, we argue that both positive and negative relationships between self-efficacy and resource allocation are part of an adaptive process. We present the results of two empirical studies demonstrating that a negative relationship between self-efficacy and resource allocation is not always maladaptive and, in fact, can lead to positive indirect effects on performance. In Study 1, we observed natural fluctuations in self-efficacy as individuals completed a mathematics test, finding that the tendency to reduce resource allocation with high self-efficacy is most clearly observed when time is scarce. In turn, an inverted-U relationship between resource allocation and overall performance under high time scarcity emerged such that moderate levels of resource allocation resulted in the highest levels of performance. Study 2 used an experimental design in which self-efficacy was manipulated. Replicating core findings from Study 1, individuals drew upon self-efficacy to balance resource allocation across competing demands. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our results.
Effective leaders are believed to inspire followers by providing inclusive visions of the future that followers can identify with. In the present study, we examined the neural mechanisms underlying this process, testing key hypotheses derived from transformational and social identity approaches to leadership. While undergoing functional MRI, supporters from the two major Australian political parties (Liberal vs. Labor) were presented with inspirational collective-oriented and noninspirational personal-oriented statements made by in-group and out-group leaders. Imaging data revealed that inspirational (rather than noninspirational) statements from in-group leaders were associated with increased activation in the bilateral rostral inferior parietal lobule, pars opercularis, and posterior midcingulate cortex: brain areas that are typically implicated in controlling semantic information processing. In contrast, for out-group leaders, greater activation in these areas was associated with noninspirational statements. In addition, noninspirational statements by in-group (but not out-group) leaders resulted in increased activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area typically associated with reasoning about a person’s mental state. These results show that followers processed identical statements qualitatively differently as a function of leaders’ group membership, thus demonstrating that shared identity acts as an amplifier for inspirational leadership communication.
Across cultures, the idea of money has dual positive and negative connotations. Consistent with this notion of duality, money-priming theory posits that the salience of money makes individuals work harder for themselves while also reducing the concern they have for others. Although research has tended to support these expectations, it has almost exclusively done so using between-persons designs in controlled lab settings. To address these limitations in the literature, we used a within-persons design in two work settings to test individual behavior change as a function of the salience of money. We did so using two samples of professional athletes and tested the extent to which priming individual pay affected both self-serving and cooperative behaviors. We operationalized the money prime in these samples as the final year of individuals’ employment contracts—a time when money is made particularly salient relative to surrounding years. Consistent with money-priming theory, within-persons analyses using a sample of basketball players from the National Basketball Association revealed that self-serving behaviors significantly increased in the final contract year relative to surrounding years. However, we did not find that cooperative behaviors decreased during the final contract year. This pattern of results was replicated using a sample of professional hockey players in the National Hockey League. These findings cumulatively suggest that although the salience of money is associated with increases in self-serving behaviors, it is not adversely associated with cooperation or team success.
We examine the resource mobilization efforts undertaken by a social venture to organize the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games and bring about a change in social attitudes towards the cause of learning and intellectual disabilities. In contrast to previously advanced views of social ventures as powerless actors, we find instead that they are able to leverage the visibility afforded by large-scale events to create positions of mutual dependence, which allow them to access broad support bases and assert themselves in relationships with external parties. Specifically, we find that resource mobilization involves six distinct tactics rooted in the softer forms of power, namely, attraction and inducement. The use of these soft-power tactics depends upon the social venture’s goal at different moments of the relationship with its partners and the level of support available from each external party. Our elaborated theory highlights both the role and limitations of soft power in mobilizing resources and managing relationships.
Hostile takeover attempts are considered a key external governance mechanism aimed at addressing perceived managerial underperformance in a target firm. Studies show that target chief executive officers (CEOs) are usually dismissed shortly after a takeover attempt, regardless of whether the bidder actually completes the acquisition. Yet, little is known about the investment behaviors of target CEOs who actually retain their positions in the wake of an unsuccessful hostile takeover attempt. Engaging with this underexplored governance context, we advance a behaviorally informed model of CEO investment behaviors in response to external governance as a function of the negative performance feedback event of the takeover attempt and the timing of the market’s attempt in terms of the stage of the target CEO’s tenure. Based on a matched-pair study of 71 failed takeover attempts from 1995 to 2006, we find evidence of a nonlinear relation between target CEO tenure and degree of uncertainty of expected returns in subsequent strategic investments in the wake of a failed hostile takeover attempt. We discuss the implications for research on external governance, behavioral agency, and executives’ influences on firm processes and outcomes.
We utilize the exploration/exploitation framework to examine how a firm’s engagement in exploration influences its portfolio of external corporate venturing (ECV) activities. Three forms of equity-based ECV are considered: corporate venture capital investments, joint ventures, and acquisitions. The organizational learning literature is used to investigate how a firm’s engagement in exploration influences its usage of acquisitions relative to its overall portfolio of ECV activities. The investing firm’s industry technological dynamism is posited as a moderator of the relationship between exploration and the relative usage of acquisitions. Utilizing a sample of 1,326 firm-year observations between 1996 and 2008, we find that exploration is positively related to the relative usage of acquisitions, though this relationship is moderated by the investing firm’s industry technological dynamism.
The development of women’s entrepreneurship has positive implications for societal and economic growth. In this study, we examine the effects of culture and, more specifically, collectivism on women’s businesses. With a mixed-method and multilevel approach, we conducted a quantitative country-level analysis followed by a qualitative study of women entrepreneurs. Our results indicate that collectivism at the in-group level (family and close friends and colleagues) is a particularly important predictor of women’s business ownership. Furthermore, it is a balance of both collectivism and individualism at the in-group level that is most conducive to women’s business ownership. Institutional collectivism (at the societal level) acts as a background condition that influences the way in which in-group collectivism directly affects women’s business ownership. More specifically, when engaging in business development, women are primarily influenced by their in-groups. The freedom to pursue individual goals, combined with support from the in-group, provides the most beneficial environment for women to develop businesses, especially in societal-level cultures at the extreme ends of the collectivism spectrum—highly collectivistic or highly individualistic. A better understanding of these cultural factors should help with designing better business development training programs for women entrepreneurs and properly advising policy makers.
Emerging evidence suggests that pay dispersion among non-CEO top management team (TMT) members harms firm performance, which raises questions about why firms’ owners tolerate or even support it. Prior research shows that the key distinction between founder and family owners is that in addition to firm performance and growth goals, family owners pursue socioemotional goals. On the basis of this distinction, we develop and test theory linking founders’ and families’ ownership to TMT pay dispersion. Consistent with our theory, a Bayesian panel analysis of Standard & Poor’s 500 firms shows that founder owners use less TMT pay dispersion and that family owners, relative to founder owners, use more, although that declines across generations. We also provide evidence that TMT pay dispersion harms firm performance. Our theory and results are significant because they help to explain why some owners favor compensation practices that cause TMT pay dispersion, despite evidence that this harms firm performance.
Drawing from role theory and structural functionalism, we examined the temporal relationship between employees’ affective commitment to the organization (ACO) and affective commitment to the supervisor (ACS) and how these commitments affect turnover. We further examined perceived supervisor-organization value congruence as a moderator. In Study 1, a three-wave panel study (N = 317), we found longitudinal change in ACO to result in a temporal change in ACS, suggesting ACO precedes ACS. Study 2 (N = 272) extended this result by looking at the relationships of these commitments to turnover and perceived supervisor-organization value congruence as a moderator. ACS mediated a negative relationship between ACO and turnover. Moreover, ACO’s relationship with ACS and indirect relationship with turnover were stronger at high levels of supervisor-organization value congruence.
Despite the scholarly interest in contracts and trust governing interorganizational relationships, an understanding of how contracts influence trust remains limited by the way in which the interaction between the two constructs is conceptualized. By bringing together recent advances in the literature on interorganizational governance, I consider (a) the controlling and the coordinating dimensions of formal contracts, (b) trust and distrust as two distinct constructs, and (c) both the calculative and noncalculative aspects behind the development of trust and distrust. Drawing upon information-processing theory, I develop a series of propositions about how each contractual dimension influences the development of trust and distrust by inducing specific information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. My theoretical analysis leads me to discuss the trade-offs inherent in governance choices, and I discuss the implications of my propositions for the literature on interorganizational governance mechanisms.
Research suggests that organizational members highly prize respect but rarely report adequately receiving it. However, there is a lack of theory in organizational behavior regarding what respect actually is and why members prize it. We argue that there are two distinct types of respect: generalized respect is the sense that "we" are all valued in this organization, and particularized respect is the sense that the organization values "me" for particular attributes, behaviors, and achievements. We build a theoretical model of respect, positing antecedents of generalized respect from the sender’s perspective (prestige of social category, climate for generalized respect) and proposed criteria for the evaluation of particularized respect (role, organizational member, and character prototypicality), which is then enacted by the sender and perceived by the receiver. We also articulate how these two types of respect fulfill the receiver’s needs for belonging and status, which facilitates the self-related outcomes of organization-based self-esteem, organizational and role identification, and psychological safety. Finally, we consider generalized and personalized respect jointly and present four combinations of the two types of respect. We argue that the discrepancy between organizational members’ desired and received respect is partially attributable to the challenge of simultaneously enacting or receiving respect for both the "we" and the "me."
Given the increasing interest in alliance portfolios, alliance portfolio diversity (APD) has been the focus of many recent studies. Yet, the performance consequences of APD—or of diversity in general—are neither theoretically clear nor empirically consistent. With meta-analytic analyses, we assess extant research on the APD–performance link. Across studies, APD has a positive impact on performance, although the level of analysis and how performance is measured influence the relationship. Going beyond conventional quantitative synthesis, however, we also systematically uncover patterns in how theoretical orientation and the operationalization of diversity moderate the APD–performance relationship. Our study serves as an invitation for future APD studies to employ more sophisticated theoretical and operationalization approaches as they expand our knowledge of diversity in alliance portfolios.
Applications of social exchange theory in organizational research have tended to ignore the resource context and its impact on a focal dyadic social exchange. Integrating insights from the social exchange theory and the conservation of resources theory, we examine the role of resource availability in the social exchange of resources. The type of social exchange we focus on is the psychological contract. Specifically, we examine the antecedents and consequence of breach of employee obligations to an employer. We test our predictions using multisource data obtained from employees over three measurement periods in Sample 1 and matched triads (employee, supervisor, and coworker) in Sample 2. We found that family–work conflict (FWC) and breach of employer obligations are positively, while conscientiousness is negatively, related to employees’ perceptions of breach of their obligations. Conscientiousness moderated the FWC–breach relationship: Employees low on conscientiousness have a stronger positive relationship between FWC and breach of employee obligations. Breach of employee obligations is, in turn, negatively related to employee career progression (a job promotion over the following year in Sample 1 and supervisor-rated promotability in Sample 2). Findings highlight the interconnected nature of demands, resources, and obligations and that dyadic social exchange obligations should be examined in the context of other demands.
In this study, we propose that the upward leader-leader exchange (LLX) relationship is an important moderating condition in predicting the consequences of leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation within work groups. We assert that the structural and operating efficiencies created by LMX differentiation will depend on group members’ appraisal of the legitimacy of the within-group LMX disparity. Drawing on relative deprivation theory, we argue that the level of perceived legitimacy of LMX differentiation varies with levels of LLX. Using data collected from 579 subordinates and 74 managers in 74 work groups over two time periods, we propose and test hypotheses that the quality of a leader’s LLX relationship will moderate the mediated relationship between LMX differentiation, group-level teamwork, and team effectiveness. We find support for our moderated-mediation model and suggest implications for theory and practice.
In recent years, personal initiative has been found to predict job performance. However, implicit in this direct initiative–performance relationship are more complex process dynamics that can be better understood when contextual antecedents, moderators, and mediators are considered. Drawing from perspectives of proactive behavior as a goal-directed process, a research model of personal initiative was tested in a three-study investigation intended to build upon and advance prior work. Specifically, the model indicates that climate for initiative interacts with the social astuteness dimension of political skill (i.e., opportunity recognition) to influence the demonstration of personal initiative, and this first part of the model is tested and supported in Study 1. Then, personal initiative is hypothesized to interact with the interpersonal influence dimension of political skill (i.e., opportunity capitalization) to predict supervisor assessments of job performance, and this part of the model is tested and supported in Study 2. Study 3 provided a test of the entire model and demonstrated support for moderated mediation, thus adding increased confidence in the validity of the theory and findings through constructive replication.
Drawing on organizational learning theory, this article examines the moderating influences of different forms of internal and external sell-off experience on the relationship between firm sell-off activity and subsequent firm accounting performance. The results from a longitudinal analysis of sell-off activity by 293 European companies over a 15-year period (1995-2009) are consistent with basic predictions from learning theory, suggesting a positive moderating influence of a firm’s general sell-off experience. Yet, by distinguishing between multiple forms of learning (i.e., experiential, superstitious, interfirm, and vicarious learning), we further argue and find that the composition of a firm’s general sell-off experience is of substantial importance. Specifically, we find that learning benefits result from the repeated sale of related assets, whereas high levels of experience heterogeneity negatively affect the relationship between firm sell-off activity and subsequent firm performance. Furthermore, external sell-off experience by advisors and by industry peers is found to positively influence the divestiture–firm performance linkage. Collectively, these findings contribute to organizational learning theory and extend prior research on divestiture performance.
Much of the recent research on executive characteristics focuses on attributes that society tends to view negatively, such as self-interest, self-serving bias, and narcissism. While providing insights into how executives’ impact organizational outcomes, there may be attributes more positively viewed by society present in top management teams (TMTs) that have been overlooked, specifically TMT modesty. Though modesty deviates from the conventional view of executives, evidence from social psychology suggests that modesty positively impacts career success and upward mobility, suggesting that at least some individuals that rise to the level of the TMT are more modest than previously expected. Building on this insight, we argue that TMT modesty both elicits positive investor reactions following earnings calls and corresponds with higher levels of firm performance.
More and more boards are tapping interim CEOs to temporarily fill the corner office. Prior research indicates the negative performance implications of this decision; yet, little is known about the rationale behind this decision. Our aim is to fill this research gap. Drawing on agency and human capabilities frameworks, we examined the contextual elements that influence a board’s decision to pursue temporary leadership. Within a sample of 375 successions occurring between 1998 and 2005, we found that boards of directors were more likely to select interim CEOs under certain succession conditions, namely, when the prior CEO was forced out and there was no heir apparent or when the prior CEO had served for a short tenure. Our results highlight the importance of context in succession selections and provide insights into why a board would pursue a decision with seemingly negative repercussions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
We adopt an information acquisition and learning perspective to explore the relationship between new product development (NPD) strategy implementation duration and new venture performance. We suggest that the relationship between NPD strategy implementation duration and new venture performance is contingent on the level of environmental turbulence as reflected in an industry’s growth level and firm information-processing capabilities as reflected in the level of centralization of top management team (TMT) mental models. Longer NPD strategy implementation durations are appropriate in stable, low-growth industry environments or when firms are run by TMTs who exhibit high mental model centralization. Meanwhile, shorter NPD strategy implementation durations are called for in turbulent, high-growth industry environments or when firms are run by TMTs who exhibit low levels of mental model centralization. We also suggest that level of industry growth and TMT mental model centralization jointly influence the relationship between NPD strategy implementation duration and new venture performance and that this relationship is strongest for low-growth industries and high levels of TMT mental model centralization. Tests performed on a sample of 94 new ventures founded between 1996 and 2006 and competing in technology intensive industries confirm our hypotheses. We offer theoretical implications for research on new venture performance and on firm competitive strategy implementation.
Drawing on a multilevel model of motivation in work groups and a functionalist perspective of citizenship and socially responsible behaviors, we developed and tested a multilevel model of voluntary workplace green behavior that explicates some of the reasons why employees voluntarily engage in green behavior at work. For a sample of 325 office workers organized into 80 work groups in three firms, we found that conscientiousness and moral reflectiveness were associated with the voluntary workplace green behavior of group leaders and individual group members. Furthermore, we found a direct relationship between leader green behavior and the green behavior of individual subordinates as well as an indirect relationship mediated by green advocacy within work groups. Our theory and findings shed new light on the psychological and social conditions and processes that shape voluntary workplace green behavior in organizational settings and suggest implications for organizations striving to improve their social responsibility and environmental sustainability.
By incorporating institutional theory with the dynamic capability perspective, we investigate how emerging-market firms’ organizational capability to acquire resources through political networking with government officials complements their absorptive capacity in enhancing incremental and radical innovations. We further investigate the conditions under which the complementary effect matters. On the basis of a survey of 108 senior executives in China, we find that political networking capability complements absorptive capacity in overcoming resource constraints and organizational disadvantages in enhancing firms’ innovations, and the result is more effective in improving radical rather than incremental innovations. Furthermore, the complementary effect becomes stronger for emerging-market firms’ radical innovations when facing intense competition. We provide theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
How can a firm develop, distribute, and use knowledge more effectively and efficiently in ways that increase its ability to pursue an ambidextrous orientation? Synthesizing insights from social cognition and upper-echelons perspectives, we offer a new theoretical vantage point that brings the role of top management teams’ cognitive structure to the fore and, in particular, the enabling influence of transactive memory systems. We argue that transactive memory provides a top management team with a system for generating, distributing, and integrating knowledge based on members’ specific areas of expertise in ways that increase its ability to both differentiate and integrate strategic agendas for ambidexterity. From a multisource study of top management teams in a sample of technology-based small-to-medium-sized firms, we find that while top management teams with well-developed transactive memory systems are able to pursue an ambidextrous orientation, the impact of transactive memory is also shaped by diverse organizational experience and functional expertise within these teams. We discuss the scope and significance of these findings for theory, future research, and managerial practice.
Interest in the important role that ethical leaders play in organizations has expanded in recent years because of several high-profile corporate ethical breakdowns and the increased responsibility placed upon corporate leaders as a result. In the present study, we introduce a new outcome of ethical leadership: group ethical voice. We further theorized and tested two mediating mechanisms linking ethical leadership with group ethical voice. Using two field studies and one experimental study, we found support for our assertion that ethical leadership was positively associated with group ethical voice. We also found support for most of our hypothesized mediating mechanisms (ethical culture and group ethical voice efficacy) linking ethical leadership with group ethical voice—except for the indirect effect of upper-level ethical leadership on group ethical voice via group ethical voice efficacy. We further found that group ethical voice positively influenced ethical performance (significant for the sales groups, marginally significant for the customer service groups). Contributions to both ethical leadership and voice literature are discussed along with the limitations of the current study and directions for future research.
Due to increasing organizational demand and competition, employees’ goal-pursuit regulatory processes become pivotal to their work behavior and outcomes. Drawing on interpersonal regulatory fit theory, we proposed that leader prevention focus would moderate the relation between follower prevention focus and maintenance organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), whereas the relation between follower promotion focus and change OCB would be moderated by leader promotion focus. We tested these fit hypotheses using cross-level polynomial regression analyses conducted on 117 leader and 641 followers in South Korean firms. The results showed that followers’ prevention focus was positively associated with their maintenance OCB. This main effect was more pronounced when the leader’s prevention focus was high than when it was low. While we detected a significant main effect of follower promotion focus on change OCB, no fit effect was found for promotion focus. The implications of these findings as well as directions for future research are addressed.
We propose a model of knowledge creation, transfer, and adoption based on theories of creativity and social networks. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 119 full professors in management departments at U.S. universities. We examine the effects that two research strategies, coauthoring and working in multiple research fields, have on the number of publications in each of three journal quality tiers during an 8-year period. In addition, we examined the influence that having strong ties and a dense network of professional colleagues each has on the total number of citations garnered by those publications. Results showed a heterogeneous pattern of coauthoring (distributing coauthoring activity evenly across a greater number of coauthors) is positively related to the number of publications in the highest-quality journals for the focal researcher. The heterogeneity of research fields in which a researcher works is also positively related to greater productivity, albeit in second- and third-tier publication outlets. In addition, we found that the number of strong ties in the focal author’s professional support network positively related to his or her total citation count, independent of the number and quality of publications. Implications for the social network theory of creativity, organizational knowledge theory, and models of management scholars’ productivity are explored.
