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The Journal of Management has been publishing issues containing review articles for over three decades. This article summarizes recent reviews and provides advice for scholars considering the submission of a review proposal.

In his position paper, Edwards critiqued several of our comments concerning the reliability and validity of difference scores. We believe our differences of opinion occur not only because Edwards has endorsed historical arguments against difference scores, but also because he conceptualizes certain issues quite differently than we do. We address his major points of criticism and then reiterate (and perhaps clarify) our position. Edwards assumes that it is reasonable to assert a priori that difference scores will often exhibit poor reliabilities because the conditions under which poor reliabilities can occur (i.e., unreliable and highly positively intercorrelated component measures) are very common in empirical research. Although these circumstances may be common, they should not be sufficient to condemn the use of difference scores a priori because reliability may be empirically investigated and because, as we suggested, reliabilities can be improved. We take exception to Edwards’s statements, “. . . the reliability of a difference score should be evaluated not only in an absolute sense, but also in relation to viable alternatives, such as using both component measures jointly in multiple regression analysis . . . . If a difference score exhibits adequate reliability, then it is almost certain that its components will exhibit superior reliabilities, indicating that the latter should be used in place of the former.” To us, this presumes that the difference and component measures in question are conceptually interchangeable, a blanket assumption we are unwilling to make. For example, the concept of role conflict obtained from the differences between subordinate and supervisor job ratings is not the same as conceptualizations of the components of subordinate and supervisor job ratings. Also, we do not agree, given adequate difference score reliabilities, that difference scores should be discarded because their component measures show higher reliabilities. What about the theory being tested or research goals? Finally, notice that we and Edwards (1994) agree, that response surfaces do not eliminate reliability problems. We disagree with Edwards’s suggestion that the reliabilities of profile similarity measures can be “problematic” because dimensions are often formed by large numbers of heterogeneous items. Our position was never that

This is the third editorial commentary in a three-part series that addresses introductions, implications, and interestingness. The first, focusing on the introduction design, is about what the beginning of a paper should look like. The second, focusing on practice implications, is about what the end of a paper should look like. The third discusses how to develop and fit attention-grabbing ideas into the academic conversation in the literature. We hope this editorial series provides inspiration and ideas about publishing papers that people want to engage with.

This is the second editorial commentary in a three-part series that addresses introductions, implications, and interestingness. The first, focusing on the introduction design, is about what the beginning of a paper should look like. The second, focusing on practice implications, is about what the end of a paper should look like. The third discusses how to develop and fit attention-grabbing ideas into the academic conversation in the literature. We hope this editorial series provides inspiration and ideas about publishing papers that people want to engage with.

The resource-based view (RBV) provides a rich framework for analyzing the role of a firm’s tangible and intangible resources in creating and sustaining competitive advantage. As a result, it has been widely used to explain entrepreneurial firms’ strategic choices that generate such an advantage. While researchers have established the usefulness of the RBV, they have overlooked the fundamental question of how entrepreneurial firms manage their resources to gain competitive advantage. This paper examines this issue in the context of independently owned startups, which typically lack resources, are constrained in their access to key resource providers, and have limited experience in assembling and managing resources. Adopting a broader conceptualization of startups’ resource management process, the paper identifies several questionable assumptions in related RBV-based research. Further, recognizing the limits of RBV to determine ex ante the nature and magnitude of entrepreneurs’ resourcefulness when managing their resources, the paper suggests linkages between the RBV and several entrepreneurship frameworks and outlines promising research questions.

I have recently been encouraged to share my personal reflections on the emergence of resource-based theory. In many ways, I have been reluctant to do so, at least in print, since any such effort would necessarily reflect my idiosyncratic view of this history. A complete discussion of both the people involved in the development of resource-based theory and the context within which this theory developed in the field of management would, I suspect, require the objective eye of a third party. In this way, I certainly do not qualify to write such a history. However, when the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Special Theory Forum on Resource-Based Theory in the Journal of Management came around, I thought it might be time to put down on paper—a quaintly old-fashioned phrase—my own recollections of this history. In doing so, I decided to make no pretense that this is an objective or rigorous historical effort. Rather, these are the reflections of a strategic management scholar, coming toward the end of his career, about a time, now over 30 years ago, when resource-based theory did not yet exist. I have not tried to verify my reflections by appeal to historical documents, except for any papers I and others have published. I did pass this essay by many of the people mentioned in it—to see if my memories were consistent with their memories—but that is as far as I have gone in verifying the “facts” I share in this essay.

The presenter's paradox is a phenomenon wherein adding low-value information alongside high-value information reduces the overall effectiveness of communication. This is because receivers tend to evaluate messages using an averaging, rather than additive, approach. In the context of journal submissions, the presenter's paradox arises when authors undermine their papers’ value by adding extra components that fail to maintain the high standard established in the core of the paper. These additions might take the form of excessive control variables, supplementary analyses, hypotheses, words, tables, figures, or citations. We argue that authors should construct journal submissions with the presenter's paradox in mind––because in many cases, less is more.

