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Research on dynamic capabilities (DCs) has focused primarily on reactive DC deployment (i.e., opportunity discovery) with less attention being paid to proactive DC deployment (i.e., opportunity creation). Drawing on the opportunity creation perspective in entrepreneurship, we argue that proactive DC deployment is characterized by uncertainty, which makes deductive reasoning less effective and thus requires the use of heuristic reasoning. We also incorporate the evolutionary logic of variation, selection, and retention to theorize about the role of heuristic reasoning in the process of proactive DC deployment. Specifically, we integrate the concept of ecologically rational heuristic reasoning to answer two key questions: First, how does ecologically rational heuristic reasoning facilitate proactive DC deployment when the decision context is uncertain? Second, why is ecologically rational heuristic reasoning effective for proactive DC deployment? In summary, our paper advances the ongoing debate concerning DCs and the way in which heuristic reasoning assists a firm in deploying such capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crises are harmful events that can influence organizational outcomes, leading to significant scholarly and practitioner interest in crisis management. A limitation of this line of inquiry, however, is that it typically glosses over stakeholders' multiple concerns and the multiple factors that comprise organizations' response strategies. To address this limitation, we delineate stakeholders' crisis concerns into rational, emotional, and moral aspects. We then develop a typology along two dimensions of crisis response strategies—accountability and attention—to predict the likelihood that a specific strategy mitigates each of these concerns. We theorize that certain strategies mitigate just one type of concern, while others mitigate multiple concerns—albeit with a lower likelihood of success. Finally, we apply our typology to an organization's social evaluations—that is, important, proximal outcomes affected by a crisis—in order to better understand the trade-offs associated with managing stakeholders' multiple concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms can use a range of proactive impression management behaviors to reduce the impact of a negative event on firm outcomes. When a negative event is unpredictable, we theorize that firms can engage in ostentatious behaviors that display the firm's affluence and robust resource base. We term these behaviors "flaunting," and we present a two-part model that investigates how flaunting can reduce the impact of an unpredictable negative event on firm outcomes and why it is effective at doing so. In part one, we theorize how flaunting can generate net positive stakeholder group evaluations by enhancing distinctiveness among stakeholder groups. In part two, we theorize that the net positive stakeholder group evaluations can buffer the impact of an unpredictable negative event on firm outcomes. We also maintain that this buffering effect is amplified when the flaunting firm actively manages stakeholder group distinctiveness. Thus, while flaunting can be both off-putting and enticing to different stakeholder groups, we theorize that courting the love of some may be worth the cost of being disliked (or worse) by others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing work on legacy in management has focused on the upper echelons and on the "legator"—the person leaving the legacy. Drawing on the meaning maintenance model and concepts surrounding psychological ownership and identity, we build a model that focuses on "legatees"—the beneficiaries of the legacy—in the lower echelons. The departure of a manager, informal leader, or star serves as a disruption to legatees' mental representations of their working world. That disruption causes them to attend to issues of ownership (either psychological ownership or disownership of the legacy) and identity (either identification or rivalry with the legator) in order to fulfill salient needs. Fulfilling continuity and belonging needs results in two behaviors that enhance the durability of the legator's contributions: maintaining and evangelizing. Fulfilling distinctiveness and efficacy needs results in two behaviors that reduce the durability of the legator's contributions: neglecting and erasing. We theorize that these relationships are moderated by two aspects of the legacy: its magnitude and its content (in terms of whether the contributions are tangible or intangible). We describe the implications of our model for the legacy literature in management and lay out an agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative social evaluations and the strategies a firm employs to manage them have garnered significant attention among management scholars. However, past research has given less attention to the social media era's revolutionary effects on these dynamics. In the present paper, we theorize that the social media era's greater velocity, emotionality, and communality increase the likelihood that social disapproval will spread faster and more empathetically among a more heterogeneous set of constituents. We develop a framework that explicates how a firm's response strategies can prevent, contain, and attenuate "social disapproval," which we define as constituents' general enmity toward a firm. Our framework predicts that a firm's greater initial transparency is more likely to prevent social disapproval, while a reticent response to others' initial disclosures is more effective at containing it. Once social disapproval has spread, however, we posit that a firm can more effectively attenuate it by responding more deliberatively and accommodatively. Further, we theorize how traditional media era contingencies of event severity, actor prominence, and message inauthenticity take on additional meaning and have unexpected effects on the social disapproval management process in the social media era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop theory to explain how CEOs' observable personality traits influence market perceptions of firm risk and shareholder returns. Using a linguistic tool to measure nearly 3,000 CEOs' personality traits, we find that CEOs' observed levels of conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion have important consequences for the perceived riskiness of the firm, as reflected in stock volatility. We also find that these traits alter the relationship between stock risk and returns. Whereas financial economic theory generally posits a positive relationship between risk and returns, on average, we find that this relationship may be either positive or negative for a specific firm depending upon the observed personality of its CEO. Our theory and findings extend upper echelons research by showing that CEOs' personality traits not only affect market perceptions of the firm but also how those perceptions translate into value creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How a firm is perceived has implications for strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and firm outcomes. However, strategic management researchers have traditionally devoted less attention to theories that address these perceptual implications. This special topic forum (STF) includes six articles that use a sociocognitive lens to help expand our theoretical understanding of strategy and strategic management. A sociocognitive perspective encompasses how observers perceive, interpret, and make sense of an organization's strategic processes, actions, and related outcomes. The goal of this STF is therefore to advance theory in an integral domain of management scholarship while also augmenting well-known frameworks for teaching and practice. Specifically, the articles not only reflect the work that has taken place over the past three decades but also generate important theoretical and practical advances. We introduce each article, explain the key strategic questions it addresses, and offer suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social approval assets derive their value from favorable stakeholder perceptions. Past research has focused primarily on their role as signals that reduce stakeholders' perceived uncertainty about the firm. However, social approval assets can also serve as frames that influence how other information is interpreted. We theorize how the frames associated with two social approval assets—status and celebrity—influence the interpretation of equivocal information about newly public firms. Specifically, we examine how each frame influences the way underpricing is interpreted, and how these interpretations, as well as the joint effects of possessing status and celebrity, influence newly public firms' strategic alliance formations. We explore these ideas in the ambiguity-ridden context of "Dot-Com" firms during the commercial dawn of the Internet. Our findings generally support our arguments, providing new theory and evidence about the framing effects of social approval assets with different sociocognitive content, and the dynamics of information and frame (in)congruence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a commentary on scholar research about the benefits of organizational celebrity. It is the author’s view that less attention in the research has been paid to constituents’ role in the process of gaining, maintaining, and losing organizational celebrity. Works of researchers Anastasiya Zavyalova, Michael D. Pfarrer, and Rhonda K. Reger, Thomas J. Roulet and Marco Clemente are included.