We examine how firms’ resources and the power of their governmental owners influence the likelihood of privatization of state-owned enterprises. Using data on 206 Chinese pharmaceutical firms over the period of 2000 to 2007, we found that firm financial performance (a proxy for firm resources) increased the likelihood of privatization. In addition to firm resources, we investigated how a heterogeneous body of decision makers within the governmental hierarchy influences the likelihood of firms’ privatization. We found that provincial governmental owners’ willingness to privatize firms increased when they had higher fiscal power. The results of this study also indicated a negative moderating influence of provincial fiscal power: Higher fiscal power of provincial governmental owners weakened the relationship between firm financial performance and the likelihood of privatization.
Prior research on interorganizational trust (IOT) has drawn on multiple theories across disciplines, resulting in mixed findings. This meta-analysis combines the three major theories of IOT, namely, transaction cost economics, social embeddedness theory, and resource dependence theory, to retheorize about these IOT relationships. Specifically, we consolidate 168 tests of IOT across theories and corroborate the additive predictive validity of each of the three theories and their combined explanations on IOT development. In particular, by combining IOT theories, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between relationship duration and IOT; we also find an intertemporal link among the three IOT theories, and relationship duration as the spanning factor functions to moderate the IOT relationships across theories. These findings serve to reconcile prior conflicting findings and shed new light on IOT development. We conclude our meta-analysis by providing directions for future research.
We used data obtained from customer contact employees in the People’s Republic of China to test a moderated mediation model of the processes through which core self-evaluations (CSE) influence voice behavior. Specifically, we examined personal control and approach/avoidance motivation as psychological pathways and procedural justice perceptions as a moderator of the CSE–voice behavior relationship. As predicted, our results revealed that CSE related to employee voice behavior indirectly through personal control and approach motivation but not avoidance motivation. Furthermore, and consistent with our prediction, results showed that procedural justice perceptions moderated the mediated influence of both personal control and approach motivation on the CSE–voice behavior relationship such that this relationship is stronger when procedural justice perceptions are high but not low. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of explanatory frameworks for understanding the documented effects of CSE on employee work outcomes.
Using a cross-level design and relying on a contingency approach to understanding empowering leadership, we investigate the mediating role of individual-level psychological empowerment in the cross-level relationship between team-directed empowering leadership and two complementary forms of individual-level citizenship: affiliative organizational citizenship behavior and taking charge. We also investigate the moderating role of organizational support climate in the relationship between empowering leader behavior and these two forms of citizenship. Using data collected from 98 work teams in one large organization in China, in addition to support for the mediating role of psychological empowerment, we found a "double-edged" moderating effect for organizational support climate. For affiliative organizational citizenship behavior, and consistent with reciprocation perspectives posited by social exchange theory, results showed that the highest levels occurred when both empowering leadership behavior and organizational support climate were high. In contrast, for taking charge, and consistent with control theory, results showed that the highest levels occurred when empowering leadership behavior was high but when organizational support climate was low. Our findings highlight the counterintuitive notion that organizational support climate may not always have uniformly positive effects and also reinforce the importance of including both individual and work context factors when attempting to understand cross-level empowering leadership effects.
The purpose of this meta-analysis was to clarify the current understanding of the relationship between counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and withdrawal. First, we articulate theoretical and conceptual reasons for the confusion on important issues, such as their conceptualization, labeling, and measurement. Second, we conduct a meta-analysis between current CWB and withdrawal measures. We found that, as measured, CWB and withdrawal are strongly related and have patterns of nomological relationships with common correlates that are nearly identical. The relationship between organizational-target CWB and withdrawal is particularly strong. The results suggest that withdrawal may be best represented as a facet in the hierarchical model of CWB, perhaps even as a facet of organizational-target CWB. We also discuss important avenues and needs for future research.
Previous researchers have questioned whether the association between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and organizational performance indicates causality. Strategic human resource management theories, including the resource-based view of the firm and the behavioral perspective, have provided explanations linking human resource management practices to organizational performance. We add arguments based upon general systems theory to suggest a more complex relationship where performance provides feedback on HPWS in the form of information and resources. This feedback generates both the data and the slack resources needed to support an adaptive process of HPWS implementation. We test the causal associations between HPWS and performance using a large longitudinal data set with three time points. Findings showed that past HPWS positively contributes to later productivity as well as the reverse. The reciprocal relationship supports the need to extend strategic human resource management theory by considering productivity as an antecedent as well as an outcome of human resource management practices.
Researchers have proposed that leader support helps employees behave proactively at work. Leader support can facilitate the opportunities for employees to bring about change, as well as their motivation to do so. Nevertheless, empirical studies have shown mixed effects of leader support on employees’ proactive behavior. In this study, to reconcile the inconsistent findings on the impact of leader support on employees’ proactive behavior, the authors consider the content, mediating mechanisms, and boundary conditions of leader support in shaping employees’ proactive behavior. On the basis of attachment theory, the authors propose that secure-base support from leaders (support in the form of leader availability, encouragement, and noninterference) positively predicts employees’ proactive work behavior by increasing their role breadth self-efficacy and autonomous motivation. These hypotheses are supported in an online-survey sample from U.S. participants (N = 138) and a sample from a large gas and oil company in China (N = 212). The authors further propose that the beneficial effects of secure-base support from leaders are more prominent for individuals with lower attachment security. This hypothesis was also supported: Individuals high in attachment anxiety especially benefited from leader secure-base support in terms of its effect on role breadth self-efficacy; whereas those who are high in attachment avoidance especially benefited from leader secure-base support in terms of its effect on autonomous motivation. Our study helps explain how leaders’ support motivates employees’ proactive behavior, particularly for those individuals who have lower attachment security.
Extant research suggests that entrepreneurs’ identities influence the venture creation process. However, we know little about how the "hats" that entrepreneurs wear (i.e., their different role identities) influence how entrepreneurs think about—and select—opportunities. Employing verbal protocol and content analysis techniques, we show that, depending on the role identity assumed, entrepreneurs attend to different opportunity features and make different decisions with regard to opportunity consideration and selection. As a result, role identity has an important situated influence on entrepreneurs’ cognition, which may significantly affect the pattern of growth and pursuit of their new ventures.
Boards of directors must navigate between adopting standardized "best practices" for their CEOs’ pay plans, on the one hand, and customizing their CEOs’ pay to align their particular CEO’s goals with those of shareholders, on the other. We build theory proposing that the incentive effects of different CEO compensation types vary consistently over CEO tenures and, therefore, that overstandardization of CEO pay plans actually can hurt shareholders. Our analysis of a sample of U.S. Standard & Poor’s 500 firms from 1998 to 2005 shows declining benefits to shareholders from performance-based compensation (i.e., options and bonuses) as CEO tenure increases but an opposite effect for non-performance-based (i.e., salary) pay. These findings can be considered a preliminary warning that normative "best practices" should not become the exclusive approach to determining CEO pay packages; instead, boards should consider more holistic approaches that incorporate the fit between CEO characteristics and organizational goals.
Despite recent theoretical advances, the pattern of trust development between coworkers has yet to receive focused longitudinal attention. Furthermore, current theory suggests that employees attend to an array of independent trust cues in any given situation but fails to identify which cues are important when. In a four-wave longitudinal field study, we demonstrate how new coworker intentions to engage in trust behaviors (reliance and disclosure) evolve during employee socialization and examine the trust cues that prime decisions to trust. We present a latent growth model of trust development that reveals, for the first time, that reliance and disclosure intentions in early work relationships develop in a positive, nonlinear pattern over time. Furthermore, the study indicates that propensity to trust has a statistically significant effect on the initial status of intention to rely on and disclose information to coworkers but not on changes in trust behavior over time. The multiwave design permits comprehensive assessment of the change in impact of different trust cues over time and demonstrates that the importance of certain cues varies depending primarily on the type of trust in question and potentially changes as a relationship matures. We discuss the theoretical implications and directions for future research.
In this article we address the increasingly important yet understudied phenomenon of nonnative accentedness on decision making. In three experimental studies, we investigated whether messages about a company delivered in nonstandard-American-accented speech influenced choice. In Study 1, we found that individuals were more likely to choose a company or a product when a message was read in a standard American English accent than when the message was delivered with a Mandarin Chinese or a French accent. In Study 2, we found that expectations regarding company messages are violated when speakers have accents and that, in turn, expectation violations mediated the relationship between accent and choice. In Study 3, we replicated the findings of the effect of accent on choice using Indian and British accents. We also hypothesized and found support for a conditional indirect effects model such that implicit pro-American bias moderated the indirect relationship between accent and choice as mediated by expectation violations. Theoretical and practical implications of this topic of study are discussed.
This study investigates what determines social actors’ motivations and opportunities to risk changing their current courses of action and the extent to which they are likely to change, by integrating structural and behavioral perspectives on decision making. Behavioral perspectives argue that performance relative to aspirations determines the actors’ risk preference and motivation to change, while structural perspectives suggest that the actors’ choices and actions are enabled and constrained by the opportunities surrounding their structural positions to form exchange relations with the external audiences. We propose a theoretical model of how the actors’ status, distinctiveness, and relative performance interact to influence their motivations and opportunities to change, resulting in differential responsiveness to relative performance in terms of the degree of change. This model is empirically examined and supported in the context of the U.S. feature film industry between 1986 and 2006, where film directors decide the distances of change in the genre repertoires for their next film project. Overall, this study shows the importance of considering the interactions between the structural and behavioral antecedents to understand when and how social actors make decisions to change in an attempt to survive and prosper in dynamic environments.
The relationship between contractual and relational arrangements in interorganizational relationships has been subject to an ongoing debate. We propose that in the context of cross-border partnerships, the governance mechanisms can be both substitutes and complements depending upon contingencies posed by uncertainties of two different origins: environmental and behavioral. We argue that environmental uncertainty (i.e., instability and unpredictability of the external environment) drives the formal and relational arrangements into a more substitutive relationship by elevating the adaptation complications in which increasing reliance on either form of governance inhibits the effective operation of the other. Contrastingly, behavioral uncertainty (in the form of inadequate common grounds and shared frameworks among collaborating firms) encumbers the understanding of partner behavior and conduct and drives the governance mechanisms into a more complementary relationship in which contractual and relational mechanisms facilitate the effective operation of each other. Empirical results from 205 cross-border partnerships of large U.S. firms support our theorized relationships.
The narrative surrounding the nature of relationships and interactions between and among women at work is decidedly negative, which is evident in the coverage that female competition and the queen bee syndrome receive in the media, nonfiction books, and the management and psychology literatures. In the current article, we propose a two-stage theory that is grounded in gender stereotyping to account for this narrative. In the first stage, we draw from theories of social comparison and in-group distancing to offer plausible reasons for why women’s same-sex relationships at work might be more fraught with interpersonal conflict than men’s. In the second stage, we set aside consideration of possible gender differences in same-sex conflict frequency and draw from attribution theory to propose that female same-sex conflict is more problematized by third parties than male same-sex conflict, which could produce the exaggerated perception that women have more dysfunctional same-sex workplace relationships than men. Implications for future research and gender equality in organizations are discussed.
This article relies on tournament and social comparison theorizing to understand how multiple concurrent pay structures and, thus, potential for comparison to multiple referents, affect turnover in the CEO’s top team. Specifically, we explore how the concurrent effects of pay dispersion within the CEO’s top team, pay disparity between the team and the CEO, and pay level in comparison to top teams at other firms in the industry affect turnover among members of the CEO’s top team. Consistent with social comparison theorizing, we find that pay dispersion is positively associated with turnover within CEO’s top teams. We also find that pay disparity has an effect consistent with tournament theorizing in which firms with greater tournament prizes (i.e., CEO salary gap) have lower turnover within their CEOs’ top teams. Furthermore, we find that pay disparity interacts with both pay dispersion and pay level to affect turnover within CEOs’ top teams. These results have theoretical and practical implications for CEOs’ top-team pay design in organizations. Specifically, our findings imply that theoretical mechanisms associated with how firms compensate executives—and the inherent comparisons in which those pay structures result—work in concert to affect turnover within the CEO’s top team. Hence, to understand the effect that compensation has on executives’ subsequent responses, researchers and practitioners must consider multiple concurrent pay references simultaneously.
This study examined workplace interactions in which lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) workers faced decisions related to revealing or concealing their LGB identities at work (i.e., identity management situations). Participants were 61 LGB adults who completed a baseline survey about their organization and, over 3 weeks, responded to event-based surveys immediately after identity management situations. Results suggested that LGB workers manage their stigmatized identity strategically according to situational characteristics. Indeed, much of the variance in use of revealing and concealing strategies was due to differences within people from situation to situation. Use of identity management strategies was predicted by interaction partner cues of acceptance or rejection as well as perception of LGB-related organizational climate and policies. Results at the within-person and between-person levels diverged in noteworthy ways.
The concept of greed is one of the oldest social constructs; however, greed as a managerial attribute that affects firm outcomes has yet to attract scholarly attention in management. In this study, we examine the relationship of CEO greed to shareholder wealth. After anchoring greed to familiar constructs in organizational literature, we test our hypotheses on a sample of over 300 publicly traded firms from multiple industries. As predicted, greed has a negative relationship with shareholder return, but this relationship is moderated by the presence of a powerful, independent board, managerial discretion, and CEO tenure. The contributions of this study, which include refining our understanding of self-interest and opportunism, developing the greed construct, and illustrating its impact on shareholder wealth, are intended to open a new line of inquiry in the management literature.
In this study we introduce a justice perspective to examining the result of bargaining between CEOs and boards over the allocation of firm residuals that ultimately determines CEO compensation. Framing CEO pay as the result of bargaining between CEOs and boards focuses attention on the power of CEOs to increase their share of firm residuals in the form of increased compensation, and the diligence of boards of directors to constrain CEO opportunism. Framing this negotiation through a theory of justice offers an alternative perspective to the search for pay-performance sensitivity. We predict and find that as board diligence in controlling opportunism declines and CEO power increases, CEOs are increasingly able to capture a larger portion of firm residuals relative to shareholders. This finding supports critics who charge that CEO pay violates norms of distributive and procedural justice.
The present research builds theory regarding the consequences of work unit ethnic diversity by advancing a status-based, multilevel model of when ethnic diversity is likely to constrain work unit performance. In contrast to past work unit diversity research, which has largely ignored the varying degrees of status ascribed to members of different ethnic groups, I propose that ethnic diversity is most likely to constrain work unit cohesion, and in turn work unit performance, in work units composed of two ethnic subgroups that are separated by large differences in status (i.e., ethnic status subgroups; ESS). Furthermore, and consistent with evidence that the consequences of work unit diversity are contingent on the broader social contexts in which work units are embedded, I predict that the presence of ethnic status subgroups in the community exacerbates the detrimental consequences of ethnic status subgroups in work units. Findings from a multisource, field-based data set (N = 743 employees nested within 131 bank branches) support the study hypotheses. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Publication bias is the systematic suppression of research findings due to small magnitude, statistical insignificance, or contradiction of prior findings or theory. We review possible reasons why publication bias may exist in strategy research and examine empirical evidence regarding the influence of publication bias in the field. Overall, we conclude that publication bias affects many, but not all, topics in strategic management research. Correlation inflation due to publication bias ranged in magnitude from .00, indicating no bias, to .19, representing considerable bias. These results suggest that caution should be exercised when interpreting scientific conclusions regarding certain determinants of firm performance, while greater confidence may be expressed in others. We discuss how publication bias can be addressed both philosophically and empirically in the domain of strategy.
This study is an effort to reveal market-driven innovation via acquisitions. By differentiating the organizational process of resource integration pertaining to market- versus technology-driven innovation via acquisitions, we show that product market relatedness and technology relatedness have differential effects on postacquisition innovation performance, depending on the size of the acquirer. Our analysis of acquisitions in high-tech industries indicates that larger firms maximize their postacquisition technological innovation performance at a lower level of technology relatedness and, in contrast, at a higher level of product market relatedness, whereas the opposite is true for smaller firms. This study contributes to the acquisitions research by identifying (a) market-driven innovation via acquisitions and (b) different mechanisms through which product market and technological resources affect postacquisition technological innovation.
How does the scientific value of innovations vary with the maturity of the knowledge that underlies them? We reconcile conflicting views in the innovation literature by introducing a contingency perspective that underscores the role of knowledge distance along technological and geographical domains. We predict an inverted U-shaped effect of knowledge maturity on the scientific value of new innovations. We further suggest that incorporating geographically distant knowledge can enhance the value contribution of knowledge maturity, whereas incorporating technologically distant knowledge or waiting for the adoption of knowledge in the industry mitigates this value. Our analysis of 5,575 biotechnology patented innovations offers support for our conjectures. We thus advance research on knowledge management and innovation by underscoring the temporal aspect of innovation and its interplay with technological and geographical distances.
Past research suggests that autonomy has highly variable effects on team performance, and that one explanation for this pattern of findings is that autonomous teams fall into a state of disorder where they lack clarity regarding the goals of the broader organization. Following this perspective, the authors develop a model proposing that performance feedback coupled with high autonomy enables teams to have greater clarity of the organization’s goals, which in turn increases team performance. This model was tested on 110 teams in a defense industry manufacturing firm in South Korea using mediated-moderation techniques. Results indicate that highly autonomous teams that receive a high degree of performance feedback outperform other teams because of their heightened level of organizational goal clarity. In contrast, highly autonomous teams that receive low levels of feedback perform at the lowest levels compared to other teams because of a lack of organizational goal clarity. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for theory, research, and practice.
Drawing on trait activation theory, we examine a person-situation interactionist model to predict unethical behavior in organizations. In particular, we examine abusive supervision as a condition under which employee Machiavellianism (Mach) is activated and thus more strongly predicts unethical behavior. We offer a more fine-grained analysis of the Mach–trait activation process by specifically examining the interactive effect of each Mach dimension (viz., Distrust in Others, Desire for Control, Desire for Status, and Amoral Manipulation) and abusive supervision onto unethical behavior. We collected multisource field data to test our hypotheses across two studies. We then tested our theoretical model utilizing an experimental design. The results of our field studies indicate that the interaction of amoral manipulation and abusive supervision is the most predictive of unethical behavior, whereas our experimental findings indicate that the interaction of desire for control and abusive supervision is the primary predictor of unethical behavior. Implications for the Machiavellianism literature and trait activation theory are discussed.
The use of short-term bonuses to motivate employees has become an organizational regularity, but a thorough understanding of the relationship between these incentives and actual performance is lacking. We aim to advance this understanding by examining how three types of bonuses (cash, family meal voucher, and verbal reward) affect employees’ productivity in a field experiment conducted in a high-tech manufacturing factory. While all types of bonuses increased performance by over 5%, nonmonetary short-term bonuses had a slight advantage over monetary bonuses. In addition, the removal of the bonuses led to decreased productivity for monetary bonuses but not for the verbal reward. However, this negative effect of monetary short-term bonuses diminishes when a cash bonus is chosen by employees rather than granted by default. Theoretical implications about the effect of short-term bonuses on intrinsic motivation and reciprocity, as well as practical applications of short-term bonus plans that stem from our findings, are discussed.
To progress beyond the idea that the value of interfirm collaboration is largely determined by the complementarity of the resources held by partners, we build a theoretical framework that explains under which conditions a set of resources or capabilities can be considered as complementary and resulting in superior value creation. Specifically, we argue that the tasks that an interfirm collaboration has to perform determine complementarities and that complementarities arise from similar and dissimilar resources alike. We capture this relationship in the concept of task resource complementarity. Further, we examine factors that impact on the relevance of this construct as a predictor of partner selection. Finally, we discuss which implications arise for a theory of the firm when tasks are explicitly incorporated into the conceptualization of resource complementarity.
Theory and practice suggest workplace incivility is progressive and dynamic. To date, however, workplace incivility has been assessed as a between-person phenomenon by asking employees to summarize their exposure to incivility over some specific period (e.g., 1 year or 5 years). Consequently, little is known about the time-varying and progressive aspects of workplace incivility as suggested by both the referent literature and experience. Within the context of employee burnout and withdrawal, we developed a novel, dynamic mediated model of workplace incivility change and tested specific predictions about its time-sequential effects. Latent change score modeling of weekly survey data from 131 employees indicates that incivility change uniquely affects subsequent changes in burnout, which, in turn, lead to subsequent changes in turnover cognitions. We also explore whether this dynamic mediated effect varies across time and individuals.
