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My research journey spans a period of exciting new theories informing innovative practices in businesses and other organizations and a period littered with concerns about the research-practice gap, questionable research practices, and a strong emphasis on the number of publications in top journals for hiring and promotions. These recent developments led to the dilution of both scientific freedom and scientific responsibility in our scientific work. I offer my research journey to illustrate the importance of both, with the most recent endeavor in a global responsible research movement to produce useful and credible knowledge that will enable business and management practices to serve all stakeholders and to solve the world's most challenging problems. Emerging institutional changes in business schools, journals, associations, and accreditation agencies provide hope that scholars will soon find the conditions favorable for both freedom and responsibility to support their aspiration to pursue research that will contribute to better societies and meaningful careers.

Management research has been criticized for the gap between research and practice (the relevance issue) since the early 1990s. In recent years, there has been an equally important reckoning that bu...

Optimal or rational decision making is not possible due to informational constraints and limits in computation capability of humans (March & Simon, 1958; March, 1978). This bounded rationality serves as a filtering process in decision making among business executives (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). In this study, we propose the concept of CEO reflective capacity as a behavior-oriented cognitive capability that may overcome to some extent the pervasive limitation of bounded rationality in executive decision-making. Following Hinkin's (1998) method and two executive samples, we developed and validated a three-dimensional measure of CEO reflective capacity. Based on two-wave surveys of CEOs and their executive-subordinates in 213 Chinese small-medium sized firms, we tested and confirmed three hypotheses on how CEO reflective capacity is related to a firm's sustainability performance (including economic, societal, and environmental dimensions) through the mediating mechanisms of strategic decision comprehensiveness and CEO behavioral complexity. We discuss the contribution of this study to the literature on the upper echelons and information processing perspectives. We also identify the implications for future research on strategic leadership and managerial cognition in complex and dynamic contexts.

This essay takes a brief stock of the progress in the transformation of business research toward tackling the grand challenges and solving many wicked problems facing business and society today. Efforts are underway in journals, schools, academic associations and accreditation agencies to encourage attention on the societal impact of faculty research in business schools. This transformation is long overdue, and it reflects the will of the scientific community to self-correct the dual crises of research credibility and research-practice gap that dominated the business research ecosystem in the past three decades. Reflecting on the journey of this self-correction as a co-founder of the Responsible Research in Business and Management network, I draw on Robert Merton’s normative structure of science and the idea of scientific freedom and scientific responsibility, to suggest five scientific norms for the business and management research community as part of our third responsibility, in addition to our responsibilities for usefulness and credibility. Accepting this third responsibility will ensure that going forward, we will continuously and consistently deliver on our two major responsibilities of producing both credible and useful knowledge for better business practices and a better world.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to disentangle individual-level gender differences and norm-based gender roles and stereotypes to provide a finer-grained understanding of why female and male entrepreneurs experience different growth returns from their social networks across different national cultures. Design/methodology/approach This research uses a survey of 637 (278 female and 359 male) entrepreneurs across four nations varying on relational culture (importance of social relationships) and gender egalitarianism (importance of gender equality or neutrality in social and economic roles). Findings The authors find evidence that male entrepreneurs in high relational cultures benefit the most in terms of growth in revenues from larger network size while women in low relational cultures benefit the least. In cultures with low gender egalitarianism, male entrepreneurs benefit more from their larger social networks than did the female entrepreneurs. Practical implications The study presents implications for female entrepreneurs’ behaviors to gain more benefits from their social networks, especially in cultural contexts where relationships are important or where there is equality in gender roles. In these contexts, they may need to develop other strategies and rely less on social networks to grow their ventures. Social implications This research suggests that female entrepreneurs still are disadvantaged in some societies. National policy may focus on developing more opportunities and providing more support to women entrepreneurs as a valuable contributor to economic growth of the nations. Originality/value The authors disentangle the effects of gender differences, norm-based gender stereotypes and networks on entrepreneurial outcomes.

