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We examine how the interplay between CEO temporal depth (time horizons that executives consider when contemplating past and future events) and industry clockspeed (rate of industry change) shapes competitive action speed. We found that executive temporal depth related differently with competitive action speed in slow and fast clockspeed industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on fast changing industries has focused mainly on competitive and economic predictors of performance. Few studies have empirically examined the cognitive mechanisms managers use to cope with these challenges. Besides, most studies have focused on the coping mechanisms employed by firms in fast paced environments. Comparative studies exploring the differences in cognitive challenges faced by firms in fast and slow paced industries are noticeably absent in the literature. To address this gap, we examine the moderating effect of industry clockspeed on the relationship between strategy frames, strategic flexibility and firm performance. We employ two key properties of strategy frames¿complexity and centrality. The results suggest that complexity of strategy frames promotes strategic flexibility, which is successful in fast clockspeed industries. On the other hand, centrality of strategy frames fosters strategic persistence, which is effective in slow clockspeed industries. In what follows, we discuss how these results extend existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study that focuses on online user tasks, both goal-directed and experiential, and how those tasks are affected by perceived complexity of websites. The article states that perceived website complexity may increase telepresence by providing sensory depth, and hypothesizes that perceived website complexity will be negatively related to telepresence for goal-oriented users, and present an inverted-U relationship in experiential users. The article presents the results of the study, which found that online user tasks moderate the relationship between perceived complexity and telepresence, and gives examples of theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

Despite the emerging strategy research on the psychological time of upper echelons, we know little about how the individual temporal orientations of senior executives configure at the top management team (TMT) level to affect firm strategies. Because TMT members' temporal orientations configure in a complex way and trigger significant temporal interactions within the TMT, we integrate faultline and time interaction performance (TIP) theories to address this fundamental question. Specifically, we introduce the notion of TMT temporal faultlines and develop a model explaining how TMT temporal faultlines affect the intra-TMT interactions of temporal planning and, in turn, two facets of firm strategic flexibility (reactive versus proactive). Based on three-wave survey data from 221 TMTs of Iranian high-tech small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), our study found that TMT temporal faultlines had a positive effect on reactive strategic flexibility but a negative effect on proactive strategic flexibility through inhibiting TMT temporal planning. The results expand the nascent upper echelons research on psychological time by advancing the temporal perspective to the TMT level and revealing its strategic ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We integrate gender stereotype theories under a theoretical framework of stereotype activation to theorize and test the effects of legislative quotas on two distinct aspects of female board representation -- selection (female board percentage) and retention (female board turnover). Results based on a longitudinal dataset of 1071 firms across 42 countries and supplementary interviews show that quotas positively relate to both female board percentage and turnover. Based on stereotype activation theory, quota helps women bypass gender barriers created by social-role-based stereotype to promote women's access to boards, while simultaneously activating the stigma of incompetence stereotype that jeopardizes women's retention on boards. Moreover, the national culture of gender egalitarianism moderates these relationships by suppressing the salience of the two gender stereotypes. Specifically, quotas relate more positively to female board percentage and less positively to female board turnover, when gender egalitarianism in the home country is higher than when it is lower. Taken together, the nuanced theoretical underpinnings and our findings on the complex effects of quotas on female board representation reconcile the fierce global debate on quotas by decoupling the enabling and inhibiting effects of quotas on different facets of corporate boards and identifying important boundary conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, women in top management positions are seen as a panacea for alleviating diversity and inclusivenessissuesat all levels in the organizations through "trickle-down" effects of role modeling, concrete support and championing of diversity. Towards this end, corporations and policy-makers are putting a great deal of effort and resources into developing and implementing policies to hire women in top management roles (e.g., quotas and targets for women on boards) with the ultimate objective of enhancing diversity in the talent pool throughout the organization. This push for promoting more women in top management as a way to enhance gender-diverse talent pipeline at lower levels raises an important question: Does gender diversity in senior management roles promote progress of women at lower levels of the organization? We draw insights from and ground our arguments in the decoupling theory and test our cross-level hypotheses in a unique longitudinal dataset comprising 195 of the largest US based law firms . We support our theoretical argument using insights from 15 qualitative interviews. We