The impacts of firm reputation and celebrity on the possibility of the announcement of earnings surprise and on the reactions of investors to such surprises are studied. Results revealed that high-reputation firms showed less likelihood to announce positive surprises compared to celebrity firms.

The article describes a four-stage interactive model of organizational actions that can increase the speed and possibility of an organization achieving reintegration with stake-holders after a transgression.

In this article a study was carried out to examine the effects of stock-based incentives on CEO earnings manipulation behaviors with regard to prospect theory and synthesizing agency theory. Findings show that CEOs were more likely to manipulate firm earnings when they had more out-of-the-money options and ownership of lower stock.

Research on organizational celebrity is in its nascence, and our understanding of the process through which organizations gain, maintain, and lose this asset remains incomplete. We extend this research by examining which information is the primary catalyst of the celebrity process, how and why this process unfolds, and what the potential consequences are for an organization. In doing so we make three primary contributions. First, we propose that the availability of information about the salient and socially significant elements of an organization's identity makes the media more likely to cast the organization as a main character in their dramatic narratives. Second, we theorize that the salience of these elements attracts constituents' attention and the social significance evokes their emotional responses. However, because some constituents may view the elements of an organization's identity as congruent and others as incongruent with their personal identities, an organization may simultaneously gain celebrity among some constituents and infamy among others. Third, we theorize that because of the different emotional responses that are generated from constituents' perceptions of identity (in)congruence, celebrity is more difficult to maintain and easier to lose than infamy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers advice for writing scholarly articles and submitting them to academic journals. Topics include the establishment of common ground with readers, the need to raise the readers' concern about a gap in the literature, and the recommendation of a course of action in relation to theory. The structure of several articles in the journal "Academy of Management Review" ("AMR") is analyzed. The particular demands of writing on management theory are noted.