The mission ofManagement and Organization Review, founded in 2005, is to publish research about Chinese management and organizations, foreign organizations operating in China, or Chinese firms operating globally. The aspiration is to develop knowledge that is unique to China as well as universal knowledge that may transcend China. Articulated in the first editorial published in the inaugural issue of MOR (2005) and further elaborated in a second editorial (Tsui, 2006), the question of contextualization is framed, discussing the role of context in the choices of the research question, theory, measurement, and research design. The idea of ‘engaged indigenous research’ by Van de Ven, Meyer, and Jing (2018) describes the highest level of contextualization, with the local context serving as the primary factor guiding all the decisions of a research project. Tsui (2007: 1353) refers to it as ‘deep contextualization’.

This article develops concepts of microdivisionalization and microbusiness units or MBUs. The structure and operation of the microdivisionalized firm and its MBUs are shown in the context of the Ha...

Organization design seeks to balance potentially conflicting objectives while achieving a broader mission. EO13769 created a challenge for the president of the Academy of Management in leading through these conflicts, as President Anita McGahan describes: how to be true to her own moral values while leading an organization with well-established design constraints, and members with diverse opinions. This article shares the perspectives of 12 scholars on the lessons we can learn from Professor McGahan’s leadership of a constraining organization through a challenging time.

In this study, by proposing, defining, measuring, and theorizing on CEO reflective capacity, we convey that CEO cognitive capability warrants systematic research in the upper echelons and manageria...

Management scholarship has grown tremendously over the past 60 years. Most of our paradigms originated from North America in the 1950s to the 1980s, inspired by the empirical phenomena and cultural, philosophical, and research traditions of the time. Here following, we highlight the contextual differences between the East and the West in terms of institutions, philosophies, and cultural values and how they are manifest in contemporary management practices. Inspired by theory development in management studies over time, we offer insights into the conditions facilitating new theories, and how these might apply to emergent theories from the East. We discuss the contributions of the six papers included in this special research forum as exemplars of integrating Eastern concepts and contexts to enrich existing management theories. We highlight the difficulty with testing Eastern constructs as distinct from Western ones by discussing the properties of equivalence, salience, and infusion in constructs. We provide directions for future research and encourage an agentic view to creating new theories and paradigms.

We discuss three traditional Chinese philosophies—Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism—as they relate to Western-originated leadership theories. We analyze articles reporting interviews with fifteen contemporary Chinese business leaders to determine how their leadership practices reflect the traditional philosophies. We discuss future research directions for Chinese and global leadership. In a response to world-wide call for developing indigenous theories and knowledge about management, we encourage scholars to consider cultural settings and traditional wisdom in their studies of contemporary leadership practices.

In 1987, Qinghou Zong and two partners borrowed 140,000 RMB and started their entrepreneurial venture in Hangzhou: Wahaha. The first year was a hard period of exploration and learning, and Zong was selling ice cream, soft drinks and exercise books from a tricycle. It was not until the second year that Wahaha made remarkable profits, by producing nutritional drinks. Zong chose the name ‘Wahaha’ for his company; the literal translation is ‘laughing child’, which means a happy child. Wahaha initially aimed to tap a niche in the market for a ‘children’s liquid nutrient’. With Chinese single-child families, and the parents’ full concern for their single child, Wahaha was a resounding success from the beginning. Nowadays its product covers eight categories and has more than 150 products, including dairy drinks, bottled water, carbonated soft drinks, fruit juice, tea drinks, health foods and canned foods.

Lenovo was founded in Beijing in 1984 as Legend, and incorporated in Hong Kong in 1988. It acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005 and agreed to acquire its Intel-based server business in 2014. As a Chinese multinational computer technology company with headquarters in Beijing, China, and Morrisville, North Carolina, USA, Lenovo designs, develops, manufactures and sells personal computers, tablet computers, smartphones, workstations, servers, electronic storage devices, IT management software and smart televisions. In 2014, Lenovo was the world’s largest personal computer vendor by unit sales. Lenovo started its smartphone business from scratch in 2012 and had reached fourth place in the world by 2014.