The aim of this commentary is to show how the use of formal models—both closed form and computational—can improve theory development and theory testing in organization theory. I also provide practical suggestions (aimed at PhD students and researchers considering developing a formal model) for dealing with challenges in developing and writing a formal modeling paper. By uncovering how formal models contribute to organization theory and presenting the constraints that formal modeling papers are subject to, this commentary can also help consumers of modeling papers to extract more value from this research method.

Despite evidence on the increasing centrality of moral approaches to leadership for extant employees, management research provides little guidance on whether and how prospective employees come to draw conclusions about such leadership in their employer choice. Therefore, this paper integrates authentic leadership into signaling theory to identify CEO sociopolitical activism—a public and costly expression of personal political values by a company's highest and most visible leader—as an effective signal that is interpreted by job seekers to evaluate the CEOs’ degree of authentic leadership. Three experiments, including a parallel design for causal mediation inferences, and a field survey support that authentic leadership attributions mediate the positive impact of CEOs’ activism on job seekers’ employer attractiveness evaluations and employer choice. This mediation is attenuated when the activist CEO's espoused political values are incongruent with those of the job seeker and when the CEO engages in activism due to customer pressure rather than personal convictions. These findings primarily contribute to signaling theory and the literature on authentic leadership. For practitioners, the paper identifies a unique leadership signal that can contribute to an employer brand while cautioning about the costs this signal might impose on companies’ diversity.

In this paper, we explore under which conditions subsidiaries of multinational corporations can benefit from the external networks of sister subsidiaries in terms of new knowledge generation. We focus on the phenomenon of unconnected sister alliances—that is, alliances of sister subsidiaries with whom the focal subsidiary lacks a recent history of internal R&D collaboration. Whereas unconnected sister alliances provide knowledge recombination opportunities for the focal subsidiary, realizing them is challenging because of particular knowledge transfer frictions. In this paper, we theorize on how particular conditions (i.e., headquarters proximity, knowledge overlap, size of focal subsidiary’s own alliance network) influence the strength of these frictions, resulting in hypotheses on how these conditions moderate the relationship between the number of unconnected sister alliances and the generation of new knowledge by focal subsidiaries. We rely on a panel data set of 2,258 R&D subsidiaries belonging to 118 firms in the pharmaceutical industry to empirically test our hypotheses. Jointly, our findings enrich our current theoretical understanding of how different types of external linkages and their interactions shape subsidiaries’ generation of new knowledge. We also illuminate the opportunities and challenges that multistep knowledge transfer processes entail.

Progress in coopetition research is impeded by two problems in the literature: (a) superficial conceptualization of simultaneity and outcomes and (b) lack of theorizing about core properties of coopetition and how they influence outcomes. This paper addresses these interrelated problems and charts a path towards a theory of coopetition. We systematically analyze competition and cooperation and illuminate how the interplay between specific aspects of competition and cooperation manifests through unique coopetition mechanisms. We explicate a range of possible outcomes from coopetition—joint value creation for all firms, value creation for individual firms, and value destruction—and suggest that coopetition mechanisms help explain how and why coopetition may lead to varying outcomes. Furthermore, we explain how effective navigation of simultaneity and value creation intent, two fundamental elements of coopetition, may be instrumental in deriving beneficial outcomes. Navigating simultaneity involves balancing competition and cooperation and maintaining both at moderately strong levels, and navigating value creation consists of managing the trade-off between joint value creation and firm value creation without compromising overall value creation. By explaining how coopetition manifests, what its unique underlying properties are, and how such properties influence outcomes, our paper provides a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and progresses the literature towards a theory of coopetition.

This paper addresses two fundamental problems in the absorptive capacity (AC) literature: conceptual ambiguity on what AC is and a lack of synthesized empirical findings showing how AC matters for firm outcomes. We take a two-pronged approach to address these problems: (1) conceptual distillation of the literature to discern the core AC dimensions, outcomes, and contingent external knowledge conditions and (2) meta-analysis of the empirical literature to synthesize the findings. For conceptual distillation, we identify three dimensions of AC: absorptive effort (i.e., the knowledge-building investments made by a firm), absorptive knowledge base (i.e., the current knowledge stock of a firm), and absorptive process (i.e., a firm’s internal procedures and practices related to knowledge diffusion). We develop these dimensions by explicating their theoretical roots, functions, mechanisms, and corresponding measures. Leveraging the conceptual distillation, we conduct meta-analyses of the empirical literature and synthesize key findings. We find that AC has a significant positive effect on firm outcomes and that the most commonly used dimension, absorptive effort, has the lowest mean effect size. We also find that knowledge acquisition and innovation generation fully mediate the effect of absorptive knowledge base but partially mediate the effects of absorptive effort and absorptive process on firm performance. Furthermore, AC’s effects on firm outcomes vary across external knowledge contingencies. Overall, this paper provides a strong theoretical and empirical basis to advance a dimensional approach in AC research and thereby facilitates a more rigorous research necessary for cumulative knowledge development on this important topic.