Social information exchange (SIE) in organizations has long been an area of interest for management scholars; however, in recent years, this literature has become fragmented and widely dispersed. As communication and transfer of information increasingly occur between individuals and aggregates of widely varying national and regional cultures, a reconsideration and review of the topic is appropriate, including identification of key issues in this research domain and an integration and synthesis of what we currently know about SIE across cultural boundaries. We examine the last 13 years of cross-cultural SIE research at the country, organization and subunit, team and dyad, and individual levels; provide a basic analytic framework; and provide propositions and direction to guide future research. Our review notes key findings based on three general topics in the literature: (1) antecedents to SIE, (2) process and relational outcomes of SIE, and (3) performance outcomes of SIE. We conclude that this area of research would benefit from increased focus on the nature of the relationship between the exchange partners, the broader social context in which exchanges are embedded, consideration of the capabilities of the actors and their task requirements, and timing of events. Issues regarding SIE quality and fidelity, motivations, cultural distance, and uncertainty are discussed. These research directions can potentially enhance diverse literatures, such as interpersonal interactions, team decision making, knowledge transfer, and corporate governance.
Although both researchers and practitioners know that an employee’s performance varies over time within a job, this within-person performance variability is not well understood and in fact is often treated as error. In the current paper, we first identify the importance of a within-person approach to job performance and then review several extant theories of within-person performance variability that, despite vastly different foci, converge on the contention that job performance is dynamic rather than static. We compare and contrast the theories along several common metrics and thereby facilitate a discussion of commonalities, differences, and theory elaboration. In so doing, we identify important future research questions on within-person performance variability and methodological challenges in addressing these research questions. Finally, we highlight how the conventional practical implications articulated on the basis of a static, between-person perspective on job performance may need to be modified to account for the dynamic, within-person nature of performance.
Sociocultural factors are important determinants of merger and acquisition (M&A) outcomes. Despite advances in this field, our understanding of sociocultural factors in M&As remains incomplete. In particular, the roles of sociocultural interfirm linkages, HR flexibility, and organizational cultural differences in M&As require further elucidation. The present article contributes to the M&A literature by further clarifying the multifaceted role of these sociocultural factors in M&As. We suggest that sociocultural interfirm linkages (complementary employee skills, trust, collective teaching, and cultural integration) between the merging firms influence the level of knowledge transfer in M&As. Furthermore, we argue that HR flexibility (flexibility in employee skills, flexibility in employee behavior, and flexibility in HR practices) is vital for the development of the above-mentioned sociocultural interfirm linkages in M&As. Finally, we maintain that organizational cultural differences are important antecedents of HR flexibility in M&As.
In contrast to the abundance of evidence on employee reactions to manager unfairness, we know very little about factors that predict whether managers will act fairly or not. This article explores the effect of procedural unfairness that emanates from higher level managers on procedural fairness enactment at lower levels in the organization. We argue that lower level managers can enact both more and less fair procedures in response to higher level unfairness and that this depends on the extent to which lower level managers define the self in terms of their relation with their higher level manager (i.e., relational-interdependent self-construal). We study both the moderating role of self-construal and how it is embedded in the physical environment of the organization. We pay particular attention to how spatial distance between higher and lower management affects self-construal at lower levels and—because of this relationship—the enactment of fair procedures within the organization. We conduct four studies (in two of which we study spatial distance as an antecedent for self-construal) and show that relatively high levels of relational-interdependent self-construal lead to assimilation in terms of procedural fairness enactment, whereas relatively low levels lead to contrast.
We examine three knowledge-based processes and interactions underlying an effective improvisation capability in research and development (R&D) teams: a team’s ability to create a shared understanding of new knowledge, a team’s experience working together, and a team’s ability to gather external knowledge. Using a sample of 100 R&D teams developing computer technology innovations, we also examine the moderating role of "minimal structures" (goal clarity combined with autonomy) as a contextual factor supporting effective improvisation. Our results detected different ways in which the processes and interactions involved in an improvisation capability interacted with the context. We find support for the positive relationship between shared understanding of new knowledge and improvisation capability and find that this relationship is strengthened by minimal structures. Team’s experience working together was not associated with improvisation capability, but when minimal structures are present, more experience working together is positively related to improvisation. Finally, a team’s external knowledge-gathering ability is positively associated with improvisation, but, surprisingly, when minimal structures are present, this positive effect is reduced. We conclude with implications for improvisation theory and for the practice of R&D teams.
Power distance is a value that differentiates individuals, groups, organizations, and nations based on the degree to which inequalities are accepted either as unavoidable or as functional. Understanding power distance is especially important in organizational research because power is fundamental to all relationships, is inherent in hierarchical organizations, and affects many organizational processes and outcomes. We begin by reviewing existing value taxonomies and definitional elements of power distance. Next, we review theories and research linking power distance to micro and macro work-related outcomes. We conclude by identifying areas where additional organizational research on power distance is needed and, in doing so, provide an agenda for future research in this area. Our review highlights power distance as an important explanatory variable and boundary condition for many relations that organizational (not just cross-cultural) scientists examine.
In this study, the authors provide an assessment of the ecological theory of organizational form emergence and focus on the positive density effect associated with legitimation. The argument comes in two steps. First, organizational ecology seeks to understand cross-population similarities in search of general patterns in form emergence processes. Using summative meta-analysis, the authors show that the average effect of density dependence on population-level legitimation is positive, but this average effect hides large variation across different populations. Second, in the spirit of recent revisions of this theory, the authors introduce two concepts that can be linked to industries or populations to explain this unaccounted-for variation: perceived simplicity of organizational goals and tangibility of offerings. Using formative meta-analysis, the study reveals that both population-level characteristics increase legitimation. Density effects on organizational founding rates tend to be stronger in manufacturing and for-profit industries, which are arguably settings featuring higher simplicity of goals and larger tangibility of offerings, respectively. On the basis of this set of findings, the authors conclude with a plea for a population-level theory of ecological differences, developing a comparative research strategy that is distinct from the current emphasis on single-population studies.
Proposed as a theory of motivation, the basic tenet of conservation of resources (COR) theory is that humans are motivated to protect their current resources and acquire new resources. Despite its recent popularity in the organizational behavior literature, several criticisms of the theory have emerged, primarily related to the central concept of resources. In this review, we address concerns regarding the conceptualization, conservation, acquisition, fluctuation, and measurement of resources. We highlight gaps in the COR literature that can be addressed by integrating research from other areas of psychology and management. In this manner, we hope to push the COR literature forward by resolving several concerns and providing suggestions for future research that might address other concerns.
Starting with the premise that subteam psychological safety (PS) microclimates are vitally important to team behavior yet invisible to team-level PS concepts and measures, we introduce a multilevel theory and model of PS within work teams. We first demonstrate the inevitability and influence of distinct PS microclimates in teams and highlight the limits of current team PS approaches, and then develop a multilevel PS theory using social network methods. We introduce multilevel PS measures and theorize their influence on specific aspects of team and subteam learning and performance outcomes. These include new applications of traditional network metrics (e.g., team PS density, member-only PS density, subteam PS density, and leader PS centrality) and a newly developed multilevel team PS index (mPSi). The mPSi measure synthesizes multilevel leader and member PS influences in a single number to better predict outcomes in teams that engage in multilevel (subteam and intact-team) activity to meet work demands. We employ the new metrics to examine four archetypal team PS structures, contrasting new and current approaches and illuminating the implications of incongruity between subteam and intact-team safety climates. We propose that this multilevel theory extends the team PS literature, effecting far greater understanding and prediction of team outcomes and development, while increasing the number of team PS studies that reach publication.
We examined when job embeddedness might serve as a boundary condition between interactional fairness and employee behavior. Specifically, we explored whether elements of affective attachment associated with job embeddedness moderated relations of supervisors’ interactional fairness with citizenship behavior and production deviance. Results from a field and a scenario study supported the idea that interactional fairness exerts a stronger effect on these outcomes for employees embedded in their jobs than for their less attached coworkers. We found this result even after controlling for turnover intent. Practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Assessing the relative importance of predictors has been of historical importance in a variety of disciplines including management, medicine, economics, and psychology. When approaching hypotheses on the relative ordering of the magnitude of predicted effects (e.g., the effects of discrimination from managers and coworkers are larger than that from clients), one quickly runs into problems within a traditional frequentist framework. Null hypothesis significance testing does not allow researchers to directly map research hypotheses on to results and suffers from a multiple testing problem that leads to low statistical power. Furthermore, all traditional structural equation modeling fit indices lose much of their suitability for model comparison, because order hypotheses are not countable in terms of degrees of freedom. To adequately tackle order hypotheses, we advocate a Bayesian method that provides a single internally consistent solution for estimation and inference. The key element in the proposed model comparison approach is the use of the Bayes factor and the incorporation of order constraints by means of a smart formulation of prior distributions. An easy-to-use software package BIEMS (Bayesian inequality and equality constrained model selection) is introduced and two empirical examples in the organizational behavior area are provided to showcase the method, both offering new findings that have implications for theory: the first on the differential impact of discrimination in the workplace from insiders and outsiders to the organization on employees’ well-being, and the second on Karasek’s stressor–strain theory about how the relative order of magnitude of the effects of job control and demands depends on the specific well-being outcome dimension.
Creativity and innovation in any organization are vital to its successful performance. The authors review the rapidly growing body of research in this area with particular attention to the period 2002 to 2013, inclusive. Conceiving of both creativity and innovation as being integral parts of essentially the same process, we propose a new, integrative definition. We note that research into creativity has typically examined the stage of idea generation, whereas innovation studies have commonly also included the latter phase of idea implementation. The authors discuss several seminal theories of creativity and innovation and then apply a comprehensive levels-of-analysis framework to review extant research into individual, team, organizational, and multilevel innovation. Key measurement characteristics of the reviewed studies are then noted. In conclusion, we propose a guiding framework for future research comprising 11 major themes and 60 specific questions for future studies.
We connect the replication crisis in social science to the default model of constant effects coupled with the flawed statistical approach of null hypothesis significance testing and the related problems arising from the default model of constant treatment effects. We argue that Bayesian modeling of interactions could lead to a general improvement in the communication and understanding of research results. Moving to Bayesian methods (or, more generally, multilevel approaches that incorporate external information) offers an opportunity for introspection into how social scientists interact with social phenomena to produce knowledge.
Although interpersonal interactions are the mainstay of many assessment center exercises, little is known about how these interactions unfold and affect participant behavior and performance. More specifically, participants interact with role players who have been instructed to demonstrate behavior reflecting specific dispositions as part of the exercise. This study focuses on role player portrayed disposition as a potentially important social demand relevant to participant behavior and performance in interpersonal simulations. We integrate interpersonal theory and trait activation theory to formulate hypotheses about the effects of role player portrayed disposition on participant behavior and performance in 184 interpersonal simulations. A significant effect of portrayed disposition was found for participant relationship building and directive communication behavior. Furthermore, portrayed disposition moderated the relationship between participant use of these behaviors and performance ratings. Conceptually, this study sheds light on the complementary mechanisms and social demands that produce participant performance differences across exercises. At a practical level, this study provides valuable evidence-based guidance for developing interpersonal simulations.
Job analysis has a central role in virtually every aspect of HR and is one of several high performance work practices thought to underlie firm performance. Given its ubiquity and importance, it is not surprising that considerable effort has been devoted to developing comprehensive job analysis systems and methodologies. Yet, the complexity inherent in collecting detailed and specific "decomposed" information has led some to pursue "holistic" strategies designed to focus on more general and abstract job analysis information. It is not clear, however, if these two different strategies yield comparable information, nor if respondents are equally capable of generating equivalent information. Drawing from cognitive psychology research, we suggest that experienced and careless job analysis respondents are less likely to evidence convergence in their decomposed and holistic job analysis judgments. In a field sample of professional managers, we found that three different types of task-related work experience moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average R2 of 4.7%. Three other more general types of work experience, however, did not moderate this relationship, supporting predictions that only experience directly related to work tasks would prove to be a liability when making judgments. We also found that respondent carelessness moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average R2 of 6.2%. These results link cognitive limitations to important job analysis respondent differences and suggest a number of theoretical and practical implications when collecting holistic job analysis data.
Transparency is often cited as essential to the trust stakeholders place in organizations. However, a clear understanding of the meaning and significance of transparency has yet to emerge in the stakeholder literature. We synthesize prior research to advance a conceptual definition of transparency and articulate its dimensions, and posit how transparency contributes to trust in organization-stakeholder relationships. We draw from this analysis to explicate the mechanisms organizations can employ that influence transparency perceptions.
Using 50 effect sizes from both published and unpublished studies (team n = 3,198), we provide meta-analytic support for the positive relationship between shared leadership and team performance. Employing a random effects model, we found that the theoretical foundation and associated measurement techniques used to index shared leadership significantly moderated effect size estimates. Specifically, as compared to studies that conceptualized and employed assessments of overall shared leadership from members (i.e., an aggregation approach), network conceptions and measures of shared leadership evidenced higher effect sizes. Both network density and (de)centralization approaches to the study of shared leadership–performance relations exhibited significant and higher effect sizes than did the aggregation-based studies. Analyses also revealed lower average effect sizes when the sample studied was in the classroom/lab as compared to the field. Task complexity significantly moderated the shared leadership, with lower effect sizes observed with more complex tasks. No significant influence of team task interdependence was observed. We highlight the relative value of employing social network theories and measures as compared to aggregate theories and measures of shared leadership. Directions for future research and application are discussed.
Why do some leaders use their position to amass personal prestige and resources, and others to benefit the team, the organization, or society? This article synthesizes new, cross-disciplinary research showing that self-serving leader behavior is predictable based on the function and nature of power—an essential component of leadership. First, because power increases goal-oriented behavior, it amplifies the tendency of self-focused goals to yield self-interested behavior. Self-focused goals may arise from a variety of sources; evidence is reviewed for the role of traits (e.g., low agreeableness), values (e.g., self-enhancement), self-construal (e.g., independence), and motivation (e.g., personalized power motivation). Second, because power is generally desirable, leaders whose power is threatened (e.g., self-doubts, positional instability) will turn their focus to maintaining that power—even at others’ expense. These ideas have important implications for research and for organizational efforts to develop leaders who will improve others’ outcomes rather than merely benefit themselves.
Empirical research on workaholism has been hampered by a lack of consensus regarding the definition and appropriate measurement of the construct. In the present study, we first review prior conceptualizations of workaholism in an effort to identify a definition of workaholism. Then, we conduct a meta-analysis of the correlates and outcomes of workaholism to clarify its nomological network. Results indicate that workaholism is related to achievement-oriented personality traits (i.e., perfectionism, Type A personality), but is generally unrelated to many other dispositional (e.g., conscientiousness, self-esteem, positive affect) and demographic (e.g., gender, parental status, marital status) variables. Findings are mixed regarding the relationship between workaholism and affectively laden variables, which speaks to the complex nature of workaholism. Results also show that workaholism is related to many negative outcomes, such as burnout, job stress, work–life conflict, and decreased physical and mental health. Overall, results provide solid evidence that workaholism is best conceptualized as an addiction to work that leads to many negative individual, interpersonal, and organizational outcomes.
Although the design, scoring, and interpretation of assessment centers (ACs) commonly focuses on job-relevant dimensions, over three decades of past studies have questioned the evidentiary basis underlying dimension-based interpretations of ACs. This review combines multiple approaches to examine the structure of AC dimensions. First, we consulted the AC, job performance, leadership, and personality literatures to articulate competing models of the dimensions underlying AC ratings. Next, meta-analytic confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to compare the fit of these models to existing AC data. The results supported a model including administrative skills, relational skills, and drive. Third, socioanalytic theory was used as a basis to examine the nomological network of these three broad factors, specifically their relationships with general mental ability and the five factor model of personality. The analyses supported the nomological network of drive and administrative skills but less so for relational skills. These findings are discussed with regard to the construct-related validity of AC dimensions, the fidelity of ACs to the broader criterion domain, and the value of applying generalizable models to the analysis of AC ratings.
Socially responsible human resource management (SRHRM), defined as corporate social responsibility (CSR) directed at employees, underpins the successful implementation of CSR. While its relationship with employee social behavior has been conceptualized and received some empirical support, its effect on employee work behaviors has not been explored. In this article we develop and test a meso-mediated moderation model that explains the underlying mechanisms through which SRHRM affects employee task performance and extra-role helping behavior. The results of multilevel analysis show that organization-level SRHRM is an indirect predictor of individual task performance and extra-role helping behavior through the mediation of individual-level organizational identification. In addition, the mediation model is moderated by employee-level perceived organizational support and the relationship between organizational identification and extra-role helping behavior is moderated by organization-level cooperative norms. These findings provide important insights into why and when SRHRM influences employee work behaviors.
If an organization’s management is caught in the act of misconduct, it may call for a changing of the guard. Surprisingly, though, there is little empirical evidence examining the presumed benefits of executive turnover in the aftermath of wrongdoing. In this study, we explore investor reactions to CEO turnover following financial misrepresentation. We theorize and find that firms can be successful at managing investor reactions to organizational misconduct by either scapegoating or signaling change, but middle-ground approaches that do not commit to one or the other are less successful. We test our ideas in a firm-level event study of market reactions to CEO successions following a material financial statement restatement. We discuss the results, which generally support our predictions, and their implications for development of the scapegoating and signaling literatures and research on both executive succession and restoring corrupt organizations.
This study underlines the limitations of commonly used proxies to measure value creation in interfirm alliances and addresses these limitations in two ways. First, this study adopts a co-opetition-based approach in theoretically conceptualizing value creation in interfirm alliances as a three-dimensional construct and argues that in addition to "common benefit" and "private benefit cooperation" (generally known as "private benefits"), a third dimension, namely "private benefit competition" should also be considered as an integral dimension of value creation. Second, by analyzing data collected from 155 firms of five high-technology research-intensive sectors in India that engaged in 288 alliances characterized by varying degree of co-opetition, this study empirically validates the distinctiveness of these three dimensions and presents a 17-item multidimensional scale of value creation.
Although pay-for-performance’s potential effect on employee performance is a compelling issue, understanding this dynamic has been constrained by narrow approaches to pay-for-performance conceptualization, measurement, and surrounding conditions. In response, we take a more nuanced perspective by integrating fundamental principles of economics and psychology to identify and incorporate employee characteristics, job characteristics, pay system characteristics, and pay system experience into a contingency model of the pay-for-performance–future performance relationship. We test the role that these four key contextual factors play in pay-for-performance effectiveness using 11,939 employees over a 5-year period. We find that merit and bonus pay, as well as their multiyear trends, are positively associated with future employee performance. Furthermore, our findings indicate that, contrary to what traditional economic perspectives would predict, bonus pay may have a stronger effect on future performance than merit pay. Our results also support a contingency approach to pay-for-performance’s impact on future employee performance, as we find that merit pay and bonus pay can substitute for each other and that the strength of pay-for-performance’s effect is a function of employee tenure, the pay-for-performance trend over time, and job type (presumably due to differences in the measurability of employee performance across jobs).
Many employees possess inconspicuous identities that are stigmatized. At work, a context wherein impression management concerns are salient, these individuals face decisions about when, how, and to whom to disclose their concealable stigmas with important consequences for the way individuals experience work. In the following review, we integrate findings from psychological, sociological, and management literatures pertaining to the management of concealable stigmas. We further push the boundaries of this evidence to develop a multilevel model of workplace identity management behavior. That is, we conceptualize identity management as a within- and between-person phenomenon, accounting for the notion that identity management behaviors will vary as a function of the situation but that people will also exhibit identity management behavioral averages, tendencies, and accumulation that facilitate meaningful comparison among employees. Throughout the review, we highlight common themes, clarify inconsistent findings, and call attention to several fruitful areas we see ripe for future research.
Shareholder activism has become a dynamic institutional force, and its associated, rapidly increasing body of scholarly literature affects numerous disciplines within the organization science academy. In addition to equivocal results concerning the impact of shareholder activism on corporate outcomes, the separation of prior research into financial and social activism has left unanswered questions critical for both the scholarly discourse on shareholder activism and the normative debate on shareholder empowerment. The heterogeneity of factors in shareholder activism, such as the firm, activist, and environmental characteristics that promote or inhibit activism, along with the breadth of activism’s issues, methods, and processes, provide a plethora of theoretical and methodological opportunities and challenges for activism researchers. Our multidisciplinary review incorporates the financial and social activism streams and explores shareholder activism heterogeneity and controversy, seeking to provide an impetus for more cohesive conceptual and empirical work in the field.