Five-Star Holdings Ltd., founded on 18 December 1998 with 236 million RMB registered capital and headquartered in Nanjing, is a diversified investment enterprise engaged in modern service industrial chain and supply chain management, real estate, finance and investment, and specialised operations. Five-Star Holdings established the famous and successful Five-Star Electric Appliances chain, which achieved the top third position in the industry in only six years. In 2006, they formed a joint venture with Best Buy, the world’s largest home appliances enterprise. In early 2009, Five-Star Holdings was officially spun off from Best Buy.

Established in 1984, China Vanke Co. Ltd., is the largest residential property developer in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Vanke annually provides homes for more than 400,000 households, and had a total sales revenue worth 140 billion RMB by the end of 2012. Vanke has focused on major regions such as the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Bohai-Rim region, and now has a business presence in more than 60 cities across China. Since its stock market launch in 1991, the company’s revenue and net profit have grown at compound annual rates of 30.2 % and 34.3 %. Forbes identified Vanke as one of the most admired Chinese companies, and as the best Asian company. Internationally renowned media such as Investor Relations (now IR), The Asset and Asiamoney (now GlobalCapital Asia) have presented the company with awards for ‘Best Corporate Governance’ and ‘Best Investor Relations.’

Founded in 1992, HC360.com (HC Group for the company and its subsidiaries) is a leading business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce service provider in China (People’s Republic of China—PRC). Its core internet product is Mai-Mai-Tong, a strong online marketing platform, with professional services, and cutting-edge internet technologies that have made HC Group a reliable trading platform with full e-commerce services focusing on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Established at Northeastern University, Shenyang, China in 1991, the history of e Neusoft can be traced back to 1988, when Dr. Jiren Liu from Northeastern University worked with two other colleagues to set up a computer software and network engineering research lab with 30,000 RMB and three computers.

In 1987, as China’s first commercial bank founded by an enterprise and a pilot bank in the efforts of the Chinese government to drive financial reform, China Merchants Bank (CMB) was established at the forefront of China’s reform and opening-up campaign, in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. In 2002, CMB was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange; and in 2006, the bank was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Founded in 1992, the Fosun Group is a classic story of success following China’s reform and opening-up. Moreover, the Fosun Group is becoming a representative model for Chinese home and global investments by actively implementing an investment model ‘Combining China’s Growth Momentum with Global Resources’. In recent years, Fosun has put great effort into internationalisation and global investments. The most recent investments include the 2015 acquisition of the French Club Mediterranee SA (Club Med) and a strategic alliance with British tour operator, the Thomas Cook Group.

Tecsun was established in 1992, and registered as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Federal Tecsun, Inc. of the United States in 1997 in the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). The company specialises in research, development, design and manufacture of American-style modern wood and steel homes. Tecsun (Suzhou) Homes Co. Ltd. is one of the most talked-about enterprises in China for its value-based management and sustainable human resources (HR) management. The Tecsun Employee Code of Conduct (the ‘Code’), spelling out the company’s rules and regulations, has been hailed as the ‘Management Bible for Chinese enterprises’. Before its third edition was published in 2013, a half-million copies had been, sold and it had undergone 28 printings.

Established in Beijing in 1993, Vantone Holdings Co. Ltd. (hereafter Vantone) is one of China’s largest and most innovative professional real estate investment companies. The company’s business is concentrated in high-growth urban areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Hangzhou and Chengdu. With its value-driven and innovation-oriented strategies, Vantone specialises in real estate investment with two major businesses: direct investment and fund investment. The company’s business activities range across real estate development, industry estate, fund management and asset management.