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.

The present commentary addresses issues raised in four replies to my editorial on the functional properties of perceived self-efficacy (Bandura, 2012). In my comments on the paper by Jackson, Hill, and Roberts (2012), I discuss the arbitrary nature of “disposition” and question whether an essentially atheoretical computer-structured inventory based on a mixture of superficially assessed habitual behaviors constitutes a theory of personality. In another set of comments, which speak to the paper by Vancouver (2012), I identify two major flaws in Powers’ (1991) perceptual control theory and document experimental compromises in Vancouver’s efforts to demonstrate that goals and self-efficacy operate counteractively. My comments on the Yeo and Neal (2013) paper center on their unsuccessful efforts to explain and verify the proposition that general and specific self-efficacy work at cross-purposes. In response to Bledow’s (2013) entry, I address the conceptual ambiguity of his theory of unconscious self-motivation, misconstruals of the role of self-efficacy in the process of change, and marginalization of the functional role of consciousness in human behavior.

Heavy-tailed distributions occur often in empirical settings, making it difficult for management scholars to use linear regression models (LRMs) to investigate the nuanced relationships between dependent and predictor variables. Both frequentist and Bayesian quantile regression models (QRMs) are alternative techniques that can help management scholars overcome the hurdles associated with using LRMs. This study compares LRMs and QRMs and shows how the frequentist and Bayesian QRM can open up doors for management scholars to develop and test theory in novel and informative ways. In introducing Bayesian estimation, it also shows how Bayesian quantile regression can achieve what existing Bayesian LRM and frequentist QRM techniques cannot. Following this exploration, this paper explains how management researchers can systematically apply QRMs in two concrete empirical settings. The first example shows that organizational behavior and human resource scholars can apply QRMs to study questions related to gender inequality. The second example illustrates that QRMs enable strategy and organizational theory researchers to detect nuanced relations between environmental factors and firm performance. This paper demonstrates that the QRM is a comprehensive strategy capable of helping researchers obtain a complete regression picture for data with heavy-tailed distributions.

This editorial examines author-reported information on author team characteristics and decision points during the paper development process. In addition to presenting the typical practices of our authors, we present data linking author team practices to the actual recommendations and ratings made by reviewers on these papers. The ultimate goal of this editorial is to attempt to identify some potential drivers of publishing success at Journal of Management. While there does not seem to be a magic feather that predicts manuscript success, two of our findings suggest that seeking outside expertise when developing a team of authors, and frequent electronic communication with those authors, might have a positive effect on the assessed quality of the manuscript.

Despite the rapid growth of research on organizational sensemaking and an acknowledgment of the critical role of language in the sensemaking process, the literature on sensemaking and language is fragmented. In particular, there is no systematic review that explains the roles and functions of different linguistic elements in meaning construction. The purpose of this review paper is to develop an integrative theoretical framework that organizes existing research in a way that allows us to better understand how different linguistic processes shape the construction of meaning in sensemaking. First, we explain how a cognitive linguistic perspective elucidates how language provides the cognitive associations, schema, and frames used in sensemaking. Second, we discuss how a focus on the social practices of language use, as in rhetorical, narrative, or interactionist approaches, illuminates the patterns of meaning-making among organizational members in social interaction. Third, we explain how a focus on discourse helps us to understand how discursive structures enable or constrain sensemaking and thereby reproduce or transform systems of thought. This leads us to turn to the differences in these perspectives and suggest how they can be brought together in an integrative theoretical framework. Finally, we discuss the contributions of our framework and propose an agenda for future research focusing on the multifaceted role of language in sensemaking, intertextual and multimodal links in the language of sensemaking, the agentic and structural role of language in sensemaking, episodic and latent aspects of language use in sensemaking, and the role of power in discursive sensemaking.