Recent reports suggest that an increasing number of organizations are using information from social media platforms such as Facebook.com to screen job applicants. Unfortunately, empirical research concerning the potential implications of this practice is extremely limited. We address the use of social media for selection by examining how recruiter ratings of Facebook profiles fare with respect to two important criteria on which selection procedures are evaluated: criterion-related validity and subgroup differences (which can lead to adverse impact). We captured Facebook profiles of college students who were applying for full-time jobs, and recruiters from various organizations reviewed the profiles and provided evaluations. We then followed up with applicants in their new jobs. Recruiter ratings of applicants’ Facebook information were unrelated to supervisor ratings of job performance (rs = –.13 to –.04), turnover intentions (rs = –.05 to .00), and actual turnover (rs = –.01 to .01). In addition, Facebook ratings did not contribute to the prediction of these criteria beyond more traditional predictors, including cognitive ability, self-efficacy, and personality. Furthermore, there was evidence of subgroup difference in Facebook ratings that tended to favor female and White applicants. The overall results suggest that organizations should be very cautious about using social media information such as Facebook to assess job applicants.
Extant stakeholder studies posit that the media have a direct impact on firms’ pollution behaviors. By integrating agenda-setting theory with the stakeholder framework, we propose the media exert an influence on firms’ pollution behaviors through two primary stakeholders: the government and the public. Longitudinal archival data collected from Chinese newspapers in 2009 indicate that the government tends to take actions upon the official newspaper reports, while the public acts upon the reports from commercialized papers. Both the government’s and the public’s actions can prompt the firm to provide solutions to its pollution problems. In addition, the government’s actions mediate the relationship between official media coverage and firm solutions, and the public’s actions mediate the link between commercialized media coverage and firm solutions.
Using a sample of 1,468 private sector establishments, this article addresses the relationship among part-time workers, commitment-based human resource (HR) systems, and establishment financial performance. Building on theoretic perspectives about equity perceptions and reciprocal exchanges, we find that the proportion of part-time workers in an establishment workforce is nonlinearly related to establishment financial performance in an inverted U-shaped relationship. In addition, the interaction between part-time workers and commitment-based HR systems is negatively related to establishment performance. The analysis suggests that those deciding about how to structure establishments’ workforces should consider how interactions between different types of workers within workforces can influence establishment performance.
Knowledge creation is a collective and social activity, and a large body of research has established that knowledge creation by researchers (knowledge workers) is influenced by their direct exchange partners. We examine why knowledge worker ego networks are structured as they are, but also why and how knowledge worker networks change over time. We examine two changes to knowledge workers’ ego networks: the addition of new direct exchange partners and the deletion of existing direct exchange partners. Our study offers important evidence that two network dimensions (tie strength between ego and his or her alters, and the level of connectivity among ego’s alters) provide distinctive insight into how networks change. Importantly, our study provides evidence that three critical components of the knowledge creation process—access to diverse and redundant resources, shared experiences and tacit mutual understanding to develop the resources, and previous knowledge creations—act as causal mechanisms behind network changes in subsequent periods. Our study is at the individual level as we study biomedical research scientists and their direct exchange partners—the others to whom they are directly connected through coauthorship.
This study examines personal ties between boundary-spanning personnel in interorganizational exchanges in emerging markets. Drawing on social embeddedness theory and boundary spanning theory, we propose that strong ties between boundary spanners may benefit exchange parties in their interorganizational relationships through two heightened boundary-spanning behaviors—information processing and external representation. The results from 225 manufacturer–distributor dyads in China indicate that interpersonal ties at the higher levels (between top executives) and at the lower levels (between salespersons and individual buyers) are both positively associated with relationship quality of the buyer–supplier relationship through dyadic boundary-spanning behaviors. Between two levels of interpersonal ties, ties at the lower levels exhibit a stronger association with relationship quality than do ties at the higher levels. Furthermore, the positive effects of interpersonal ties on conflict resolution and cooperation are amplified when both levels of ties are strong in the focal relationship.
Despite managers’ claims that their organization’s human capital is their "most important asset," few can confidently state the financial value of that resource or quantify in financial terms how changes in management practices, culture, or workforce composition affect the value of that resource. Scholars of strategic human capital and strategic human resource management face a similar situation, relying more on inferences about human capital resource value than on empirical measures of it. In an effort to explicate the challenges associated with financial valuation so that scholars can begin to move past them, we provide a multidisciplinary review of existing work that has been concerned with the estimation, disclosure, and management of the financial value associated with an organization’s human capital resources. We propose a multilevel organizing framework to facilitate the linkage between the financial valuation issues highlighted in our review and the recent literature on strategic human capital/strategic human resource management. Based on the insights drawn from this review, we then propose a series of next steps or "action items" to stimulate future research that holds promise for yielding both new theoretical insights and important practical implications for organizations.
In contrast to older, conventional accounts that treat ethical decision making and behavior as the result of deliberative and intendedly rational processes, a rapidly growing body of social science research has framed ethical thought and behavior as driven by intuition. We review this important new body of knowledge in terms of both the process and content of moral intuition. Then, to demonstrate its value to organizational scholars, we consider the potential impact of moral intuition research in four areas of organizational studies especially suited to insights from this research: leadership, organizational corruption, ethics training and education, and divestiture socialization. Our review and discussion suggest that the literature on moral intuition is incredibly rich, fruitful, and meaningful to a wide range of audiences.
While research has identified a variety of hybrid governance structures, it has described and sought to explain this variety from different theoretical perspectives that are not readily reconcilable. This limits our ability systematically to compare different types of hybrids and on this basis to further theoretical understanding. Results of an empirical survey of transactions in buyer–supplier relations in the German construction industry provide novel insights into three distinct, widely employed types of hybrid governance structures. The study systematically compares the found hybrid governance structures and explores their rationales. As its main theoretical contribution, this study offers an empirically based typology of hybrid governance structures that complements earlier theorizing. It suggests that embeddedness and transaction cost arguments complement one another in explaining different and previously theoretically unspecified types of hybrid governance structures.
Research has offered that one of the key advantages of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is the ability to learn from a diverse collection of environments. However the internationalization process model literature linking organizational experience to foreign subsidiary ownership structure has emphasized the role of related or market-specific experience, without fully considering the role of experience across a heterogeneous collection of markets. The current study seeks to bridge this gap and improve our understanding of the generalizability and influencing factors of the internationalization process model by considering how prior focal-market experience and heterogeneity in host-market experience across an MNE’s operations influence subsequent decisions on foreign subsidiary ownership structures. In the empirical context of Japanese automotive firms, the results suggest that when MNEs (a) have greater levels of experience in a focal host country or (b) have experienced a greater variety of regulatory differences across their multinational operations, they are more likely to pursue majority-owned structures in the face of less transparent regulatory environments. Our results also suggest that MNEs with greater levels of both focal host-country experience and variance in environments experienced across their operations, have less confidence in their experience in a focal host country, and are even less likely to pursue majority-ownership structures in the face of less transparent regulatory environments.
Extant research suggests subtle, interpersonal forms of discrimination, though often normalized and overlooked, may be just as detrimental to targets as compared to more traditional, overt forms of discrimination. To further examine this question, we meta-analyzed the current literature to estimate the relationship between discrimination and a host of psychological, physical health, and work-related correlates as a function of its form (subtle or overt). Analysis of 90 effect sizes suggested that subtle and overt forms of discrimination hold relationships of comparable magnitude with a host of adverse correlates. By demonstrating that these two forms of discrimination are not differentially related to relevant outcomes, our findings call into serious question the pervasive belief that subtle discrimination is less consequential for targets as compared to overt discrimination (Landy, 2008; McWhorter, 2008). Taken together, our results suggest that subtle discrimination is at least as important to consider and address as its overt counterpart. Implications for organizational scholars and practitioners are discussed.
Research from the behavioral theory of the firm argues that declining performance below aspiration levels drives firms to engage in problemistic search that results in strategic actions designed to overcome performance shortfalls. This research has considered only strategic actions taken in the firm’s market environment though, such as investments in R&D. Firms operate and take strategic actions in both the market and nonmarket environment, the latter including firm interactions with the government. The research presented here argues that for reasons of risk aversion, firms facing declining performance below aspiration levels are likely to engage in strategic actions in the nonmarket environment immediately following a performance shortfall. In contrast, risk-taking preferences are argued to motivate firms to take strategic actions in the market environment in the future. We find support for these arguments utilizing 27 years of data from large U.S. firms.
Social media (SM) pervades our society. One rapidly growing application of SM is its use in personnel decision making. Organizations are increasingly searching SM (e.g., Facebook) to gather information about potential employees. In this article, we suggest that organizational practice has outpaced the scientific study of SM assessments in an area that has important consequences for individuals (e.g., being selected for work), organizations (e.g., successfully predicting job performance or withdrawal), and society (e.g., consequent adverse impact/diversity). We draw on theory and research from various literatures to advance a research agenda that addresses this gap between practice and research. Overall, we believe this is a somewhat rare moment in the human resources literature when a new class of selection methods arrives on the scene, and we urge researchers to help understand the implications of using SM assessments for personnel decisions.
Management researchers have long been concerned with the antecedents and consequences of managerial compensation. More recently, scholarly and popular attention has turned to the gap in pay between workers at the highest and lowest levels of the organization, or "pay dispersion." This study investigates the performance implications of pay dispersion on a longitudinal (10-year) sample of publicly traded firms from multiple industries. We combine explanations based on tournament theory and equity theory to develop a model wherein pay dispersion has opposing effects on a firm’s short-term performance and their trend in performance over time. We also show that ownership is a key antecedent of pay dispersion. Specifically, transient institutional investors (who have short time horizons and equity stakes in a wide variety of firms) positively influence pay dispersion whereas dedicated institutional investors (who have longer investment time horizons and equity stakes in fewer firms) negatively influence pay dispersion. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of these findings for scholars, managers, and policy makers alike.
Drawing from tenets of self-determination theory, we propose and test a multilevel model that examines the effects of employee involvement climate on the individual-level process linking employee regulatory focus (promotion and prevention) to innovation via thriving. Using data collected at three points in time from 346 participants in 75 groups, multilevel path analytic results demonstrated support for a positive indirect effect from promotion focus to innovation via thriving and a negative indirect effect from prevention focus to innovation via thriving. In addition, results showed a positive indirect effect from employee involvement climate to innovation via thriving. Perhaps most important, cross-level moderated mediation results demonstrated that employee involvement climate strengthens the relationship between promotion focus and thriving, which, in turn, positively relates to innovation. The theoretical and practical implications of these multilevel effects on innovation are discussed.
Based on role accumulation theory and boundary theory we propose and examine a model that represents the process by which family involvement influences promotability through enrichment, and the moderating roles of employees’ boundary management preferences (i.e., segmentation/integration) in that process. Data collected from 347 registered nurses and their supervisors (N = 40) across three periods showed that as employees’ family involvement increases, they are able to accumulate resources from their family role and transfer them to the workplace. This increase in family-to-work enrichment (FWE) benefits employees by increasing supervisor perceptions of employees’ promotability. As hypothesized, an integrating boundary management preference serves as a double-edged sword for employees such that it strengthens the positive influence of family involvement on FWE, but weakens the relationship between FWE and supervisor perceptions of promotability.
This study examines the contingent effect of the degree of exploration characterizing strategic initiatives on the relationship between group-level organizational learning activities (i.e., searching, processing, codifying, and practicing) and the performance of strategic initiatives. Results from a sample of 96 strategic initiatives conducted by three large European insurance corporations provide broad, albeit not unanimous, support for our prediction that the four learning activities are more beneficial when the degree of exploration is high. Moreover, for initiatives with lower degrees of exploration, we found no significant association of searching, processing, codifying, or practicing with initiative performance. These findings suggest that effective organizational learning depends not only on investments in learning activities, but also on the alignment between these investments and the degree of exploration inherent in the learning task.
Although teams are considered to be the building blocks of modern organizational designs and numerous theoretical models, and narrative and meta-analytic reviews of the literature exist, there is a lack of coherence, integration, and understanding of how team composition effects relate to important team outcomes. Accordingly we have five primary goals for this article. First, we categorize team composition models into four types and highlight theory and research associated with each one. Second, we offer an integrative framework that represents members’ attributes as simultaneously contributing variance to each of the four model types. Third, we overlay temporal considerations that suggest different team compositional mixes will be more or less salient at different periods of performance episodes or stages of team development. Fourth, we integrate membership dynamics into our model. And fifth, we advance an integrative optimization algorithm that incorporates implications from all for the four previous approaches, as well as temporal dynamics and membership change. In so doing, we provide a synthesis of previous work and theories and outline a research agenda for both research and practice.
Although counterproductive work behavior (CWB) has long been established as a broad domain of job behaviors, little agreement exists about its internal structure. The present research addressed alternative models of broadly defined CWB according to which specific behaviors can be grouped into (a) one general factor, or into (b) two, (c) five, or (d) eleven narrower facets, and a number of possible integrations of these models. First, conceptual differences between these models (including the nature of overall CWB as implying a reflective or formative model, boundaries of the domain, and relations among specific facets) are reviewed with regard to theoretical and practical implications. In Study 1, structural meta-analysis was then used to test whether a reflective higher-order factor underlies meta-analytically constructed correlation matrices of five CWB facets. Analyses supported a general factor model. For Study 2, a primary data set (N = 1,237 employees) was collected in order to test alternative structural models and possible integrations of these models. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the best fit was for a bimodal (nonhierarchical) model in which individual CWBs simultaneously load on one of the eleven facets describing their content (e.g., theft, absenteeism) and on one of three factors describing the target primarily harmed (organization, other persons, self). Less support was found for hierarchical models and for models involving fewer content factors. These findings suggest that CWB is best described by a reflective higher-order factor at the general level and by a complex set of bimodal facets at the more specific level.
In light of the prevalent experience, theoretical importance, and underexamination of the intersection of pregnancy and work, the current study explores how pregnant employees manage their concealable stigmatized identities at work over the course of pregnancy. Using a weekly survey methodology, we were able to examine within-person changes in identity management and physical health. Results suggested a reciprocal relationship between revealing and physical health wherein revealing led to more frequent physical health symptoms and more frequent physical health symptoms led to decreased revealing. Furthermore, concealing exerted a unidirectional impact on physical health wherein concealing predicted subsequent decreases in physical health symptoms. Finally, supportive work–family cultures and supervisor support were linked to lower concealing, higher revealing, and less frequent physical health symptoms at the initial measurement occasion (i.e., earlier stages of pregnancy); however, these benefits appeared to diminish over time. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.
A wealth of governance research has examined CEO successions and the negative organizational consequences that arise when boards are unable to effect smooth leadership transitions. Despite those findings, empirical and anecdotal evidence indicates that disruptive successions are still very common. In this article, we investigate whether disruptive CEO successions are viewed as a governance lapse by the board. We focus specifically on succession processes that involve the use of an interim leader. We leverage established research that shows that the pattern of board turnover observed in the wake of negative events is indicative of whether board behaviors are—in practice—viewed as normative violations. We theorize that audiences will disapprove of boards’ use of interim CEOs and, therefore, expect that these successions will prompt higher rates of board turnover than those observed following noninterim successions. However, we also anticipate that this relationship will be moderated by situational characteristics (e.g., surprise CEO departure, dynamic industry environment) that complicate succession planning and make audiences more accepting of a board’s decision to rely on an interim CEO. Our analysis of 438 successions at publicly traded U.S. firms provides support for these arguments. We discuss the implications of our findings for successions and corporate governance.
Drawing on shared reality theory and social exchange processes in leader–member exchange (LMX), we posit that variability in LMX ratings at both the dyadic and group levels act as cross-level moderators of the routinely studied individual-level LMX–performance ratings association. Specifically, we introduce dyadic dispersion LMX as a key dyad-level variable that attenuates the positive individual LMX–performance association. Furthermore, we conceptualize that LMX differentiation, a group-level construct, is dysfunctional for individual outcomes as it violates norms of equality, and we suggest that the positive individual-level LMX–performance ratings association is plausible only in low differentiation workgroups and not high differentiation workgroups. Our analyses invoke new cross-classified and traditional nested models with multisource ratings of performance, and the findings largely support the study hypotheses. Implications for LMX at different levels of analyses as well as future theory and research are discussed.
Recent efforts have been made to identify and compare employees with profiles reflecting different combinations of affective (AC), normative (NC), and continuance (CC) organizational commitment. To date, the optimal profiles in terms of employee behavior and well-being have been found to be those in which AC, NC, and CC are all strong, or those where AC, or AC and NC, dominate. The poorest outcomes are found for profiles where AC, NC, and CC are all weak, or CC dominates. The primary goal of the current study was to use latent profile analysis and latent transition analysis to identify profile groups and examine changes in profile membership over an 8-month period in an organization undergoing a strategic change. We also tested hypotheses concerning the relation between perceived trustworthiness of management and employees’ commitment profile within and across time. We found that commitment profiles have substantial temporal stability and that trustworthiness positively predicts memberships in more desirable commitment profiles. There was also some, albeit weak, evidence that changes in perceived trustworthiness were accompanied by corresponding shifts in the commitment profile.
CEO duality—the practice of a single individual serving as both CEO and board chair—has been the subject of academic interest for more than 20 years. In that time, boards’ use of CEO duality has fluctuated and the scholarly conceptualizations of the phenomenon have become more complex. As such, the need to understand CEO duality has only increased with time. We review and integrate the disparate literature on this topic so that future attempts to study it will benefit from a more complete understanding of the knowledge already produced. We review the demonstrated antecedents and consequences of CEO duality, pointing out that while much work has been done in this area, much remains that we do not understand. Finally, we offer new theoretical, methodological, and contextual directions that researchers could explore to extend knowledge about CEO duality.
In this study we employ two distinct lenses of emotional labor—EL as occupational requirements and EL as intrapsychic processes of surface acting—and examine their relationship with job satisfaction. In a large, occupationally diverse sample, results indicate that occupational EL requirements are positively related to job satisfaction, whereas surface acting is negatively related to job satisfaction. Additionally, occupational EL requirements have a cross-level moderation effect on the relationship between surface acting and job satisfaction. Nonlinear effects are also observed for surface acting: the initial negative relationship of surface acting with job satisfaction is exacerbated at high levels of surface acting. Overall, this study enriches current research findings by incorporating the role of the occupational context, and provides insight into alternative evaluations of EL.
Recent advances in leadership research suggest that collective-focused leadership climate and differentiated individual-focused leadership might simultaneously, yet oppositely, affect collective outcomes. The present study extends this literature by addressing open questions regarding theory, methods, statistics, and level of analysis. Therefore, a new and more parsimonious theoretical model is developed on the organizational-level of analysis. Drawing on the commitment literature, we argue for opposite relations of the two leadership constructs on the affective organizational commitment climate. We subsequently theorize that contingent-reward leadership climate moderates these opposing relationships, making our study the first in this field to investigate moderators. Last, we reason that organizational effectiveness is enhanced when affective commitment is "put into action" and raises the organizational citizenship behavior climate. Our three-path moderated-mediation hypotheses are tested, and supported, by structural equation modeling analyses in a multisource data set containing 16,911 respondents from 157 companies. Extensive alternative model testing shows that our theory and findings are robust.
Status is a pervasive construct in the organizational literature, and a recent surge in interest in the topic testifies to its potential as a field of study. In this article, we review the existing studies on status, and we propose an integrative classification framework based on two distinct dimensions: the level of analysis—macro, meso, or micro—and the role status hierarchies play in extant research. We do so with a view to clarifying the status construct, differentiating it from the cognate concept of reputation, and clearly stating the ways in which status dynamics could inform organizational scholars and their research efforts. We conclude by highlighting underdeveloped theoretical intersections and suggesting potentially fruitful directions for future inquiry.