As discussed in Chap. 2, there has been little empirical research focusing specifically on executive leadership in Chinese private enterprises. The existing literature is composed mainly of large-sample survey studies of executive leadership, with no distinction between firms with different ownerships. Given an extremely dynamic, complex and inhospitable environment, both institutional and social, we argue that the emergence and success of the vibrant private economy can be ascribed primarily to the exceptional leadership of the founders of private enterprises as well as the other leaders who have worked with them. To further develop this insight, we interviewed 13 carefully selected and extraordinarily successful Chinese leaders of private firms to gain an in-depth understanding of their unique backgrounds, management practices and thoughts on leadership. Chaps. 3 to 15 contain the interview transcripts. In this chapter, we present the results of the content analysis of these 13 interviews.

Established in Guangdong (China) and with the ‘LI-NING’ trademark registered in 1989, the company was founded by Ning Li, a well-known Chinese gymnast, after he retired from competing. Li Ning Company Ltd. was the first leading sports brand enterprise in China. More than twenty years later, it has become a leading Chinese sports brand in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and is exploring international markets.

Founded on 22 August 1996 after obtaining approval from the People’s Bank of China, Taikang Life Insurance Co. Ltd (hereafter Taikang) is one of largest insurance companies in China, offering services ranging from life insurance to asset management.

The Alibaba Group was founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma (Ma Yun), a former English teacher from Hangzhou, China, who aspired to help make the internet accessible, trustworthy and beneficial for everyone. Since its inception, it has developed leading businesses in consumer e-commerce, online payments, business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces and cloud computing, reaching internet users in more than 240 countries and regions.

According to the IMF World Economic Outlook database, in 2014 China became the largest economy in the world, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$18.088 trillion (16.6 of the world total), based on purchasing power parity (PPP) valuation, surpassing the USA (US$17.348 trillion; 15.9 of the world total) (IMF 2015). It is an average GDP (PPP) per capita of $13,224, a growth of 42,764 % from 1980, the beginning of its economic reform period, when GDP (PPP) was US$309 per capita (IMF 2015). The estimated calculation of IMF data put China in the top position in 2015 in terms of PPP.

We develop a social–structural perspective on the relationship between employee–organization relationships (EORs) and team creativity. We argue that the mutual investment EOR approach, in which employers expect high levels of employee contributions and offer extensive inducements, will be associated with higher team creativity relative to other EOR approaches. We also advance the argument that this relationship will be mediated by team member work-related communication density and that the mediated relationship will be stronger when team members’ tasks are complex. We find support for the model in a two-wave study of 1,807 employees in 229 teams in 55 Chinese high-technology organizations. We discuss the implications for future employment relationship research and practice.

Summary In studying the effect of employment-relationship practices on employees, research has largely ignored individual differences, both cross-culturally and within cultures. In this study, the authors examine the moderating effect of middle managers' traditionality, a within-culture value orientation regarding submission to authority and endorsement of hierarchical role relationships, on their responses to an organization's employee–organization relationship practices. Based on social learning and social exchange theories, the authors expect the more traditional middle managers to respond less positively in terms of their performance and commitment to high levels of expected contributions and the associated psychological empowerment but respond more positively to high levels of offered inducements. Using a sample of 535 middle managers from 40 companies in China, the authors find support for all hypotheses except the moderating effect of traditionality on the relationship between offered inducements and performance. Additional analysis reveals that less-traditional managers responded to economic rewards (but not developmental rewards) with higher job performance. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for research and the practice of employment relationships. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The above article from Management and Organization Review, published online 7 SEP 2011, has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal's outgoing Editor-in-Chief Anne Tsui, the journal's incoming Editor-in-Chief Arie Y. Lewin, and John Wiley & Sons Asia Pty Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to unattributed overlap with work previously published in Academy of Management Review, 34(4): 586–591: ‘Editor's comments: The better angels of our nature – Ethics and integrity in publishing process’ by Marshall Schminke. The editors and authors joindy wrote a letter, available below, to explain the process used to come to the retraction decision.The purpose of this letter is to explain the circumstances and reasons for the retraction of the paper ‘Ethics and integrity of the publishing process: Myths, facts, and a roadmap’ by Schminke and Ambrose in Management and Organization Review (MOR), Volume 7 issue 3, pages 397 to 406, November 2011.Retraction of a published paper due to self-plagiarism is an unpleasant if not painful experience for both journal editors and authors. Self-plagiarism means that authors have used materials in another paper (whether published or in working paper format) without attributing the source of the materials or ideas. In this instance, the materials being self-plagiarized are from an earlier editorial written by the lead author. Self-plagiarism is in violation of publication ethics, according to the Committee of Publication Ethics' guidelines on suspected plagiarism (http://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/plagiarism%20B_0.pdf).