The phenomenon of a platform owner entering its complementor spaces has been growing and, given its potential impact on the dynamics of competition in platform-mediated industries, has captured the interest of entrepreneurs, scholars, and policy makers. Empirical studies on the consequences of such platform owner entry have been scant so far and show mixed results for complementors. Drawing on competitive dynamics theory, our paper revisits an implicit assumption held in extant studies that allows us to hypothesize on dissimilar entry modes across owners, to study the implications of entry mode differences. We argue that how an owner enters its complementor spaces drives the level of competitive pressure that such an entry exerts on the affected complementors. In turn, this determines the size and valence of the repercussions on complementors’ product performance as well as their responses. Drawing on platform theory, we argue that an owner’s mode of entry into complementor spaces relates to that owner’s approach to platform governance. Using a unique panel dataset of health and fitness mobile apps in the Apple iOS and Google Play store, our results support our prediction that the mode of entry plays a significant role in the resulting complementor dynamics. We find contrasting modes of entry and resulting dynamics that arise between a platform that follows a closed and reigning approach to governance and one that follows an open and laissez-faire approach. Our findings help explain apparent contradictions in prior studies and extend our understanding of this increasingly common phenomenon in platform-mediated industries.

In the past decade there has been growing internationally-based evidence towards a trend in organizational staffing strategies which have placed emphasis upon the direct or brokered hiring of workers on temporary, fixed-term or “contingent” employment contracts in lieu of contracts with the implication of an ongoing relationship. Concurrently, there has been an emergence of research activity concerning individual and organizational-level consequences associated with the increased organizational reliance on fixed-term contracts in the workplace. This paper provides an overview of the contingent work literature and identifies topical themes and research questions which have been the primary focus of attention, as well as the possible causal interrelationships among the diverse constructs which have been examined. The paper highlights aspects of the existing research that may benefit from further exploration, as well as consideration of a number of theoretical and methodological issues which have also emerged. © 2004Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The use of organizational web sites for recruitment has become increasingly common. Despite their widespread growth, however, little is known about how these web sites influence recruitment outcomes. In the current paper, we present a model that explicates how job seekers interact with and respond to web site characteristics to predict various job seeker attitudes and behaviors. We suggest that job seekers are initially affected by the facade of a web site, comprised of the web site’s aesthetic and playfulness features. Coupled with system features of the web site, these initial affective reactions then influence perceptions of the usability of the web site. Perceptions of usability and affective reactions work through two key mediating constructs, job seeker search behavior and web site attitude, to ultimately predict applicant attraction. Throughout the paper we present a series of testable propositions that should serve to guide future research.

Over the past decade, the topic of social class in organizations has enjoyed unexpected growth. However, management researchers lack an in-depth understanding of what we know (and do not know) about the role of social class in organizations. This lack of understanding is exacerbated by the fragmentation of extant research across disciplinary and paradigmatic lines. Accordingly, in this paper, we review over 400 quantitative, qualitative, and conceptual articles and offer an in-depth look at the current state of literature on social class and work. Specifically, we introduce a framework for organizing extant social class research and draw attention to the institutionalization of social class distinctions in organizations. We also identify opportunities for scholars to engage understudied areas and to connect across paradigms. Overall, we hope to fuel future research and further organizational scholars’ understanding of this complex yet impactful phenomenon.

The amount and type of pay information made available by organizations to employees and between employees can have important effects on employee attitudes and behaviors as well as organizational performance. Although a large body of research on pay information exists, on topics ranging from pay transparency to pay secrecy, researchers have used inconsistent definitions (pay secrecy, openness, transparency, pay communications) and operationalizations that hinder knowledge development. In this paper, consistent with the theory of information asymmetry and based on research reviewed here, we promote a new integrative definition (“pay information disclosure”) that anchors both current and future research. We define the concept of pay information disclosure (PID) as the communication of relevant pay information between and among actors. By viewing pay information disclosure research in an information asymmetry context, with its focus on the causes and consequences of unequal access to information, we can synthesize research that examines motives for and outcomes of PID for individuals, organizations, and society. Based on our review, we outline a research agenda that identifies research questions and methods to stimulate studies to better understand the role of pay information in the workplace and in society.

Maternity, a period of transition beginning with prenatal bodily changes and progressing through postnatal lactation, is experienced by up to 66% of working women. Over the past several decades, research on maternity in the workplace has grown exponentially to reveal salient maternity biases that plague women as they navigate their employee and motherhood identities. With the aim of providing information that aids scholars and practitioners in better understanding the experiences of working mothers, we conducted a systematic review of 239 papers on maternity bias (i.e., formal, interpersonal, and internalized). Our interdisciplinary review discusses these three forms of bias and how they might present across different career stages for working mothers. Additionally, we review the antecedents that may drive maternity bias and the outcomes that result for working mothers who perceive or anticipate bias at work. Finally, we discuss areas of previous research aimed at overcoming maternity bias from the perspective of working mothers, their colleagues, and their organization. We conclude by discussing the trends brought to light in our review, the collective strengths and weaknesses of commonly adopted theoretical perspectives of the research reviewed, implications for combating maternity bias for women and their organizations, and recommendations for future research. Our model of maternity bias comprehensively reviews past work to provide insights into the bias that working mothers endure at work but also provides a path forward, as better understanding these biases empower organizations, coworkers, and employees to remediate maternity bias.

