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When people want to conduct a transaction, but doing so would be morally disreputable, they can obfuscate the fact that they are engaging in an exchange while still arranging for a set of transfers that are effectively equivalent to an exchange. Obfuscation through structures such as gift-giving and brokerage is pervasive across a wide range of disreputable exchanges, such as bribery and sex work. In this article, we develop a theoretical account that sheds light on when actors are more versus less likely to obfuscate. Specifically, we report a series of experiments addressing the effect of trust on the decision to engage in obfuscated disreputable exchange. We find that actors obfuscate more often with exchange partners high in loyalty-based trustworthiness, with expected reciprocity and moral discomfort mediating this effect. However, the effect is highly contingent on the type of trust; trust facilitates obfuscation when it is loyalty-based, but this effect flips when trust is ethics-based. Our findings not only offer insights into the important role of relational context in shaping moral understandings and choices about disreputable exchange, but they also contribute to scholarship on trust by demonstrating that distinct forms of trust can have diametrically opposed effects.

Organizations and individuals invest resources in supporting employee wellbeing, a trend that has intensified in recent years. Despite this increased emphasis on enhancing wellbeing, employees continue to vary in terms of the state of their wellbeing. To gain insight into how and why employee wellbeing statuses vary, I adopted an inductive approach to explore the diverse contributors to employee wellbeing outcomes. This exploration involved interviews with 57 employees at a single organization and uncovered a wide array of wellbeing facilitators, factors that support employee wellbeing, and wellbeing inhibitors, factors that are detrimental to employee wellbeing. I examined what employees identified as contributors to the state of their wellbeing and developed a theoretical framework outlining archetypes of employees that relate to high and low levels of wellbeing. Drawing on the interviews with participants who reported low and high wellbeing statuses, I examined contextual factors that contributed to employee wellbeing. Contributing to the body of work that examines how contextual factors impact employee wellbeing, I elucidated the role of historical comparison, finding that employees make comparisons between their current context to their historical contexts to validate their present state of wellbeing. In highlighting the role of the past to the present, I revealed how employees support themselves by trying to leverage coping skills developed in the past. As a result, existing skills act as reinforcing, compensatory, or ineffective contributors to their wellbeing. In highlighting the role of employee comparisons between their past context and their present, and the ways that coping skills may or may not support their wellbeing, I uncovered findings that may shape future research and organizational endeavors to support employee wellbeing.

A wide class of economic exchanges, such as bribery and compensated adoption, are considered morally disreputable precisely because they are seen as economic exchanges. However, parties to these exchanges can structurally obfuscate them by arranging the transfers so as to obscure that a disreputable exchange is occurring at all. In this article, we propose that four obfuscation structures—bundling, brokerage, gift exchange, and pawning—will decrease the moral opprobrium of external audiences by (1) masking intentionality, (2) reducing the explicitness of the reciprocity, and (3) making the exchange appear to be a type of common practice. We report the results from four experiments assessing participants’ moral reactions to scenarios that describe either an appropriate exchange, a quid pro quo disreputable exchange, or various forms of obfuscated exchange. In support of our hypotheses, results show that structural obfuscation effectively mitigates audiences’ moral offense at disreputable exchanges and that the effects are substantially mediated by perceived attributional opacity, transactionalism, and collective validity.

This dissertation questions how organizations’ experience with problems while using prior technologies affects the adoption of new technologies. It develops and tests a model of technology adoption that takes into account three factors – characteristics of organizations, technologies, and the environment. Drawing on organizational learning theory, this dissertation makes four general predictions. First, focal organizations’ direct experience with problems while using prior technologies increases the likelihood of adopting new technologies. Second, focal organizations’ indirect experience with problems through their production network partners increases their likelihood of adopting new technologies and strengthens the relationship between direct experience and technology adoption. Third, the relationship between learning from direct and indirect experiences and technology adoption is stronger for a new technology developed inside the industry than for that developed outside the industry. Lastly, organizations’ social relationships with production network partners, which are influenced by both types of learning, affect the likelihood of adopting new technologies. I test these predictions in the context of the music recording industry, using a longitudinal dataset of records released in the U.S. music recording industry between 1962 and 2005. Five on-line metadata servers provide detailed information on records, record labels, artists, and other participants in record production. I discuss the implications of my findings for organizational learning theory, social network perspective, and the literature on technological change.

The central thrust of this dissertation is oriented around institutional practices in organizations--i.e., those processes that organizational decision makers take for granted and execute quasi-automatically. My goal is to better understand how such practices emerge and become habitualized over time, how they affect perceptions of the organizational environment, and how they influence organizational success. Specifically, the dissertation analyzes institutional practices as they pertain to (1) routines, (2) trust, and (3) identity.The first chapter investigates the performance consequences of institutional practices in the form of organizational routines in the domains of alliance management and new product development. I develop the argument that the effectiveness of those routines is highest in "normal" environments but comparatively weaker in both volatile and stable contexts, suggesting an inverse U-shaped moderation effect of environmental dynamism on the link between those organizational routines and competitive advantage. Longitudinal key informant survey data from 279 firms provide strong support for my position.Chapter two is concerned with how institutional practices affect perceptions of other organizations in the field. Specifically, I integrate a calculative and a relational perspective on institutions to better understand the sources of organizational trustworthiness perceptions. Using the setting of interfirm alliances and based on dyadic survey data from 171 such alliances, I find that the calculative perspective (represented by contractual safeguards) has higher predictive power when the partner lacks a favorable reputation, whereas the relational perspective (represented by organizational culture) predicts trustworthiness more strongly when familiarity with the partner organization is high.Finally, the third chapter develops a better understanding of how social cognition affects organizational resistance to institutional pressures. A series of expe

The current research aimed at investigating the brain lateralization effect in response to TV advertising of different commercial sectors. This study explored the effects of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) stimulation on subjective evaluation (semantic differential), in response to some consumer goods. We adopted rTMS (low-frequency 1Hz on left and right DLPFC) to modulate the consumers’ (N= thirty-three) response during the vision of five commercials. After three hours from the first evaluation of TV commercials without stimulation, rTMS was delivered in brain frontal areas (F3 and F4 areas) before the vision of each stimulus. Following the stimulation, subjects evaluated advertising a second time by using the same semantic differential. An increase of TV commercials preference occurred in subjects who were inhibited on right DLPFC; while a decrease of advertising preference was shown in subjects who were inhibited on left DLPFC. These results reveal the important role of DLPFC for emotions’ elaboration. In particular, the left and right DLPFC seem to be related respectively to positive and negative evaluation of emotional stimuli.