Tournament theory is useful for describing behavior when reward structures are based on relative rank rather than absolute levels of output. Accordingly, management scholars have used tournament theory to describe a wide range of inter- and intraorganizational competitions, such as promotion contests, innovation contests, and competition among franchisees. While the use of tournament theory has gained considerable momentum in recent years, the ideas that underlie the theory have become blurred and potentially useful insights remain trapped within disciplines. We, therefore, provide a synthesis of the theory’s foundational concepts, review its use in the management literature, identify advancements from related disciplines that may be imported to management research, and delineate the steps likely to be critical to moving the theory forward. Our hope is this review will make tournament theory more accessible and salient to management researchers with a view toward developing more nuanced versions of the theory and applying it in a wider range of contexts.
Despite decades of research on organizational disasters, such events remain too common. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines agree that one of the most viable approaches to preventing such catastrophes is to observe near-misses and use them to identify and eliminate problems before they produce large failures. Unfortunately, these important warning signals are too often ignored because they are perceived as successes rather than near-misses (or near-failures). In this article, we explore the effect of a climate for safety on improving near-miss recognition by observers, hypothesizing that safety climate increases the level of attention that observers pay to the underlying processes that generate an apparently successful outcome. Using a database of anomaly reports for unmanned NASA missions, we show that organizational safety climate and project stakes increase reporting rates of near-misses, both independently and interactively. In follow-up laboratory experiments, we confirm the independence of these effects to improve the likelihood that people differentiate near-miss outcomes from successes. Results suggest organizations can increase the recognition of near-misses with organizational messages that emphasize a positive safety climate.
We advance competitive dynamics research by introducing alliance portfolio configuration as an important antecedent of competitive action frequency. We propose and test a model for developing effective alliance portfolio configurations that enhance a firm’s ability to discover, conceptualize, and carry out new competitive actions. Our model consists of three overlapping components: (a) opportunity recognition capacity as evidenced by the portfolio attribute of structural holes, (b) opportunity development capacity as indicated by R&D alliance scope, and (c) action execution capacity as exhibited by equity alliances with trusted partners. We hypothesize and find a multiplicative effect of the configuration of all three alliance portfolio attributes on the frequency of competitive actions carried out by 12 large global automobile manufacturing firms with 1,471 unique partners and 37,520 alliances formed over a 16-year period (1988 to 2003). The three-way configuration of portfolio attributes was stronger for more complex competitive actions requiring more time, expertise, and resources to develop and execute.
While creating and running new ventures, entrepreneurs are exposed to conditions known to generate high levels of stress (e.g., rapid change, unpredictable environments, work overload, personal responsibility for others). Thus, it has been assumed that they often experience intense stress. A markedly different possibility, however, is suggested by Attraction-Selection-Attrition (ASA) theory. This perspective suggests that persons who are attracted by, selected into, and persist in entrepreneurship may be relatively high in the capacity to tolerate or effectively manage stress. In contrast, persons who are relatively low in this capacity tend to exit from entrepreneurship either voluntarily or involuntarily. As a result, founding entrepreneurs as a group are predicted to experience low rather than high levels of stress while running new ventures. Results supported this reasoning: Founding entrepreneurs reported lower levels of stress when compared to participants in a large national survey of perceived stress. Additional findings indicate that entrepreneurs’ relatively low levels of stress derive, at least in part, from high levels of psychological capital (a combination of self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience). Psychological capital was negatively related to stress, and stress, in turn, was negatively related to entrepreneurs’ subjective well-being. Furthermore, and also consistent with ASA theory, the stress-reducing effects of psychological capital were stronger for older than younger entrepreneurs.
New ventures often form a formal board of directors for the first time at the initial public offering (IPO). The tumult of external changes places a premium on rapid decision making within a resource-constrained venture. According to the social psychological theory, group consensus and decision alternatives serve as two key drivers for making rapid decisions. Therefore, based on signaling theory, the valuation from investors at the IPO depends on the observable signals that can imply the group consensus and decision alternatives in a board. We argue and test the hypothesis that, when group consensus and decision alternative signals are jointly considered, the relationship between the ratio of founders on the board and the IPO price premium will have an inversed U shape. In addition, we analyze how three contextual factors (original chief executive officer [CEO], founders’ ownership, and venture capitalist [VC] on the board) can influence their signal consistency with founder directors on group consensus and decision alternatives, which ultimately changes the pattern of the inverted U shape. Based on a unique sample of 274 Chinese new venture IPOs over the period from 2004 to 2009, our results show that if the firm is managed by a nonoriginal CEO, the relationship between the founder–board ratio and the IPO price premium is an inverse U shape. Furthermore, if a VC sits on the board, the presence of founder directors has a linear positive effect on IPO premium; otherwise, the inverse U-shaped relationship still holds.
Extant research has shown that firms with high levels of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) outperform competitors. The present study sheds light on this performance relationship in large, publicly listed high-tech firms by examining whether the strength of this relationship depends upon the CEO’s narcissism, an executive personality trait recently debated controversially in both academic and practitioner publications. A theoretically derived research model is empirically validated by means of multisource secondary data for 41 S&P 500 firms from 2005 to 2007. Findings indicate that narcissistic CEOs usually weaken the EO-performance relationship, although the opposite is true under some conditions, such as in highly concentrated and dynamic markets.
We develop an isomorphism-signaling framework to explain the likelihood of isomorphic behavior (and nonconformity) by a focal firm toward local rivals and nonlocal rivals and then predict financial performance associated with the action. In the presence of asymmetric information, we predict a causal relationship between rival isomorphism and financial performance that reveals a paradox—that is, we theorize and show conditions in which "conforming" reflected by rival isomorphic behavior is a signal that "separates" high-quality from low-quality firms. We consider a firm’s costs and benefits of local and nonlocal rival isomorphism and assert that a firm can signal its quality, which affects financial performance of the equity offering. We test and find support for our hypotheses using a sample of firms raising capital abroad from 1994 to 2005.
Current theory and research suggest a positive linear relationship between perceived organizational support (POS) and employees’ taking charge, or change-suggesting, behaviors. Via a sample of 89 subordinate-supervisor dyads, we hypothesize and test an inverted U-shaped relationship between employees’ POS and their taking charge behaviors and the likelihood that this curvilinear pattern is accentuated when employees anticipate costs related to their taking charge. Results support both of these patterns. We conclude by discussing our findings’ implications regarding future needed sensitivity on the part of managers as well as management scholars regarding how to gauge optimal levels of POS.
As entrepreneurship research has matured, scholars have increasingly recognized that the formation of new ventures is commonly accomplished by teams as opposed to lone entrepreneurs. Over the past two decades, the upper echelons perspective has served as the primary lens for investigating new venture team functioning and performance. However, researchers have begun to move beyond the relationship between team characteristics and team outcomes, to explore intermediary mechanisms that more precisely explain how team inputs lead to team effectiveness. In this article we apply an inputs-mediators-outcomes framework, which has served as a foundation for teams research in organizational behavior over the past 50 years, to first organize and review prior work on new venture teams, and then to provide a roadmap for future research. By integrating the upper echelons approach from strategic management with the inputs-mediators-outcomes framework from organizational behavior, we clarify what is known about new venture teams and shed light on important issues that could help the field of entrepreneurship to develop a more comprehensive understanding of why some new venture teams, but not others, achieve successful outcomes.
Although absenteeism has been identified in theoretical models as a key long-term consequence of emotional labor, few studies have empirically examined this link. In this article, we investigate the relationship between surface acting and absenteeism and the moderating role of surface acting self-efficacy. Drawing on resource perspectives, we argue and show that when valued resources are threatened or lost as a result of surface acting, employees will actively strive to prevent further resource loss by withdrawing from work. We propose, however, that surface acting self-efficacy can help buffer the resource depleting effects of surface acting leading to withdrawal. Using data from two sources, collected at two points in time, we surveyed 121 nurses and linked these data to absenteeism data collected 12 months postsurvey. Results showed direct effects of surface acting on absenteeism; in addition, higher surface acting self-efficacy minimized the detrimental effects of surface acting on absenteeism. We also found support for the mediating role of affective commitment in explaining this interaction effect. These results suggest that the effects of surface acting on absenteeism are less detrimental for employees with high surface acting self-efficacy as these individuals are less negatively affected by the drain on the motivational resources that keep them feeling attached to their workplace and, in turn, keep them at work. This study extends our understanding of emotional labor processes and provides insights into the active process whereby employees are driven by the motivation to conserve resources and prevent further losses.
In this article, we review the literature on interfirm contracting in an effort to synthesize existing research and direct future scholarship. While transaction cost economics (TCE) is the most prominent perspective informing the "optimal governance" and "safeguarding" function of contracts, our review indicates other perspectives are necessary to understand how contracts are structured: relational capabilities (i.e., building cooperation, creating trust), firm capabilities, relational contracts, and the real option value of a contract. Our review also indicates that contract research is moving away from a narrow focus on contract structure and its safeguarding function toward a broader focus that also highlights adaptation and coordination. We end by noting the following research gaps: consequences of contracting, specifically outcome assessment; strategic options, decision rights, and the evolution of dynamic capabilities; contextual constraints of relational capabilities; contextual constraints of contracting capabilities; complements, substitutes, and bundles; and contract structure and social process.
While strategic alliances have emerged in recent years as common and important structural vehicles for business development, surprisingly little is known about how collaborative activities are organized and administered within these governance structures. We see classic organizational scholarship as useful insofar as it both provides clear classifications that distinguish alternative intraorganizational designs and explicates how they affect the inner workings of organizations. Existing alliance classification schemes based on type of collaborative activity, partner characteristics, or legal structure, on the other hand, rarely delineate important differences of how collaborative work is organized among partners. We seek to redress this shortcoming by developing a framework of alliance structural parameters based on classic organizational design considerations. Specifically we identify and discuss five key design parameters for alliances: the structural interface between partners, the structural "intraface" within partners, and the specialization, formalization, and centralization of the alliance organization. We show how consideration of these five parameters provides a deeper understanding of alliance governance and suggest how partner organizations can achieve differential levels of connectivity and steering for their collaborative ventures.
Stability and routine are two words that can rarely be used to describe the present-day workplace. Instead, individuals, teams, and organizations are required to respond to dynamic and changing situations. As a result, researchers have become increasingly interested in understanding performance adaptation, evident in the substantial growth in research over the past two decades. However, what researchers mean when they study adaptation is often broad, vague, and inconsistent—especially at the organizational level—such that drawing solid conclusions is challenging. To move toward integration, we focused the review on individual and team performance adaptation, where the mechanisms of adaptation can be observed. We developed a conceptual taxonomy to map extant research, provide insights for synthesis, and identify directions for future theory building and research. Specifically, we identify four theoretical approaches: (a) a performance construct, (b) an individual difference construct, (c) a change in performance, and (d) a process. Each perspective is reviewed, identifying definitions and key assumptions; discussing conceptual foundations and empirical findings; and highlighting discrepancies, similarities, and opportunities for synthesis. The discussion recommends useful lines of inquiry for future research. Moreover, to promote individual-, team-, and organizational-level integration, we propose a multilevel conceptual architecture specifying the what (nature), where (levels), and how (mechanisms) of adaptation to better define the nature of the phenomenon. In combination, the taxonomy, review content, and conceptual architecture are designed to enhance conceptual clarity and consistency, encourage integration, and advance theory and research on adaptation as a pervasive phenomenon in organizational science.
Considerable research has explored the variables that affect the success of newcomer on-boarding, socialization, and retention. We build on this research by examining how newcomer socialization is affected by the degree to which newcomers’ peers and leaders provide them with positive feedback. We refer to newcomers’ perceptions of this feedback as "social validation." This study examines the impact of social validation from peers and leaders on the development of organizational identification over time and the turnover attitudes of new employees. We found that perceptions of social validation significantly predicted how new employees used coping strategies to adapt to their new role over time, and consequently the development of identification and turnover intentions. Specifically, increased peer social validation predicted a greater use of positive coping strategies to engage with the new organization over time, and less use of disengagement coping strategies. In contrast, initial leader validation decreased newcomers’ disengagement from the organization over time. These results highlight the role of the social environment in the workplace in temporally shaping and validating newcomers’ adaptation efforts during transitions.
Based on earlier taxonomies of group composition models, aggregating data from individual-level responses to operationalize group-level constructs is a common aspect of management research. The present study contributes to the literature on group composition models by quantitatively integrating the climate literature via meta-analysis to determine which of the two most common methods of aggregation, direct consensus and referent-shift consensus, is the stronger predictor of group-level outcomes. We found that referent-shift consensus was a stronger predictor of job performance and customer service performance than direct consensus. However, we found that direct consensus was a stronger predictor of job attitudes than referent-shift consensus. We also found that climate-performance relationships were moderated by aggregation method of the performance criterion. The implications of these findings for advancing multi-level theory and research are discussed.
This study provides meta-analytic estimates of the antecedents and consequences of feedback-seeking behavior (FSB). Clear support was found for the guiding cost/benefit framework in the feedback-seeking domain. Organizational tenure, job tenure, and age were negatively related to FSB. Learning and performance goal orientation, external feedback propensity, frequent positive feedback, high self-esteem, a transformational leadership style, and a high-quality relationship were positively associated with FSB. Challenging some of the dominant views in the feedback-seeking domain, the relationship between uncertainty and FSB was negative and the relationship between FSB and performance was small. Finally, inquiry and monitoring are not interchangeable feedback-seeking tactics. So FSB is best represented as an aggregate model instead of a latent model. In the discussion, gaps in the current FSB knowledge are identified and a research agenda for the future is put forward. Future research may benefit from (a) a systematic and integrative effort examining antecedents of both feedback-seeking strategies on the basis of a self-motives framework, (b) adopting a process perspective of feedback-seeking interactions, and (c) taking the iterative nature of feedback into account.
We study how New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) firms adopted governance committees on their boards of directors. The drive to adopt started as a social movement but was facilitated greatly by the collapse of Enron Corporation and a subsequent mandate by the NYSE that all of its traded firms must have governance committees. Using institutional theory and a sample of NYSE firms, we develop and test hypotheses about the speed of governance committee adoption, the likelihood of committee adoption by the NYSE deadline, and the types of directors that were placed on the inaugural governance committee. Our study adds to theory about how organizations respond to external pressures when responding is contrary to the interests of executives.
Huddles—informal gatherings of two or more individuals, convened to discuss substantive issues regarding the work of one or more of the participants—are a form of social interaction that can play a critical role in the learning of organizational actors. We identify their defining properties and propose a multi-level framework for understanding the participant- and huddle-level factors that promote individual learning that is important to the work of the organization. We test our hypotheses using data obtained from huddles conducted in newspaper newsrooms using an experience sampling approach. Results confirm the importance of occupational tenure heterogeneity, perceived job relevance, attention to others’ emotions, and conversational reflexivity for participant learning in huddles. These results set the stage for understanding how the informal structure of an organization can be developed in ways that promote learning and adaptation.
This review systematically examines comparative international entrepreneurship (CIE) research, analyzing 259 articles published in 21 leading journals from 1989 to 2010. We outline the importance of multi-country studies of entrepreneurial activity in enabling the comparison and replication of research and generating meaningful contributions to scholarship, practice, and policy. Our systematic review classifies research findings into four levels—individual, firm, industry, and country—each with respect to characteristics, antecedents, and outcomes of entrepreneurial activities as well as theory and methodology. Taken together, our review highlights the heterogeneous nature of entrepreneurship across countries and its role in explaining outcomes at firm (e.g., financial and export performance) and country (e.g., economic growth) levels as well as antecedents at the country level (e.g., culture). We find the CIE literature is highly fragmented with substantial knowledge gaps related to content, theory, and methodology, for which we outline a detailed future research agenda. Given the atheoretical nature of most published CIE research, we provide specific suggestions to extend the current dominant theoretical perspectives (institutions, culture, resource-based view, transaction cost economics, economic growth, and human capital); consider new lenses from management, international business, and entrepreneurship; and integrate and test multiple theories. From a content perspective, we outline the need to define and cross-reference prior studies of entrepreneurship and prioritize emerging phenomena that are critical to practice, and policy, and offer specific directives for integrated and multi-level studies of characteristics, antecedents, and outcomes. Methodological suggestions include theory-based rationale for the selection of countries, greater attention to data collection and sample selection equivalence, and the solutions to the ecological fallacy problem. We urge scholars to work together and across countries, cooperating with interested agencies and associations to develop new longitudinal, multi-level data sets and introduce dual qualitative/quantitative approaches and new diverse, sophisticated analytical tools.
This 10-day diary study examined emotional exhaustion throughout the workday using conservation of resources and self-determination theories in the context of service work (nursing). Results revealed that the impact of prework emotional exhaustion on postwork emotional exhaustion was moderated by both personality and motivation. Neurotic individuals had high levels of postwork exhaustion regardless of their level of prework exhaustion. Extrinsically motivated individuals were especially likely to be exhausted after work if they were also exhausted before work. Finally, although intrinsically motivated individuals were less likely to be exhausted in general, the salutary effects of intrinsic motivation were reduced when prework exhaustion was high. These findings are consistent with the idea that neuroticism reflects a state of chronically worrying about resource loss, extrinsic motivation is a drain on personal resources, and intrinsic motivation is a resource that is less accessible as prework exhaustion levels increase.
We examine how two types of slack resources relevant to knowledge employees—human resource slack and financial slack at the R&D functional level—influence the rent-generating potential of firm-specific knowledge resources. According to the resource- and knowledge-based views of the firm, firm-specific knowledge resources are critical for generating economic rents for a firm. However, without motivated knowledge employees investing in the corresponding specialized human capital in the process of absorbing and deploying firm-specific knowledge resources, the resource potential for rent generation would be greatly discounted. We argue that human resource slack among knowledge employees and financial slack available for R&D activities affect the rent-generating potential of firm-specific knowledge resources by influencing knowledge employees’ incentives to invest in specialized human capital. In particular, while financial slack facilitates rent generation of firm-specific knowledge resources by increasing employee incentives to invest in specialized human capital, human resource slack hinders it by reducing such incentives. Empirical results based on longitudinal R&D employment data, U.S. patent data, and Compustat support these arguments.
Machiavellians are said to be manipulative people who reduce the social capital of the organization. Yet some authors note that Machiavellians are also highly adaptive individuals who are able to contribute, cooperate, and use pro-social strategies when it is advantageous to them. Here we study whether transformational leader behavior can stimulate Machiavellian followers to engage in organizationally desirable behaviors such as challenging organizational citizenship behavior. We hypothesized and found in two multi-source field studies that transformational leadership moderates the relationship between Machiavellianism and challenging organizational citizenship behavior. In Study 2, we hypothesized a moderated mediation model and found that enhanced job autonomy and accompanying intrinsic motivation relating to transformational leadership explain (part of) the relationship between transformational leader behavior and challenging citizenship behavior of Machiavellian followers.
This review incorporates strategic planning research conducted over more than 30 years and ranges from the classical model of strategic planning to recent empirical work on intermediate outcomes, such as the reduction of managers’ position bias and the coordination of subunit activity. Prior reviews have not had the benefit of more socialized perspectives that developed in response to Mintzberg’s critique of planning, including research on planned emergence and strategy-as-practice approaches. To stimulate a resurgence of research interest on strategic planning, this review therefore draws on a diverse body of theory beyond the rational design and contingency approaches that characterized research in this domain until the mid-1990s. We develop a broad conceptualization of strategic planning and identify future research opportunities for improving our understanding of how strategic planning influences organizational outcomes. Our framework incorporates the role of strategic planning practitioners; the underlying routines, norms, and procedures of strategic planning (practices); and the concrete activities of planners (praxis).
This study examines how firms use benchmarking information about peers to determine the compensation that they offer to chief executive officers (CEOs). It jointly addresses two distinct perspectives: pay equity and managerial power. Pay inequity provides strong motivation for CEOs to restore equity, by promoting the logic of external fairness and urging boards of directors to implement peer benchmarking and adjust the focal CEO’s compensation levels. Although pay inequity may motivate CEOs to restore equity, their reaction to inequity may be effective only when they have sufficient power over the board of directors to influence the pay-setting process. Results from a sample of 1,555 CEOs generally support predictions about the moderating effects of CEO power in the relationship between a focal CEO’s pay and peer CEOs’ pay. The compensation for underpaid CEOs with relatively greater power over the board is associated with their peers’ compensation, suggesting that peer benchmarking is more aggressively used to adjust CEO compensation upward. For overpaid CEOs, the relationship between the focal CEO’s pay and peer CEOs’ pay is weaker when the CEOs have greater influence over the board, suggesting that such CEOs are able to avoid the use of benchmarking and downward adjustments of pay.