Disciplinary advances are dependent on two intertwined pillars: refinements in theory and refinement in methods. Numerous guides exist for making a theoretical contribution, yet mystery surrounds what exactly constitutes a methodological contribution. Our goal is to eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, this mystery. We draw on decades of collective experiences as authors, reviewers, and editors of methodologically oriented inquiry to offer insights about how to develop and evaluate methodological contributions worthy of publication in premier management journals. We provide a typology of different kinds of methodological advancements, describe contributions across a method's life cycle phases, and provide recommendations for avoiding common mistakes in developing and publishing papers that offer a methodological contribution. In doing so, we consider works whose methodological contributions are their sole source of value added as well as empirical studies that have a methodological contribution as one of multiple sources of value added.

Who constitutes the top management team (TMT)? What are the boundary conditions that distinguish the TMT from other managers? Despite nearly four decades of TMT research, the concept of the TMT remains poorly defined and often goes undefined in empirical TMT research. We conducted a review of the TMT literature to better understand how the TMT construct is conceptualized and operationalized, to identify gaps in alignment and consistency, and to develop a roadmap for scholars to improve both aspects of the literature. We review all TMT-related papers published in Financial Times 50 (FT50) journals between 1984 and 2019. Our analysis reveals (1) a wide discrepancy in conceptual definitions of the TMT among the minority of studies actually providing a conceptual definition, (2) operationalizations seemingly based more on data availability rather than alignment with a conceptual definition, and as a result, (3) an overall lack of coherence in understanding of the TMT phenomenon. We explore these challenges, develop a definition of the TMT that integrates insight from the academic and practitioner communities, and build a roadmap for future TMT and upper echelons research.

The most consensually shared insight in leadership research may be that in understanding leadership effectiveness, multiple elements of leadership should be considered: different leader behaviors, psychological traits and states, demographic attributes, etc. The notion that leadership consists of multiple elements begs the question of whether these elements have interactive effects, but the empirical study of interactive effects of elements of leadership is far less common. Studying interacting elements of leadership has particularly strong potential to bridge siloed perspectives in leadership research, however: When interactive effects concern elements drawn from different research perspectives, their interpretation requires theory bridging these perspectives. An integrative review of empirical studies of interacting elements of leadership can therefore uniquely contribute to the development of integrative theory bridging siloed perspectives in leadership research. Drawing on 117 empirical papers reporting tests of interactions of elements of leadership, we provide such a review. We identify four perspectives on such interactions, which we call the relationship, status, social identity, and congruence perspectives. We also outline how the field can build towards integration of these perspectives.

This paper analyzes the link between economics and the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. Although, historically there has been a strong link between the disciplines of strategy and economics, explicit citations of key RBV works has been disappointingly low in mainstream economics journals. However, there are substantial bodies of works that build implicitly on the ideas of the RBV, in particular the consequences of path dependency on firm behavior, to explain a number of different economic issues. The issues we review in the paper are all influenced by path dependency and include: (1) diversification and market entry, (2) corporate refocusing, and market exit, (3) explaining innovative activity among firms, (4) diversification and performance and (5) industry evolution with rapidly changing products. Furthermore, we identify a number of reasons that may have limited the explicit use of the RBV in economics, which include the problems of causal ambiguity, tautology and firm heterogeneity. Finally, potential areas for future research are identified, which include the interaction of the RBV and Agency Theory, the RBV as a dynamic theory, using the RBV to explain radical change and the application of the RBV to issues of antitrust.

As a means to enhance prescriptive theory on a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation, this paper addresses the strengths and weaknesses of three approaches to measurement: managerial perceptions, firm behaviors, and resource allocations. We examine a set of recent studies employing these approaches, propose important contingencies regarding their use, and suggest that measurement accuracy can be improved by using a triangulation of methods. The paper concludes with a discussion of theoretical, resource availability, and interpretability considerations in measurement selection.

This paper provides an overview of the literature on interorganizational relationships. Although the literature on interorganizational relationships is extensive, a pervasive theme that is either explicit or implicit in the majority of the articles is the simple notion of whether interorganizational relationships make sense and whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. This article reviews six widely used theoretical paradigms that explain interorganizational relationship formation, including transaction costs economics, resource dependency, strategic choice, stakeholder theory, organizational learning, and institutional theory. Although each paradigm alone is insufficient to capture the complexities of interorganizational relationship formation, the fact that interorganizational relationships can be justified from such diverse theoretical backgrounds is impressive. The paper also reviews the six forms of interorganizational relationships most commonly pursued in practice and discussed in the literature, including joint ventures, networks, consortia, alliances, trade associations, and interlocking directorates. Through these discussions, we elaborate on the potential advantages and disadvantages of participation in interorganizational relationships.