Research about the effects of an organization's general reputation following a negative event remains equivocal: Some studies have found that high reputation is a benefit because of the stock of social capital and goodwill it generates; others have found it to be a burden because of the greater stakeholder attention and violation of expectations associated with a negative event. We theorize that stakeholders' level of organizational identification helps explain which mechanisms are more dominant. We test our hypotheses on a sample of legislative references associated with National Collegiate Athletic Association major infractions from 1999-2009. Our results indicate that high reputation is a burden for an organization when considering low-identification stakeholder support: As the number of legislative references increases, a high-reputation university will receive fewer donations from non-alumni donors compared to universities without this asset. In contrast, high reputation is a benefit when considering high-identification stakeholder support: As the number of legislative references increases, a high-reputation university will receive more donations from alumni donors compared to universities without this asset. However, an exploratory investigation reveals that alumni donations to high-reputation universities decline as the number of legislative references increases, suggesting that the benefit of a high reputation has a limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We extend research on social evaluations and crisis management by explicating the sociocognitive mechanisms that influence how an organization and its external evaluators perceive and respond to the onset of a crisis. Specifically, we highlight the role of social approval--evaluators' general affinity toward an organization--not only as a critical outcome of crisis management but also as an important antecedent. We first identify the distinct aspects of social approval and explain why it is an important perception in a crisis context. We then detail how managers attempt to limit the probability and magnitude of social approval loss when responding to a crisis, and how an organization's existing endowment of social approval affects this decision. We theorize that social approval will serve as either a buffer or a burden in influencing evaluators' crisis sense making and attributions. As a result, we argue, organizations endowed with higher and lower levels of social approval may be motivated to take less responsibility at the onset of a crisis than has been previously theorized. We conclude with a discussion of the broader managerial and social implications of our theory and how it expands our understanding of the crisis management process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing perspectives on corporate philanthropy are predominantly rational and limit decision making to the executive suite. Recently, however, recognition has grown that employees are also important drivers of corporate philanthropy efforts and that their motives may be more empathic in nature. Integrating arguments from affective events theory, intergroup emotions theory, and affect infusion theory, we develop a framework in which organization members' collective empathy in response to the needs of unknown others infuses executives' decisions, thereby affecting the likelihood, scale, and form of corporate philanthropy. Our theory has implications for research on emotions in organizations, as well as for our understanding of the role of organizations in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We contribute to research on the management of social perceptions by considering the relative effectiveness of a firm's technical and ceremonial actions in managing media coverage after its own or its competitors' wrongdoing. We examine these relationships in the context of product recalls by U.S. toy companies over the ten-year period 1998-2007. As hypothesized, firms with higher levels of wrongdoing experience less positive media coverage; however, this decline is mitigated during periods of higher industry wrongdoing. Additionally, we find support for a negative spillover effect: the tenor of media coverage about a focal firm is less positive if others in its industry recall products. Further, technical actions help firms attenuate the negative effect of their own wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage, whereas ceremonial actions amplify this effect. In contrast, ceremonial actions are more effective in attenuating the negative effect of industry wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage about a focal firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-sector partnerships (XSPs) are an important part of today's organizational landscape and a favored strategy for addressing complex social problems. However, a discrepancy exists between the popularity and prevalence of XSPs and evidence of their ability to produce value with respect to the problems they address. We therefore offer a framework for increasing and assessing XSP value based on an alternative conception of organizational constitution rooted in communication theory. Our central argument is that the overall value of XSPs is not merely in connecting interested parties but, rather, in their ability to act- to substantially influence the people and issues within their problem domain. This ability, we argue, comes from the constitution of organizational forms that are distinct from their members and that display collective agency -the capacity to influence a host of relevant outcomes beyond what individual organizations could do on their own. Our primary contributions are developing a framework for understanding XSP constitution in terms of communication processes and explaining how XSP value can be increased and assessed through communication practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]