This research holds that extant theory on real options has several limitations with regard to strategic initiatives in markets influenced by network effects. In addressing these limitations, the authors argue that markets with strong network effects tend to enhance both growth and deferral options. Furthermore, the extent to which growth and deferral options affect market entry in these settings is conditioned by both the strength of network effects (i.e., network intensity) and the presence of a dominant design in the market. Implications for real options theory in the context of network effects and for firms considering entry into markets influenced by network effects are offered and discussed.
Using a sample of 162 R&D teams, we investigated the influence of HRM systems for knowledge-intensive teamwork on external team knowledge acquisition and internal team knowledge sharing. This study also examined the interactive effect of HRM systems and knowledge tacitness and the combined influence of HRM systems and empowering leadership. HRM systems for knowledge-intensive teamwork were positively associated with team knowledge acquisition and team knowledge sharing. Knowledge tacitness moderated the HRM–knowledge acquisition relationship, reducing the influence of HRM systems. Further, empowering leadership appeared to substitute for the effect of HRM systems. Our findings suggest that an integration of strategic HRM and knowledge teamwork literatures will prove useful for advancing our understanding of knowledge-based competition. Furthermore, by investigating HRM systems and leadership behaviors in tandem, we gain new insights about the interplay between these two important aspects of organizational life.
Existing justice theory explains why fair procedures motivate employees to adopt cooperative goals, but it fails to explain how employees strive toward these goals. We study self-regulatory abilities that underlie goal striving, abilities that should thus affect employees’ display of cooperative behavior in response to procedural justice. Building on action control theory, we argue that employees who display effective self-regulatory strategies (action-oriented employees) display relatively strong cooperative behavioral responses to fair procedures. A multisource field study and a laboratory experiment support this prediction. A subsequent experiment addresses the process underlying this effect by explicitly showing that action orientation facilitates attainment of the cooperative goals that people adopt in response to fair procedures, thus facilitating the display of actual cooperative behavior. This goal striving approach better integrates research on the relationship between procedural justice and employee cooperation in the self-regulation and the work motivation literature. It also offers organizations a new perspective on making procedural justice effective in stimulating employee cooperation by suggesting factors that help employees reach their adopted goals.
We sought to clarify the relationship between virtuality and social loafing by exploring two work–family moderators—family responsibility and dissimilarity in terms of family responsibility—and two mediators—cohesion and psychological obligation—in two studies. We expected that "busy teams" (i.e., comprising similar individuals with many family responsibilities) would exhibit the strongest positive virtuality–social loafing relationship, and teams comprising similar individuals with few family responsibilities would experience a weaker virtuality–social loafing relationship. We expected that individuals working with dissimilar others would report consistently high levels of social loafing regardless of virtuality. Furthermore, we expected cohesion and psychological obligation to one’s teammates would mediate these effects. Similar individuals in teams indeed exhibited different virtuality–social loafing relationships in both studies, suggesting that the flexibility provided by virtuality might be more effective in teams comprising similar people with few family responsibilities. Study 2 further revealed that cohesion and obligation may mediate these effects, such that high levels of these mediators were associated with low levels of social loafing in similar teams comprising people with few family responsibilities. We discuss contributions to the virtual work and social loafing literatures, as well as the work–family and team literatures. We also suggest several specific actions managers can take on the basis of these findings, including for employees with few versus many family responsibilities.
Extraversion has exhibited inconsistent relationships with employees’ interpersonal citizenship. Across three studies, we integrate literature on personality with impression management and socioanalytic theories to propose that employees’ impression management motives act as a contingency, strengthening the relationship between extraversion and interpersonal citizenship. First, in Studies 1 and 2, across two settings (field and university) and two designs (nonexperimental and experimental), we confirm that extraverted individuals engage in citizenship to a greater extent when they are also either predisposed (Study 1) or cued (Study 2) to manage others’ impressions. In Study 3, we extend these findings by using a conditional mediation process model to develop and test the hypothesis that an individual’s strategy to get along serves as an explanatory mechanism to the interactive effect of extraversion and impression management motives on interpersonal citizenship. Overall, our results suggest that the prediction of interpersonal citizenship can be improved when considering the conjoint influence of employees’ extraversion and impression management motives.
We study theory of mind (ToM) and empathic underpinnings of Machiavellianism by use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, where account managers are used as participants in 3 studies. Study 1 finds evidence for activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, left and right temporo-parietal junction, and left and right precuneus regions; all five regions are negatively correlated with Machiavellianism, suggesting that Machiavellians are less facile than non-Machiavellians with ToM skills. Study 2 presents evidence for activation of the left and right pars opercularis, left and right insula, and left precuneus regions; the former four regions of the motor neuron system were positively associated, and the latter negatively associated, with Machiavellianism, implying that Machiavellians resonate more readily with the emotions of others than non-Machiavellians. This is the first study to our knowledge to show a negative correlation between perspective taking and emotional sharing in empathic processes in general and Machiavellianism in particular. Study 3 tests implications of managerial control on both performance and organizational citizenship behaviors, as moderated by Machiavellianism in the field. Our study grounds the functioning of Machiavellianism in organizations in basic neuroscience processes, resolves some long-standing ambiguities with self-report investigations, and points to conditions under which Machiavellianism both inhibits and promotes performance and citizenship behavior.
Management scholars have historically framed trust as a consequence of organizational justice that develops slowly over time. However, theory and empirical research outside of the management literature suggest that trust is inevitably present prior to the initiation of exchange relationships. For instance, neuroscientific evidence suggests that the human brain has evolved mechanisms capable of automatically evaluating the trustworthiness of potential exchange partners without conscious deliberation. This article presents a new theoretical model suggesting that trust forms rapidly and exerts significant influence on employee perceptions of justice. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Grounded in Vroom’s motivational framework of performance, we examine the interactive influence of collective human capital (ability) and aggregated service orientation (motivation) on the cross-level relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and individual-level service quality. Results of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) revealed that HPWS related to collective human capital and aggregated service orientation, which in turn related to individual-level service quality. Furthermore, both HLM and ordinary least squares regression analyses revealed a cross-level interaction effect of collective human capital and aggregated service orientation such that high levels of collective human capital and aggregated service orientation influence individual-level service quality.
Opportunities for financial reporting fraud arise because of information asymmetries—often labeled "lack of transparency"—between top managers and their diverse shareholders. We evaluate the relative contributions of information asymmetries arising from industry-level and firm-level complexities to the likelihood of top managers committing financial reporting fraud. Using a sample of 453 matched pairs of firms that have and have not been identified as having committed financial reporting fraud, we found that information asymmetries arising from industry- and firm-level complexities increase the likelihood of financial fraud. Moreover, more CEO stock options increase the likelihood of fraud when industry complexity is high, while aggressive monitoring by the audit committee reduces the likelihood of reporting fraud when firm-level complexity is high.
Drawing on the principles of upper echelons theory and team leadership research and using 101 subsidiary top management teams (TMTs), our study revealed that subsidiary CEO transformational leadership that was focused evenly on every TMT member increased team effectiveness and firm performance, whereas leadership that differentiated among individual members decreased both outcomes. By differentiating the amount of individual consideration and intellectual stimulation across TMT members, CEOs unintentionally disrupted the team’s dynamics (team potency), ultimately reducing team effectiveness and subsidiary firm performance ratings. Furthermore, CEO gender and moral inconsistency across executives served as moderators of the detrimental effects of differentiated leadership on the outcomes. The negative effect of differentiated leadership behavior was stronger among female CEOs and those who failed to consistently exhibit moral behaviors that might justify differentiation in transformational leadership.
We investigated the role of employees’ status appraisals within their work group in relation to their challenging-promotive voice behavior. We argued that fair and respectful treatment of their voice input by the authority figure of the group (i.e., supervisory responsiveness) enhances employees’ self-perceived status, thereby motivating them to engage in subsequent voice behavior. Using a sample of 337 supervisor-subordinate dyads collected in manufacturing industry organizations in China, we found that self-perceived status mediated the relationship between supervisory responsiveness and voice behavior. We further identified employees’ self-efficacy for voice as a moderator in this mediational chain for the path from supervisory responsiveness to self-perceived status. The indirect relationship between supervisory responsiveness and voice behavior through self-perceived status was more pronounced when self-efficacy for voice was higher rather than lower.
Prior studies demonstrate the role of various facets of CEOs’ individual characteristics in shaping a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO). We complement this line of research by theorizing and testing the impact of CEOs’ social capital on EO. From an original, multisource survey data set of 122 Chinese technology firms, we find that a CEO’s bonding social capital with organizational members from various functional units has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm EO, while the CEO’s bridging social capital with the firm’s diverse set of external stakeholders has a positive association with EO. In addition, we find that the relationship between CEO bridging social capital and EO becomes stronger as the firm’s environmental instability increases.
This study considers how cross-sectional differences and intertemporal variations in interdependencies between productive activities at the industry level moderate the contribution of exploration to long-run organizational performance. We use patent data to measure interdependencies between productive activities at the industry level and computer-assisted content analysis to derive firms’ orientation toward exploration. We also introduce statistical techniques to control bias in estimates induced by potential sources of endogeneity. Our analysis shows that exploration largely contributes positively to long-run organizational performance. This positive effect is stronger in industries with more extensive levels of interdependency or that exhibit more changes in such interdependencies. This study shows the unique and contingent ways in which exploration affects long-run performance. We hope our ideas will influence several areas of future research, not the least of which involves exploration and interdependencies in developing our understanding of organizational success.
Market basket analysis (MBA), also known as association rule mining or affinity analysis, is a data-mining technique that originated in the field of marketing and more recently has been used effectively in other fields, such as bioinformatics, nuclear science, pharmacoepidemiology, immunology, and geophysics. The goal of MBA is to identify relationships (i.e., association rules) between groups of products, items, or categories. We describe MBA and explain that it allows for inductive theorizing; can address contingency (i.e., moderated) relationships; does not rely on assumptions such as linearity, normality, and residual equal variance, which are often violated when using general linear model–based techniques; allows for the use of data often considered "unusable" and "messy" in management research (e.g., data not collected specifically for research purposes); can help build dynamic theories (i.e., theories that consider the role of time explicitly); is suited to examine relationships across levels of analysis; and is practitioner friendly. We explain how the adoption of MBA is likely to help bridge the much-lamented micro–macro and science–practice divides. We also illustrate that use of MBA can lead to insights in substantive management domains, such as human resource management (e.g., employee benefits), organizational behavior (e.g., dysfunctional employee behavior), entrepreneurship (e.g., entrepreneurs’ identities), and strategic management (e.g., corporate social responsibility). We hope our article will serve as a catalyst for the adoption of MBA as a novel methodological approach in management research.
Research on organizational learning from performance feedback has produced findings on how organizational change is influenced by performance relative to aspiration levels, but has focused on short-term goal variables. In this article, we examine how short- and long-term goals are related to short- and long-term actions, respectively. We do so by predicting changes in absorptive capacity from performance relative to aspiration levels, and by testing whether long-term goals mainly affect potential absorptive capacity, which has long-term effects, while short-term goals mainly affect the realized absorptive capacity, which has short-term effects. Using data from surveys of 252 decision makers representing 129 Israeli early-stage high-tech organizations, our analysis yields supportive empirical findings. The findings imply that performance relative to aspiration levels has effects on long-term strategic actions as well as short-term ones, and thus argue against strict myopia.
Newly collected data from samples obtained from two different populations—undergraduate business students and part-time (i.e., evening) MBA students—were compared with data from samples obtained from the same two populations during each of the three previous decades (N = 1,818) to examine the correspondence between self-descriptions and descriptions of a "good manager." Both stability and change in the correspondence between self- and good-manager descriptions were predicted. Providing strong support for stability, the correspondence between self- and good-manager descriptions was greater for men than women for all data combined as well as for data collected at each point in time. However, despite changes in women’s status and in views of effective leadership across the four decades in which data were collected, the correspondence between self- and good-manager descriptions exhibited a lack of support for consistent change over time for women and men considered separately. Implications for the nature of the linkages among sex, gender, and leadership as well as implications for individuals and organizations are discussed.
Wright and Snell (1998) contend that HR flexibility is an important construct that may enable managers and management scholars to gain a greater understanding of the role of human resource management in enhancing firm performance. However, there is limited evidence regarding the psychometric properties of the measure s that have been used to assess the HR flexibility construct and examine its effects. A primary objective of this study was to develop and validate a psychometrically sound measure of the HR flexibility construct. In this article, we present evidence of content validity/adequacy, internal consistency reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity that provides support for the use of this study’s multidimensional HR flexibility measure in subsequent empirical inquiries and theory testing efforts. Implications and limitations of this current research as well as avenues for future research are discussed.
Although market responsiveness and firm innovativeness are important aspects of firm performance, little is known about which human resource management (HRM) systems foster these performance aspects and how. Building on prior research, we delineate flexibility-oriented human resource management (FHRM) systems in terms of resource- and coordination-flexibility-oriented HRM subsystems. In addition, we draw on organizational learning theory and the concept of absorptive capacity (AC) to articulate the mechanisms through which these systems might influence market responsiveness and firm innovativeness. We develop and validate measures of FHRM systems using a series of four independent samples. Our findings based on a sample of high-technology firms indicate that FHRM systems are positively associated with firm-level potential and realized AC and that potential AC, in turn, is positively associated with market responsiveness and firm innovativeness.
With emphasis on a venture’s institutional environment and its stage of development, the authors develop theory to explain how the quality of a nation’s legal system and the level of political hazards affect venture capital (VC) investment strategies in developing countries. The data set consists of 433 VC investment transaction rounds occurring in 13 Latin American countries over the period 1995 to 2003. Different from previous research on the likelihood of investment occurrence, the authors consider the size of an investment transaction as a dependent variable. The authors find a negative relationship between investment size and the political hazards risk and that larger investments are associated with ventures operating in lower quality legal systems. The authors also propose the moderating role of these institutional dimensions in the relationship between a venture’s stage of development and investment size. Findings indicate that in lower quality legal systems, conventional VC-staging strategies are not apparent, where middle and later stage ventures receive the largest investments, but with improvements to the legal system, increasingly larger investments go to early stage ventures. Regarding the stage interaction with political hazards, the authors find that the positive relationship between the venture’s stage of development and investment size weakens as the level of political hazards increases, and when political hazards are high, conventional VC-staging similarly does not occur. In uncovering the unique impact of these institutional dimensions with respect to developing country entrepreneurship, these findings shed light on the acute challenges faced by developing country ventures seeking VC funding at varying stages of development.
We present a motivational model of abusive supervision to examine the effects that exposure to abusive supervision has on creativity. In particular, we predict that intrinsic motivation mediates the negative relation between abusive supervision, as perceived by employees, and their creativity. In addition, we examine the extent to which core self-evaluations attenuate the main effect of abusive supervision and the indirect effect of intrinsic motivation. Our results, based on multiwave, multisource data collected in China, fully support our hypotheses, address unexplored theoretical predictions, and offer new directions for mistreatment, creativity, motivation, and personality research.
A congruence model of organizational design suggests that the consistency among strategy, structure, and culture enhances organizational performance. In this study, the author attempts to understand which strategy-structure and strategy-culture contingencies facilitate superior postacquisition performance. From the perspective of task interdependence, the author argues that different acquisition strategies (i.e., unrelated, vertical, related) require different levels of headquarters centralization and interdivisional integration in the organizational structure, as well as different degrees of acculturation in the organizational culture. Based on input/output (I/O) analysis, the author develops theoretical measures for different acquisition strategies to test these arguments. The results from a two-stage model capture the author’s arguments by using a sample of 154 acquisitions in the Taiwanese electronics and information sector.
There is evidence that individual attributes play an important role in self-employment entrance decisions. Drawing on the personality, psychological well-being, and goal attainment literature, the authors ask, What individual attributes are associated with persistence in self-employment? First, they theoretically develop the concept of self-employment persistence and then empirically assess the effects of individual attributes on self-employment persistence, while including the baseline effects of these individual attributes on self-employment entrance. They use a semiparametric, reduced-form, multiple-state transition model and control for demographic and social determinants. Using employment history data of a cohort of 2,839 individuals from 1957 to 2004, the authors find that openness to experience, autonomy, and tenacious goal pursuit increase persistence in self-employment, whereas neuroticism reduces persistence in self-employment. They discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.
This article explores antecedents and outcomes of group-level person-group (PG) fit perceptions. Based on the categorization-elaboration model (CEM), the authors explain how social category (gender and age) and informational diversity (education and work experience) in work teams may elicit supplementary and complementary fit perceptions among team members. The authors then examine two mechanisms through which perceived fit might influence leader-rated group performance. Supplementary fit (similarity on values) is hypothesized to work through a relationship-oriented mechanism by influencing social cohesion. Complementary fit (abilities meet job demands) is expected to work through a task-oriented mechanism by influencing the teams’ transactive memory systems. Participants include employees (N = 1,101) and leaders (N = 116) from 116 work teams in two private firms located in Seoul, Korea. Results generally support the hypothesized relationships, with the task-oriented mechanism being more influential of group performance. Post hoc analyses also suggest that a superordinate perception of PG fit may underlie the assessments of the more specific types of fit. The authors conclude that diversity within groups influences an emergent perception of group-level fit, having related supplementary and complementary components, which in turn are associated with group-level outcomes.
The study of trust-related outcomes has had a long tradition in the organizational literature. However, few have considered potential darker sides of trust or have explored its effects in the setting of entrepreneurial ventures. This study does so by examining how perceptions of entrepreneurs and angel investors concerning the degree of trust in their relationship impact the latter’s assessments of venture performance. Hypotheses are tested using survey data from the lead entrepreneur and angel investor of 54 ventures. Results indicate that angel investors evaluate portfolio company performance more positively when they perceive high trust, whereas entrepreneurs’ trust perceptions are negatively associated with angel investors’ assessments of venture performance. Further, these effects are partially mediated by the quality of information exchanges between both parties. Together, these findings point to the benefits as well as threats that come with the presence of strong trust in entrepreneur–angel investor relationships.
Following calls to capture the consequences of family involvement in the business, this article empirically investigates the mediating role of board processes (i.e., effort norms, use of knowledge and skills, and cognitive conflicts) and board (control and strategy) tasks in the relationship between family involvement and firm performance in small and medium-sized companies. To address this purpose, we developed a theoretical model using family business and corporate governance literature. We collected data from one sample of small and medium-sized enterprises, and we applied structural equation modeling to validate and test constructs and relationships. Our results show that (a) family involvement in the business has a positive impact on effort norms and use of knowledge and skills, and a negative one on cognitive conflicts, (b) board processes have generally a positive influence on board tasks performance, and (c) board strategy task performance positively influences firm financial performance, while board control tasks do not have a significant impact. Results have implications for both research and practice.
This study aims to advance our conceptual understanding of selection procedures by exploring the effect of response fidelity (i.e., written constructed response vs. behavioral constructed response) on test performance, validity, and applicant perceptions. Stimulus fidelity (multimedia stimulus) was kept constant. In a field experiment, 208 applicants for entry-level police officer jobs completed a multimedia situational judgment test with written constructed responses and behavioral responses. We hypothesized the behavioral response mode (a) to be a better predictor of police trainee performance one year later, (b) to be less cognitively saturated, (c) to exhibit higher personality (extraversion) saturation, and (d) to be perceived more positively in terms of media richness. Results suggested support for these hypotheses, although most effect sizes were not large. Implications for a building block approach to personnel selection procedures are discussed.
This study extends the sparse research on the connection between leadership and follower turnover by investigating the effects of group-level transformational leadership on the withdrawal process. Through an examination of 375 Chinese employees from 96 work groups, we used hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) analyses to test our proposed model. Findings reveal that, even when we control for the effects of leader–member exchange and contingent reward leadership, transformational leadership predicts turnover through quit intentions. In addition, our test of cross-level moderation reveals that transformational leadership can weaken the effect of quit intentions on turnover. Thus, employees are less likely to carry out quit intentions when they have transformational leaders.