In this paper, we critique the literature on MNC-Host government bargaining power relationship, and propose an integrative theoretical model within the resource-based view of the firm. Recognizing that a firm’s bargaining power is directly related to rent generation, we analyze how firm-specific resources provide the basis of a sustainable bargaining power for the MNC vis-á-vis the host government. Furthermore, we identify several industry and country characteristics as moderators of the relationship between MNC resources and bargaining power. In the last section of the paper, we offer directions for future research and theory development in this area.

This paper explores the extent to which CEO ideological divergence influences firm lobbying strategy. Because a CEO’s political ideological disposition is shown to affect firm outcomes, we theorize there are nonmarket strategic implications when the governing party is divergent or convergent from their ideology. Accordingly, we integrate insights from organizational fit literature regarding value congruence and strategic complementarity in order to examine whether CEO political ideological divergence affects lobbying investment and changes the balance between internal and external lobbying activities. Further, we theorize that these outcomes are less pronounced for firms that are highly regulated. Our results support our theorizing, therefore, by identifying how CEO ideology interacts with the opposing political ideology. We unpack the ways in which CEO political ideology influences firm political behavior, thus extending research on CEO political ideology and lobbying.

This paper reviews the growing body of work on network dynamics in organizational research, focusing on a corpus of 187 articles—both “micro” (i.e., interpersonal) and “macro” (i.e., interorganizational)—published between 2007 and 2020. We do not see “network dynamics” as a single construct; rather, it is an umbrella term covering a wide territory. In the first phase of our two-phase review, we present a taxonomy that organizes this territory into three categories: (1) network change (i.e., the emergence, evolution, and transformation of network ties and structures), (2) the occurrence of relational events (i.e., modeling the sequence of discrete actions generated by one actor and directed towards one or more other actors), and (3) coevolution (i.e., the process whereby network and actor attributes influence each other over time). Our review highlights differences between network dynamics based on relational states (e.g., a friendship) and relational events (e.g., an email message), examines the drivers and effects of network dynamics, and in a methodological appendix, clarifies the assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses of different analytical approaches for studying network dynamics. In the second phase of our review, we critically reflect on the findings from the first phase and sketch out a rough agenda for future research, organized in terms of four overarching themes: the interplay between the dynamics of social networks conceived as relational states and relational events, mechanisms underlying network dynamics, outcomes of network dynamics, and the role of cognition.

The burgeoning digital-platforms literature across multiple business disciplines has primarily characterized the platform as a market or network. Although the organizing role of platform owners is well recognized, the literature lacks a coherent approach to understanding organizational governance in the platform context. Drawing on classic organizational governance theories, this paper views digital platforms as a distinct organizational form where the mechanisms of incentive and control routinely take center stage. We systematically review research on digital platforms, categorize specific governance mechanisms related to incentive and control, and map a multitude of idiosyncratic design features studied in prior research onto these mechanisms. We further develop an integrative framework to synthesize the review and to offer novel insights into the interrelations among three building blocks: value, governance, and design. Using this framework as a guide, we discuss specific directions for future research and offer a number of illustrative questions to help advance our knowledge about digital platforms’ governance mechanisms and design features.

The eta-squared (η2) from a one-way random effects ANOVA is an index commonly used to estimate group-level properties of data in multilevel research. Under some circumstances, however, η2 values provide biased estimates of the group-level properties. Biased estimates occur because the magnitude of the 1.12 in a one-way rando m effects ANOVA is partially a function of group size. In this paper, the relationship between group size and η is described, and a simulation verifying the relationship between group size and 112 is conducted. The simulation demonstrates the conditions under which η does and does not provide a biased estimate of group-level properties. The paper concludes by (a) discussing corrections for η2, and (b) providing guidelines for calculating estimates of group-level properties in samples having unequal group sizes.

This paper describes a study of the effects of a company’s organization structure and environmental context on the relationship between that company’s dominant strategy formation pattern and its sales growth rate. Data collected, from 112 manufacturing firms operating in 78 industries were analyzed using moderated regression analysis. Results indicate that planned strategies are positively related to sales growth among firms with mechanistic structures and operating in hostile environments. Emergent strategies, on the other hand, are more positively related to sales growth among firms with organic structures and operating in benign environments. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications and limitations of the research.

Historical and contemporary accounts suggest that natural elements can facilitate creativity in one's work. Despite this potential connection, researchers have largely overlooked how nature may enhance employees’ creativity, an oversight that takes on additional meaningfulness in light of increasing investments by organizations in work designs that bring employees in contact with nature. In this paper, we draw from attention restoration theory (ART) to develop a model explaining how contact with nature at work may affect employee creativity—via broader cognitive processing. In addition, we follow the guidance of ART to deepen our understanding of for whom the creativity-generating effects of nature will be most impactful. Specifically, we describe how employees with high levels of openness to experience are particularly primed to experience expanded cognitive processing due to contact with nature at work. We test this model using a mixed-method research approach: two online experiments in the United States (Studies 1 and 2); two multiwave, multisource field studies in Taiwan and Indonesia (Studies 3 and 4), and an experience-sampling field study in Canada (Study 5).