In this article, we examine the concept of humility among chief executive officers (CEOs) and the process through which it is connected to integration in the top management team (TMT) and middle managers’ responses. We develop and validate a comprehensive measure of humility using multiple samples and then test a multilevel model of how CEOs’ humility links to the processes of top and middle managers. Our methodology involves survey data gathered twice from 328 TMT members and 645 middle managers in 63 private companies in China. We find CEO humility to be positively associated with empowering leadership behaviors, which in turn correlates with TMT integration. TMT integration then positively relates to middle managers’ perception of having an empowering organizational climate, which is then associated with their work engagement, affective commitment, and job performance. Findings confirm our hypotheses based on social information processing theory: humble CEOs connect to top and middle managers through collective perceptions of empowerment at both levels. Qualitative data from interviews with 51 CEOs provide additional insight into the meaning of humility among CEOs and differences between those with high and low humility.

Scholarship refers to the formal and serious study of subjects such as medicine,physics, biology, history, philosophy, and business. Good scholarship demandsthat researchers apply rigorous scientific methods to find valid knowledge thatcan improve life, both human and nonhuman. Hence, scholarship and scienceshare the common ideal of contributing to the development of a better society anda better world. Albert Einstein said, ‘Concern for making life better for ordinaryhumans must be the chief objective of science’ (Einstein qtd. in Isaacson, 2008:374). Similarly, Oscar Handlin, one of the greatest contemporary historians,argued ‘Scholarship has to prove its worth not on its own terms, but by its serviceto the nation and to the world’ (Handlin qtd. in Boyer, 1996: 17). Clearly, schol-arship, science, and the idea of ‘humanism’ are connected. In this editorial, wediscuss the importance of humanistic scholarship – scholarship for the purpose ofimprovinghumanwelfarebyfocusingonthesocialoutcomesoforganizations–forbusiness research and particularly for Chinese management research.We begin by analyzing the current status of humanistic studies in generalmanagement research and then provide data on humanism-oriented research inChinese management over the past thirty years. Results show a dramatic domi-nance of economic focus relative to human welfare focus, especially in the studiespublished in the Chinese journals. We conclude with a call for more researchon humanism-related topics to counterbalance the dominant economic focus.

We examine how supervisor-triggered newcomer affect may link supervisor behaviors with newcomer adjustment and performance. Using emotion as feedback system theory and the approach-avoidance framew...

In this study, the authors examine factors that explain international scholars’ success in publishing in North American management journals through collaboration. Drawing on the international entry mode literature, the authors propose that international collaboration teams are more successful when they increase complementary resources and reduce transaction costs. A sample of 364 articles from 10 North American management journals shows that teams published in higher impact management journals when they had U.S. or Canadian collaborators, higher proportions of assistant professors, and less gender diversity. Combining additional findings from 23 semistructured interviews, the authors provide a research model to explain the resources and costs embedded in international collaboration teams as well as mechanisms that help transform costs into resources.

In seeking to understand the factors contributing to work group creativity in Chinese organizations, we explored the roles of two different leadership styles (transformational and authoritarian) that Chinese leaders play in group creativity through influencing internal group processes, i.e., collective efficacy and knowledge sharing among group members. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 163 work groups involving 973 employees in twelve Chinese companies. We found transformational leadership to relate positively but authoritarian leadership to relate negatively to group creativity, mediated by both collective efficacy and knowledge sharing among members within the group. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on group leadership, group creativity and cross-cultural management.