In this article, we develop theory regarding one set of mechanisms through which increases in the compensation of directors are transmitted throughout the director labor market. In a longitudinal study using director compensation data from 1996 to 2005, we test hypotheses about how directors’ use of social comparison processes, and reciprocity between CEOs and the board, drive up the compensation level for boards of directors. Specifically, we argue and find that directors’ home firms and interlocked boards serve as salient comparison groups for board members.
Research on strategic momentum considers how experience with innovation affects firms’ subsequent innovativeness. Traditionally the momentum literature has emphasized arguments for an accelerating effect of innovation experience, but recent critiques and contrasting empirical results suggest ambiguity regarding how experience with innovation affects subsequent innovative activity. In this study, we develop arguments for a more expanded view of strategic momentum, examining momentum in the form of temporal consistency of ongoing innovation. This expanded view argues that organizations have incentives for steady-state patterns of innovation in the form of temporal consistency of ongoing innovation. To explore this expanded view of momentum, we examine how experience with innovation facilitates these temporally consistent patterns of innovation, as well as how increasing organizational age may inhibit such consistency. Analyses of generational product innovation in business productivity software highlight the importance of temporal consistency for innovativeness and momentum.
This article describes new micro-foundations for theorizing about executive compensation, drawing on the behavioral economics literature and based on a more realistic set of behavioral assumptions than those that have typically been made by agency theorists. We call these micro-foundations "behavioral agency theory." In contrast to the standard agency framework, which focuses on monitoring costs and incentive alignment, behavioral agency theory places agent performance at the center of the agency model, arguing that the interests of shareholders and their agents are most likely to be aligned if executives are motivated to perform to the best of their abilities. We develop a line of argument first advanced by Wiseman and Gomez-Mejia and put the case for a more general reassessment of the behavioral assumptions underpinning agency theory. A model of economic man predicated on bounded rationality is proposed, adopting Wiseman and Gomez-Mejia’s assumptions about risk preferences, but incorporating new assumptions about time discounting, inequity aversion, and the trade-off between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We argue that behavioral agency theory provides a better framework for theorizing about executive compensation, an enhanced theory of agent behavior, and an improved platform for making recommendations about the design of executive compensation plans.
Team effectiveness can be gauged not only by team-level outcomes but also in terms of influences on individual members. The authors present a two-sample cross-level model of individual informal learning and team commitment, as influenced by team-level processes and empowerment. In the first sample, they examine the impact of team-level constructs on individual outcomes, using 575 individuals from 80 teams in an international Fortune 500 manufacturing firm. Using a sample of 67 teams and 271 individual service engineers from a separate Fortune 500 business solutions organization, the authors further advance their model using a pre–post intervention design. Informal learning and commitment are shown to be positively impacted by team-level empowerment and processes, over and above individual predispositions and perceptions in both samples. In addition, changes in team empowerment and processes attributable to the intervention account for additional criterion variance. Implications are discussed in terms of both research and practice.
Scholarly interest in leveraging resource-based theory to explore the unit-level human capital resource (HCR) is undergoing a paradigmatic shift in the strategy and strategic human resource management (HRM) literatures. As they undertake this next generation of research, scholars will be informed by a rigorous examination of prior unit-level HCR research. To this end, we present a systematic and multidisciplinary review of scholarship that invokes resource-based theorizing in examining the unit’s HCR. We reviewed 156 articles published in the strategy and strategic HRM literatures that conceptualize HC as a unit-level resource. This review suggests that a multidimensional typology of the unit-level HCR has emerged. In particular, research has examined the HCR’s type, context, and antecedents. We build on our review of this multidimensional typology to propose a multilevel conceptual integration of current and future unit-level HCR research in the strategy and strategic HRM domains. Current scholarly work in these two areas suggests that these two literatures are converging, and the multidimensional HCR typology suggested by our review informs this convergence. We conclude with a discussion of future research domains that will advance the multilevel theoretical integration we propose.
Recently, outside blockholders, external owners that hold 5% or more of their firms’ outstanding common stockholdings, have been pressuring their firms to engage in divestiture activities. This study considers whether the influence of those owners also extends to how the divestiture is implemented, whether through spin-off or sell-off. Tests of an agency theory model using data from 205 divestitures show that the adoption of spin-offs or sell-offs is associated with the amount of outstanding common stockholdings held by outside blockholders and the size of the unit divested. Spin-offs are used more frequently when outside blockholders own more of the divesting firm’s stockholdings and the divested unit is larger, while sell-offs tend to be selected when outside blockholders own less stock and the divested business is smaller. Consistent with agency theory expectations, spin-offs would allow the blockholders to decide whether to hold or sell their interests in the divested firm, a decision they could make in accordance with their individual portfolio risks. Sell-offs of small units could be used to preserve organizational diversity and produce proceeds that would help the divesting firm’s managers pursue their self-interests. Overall, outside blockholders appear to shape how divestitures are done, even if they cannot directly intervene in their firms’ operations.
Authentic leadership occurs when individuals enact their true selves in their role as a leader. This article examines the role of authentic followership in the previously established relationship between authentic leadership and follower in-role and extrarole performance behaviors. Consideration of followers who enact their true selves is important to understand how authentic leadership fosters follower self-determined work motivation and thus work role performance. Using self-determination theory (SDT) as a guiding framework, the authors propose that authentic leadership, authentic followership, and their interplay are positively related to the satisfaction of followers’ basic needs, which, in turn, are positively related to follower work role performance. The authors conducted a survey study of 30 leaders and 252 followers in 25 Belgian service companies. The results provide evidence of positive relationship for both authentic leadership and authentic followership with follower basic need satisfaction in a cross-level model where authentic leadership was aggregated to the group level of analysis. Cross-level interaction results indicated that authentic leadership strengthened the relationship between authentic followership and follower basic need satisfaction. Follower basic need satisfaction was shown to mediate the relationship of authentic leadership and authentic followership with follower work role performance. A test of mediated moderation further demonstrated that basic need satisfaction mediates the interaction of authentic leadership and authentic followership on follower work role performance. The implications for leadership research and practice are explored.
Informed by social exchange theory, this study examines whether and how employees reciprocate to their organizations for the idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) they receive. Specifically, the authors examined whether i-deals (in scheduling flexibility and professional development) are related to employees’ flexible work role orientation, social networking behavior, and organizational trust over time. In turn, they hypothesized that these mediating variables would be positively related to employees’ use of constructive voice. Data were collected from 466 managers and professionals in the United States and China at three points in time over a 10-month period. The data analyses revealed that flexible work role orientation, social networking behavior, and organizational trust all mediated the relationship between i-deals and voice behavior. Furthermore, the mediating effects were generally stronger for professional development i-deals than for scheduling flexibility i-deals and were generally stronger in the China sample than in the U.S. sample. The article concludes with a discussion of the utility of social exchange theory as a framework for future research on i-deals and for guiding the implementation of i-deals in organizational settings.
The authors propose that a reciprocal resource gain spiral forms between coworker-based perceived social support and trust, which leads to coworkers investing personal resources into each other across work days. The authors extend conservation of resources theory by differentiating between resource investment behaviors, the perceived availability of resources, and perceptions about investment instrumentality while also examining accumulation effects that have been previously untested in studies of gain spirals. The authors confirm their hypotheses with data collected over five working days from 177 pairs of coworkers (employee N = 354) working across a wide range of jobs and industries. The authors also offer practical implications of this spiral, limitations of this research, and future directions for research on conservation of resources theory, resource investment, and day-level studies of employee behaviors.
With a diverse sample (N = 231 paired responses) of employees from various organizations in Pakistan, the authors tested for the main effects of perceived organizational politics and psychological capital on turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and supervisor-rated job performance. They also examined the moderating influence of psychological capital in the politics–outcomes relationships. Results provided good support for the proposed hypotheses. While perceived organizational politics was associated with all outcomes, psychological capital had a significant relationship with job satisfaction and supervisor-rated performance only. As hypothesized, the negative relationship of perceived organizational politics with job satisfaction and supervisor-rated performance was weaker when psychological capital was high. However, the result for turnover intentions was counter to expectations where the politics–turnover intention relationship was stronger when psychological capital was high.
Extant research has shown that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is positively associated with firm performance, but several contingencies affect the strength of this relationship. This article uses insights from the resource-based view and upper echelons perspective to introduce top management’s transformational leadership behaviors as moderators in the EO–performance relationship. The theoretically derived model is tested using survey data obtained from 790 small- and medium-sized firms in six countries. Findings indicate that, regardless of national setting, four transformational behaviors—articulating a vision, providing an appropriate model, having high performance expectations, and showing supportive leader behavior—positively affect the relationship between EO and firm performance. Further, the performance consequences of EO are greater when top management adheres to a configuration characterized by the highest possible levels of transformational behaviors. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Prior research on strategic changes has asserted that long-tenured CEOs are less likely to initiate strategic changes. The authors argue that this assertion may exclude CEOs’ prior experiences since it implicitly assumes that all new CEOs have the same inclination toward change. By viewing CEOs as individuals embedded within experiences and relationships throughout their careers, the authors propose that CEO newness—a concept integrating prior board experience, prior heir apparent experience, and length in the current position—can provide a more complete assessment of a new CEO’s tendency toward change. They further argue that the impact of CEO newness on strategic changes will be moderated by the strategic distance between a focal firm and a CEO’s previous firm, as well as by industry similarity between the two firms. The authors’ analyses of U.S. computer firms from 1994 to 2007 support their arguments, suggesting that it is useful to adopt the concept of CEO newness while considering its boundary conditions in order to better understand strategic changes.
This article extends previous research on network industries by analyzing the role that firm strategy plays in markets where network effects are important. The authors postulate that firms can benefit from the existence of network effects through their strategic choices. The main premise of this article is that companies, by influencing expectations, coordination, and compatibility, can leverage network effects and network value. The authors empirically test their hypotheses in the mobile telecommunications industry, a paradigmatic example of a network industry. This study not only seeks to understand the impact of firm strategy on network value but also analyzes the impact of the latter on firm performance.
Corporate venture (CV) units constitute vehicles through which firms may act ambidextrously, thereby increasing their longevity, but they suffer from a high failure rate. The authors examine why and how some CV units last significantly longer than others. They argue that CV units endure by developing an ambidextrous orientation themselves—they build new capabilities for the parent firm while simultaneously leveraging its existing strengths. They argue that CV units become ambidextrous by nurturing a supportive relational context, defined by the strength of their relationships with three different sets of actors—parent firm executives, business unit managers, and members of the venture capital community. Using primary data collected from 95 CV units over a three-year period, the authors test and find support for these arguments.
The authors develop and test a moderated mediation model that accounts for employee emotions (psychological contract violation), employee motivation (revenge cognitions), employee personality (self-control), and context (perceived aggressive culture) in the relationship between psychological contract breach and workplace deviance. In Sample 1, involving 146 hospitality workers and their peers, the authors found support for a conditional indirect effect of psychological contract violation in predicting workplace deviance via revenge cognitions for those employees who perceive a high as opposed to low aggressive work culture. In addition, they found that at high levels of perceived aggressive work culture, the conditional indirect effects of psychological contract violation in predicting workplace deviance via revenge cognitions were statistically significant for those employees with low as opposed to high self-control. These results were replicated in Sample 2 using an independent sample of 168 hospitality workers in a different cultural context. Overall, the results suggest that self-control and perceived aggressive culture, taken together, influence the enactment of deviant acts. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Organizations must learn and adapt to succeed in today’s ever-changing business environment, so it is essential for scholars to better understand the antecedents to learning processes among individuals, teams, and organizations as a whole. In this article, the authors offer a multilevel theory that illustrates how individuals’ motivation for different achievement goals, that is, goal orientations, shape the way they individually and collectively participate in organizational learning processes. This framework is grounded in a theoretical synthesis of organizational learning and achievement goal theories, which highlights the value of using an emergent motivational theory to better understand how predominantly cognitive learning processes may emerge across levels in organizations. In particular, the authors illustrate how mastery- and performance-oriented norms emerge in work groups and influence information interpretation and integration. The authors further describe how groups’ goal orientation norms can become embedded in the organizational culture, which impacts the ways in which learning processes are institutionalized throughout the organization. This theoretical framework provides a fuller depiction of why and how learning unfolds in organizations, which may facilitate future research on the microfoundations of organizational learning and how these can enable organizations to enhance their capabilities.
As empirical research exploring the relationship between justice and emotion has accumulated, there have been key questions that have remained unanswered and theoretical inconsistencies that have emerged. In this article, the authors address several of these gaps, including whether overall justice relates to both positive and negative emotions and whether both sets of emotions mediate the relationship between overall justice and behavioral outcomes. They also reconcile theoretical inconsistencies related to the differential effects of positive and negative emotions on behavioral outcomes (i.e., performance, withdrawal, and helping). Across two field studies (Study 1 is a cross-sectional study with multirater data, N = 136; Study 2 is a longitudinal study, N = 451), positive emotions consistently mediated the relationship between overall justice and approach-related behaviors (i.e., performance and helping), whereas negative emotions consistently mediated the relationship between overall justice and avoidance-related behaviors (i.e., withdrawal). Mixed results were found for negative emotions and approach-related behaviors (i.e., performance and helping), which indicated the importance of considering context, time, and target of the behavior. The authors discuss the theoretical implications for the asymmetric and broaden-and-build theories of emotion as well as the importance of simultaneously examining both positive and negative emotions.
Downsizing is a common business management practice. Prior research has examined the financial consequences of downsizing or the impact on individuals remaining in a downsizing organization. Taking a resource-based perspective, this study integrates and extends prior research on downsizing by examining how downsizing influences the relative likelihood that a firm will experience one of three states in the three years following downsizing. Multinomial logistic regression is employed to test hypotheses using a sample of 445 firms that downsized during the period 1995 to 2000. The authors find significant differences in the relative likelihood of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, acquisition, or remaining a nonbankrupt going concern based on the size of the downsizing, firm-level intangible resources, the tangible asset intensity of the firm, and industry-level knowledge intensity. Implications for managers and future research are discussed.
Given the increasing number of women executives in the top management teams of initial public offering (IPO) firms, the lack of female-led IPO firms is a curious fact, especially since women-owned private businesses represent almost half of the new businesses formed in the United States, with patterns of founding similar to those of male-owned businesses. This lack of female-led IPOs suggests a potentially larger problem—a gender-based capital gap for new ventures. Given the empirical evidence suggesting a positive association between the presence of female executives and firm performance, the authors test whether investor perceptions are aligned with these empirical patterns. Using a sample of MBA students, the authors construct a simulated IPO, manipulating the gender demographics of the top management team. Their results suggest that female CEOs may be disproportionately disadvantaged in their ability to attract growth capital, when all other factors are controlled. Despite identical personal qualifications and firm financials, female founders/CEOs were perceived as less capable than their male counterparts, and IPOs led by female founders/CEOs were considered less attractive investments.
This research examines a condition under which supervisor undermining is related to perceptions of leader hypocrisy that then lead to employee turnover intentions. Drawing on behavioral integrity theory and arguments from the social cognition literature, the authors argue that subordinates compare supervisor undermining to an interpersonal justice expectation, as a salient social cue, to draw conclusions regarding leader hypocrisy. In turn, the cognitive conclusion that the leader is indeed a hypocrite generates uncertainty that subordinates are motivated to manage by increasing turnover intentions. The authors examine perceptions of leader hypocrisy as the mediator of their proposed theoretical model while controlling for psychological contract breach and trust in supervisor. Results from a scenario-based experiment ( N = 202) and a survey-based study ( N = 312) provide general support for the authors’ hypotheses.
This study explores the potential benefits of executive hubris to firm innovation. Grounded in the upper echelons theory and the firm innovation literature, hypotheses were developed and tested in two studies with different contexts and methods. Study 1 uses a set of cross-sectional survey data on a large sample of Chinese CEOs in manufacturing industries. Study 2 uses a set of longitudinal archival data on U.S. public firms in high-tech industries. Both studies render robust support to the authors’ main theoretical prediction—that executive hubris is positively related to firm innovation. The authors further found that the main effect varies under certain environmental conditions: The relationship between executive hubris and firm innovation becomes weaker when the environment is more munificent and complex.
Team reflexivity, the extent to which teams collectively reflect upon and adapt their working methods and functioning, has been shown to be an important predictor of team outcomes, notably innovation. As described in the current article, the authors developed and tested a team-level contingency model of team reflexivity, work demands, and innovation. They argue that highly reflexive teams will be more innovative than teams low in reflexivity when facing a demanding work environment. A field study of 98 primary health care teams in the United Kingdom corroborated their predictions: Team reflexivity was positively related to team innovation, and team reflexivity and work demands interacted such that high levels of both predicted higher levels of team innovation. Furthermore, an interaction between team reflexivity, quality of physical work environment (PWE), and team innovation showed that poor PWE coupled with high team reflexivity was associated with higher levels of team innovation. These results are discussed in the context of the need for team reflexivity and team innovation among teams at work facing high levels of work demands.
The recruitment and selection of human resources represent the most important activities in which organizations of all types engage. However, there is much scholars still need to know about the predictors of recruitment effectiveness. Using a sample of Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) university football coaches (N = 175) and their recruiting outcomes, the authors hypothesized that recruiting effectiveness is specifically affected by the individual qualities of the recruiters, in addition to the past performance of the team under the current head coach. The results supported the hypothesis, demonstrating that the interaction of recruiter political skill and head coach performance explained significant variance in recruitment effectiveness. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed
Building on theoretical and empirical work considering the implications of accountability on individual behavior, the authors explored the antecedents and consequences of individual perceptions of accountability for job performance. Using data from two field samples, the authors considered whether the manager’s monitoring behavior thought to enhance perceptions of accountability for behaviors and outcomes predicted greater perceived accountability for task performance and interpersonal facilitation performance. They also explored whether perceived accountability mediated the relationship between monitoring behavior and subsequent performance. Hierarchical linear modeling indicated that subordinates of managers whose monitoring behavior reinforced perceptions of accountability perceived greater accountability for performance and that this perception mediated the relationship between managerial monitoring behavior and performance. The implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.
A significant amount of research has examined firms’ decisions to adopt poison pills; however, firms today are increasingly repealing or allowing poison pills to expire. Based on agency theory, the authors examine competing perspectives of governance mechanisms as having complementary or substitutive effects within the context of poison pill repeal. They test whether firms repeal poison pills when governance is strong (complementary effects) or allow for other governance mechanisms to compensate for potential agency costs associated with poison pill renewal (substitutive effects). Using a sample of 288 firms who made decisions to terminate or renew poison pills, the authors find that firms with CEO duality, fewer directors nominated by the CEO, and higher levels of outside director ownership and pressure-resistant institutional shareholdings are more likely to repeal poison pills. A curvilinear relationship between managerial ownership and poison pill repeal is also found. The results provide greater support for the notion that firms use governance mechanisms as complements rather than substitutes.
This article distinguishes between two types of employee identification developed in organizational workgroups: (1) relational identification, which arises from connections and role relationships with other members in a workgroup, and (2) collective identification, which arises from the shared characteristics of a workgroup as a whole. Using three independent field samples, the authors generated new, context-specific measurements for relational and collective identification using an inductive, multistage approach; established their construct validity; and provided evidence for their differential antecedents and consequences in organizational workgroups. Results indicate that relational and collective identification are distinct constructs and that they are embedded in separate nomological networks.
The perspective in alliance research has shifted from the individual dyad to alliance portfolios; a key descriptor of a firm’s alliance portfolio is diversity. Focusing on firms that are confronted with emerging technological fields, the authors examine the consequences of their alliance portfolio’s technological diversity on superior product innovation. The literature has not been conclusive about the consequences of portfolio diversity. The authors examine the nature of the effect of portfolio diversity on superior product innovation and follow up on the call for a contingency perspective—as not all firms benefit equally from portfolio diversity. The contingency perspective is based on the assertion that a firm’s past strategies in internal knowledge creation are a source of experiences that increase the firm’s capability to leverage extramural knowledge. Theoretically, the study thus contributes to the absorptive capacity literature that has recently acknowledged the importance of such higher-order internal capabilities. By identifying concrete dimensions of internal knowledge creation that enable firms to benefit from portfolio diversity, actionable recommendations are derived on how to align internal knowledge creation with external knowledge sourcing. The empirical support in the biopharmaceutical industry corroborates the developed theory and serves as a warning signal for firms that are ill prepared to leverage a diverse alliance portfolio.