The use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in management research has increased over 2,117% in recent years, from 6 papers in 2012 to 133 in 2019. Among scholars, though, there is a mixture of excitement about the practical and logistical benefits of using MTurk and skepticism about the validity of the data. Given that the practice is rapidly increasing but scholarly opinions diverge, the Journal of Management commissioned this review and consideration of best practices. We hope the recommendations provided here will serve as a catalyst for more robust, reproducible, and trustworthy MTurk-based research in management and related fields.

The sharing economy is estimated to add hundreds of billions of dollars to the global economy and is rapidly growing. However, trust-based commercial sharing—the participation in for-profit peer-to-peer sharing-economy activity—has negative as well as positive consequences for both the interacting parties and uninvolved third parties. To share responsibly, one needs to be aware of the various consequences of sharing. We provide a comprehensive, preregistered, systematic literature review of the consequences of trust-based commercial sharing, identifying 93 empirical papers spanning regions, sectors, and scientific disciplines. Via in-depth coding of the empirical work, we provide an authoritative overview of the economic, social, and psychological consequences of trust-based commercial sharing for involved parties, including service providers, users, and third parties. Based on the aggregate insights, we identify the common denominators for the positive and negative consequences. Whereas a well-functioning infrastructure of payment, insurance, and communication enables the positive consequences, ambiguity about rules, roles, and regulations causes non-negligible negative consequences. To overcome these negative consequences and promote more responsible forms of sharing, we propose the transparency-based sharing framework. Based on the framework, we outline an agenda for future research and discuss emerging managerial implications that arise when trying to increase transparency without jeopardizing the potential of trust-based commercial sharing.

An organization’s senior leaders, given their positions at the apex of power within the organization, shape its vision, strategies, organizational design, and culture. Yet the research on diversity has not sufficiently held them to account for the dynamics of demographic diversity and inclusion within their organizations and for producing performance benefits from diversity. This paper proposes that a fuller understanding of diversity and inclusion requires a focus on senior leaders’ roles in diversity leadership. Specifically, drawing on strategic leadership theory, it proposes a framework for strategic diversity leadership that focuses on the role of senior leaders in shaping the meaning of diversity in their organizations. It proposes that how senior leaders envision diversity within their organizations and symbolize its value in their communications and actions affects the extent and nature of diversity and inclusion, and through them a range of benefits to organizational performance. It also discusses potential antecedents affecting strategic diversity leadership and calls for the development of a theory of strategic diversity leadership.

Organizational adaptation is a ubiquitous concept in management and organization research. Discussed in many theories, sometimes under different labels, the notion of adaptation is related to organizations being congruent to the environments within which they operate. Research traditions including behavioral theory (see A Behavioral Theory of the Firm), contingency theory as explained in Differentiation and Integration in Complex Organizations, population ecology (see The Population Ecology of Organizations), institutional theory elaborated upon in both Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony and The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields, resource dependence (see The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective), and evolutionary economics (see An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change) all address organizational adaptation—though they emphasize different mechanisms. Adaptation, regarded as the strategic choice that organizations make, is often contrasted with the notion of selection driven by the determinism imposed by environments (see Organizational Adaptation: Strategic Choice and Environmental Determinism). Adaptive organizations are those able to obtain congruence both within organizations, reflected as congruence in internal functions and strategies, and across organizations, reflected as congruence with the needs of the external environment. The form of adaptation is also particularly relevant. Organizational theory has viewed adaptation as a state, an ability, and as a process. States of adaptation discuss stability and adaptation at points in time. From states of adaptation, adaptive abilities determine the impetus of adaptation and the locus of adaptation within organizations. Finally, the adaptation processes describe the means by which organizations adapt the challenges they face in negotiating new positions within environments. Research has covered each of these areas and this bibliography is organized primarily around forms of adaptation to elaborate on the ways in which it has been viewed by organizational theory and strategy scholars. The variety of research traditions examining organizational adaptation have not always aligned, however. Each research tradition seeks to explain different outcomes, from survival to performance to change. Thus, across theoretical traditions, the adaptation construct has been measured in many different ways—and often not as congruence with the external environment. In fact, this represents one of the challenges that recent research has identified as holding back progression of the adaptation research agenda. As such, this bibliography concludes with a section on issues in adaptation research in order to assist researchers in pursuing research in this area.

Conservation of resources (COR) theory proposes that mistreatment by customers (termed “customer mistreatment”) can deplete employees’ resources, lessen their ability to regulate their behaviors, and result in them engaging in customer-directed deviant behavior. However, COR has been criticized for its lack of precision regarding how this process unfolds. Integrating the person-situation interactionist perspective with COR theory, the present paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of COR theory by explicating how individual characteristics and work context—namely, psychological detachment and supervisory unfairness—can combine to attenuate/exacerbate the relationship between customer mistreatment and employees’ customer-directed deviant behavior. Using a multilevel field study with 1,092 daily-based surveys among 157 Korean call-center representatives, our results show that frontline employees’ emotional exhaustion mediates the relationship between customer mistreatment and customer-directed deviant behavior that occurs on the next working day. When faced with customer mistreatment, employees with lower (vs. higher) psychological detachment were more likely to be emotionally exhausted and engage in customer-directed deviant behavior on the next working day. Moreover, their emotional exhaustion predicted customer-directed deviant behavior more so when their supervisors treated them unfairly (vs. fairly). Taken together, the results show that the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion was strongest among employees with low (vs. high) psychological detachment and who reported more (vs. less) supervisory unfairness. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as directions for future research are discussed.

This conceptual paper presents the analytical theory of agency (ATA), an overlooked philosophical approach to the concept of action, to develop its theoretical basis in routines research in which the constructs of action and agency play crucial roles. It expounds, in the framework of ATA, the ideas of the spectrum of intentionality, kinds of action, and collective agency, which help advance the rigor of action-theoretical concepts in routines research as well as reveal the rationale of the microfoundational approach to routine actions. To uncover the developmental potential of ATA, the article discusses the most crucial conceptual challenges for routines research; it also briefly examines the limitations and future work related to using ATA in the management field.

A substantial proportion of the workforce experiences financial precarity, which is defined as persistent concern about one's personal financial welfare. Research suggests that financial precarity often harms performance at work. In this paper, we investigate whether characteristics of the work context disproportionately occupied by people at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder (low autonomy, high routinization, high interdependence, low social support) heighten the detrimental impact of financial precarity on performance. Drawing on role stress theory, we propose that these characteristics alter the degree to which the cognitive resources appropriated by financial precarity interfere with the resource requirements of a person's work role. Our predictions are tested using experience sampling data covering 8 consecutive observation days for 956 individuals in the United States (k = 7,015). Analyzing daily observations allows us to distinguish financial precarity from the day-to-day experience of transient financial events. We observed that financial precarity significantly undermined the quality of one's work during a given day, but this relationship was driven by those working in contexts with low levels of autonomy, routinization, and coworker support. This pattern was only observed for those experiencing financial precarity, not those only exposed to a negative financial event in a given day. The research demonstrates that specific characteristics of the work environment can lead to inequality in who bears the performance costs associated with financial precarity.

Many institutional investors are active political donors, but the impact that their political partisanship has on corporate practices and policies has mostly eluded academic examination. As political donations can reflect investors’ views and values, we theorize that the nature of investors’ political donations can shape managerial decision-making in important ways. We test this idea by examining changes in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, an area where managers have a high degree of discretion over how they account for investors’ views and values. Our theory introduces two focal constructs: political position, which captures the average political affiliation of actors within a group, and political dispersion, which captures the variance in political positions across group members. After hypothesizing a positive relationship between liberal-positioned investors and a firm's CSR activities, we argue that political dispersion among investors mitigates this positive effect. To account for between-group dispersion, we also suggest that liberal-positioned investors have a stronger positive effect on CSR in firms with more conservative managers. Our analysis of 19 years of shareholder political donations data for 2,062 U.S.-based firms supports our theory. This paper lays new groundwork for research on shareholder politics in management, and contributes to research on investor influence, political ideology, and CSR.

Employees with disability-related communication impairment often experience isolation from professional connections that can negatively affect their careers. Management research suggests that having lower quality leader relationships can be an obstacle to the development of professional connections for employees with disabilities. However, in this paper we suggest that lower quality leader–member exchange (LMX) relationships may not be a uniform hurdle for the professional isolation of employees with disability-related communication impairment. Drawing on psychological disengagement theory, we predict that employees with more severe, rather than less severe, communication impairment develop resilience to challenges in lower quality LMX relationships by psychologically disengaging from professional connections and, in turn, bear fewer negative consequences of professional isolation on career outcomes. In two studies of deaf and hard of hearing employees, we find that in lower quality LMX relationships employees with more severe communication impairment perceive being less isolated than employees with less severe communication impairment, and, in turn, report better career outcomes. Overall, our findings suggest that employees with more severe communication impairment may develop effective coping strategies to manage challenges of perceived professional isolation for career outcomes when in lower quality LMX relationships.