Two aspects of many real-world hiring situations affect hiring success in ways that are not well understood. One is that many applicant pools are relatively small, with perhaps fewer than 20 and sometimes fewer than 10 applicants. The other is that job seekers are likely to apply for more than one job at a time. Despite calls for more research that would be relevant to the small-scale hiring situation, scholars have given little attention to expected new-hire quality in small-pool hiring in general and even less to more specific questions of how that expected quality is affected if applicants apply for multiple jobs simultaneously. Most currently accepted methods linking expected new-hire quality to the selection ratio (or hiring rate) are based on the properties of large pools. The authors argue that those methods are based on the inherent, but dubious, assumption that all job seekers in a given applicant pool are pursuing that particular job and no other jobs. In the small-pool context, these factors have significant, and previously unrealized, negative effects on the expected quality of new hires when job seekers apply for multiple jobs at once. The authors present a conceptual development of a method, based on averages of order statistics, for estimating correct values of expected new-hire quality when pools are small and job seekers tend to apply for multiple jobs simultaneously. A series of simulations support the conclusion that the method yields accurate estimates.
Although studies about the determinants of CEO compensation are ubiquitous, the balance of evidence for one of the more controversial theoretical approaches, managerial power theory, remains inconclusive. The authors provide a meta-analysis of 219 U.S.-based studies, focusing on the relationships between indicators of managerial power and levels of CEO compensation and CEO pay-performance sensitivities. The results indicate that managerial power theory is well equipped for predicting core compensation variables such as total cash and total compensation but less so for predicting the sensitivity of pay to performance. In most situations where CEOs are expected to have power over the pay setting process, they receive significantly higher levels of total cash and total compensation. In contrast, where boards are expected to have more power, CEOs receive lower total cash and total compensation. In addition, powerful directors also appear to be able to establish tighter links between CEO compensation and firm performance and can accomplish this even in the face of powerful CEOs. The authors discuss the implications for theory and research regarding the determinants of executive compensation.
One aspect of person–job fit reflects congruence between personal preferences and job design; as congruence increases so should satisfaction. The authors hypothesized that power distance would moderate whether fit is related to satisfaction with degree of job formalization. They obtained measures of job formalization, fit, and satisfaction, as well as organizational commitment, from employees (N = 772) in a multinational firm with subsidiaries in six countries. Confirming previous findings, individuals from low-power-distance cultures were most satisfied with increasing fit. However, the extent to which individuals from high-power-distance cultures were satisfied did not necessarily depend on increasing fit but mostly on whether the degree of formalization received was congruent with cultural norms. Irrespective of culture, satisfaction with formalization predicted a broad measure of organizational commitment. Apart from the novel extension of fit theory, the authors show how moderation can be tested in the context of polynomial response surface regression and how specific hypotheses can be tested regarding different points on the response surface.
This study investigates the effects of group member nonresponse in research that examines relationships between group-level constructs aggregated from the responses of individual group members. Simulation data show that the effects of nonresponse vary greatly depending on levels of between-group variability and within-group variability expressed jointly as intraclass correlation, or ICC(1), values. Even high response rates, for example, can produce significantly attenuated correlations between group-level variables with ICC(1) levels commonly reported in group studies. Conversely, even low response rates can yield accurate group-level correlations when ICC(1) levels are high. These effects of nonresponse are equivalent whether nonresponse derives from a random or biased process. Group size appears to play no important role in moderating the effects of response rate. Suggestions for research design and post hoc diagnosis of findings are discussed.
Many lists that purport to gauge the quality of journals in management and organization studies (MOS) are based on the judgments of experts in the field. This article develops an identity concerns model (ICM) that suggests that such judgments are likely to be shaped by the personal and social identities of evaluators. The model was tested in a study in which 168 editorial board members rated 44 MOS journals. In line with the ICM, respondents rated journal quality more highly to the extent that a given journal reflected their personal concerns (associated with having published more articles in that journal) and the concerns of a relevant ingroup (associated with membership of the journal’s editorial board or a particular disciplinary or geographical background). However, judges’ ratings of journals in which they had published were more favorable when those journals had a low-quality reputation, and their ratings of journals that reflected their geographical and disciplinary affiliations were more favorable when those journals had a high-quality reputation. The findings are thus consistent with the view that identity concerns come to the fore in journal ratings when there is either a need to protect against personal identity threat or a meaningful opportunity to promote social identity.
This study draws from social information processing theory and the climate literature to examine an antecedent to and the consequences of voice climate, defined as shared group member perceptions of the extent to which they are encouraged to engage in voice behaviors. The authors test their hypotheses using data collected from a sample of 374 full-time employees nested in 54 work groups. Their results indicate that group perceptions of supervisor undermining have a negative effect on group perceptions of voice climate. In addition, voice climate predicts group voice behavior and also has a significant influence on group performance beyond the influence through group voice behavior. These findings provide additional evidence for the predictive validity of the voice climate construct and provide future research opportunities for researchers.
This study examines the role of passion among entrepreneurs. In particular, the authors integrate identity theory with the literature surrounding passion to investigate the possible pathways through which entrepreneurial identities might influence passion, as well as the relationship between entrepreneurs’ passion and behavior. Structural equation modeling of responses from 221 entrepreneurs suggests that passion rises and falls in connection with entrepreneurial identity centrality and, furthermore, that passion is associated with individual entrepreneurial behavior and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. This research provides a starting point for investigating the factors that may impact the development of entrepreneurs’ passion as well as the specific mechanisms through which passion energizes entrepreneurial action.
This article explains inconsistency in stakeholder punishment for firm misconduct. It does so by developing a cognitive view of the process by which stakeholders allocate their limited attention. This cognitive view outlines individual and situational factors that produce variation in a stakeholder’s likelihood of noticing that an act of misconduct has occurred, in how the stakeholder will assess misconduct if he or she does notice it, and in the stakeholder’s decision to punish a firm if he or she judges it to have engaged in misconduct. In sum, this process suggests that as stakeholder attention varies across each step of this process, misconduct often will not result in punishment. This suggests limits on the ability to deter firm misconduct through social control.
Interpersonal mistreatment is a common and often devastating occurrence in the workplace. Although victim characteristics are an important determinant of who is targeted, research examining the link between target characteristics and interpersonal mistreatment is limited. Researchers have not considered employees’ interpersonal style as an antecedent of the mistreatment they experience from others. Further, very few studies have attempted to understand the mediating processes underlying the relationships between victim characteristics and workplace interpersonal mistreatment. The current study addresses these needs by examining employee popularity as a mediator of the relationship between political skill and two forms of interpersonal mistreatment: workplace interpersonal conflict and workplace ostracism. Results indicate that the political skill–interpersonal mistreatment relationships were mediated by employee popularity.
The authors draw on prospect theory and demonstrate that the perceived justice of an outcome is affected by the way numerical information is presented. Three experimental studies were conducted using five different samples, representing teachers, general employees, and future employees. People generally tend to see a bigger difference in the performance between the self versus another person when their performance components are presented in frames associated with small numbers (e.g., absence rate of 3% vs. 9%) than when they are presented in frames associated with large numbers (e.g., attendance rate of 97% vs. 91%). Despite the same objective performance difference (e.g., 6% in the above example), people expected different fair shares of rewards and evaluated justice of a given outcome differently across the two frames.
This study focuses on the negotiation process that partners in a couple engage in behind the scenes to negotiate whose career will take precedence in the household and the resulting effort and burnout that individuals experience at work and at home. The author finds that gender moderates the relationship between competitive negotiation tactics and an individual’s career responsibilities. Gender also moderates the relationship between both competitive and cooperative negotiation tactics and the emotional work conducted by one’s spouse or partner. The author also observes a moderating effect of gender between emotional and career effort and burnout—both from one’s job and from one’s relationship. Results suggest that men and women react differently to negotiation tactics used within a couple and tend to be affected by gendered norms regarding the work and family domains.
The authors propose that need for cognition, an individual’s tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking, is associated with individual innovation behavior. Moreover, drawing on an interactionist perspective, the authors suggest that need for cognition becomes more important when individuals face lower job autonomy and time pressure in their work. This is because, when these job characteristics are low, there is no contextual driving force for individual innovation, so personality has a stronger influence. In a multisource study of 179 employees working in a Dutch research and consultancy organization, the authors’ expectations were largely supported. They found that need for cognition was positively associated with peer-rated innovation behavior, as were job autonomy and time pressure, even when controlling for openness to experience and proactive personality. Furthermore, the relationship between need for cognition and innovation behavior was strongest for individuals with low job autonomy and low time pressure and indeed was nonexistent at high levels of these contextual variables. This study, therefore, suggests that context can substitute for an individual’s need for cognition when it comes to individual innovation.
A meta-analysis (34 studies) is reported on the impact of hard- and softline bargaining strategies on economic (135 effect sizes) and socioemotional negotiation outcomes (30 effect sizes) in distributive negotiations. As expected, hardline strategies lead to higher economic outcomes, whereas softline strategies lead to higher socioemotional outcomes. Moreover, moderator variables are derived from the graduated reciprocation in tension-reduction model and the level of aspiration theory that are expected to qualify the relation of bargaining strategies and achieved economic outcomes. In accordance with this theoretical background, moderator analyses reveal that hardline negotiators gain the highest economic outcomes when visual contact is possible, when the opposing party is male, when negotiators are instructed to maximize individual outcomes, and when they know the bargaining zone. Also in line with the theoretical assumptions, softline negotiators gain the highest economic outcomes when they accurately reciprocate the opposing party’s concessionary behavior. Contrary to the predictions, softline bargaining does, however, not prevail when the risk and cost of impasses are high. Based on the reported findings, needs for future research and theory building are identified and discussed.
Some authors have explained the dearth of women leaders as an "opt-out revolution"—that women today are making a choice not to aspire to leadership positions. The authors of this article present a model that tests managers’ biased evaluations of women as less career motivated as an explanation for why women have lower managerial aspirations than men. Specifically, they hypothesize that day-to-day managerial decisions involving allocating challenging work, training and development, and career encouragement mean women accrue less organizational development, and this is one explanation for their lower managerial aspirations. The authors’ model is based on social role theory and is examined in a sample of 112 supervisor–subordinate dyads at a U.S. Fortune 500 firm.
The authors examine the mediating role of competitive intensity in the relationship between managerial racial diversity and firm performance (i.e., market share gain and average stock return). Racial diversity relates to firm performance via firms’ capacity to compete intensively (i.e., to introduce new competitive actions frequently). An analysis reveals that environmental munificence moderates competitive intensity’s mediating effect: Racially diverse management groups compete more intensively and perform better when they compete in munificent environments. The authors also find support for a moderated mediation model that simultaneously tests all components of their framework.
Situational strength has long been viewed as a useful way of conceptualizing and predicting person–situation interactions. Some have recently argued, however, that more rigorous empirical tests of its behavioral influence are sorely needed. The current article begins addressing this literature gap by (a) developing the Situational Strength at Work (SSW) scale, (b) examining the ways in which individual differences influence perceptions of situational strength, and (c) testing situational strength’s moderating effects on two types of voluntary work behavior (i.e., organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior). Results indicate strong psychometric properties for the SSW (thereby facilitating future organizational research on situational strength), support for theoretically based predictions regarding the role of individual differences in perceptions of situational strength, support for theoretically based moderator effects on organizational citizenship behavior, and the presence of countertheoretical (yet strong and consistent) moderator effects on counterproductive work behavior. Thus, this study makes several contributions to the situational strength literature but also reveals important areas for future theoretical development and empirical research.
Complementing received research on the role of collaboration networks in fostering interorganizational learning and innovation, the authors focus on the importance of learning from other firms’ public knowledge. To this end they introduce the concept of spillover network—the network of "source" firms whose public knowledge a "recipient" firm is able to readily absorb and use as innovation input. Using patent-based data on a panel of semiconductor firms between 1976 and 2002, the authors demonstrate that firms’ innovative performance tends to be higher when their spillover network is either munificent or rich in structural holes. However, being exposed to a spillover network that is both munificent and rich in structural holes is generally counterproductive. Consistent with the insight that the value of external knowledge inputs depends on the firm-level resources with which it can be bundled, furthermore, the authors argue that the extent to which firms benefit from their spillover network hinges on specific intraorganizational factors—their scientific intensity and degree of downstream integration.
Although considerable research has examined various antecedents of employee absence, relatively little research has examined the effects of organizational absence control initiatives on different types of absence, or how differences in employee perceptions of these initiatives may influence employee absences. Through the lens of organizational justice, the authors address this gap in the literature by tracking absenteeism in two manufacturing plants that implemented, at different times, absence control initiatives designed to increase the salience of absence outcomes via explicit rewards and punishments. Results showed that the policy changes had the intended effect of reducing casual absence, but also the unintended effect of increasing Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) absence. The results for disability-based absence were mixed. Individual employee perceptions of both the salience of absence outcomes and the fairness of the absence policies showed differential effects on casual and FMLA absence. These perceptions interacted such that employees who perceived the policies to be more salient and unfair had the highest instances of FMLA absence. Implications for absence and justice research and practice are discussed.
Research on organizational decision making seeks to understand how external events shape how organizational decision makers attend to particular issues and allocate scarce resources across the organization’s activities. The author investigates whether supplemental information available to decision makers about their own and other organizations impacts this process. He finds that media coverage about particular issues following failures throughout the field can influence decisions regarding resource allocation and that coverage about other organizations may in some cases be more influential than coverage about the focal firm. The study and its findings forward our understanding regarding how organizations scan their environments and how multiple, interacting forms of external information may collectively influence internal organizational processes.
Drawing on the sense-making perspective, the authors develop and test a cross-level model of individual creativity, integrating resistance to change and three human resource contextual factors to moderate the individual relationship. This cross-level study of working adults from a wide array of Chinese companies addresses one of the major challenges managers face in enhancing individual-level creativity: overcoming employees’ resistance to change. The authors study the efficacy of three contextual factors that are important elements of the creative process—modernity climate, leadership style, and coworker characteristics—for helping managers overcome this challenge. The authors find that the three contextual variables moderate the negative relationship between resistance to change and creativity, and the pattern of results indicates that managing human resources practices may mitigate the detrimental effects of resistance to change on creativity.
Many organizations are using knowledge management systems (KMSs) to facilitate knowledge sharing. However, few studies have empirically investigated how individual characteristics and organizational work practices influence knowledge sharing. Based on accountability theory, the person–situation interactional psychology perspective, and the five-factor model of personality, this study uses a quasi-experimental design to investigate how two accountability-inducing management practices—evaluation and evaluation plus reward—and their interactions with personality characteristics influence knowledge sharing using a KMS. One hundred employees from a Chinese software company participated in the study. The authors found that both evaluation and evaluation plus reward had a positive relationship with knowledge sharing. Greater levels of knowledge sharing occurred in the evaluation-plus-reward condition compared with the evaluation condition. Also, knowledge sharing was influenced by the interaction between evaluation plus reward and conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Implications of the study results for research and practice are discussed.
Results from four studies in multiple contexts drawing on different data sources provide full support for the proposition that Machiavellian employees prefer forming transactional psychological contracts (schemas of their employee–employer relationship that are economic in nature) and that such contracts mediate the relationship between Machiavellianism and supervisor-rated (a) organizational citizenship behaviors and (b) deviant behaviors, respectively. The authors’ research contributes to scholars’ understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the relationship between Machiavellianism and contextual performance as well as to the psychological contracts literature by demonstrating that Machiavellianism influences contextual performance because it affects the manner in which employees construe their employment relationships.
Previous research has been inconsistent in the prediction and empirical findings regarding work–family enrichment and satisfaction. The current research seeks to clarify this inconsistency by examining both directions of work–family enrichment (work-to-family enrichment and family-to-work enrichment) with both job satisfaction and family satisfaction to determine if their effects are similar or diverse. Building on the theoretical foundation of Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory, the authors explore the mediating roles of psychological distress and positive mood in this process. Using a sample of 310 working respondents, the authors found that psychological distress was a mediator to both job satisfaction and family satisfaction, while positive mood was a mediator to job satisfaction but not family satisfaction. Further, the authors found that the direct effect of work-to-family enrichment was on job satisfaction, the originating domain. In addition, the total effect of enrichment to satisfaction (through the mediation mechanisms of distress and mood) was again in the pattern of the originating domain such that work-to-family enrichment more strongly influenced job satisfaction. However, family-to-work enrichment did not directly impact family satisfaction, nor was it significantly stronger than work-to-family in its total effect on family satisfaction.
In this two-study article, the authors investigate the mechanism through which supervisory family support is linked to outcome variables and examine the moderating effect of family-friendly benefits on this relationship. Drawing on social exchange theory, they propose and find that the quality of leader–member exchange, a form of social exchange relationships, mediated the relationship between supervisory family support and work-related outcomes in Study 1 (N = 82). Furthermore, in Study 2 (N = 225), the model linking supervisory family support to outcome variables through social exchange relationships was moderated by the level of family-friendly benefits offered by the organization. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
A temporary workgroup of trained British soldiers fractured and nearly lost members’ lives when it encountered unexpected adversity in Low’s Gully, Borneo. Although demography-oriented theories of group faultlines and diversity types offer useful cross-sectional baselines for predicting and explaining workgroup fracture, the authors examine the Low’s Gully expedition to build theory exposing the longitudinal microfoundations of workgroup fracture under adversity. The authors incorporate the long-established concept of common ground among parties—information that is both mutually held and mutually understood to be mutually held—to uncover changes in group members’ communications success, intragroup trust, tacit coordination, and fracture likelihood as the expedition’s situation became increasingly tenuous. Their study of how this diverse workgroup faced extreme adversity shows how group trust can dissolve under adversity in a sequence moving from initial trust, to trust-with-trepidation, and then to distrust. Theoretical insights indicate that common ground arising from shared positive experiences increases workgroup resistance to fracture under adversity more than does common ground arising from similar backgrounds; a trust violation occurring among highly similar group members is perceived to be more severe and results in a greater increase in group fracture likelihood than does the same trust violation among dissimilar group members; perceived leader benevolence and integrity are more vital than ability for maintaining intragroup trust, even when ability is necessary for task success; and finally, distrust can sometimes be warranted and even vital for a workgroup’s task accomplishment. The authors discuss the implications for future research and practice.
An integrative self-definition model is proposed to improve our understanding of how procedural justice affects different outcome modalities in organizational behavior. Specifically, it is examined whether the strength of different levels of self-definition (collective, relational, and individual) each uniquely interact with procedural justice to predict organizational, interpersonal, and job/task-oriented citizenship behaviors, respectively. Results from experimental and (both single and multisource) field data consistently revealed stronger procedural justice effects (1) on organizational-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves strongly in terms of organizational characteristics, (2) on interpersonal-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves strongly in terms of their interpersonal relationships, and (3) on job/task-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves weakly in terms of their distinctiveness or uniqueness. We discuss the relevance of these results with respect to how employees can be motivated most effectively in organizational settings.
Adopting the theoretical framework of social exchange, the authors used the two dominant Confucian values—hierarchy and relationalism—to theorize the mediating role of affective trust in the relationship between paternalistic leadership and employee in-role and extra-role performance in the Chinese organizational context. Data from 601 supervisor–subordinate dyads of 27 companies in a Taiwanese conglomerate revealed that while the benevolence and morality dimensions of paternalistic leadership are positively associated with both in-role and extra-role performance, the authoritarian paternalistic leadership dimension is negatively related to subordinate performance. Furthermore, affective trust mediated the relationship between benevolent and moral paternalistic leadership and employee performance but did not mediate the relationship between authoritarianism and employee performance. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the Chinese context and beyond.
This empirical study of 323 new ventures examines how task and relationship conflict in the founding top management team mediates the effect of lead founder personality on new venture performance. The results reveal that (1) openness and agreeableness increase task conflict, whereas conscientiousness decreases it, and (2) openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness decrease relationship conflict, whereas neuroticism increases it. Furthermore, task conflict increases venture performance, whereas relationship conflict decreases venture performance and weakens the positive effect of task conflict. In addition, task and relationship conflict do not mediate the effect of extraversion, and they only partially mediate the effects of openness and neuroticism on new venture performance. Openness and neuroticism exert a direct impact on new venture performance, in addition to their indirect impact through task and relationship conflict.