find that an increase in the number of women in top management roles reduces the hiring prospects and increases attrition for women in junior ranks. We provide evidence that certain organizational practices reduce these paradoxical, cross-level decoupling effects of female representation in senior leadership positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current explanations of corporate fraud, centered on external and internal governance mechanisms, have ignored the role of heterogeneity in innate psychological tendencies of CEOs. We integrate upper echelons theory with value activation and behavioral ethics theories from psychology to highlight the pivotal role of CEO values ' broad, desirable goals (e.g., power, equality) that are people's guiding principles to life ' in predicting the likelihood of financial fraud. We focus on the most fundamental dimensions of personal values ' CEO self-enhancement (selfishness) and self-transcendence (selflessness). Our results highlight how the interplay of CEO values and CEO stock options predicts corporate fraud. These results extend existing research on corporate fraud by bringing heterogeneity in CEO values to the forefront of understanding financial fraud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the concept of counterfactual thinking (CFT) to the study of executive behavior and strategic change. Focusing specifically on "self-upward CFT," which refers to thinking retrospectively about how oneself might have acted differently in order to bring about better outcomes, we posit that such thinking enhances learning and adaptation. In a multi-wave survey study of founder CEOs, we find that self-upward CFT leads to greater strategic change. In theorizing about the antecedents of CFT, we adopt an interactionist perspective which jointly considers contextual stimuli and individuals' dispositions. As suggested by threat-rigidity and attribution theories, we find that a CEO's degree of performance dissatisfaction is negatively related to the CEO's degree of CFT, and that this negative relationship is especially strong for CEOs who score low on the personality traits of conscientiousness and openness. We further find evidence for a moderated mediation model showing that these two personality traits moderate the causal chain that links performance dissatisfaction, CFT, and strategic change. We discuss theoretical and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposed panel symposium aims at critically discussing recent developments and future avenues in the theorizing of strategic change. While the profound transformation of firms has spurred many new topics in strategic change research, such as digitalization, disruption and platform-based competition, we have also witnessed the emergence of new theoretical perspectives and foci. By large, these perspectives expand beyond traditional views of strategic change as top management choice, learning and cognition. Collectively, they hold the potential to advance our understanding of strategic change as a collective, multifaceted and dynamic process. The dual purpose of the symposium is to display emergent ways to enrich and innovate research and theory of strategic change, and to inspire a dialogue among scholars advancing these new perspectives about the current state and future developments of strategic change as a research field. By doing so, we aim at discussing strategic change theories in the light of current changes in practice, and at providing scholars across multiple AOM divisions with ideas and guidance for their future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence regarding the manifestation of CEO political ideology into organizational strategies has been quite equivocal. We focus on micro- dispositional sources of managerial discretion to reconcile ambiguities regarding effects of CEO political ideology, specifically conservatism vs. liberalism, on firm strategies. Using a sample of 302 unique CEOs and 1,282 firm-year observations, we examined two personality attributes - narcissism and extraversion - as moderating conditions to explain how CEOs ideology can be infused into strategic decisions, by suppressing or amplifying their managerial discretion. Our results provide support for the baseline relationship that CEO political ideologies are related positively to value-congruent firm strategies, and indicate that CEO extraversion and narcissism positively moderated these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We integrate the resource dependence and institutional economics theories to theorize and test the global drivers of female board representation on corporate boards. We examine both female board percentage (inclusiveness) and female board turnover (sustainability). Using a longitudinal panel dataset of 1071 firms across 42 countries over a 10-year period (2004 to 2013) and qualitative interviews of 25 female board members from 4 countries, we find support for our predictions. The resource dependence variable of female economic empowerment (female education and employment levels in a country) related positively to female board percentage and negatively to female board turnover. However, the institutional economics variable of female board legislative quotas related positively to both female board percentage and turnover. We also found that female economic empowerment and female board legislative quotas interacted positively and reinforced each other's effects in predicting female board percentage but did not interact in influencing female board turnover. The qualitative interviews shed light on the underlying mechanisms of these relationships as prescribed in the two theories. Our study illuminates the importance of utilizing a multi-theoretic approach in explaining the global nature of the female board representation phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the issue of complexity in the context of web sites has generated considerable interest in the Internet marketing area (Bruner and Kumar 2000; Geissler et al 2001; Stevenson et al. 2000) and information systems research (Nielson 2000; Palmer 2002; Shneidermann 1998). Web site complexity may determine the degree to which users find the web sites easy to use and their browsing experience satisfying. Despite the increasing importance of complexity, substantive research employing this construct has been constrained by three major factors. First, most studies have defined complexity as a uni-dimensional construct using a strucrural perspective (Berlyne 1960) where the focus is only on the structural features of individual web pages (Bruner and Kumar 2000; Geissler et al. 2001; Stevenson et al. 2000), ignoring the inherent interactive dimension of a web site. Second, a majority of the literature on web site design has focused on the development of "objective" measures of web site complexity based on design criteria (Bucy and Lang 1999; Nielsen 2000; Shneidermann 1998), which do not capture users' perception of complexity. Third, the absence of a valid and reliable measurement scale capturing the dimensions underlying web site complexity has seriously impeded substantive research linking web site complexity to other constructs of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that TMT polychronicity (the degree to which TMT members mutually prefer to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously instead of one at a time and believe that this is the best way of doing things) is a double-edged sword for firm innovativeness and the relationship between TMT polychronicity and firm innovativeness is contingent on three environmental facets (dynamism, complexity and munificence). Using a sample of 103 Chinese small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), we demonstrated that the relationship between TMT polychronicity and firm innovativeness was positive in dynamic, complex and munificent environments, but was negative in simple and hostile environments. The relationship between TMT polychronicity and firm innovativeness was insignificant in stable environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relationship between top management team (TMT) temporal focus (the extent to which a TMT as a whole characteristically devotes its attention to past, present and future) and corporate entrepreneurship (CE). Drawing on the attention- based view (ABV), we argue that TMT past, present and future focus individually and interactively influence CE. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 346 TMT members from 110 high- tech small and medium enterprises. We found that TMT present focus and future focus were positively related to CE, whereas TMT past focus had an inverted U-shape relationship to CE. Moreover, TMT present focus moderated the relationships of TMT past focus and future focus to CE. By highlighting the unique individual and interactive effects of TMT past, present, and future focus, our study presents an attentional explanation of a firm's CE activities and underscores an important but under-researched domain of attention--temporal focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on temporal construal and framing theories, we theorize and test how a focal firm's framing of the future temporal distance (short versus long time horizon) of its competitive actions influences rivals' responses. Based on the analyses of 2840 competitive action announcements of 28 duopoly firms from 14 industries, we found that a focal firm's use of longer temporal distance in its competitive action announcements related negatively to rivals' response speed and the likelihood of matched action from rivals, but positively to the strategic significance of rivals' responses. These results offer two broad insights to existing research in competitive dynamics. First, the results highlight the role of language as a competitive vehicle in inter-firm rivalry and point to dilemma faced by focal firms in temporal distance framing. Second, the results suggest that using longer temporal distance may benefit the focal firm by delaying rivals' response speed and preventing matched responses, but may hurt the focal firm by prompting rivals to undertake responses with greater strategic significance and to engage in competitive differentiation (unmatched responses). Thus, these results point to the complexities and dilemma facing focal firms in using temporal distance framing in their competitive announcements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2014 marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of Upper Echelons Theory. In this symposium, we want to celebrate this event by exploring future directions for capturing upper echelons' cognition through their use of verbal communication. Some of the questions we would like to address are: What are the main challenges in using words as proxies for mindsets, personality, and identities? What are the most advanced techniques, both automated and non-automated, for doing so? Which newly available data sources can be smartly used to gain direct, unobtrusive, and comprehensive access to top executives' communication? Which promising methods and sources are used in other fields? Which theoretical lenses that have not yet been applied could enrich our efforts to open the black box of executive cognition? All together, the symposium should provide participants with an inspiring overview of the growing importance of the power of words as a means to look into executives' minds. We want to provide cues as to how to leverage this power in order to enrich not only the next thirty years of upper echelons research but also other research domains in management and organization science. The panelists' work belongs to the most fascinating contributions in the fields we relate to in our symposium. The panel consists of Arijit Chatterjee, Theresa Cho, Dennis Gioia, Vivian Guo, Andreas König, Sucheta Nadkarni, and Mike Pfarrer. The Discussant will be Don Hambrick, and, as a special guest, James W. Pennebaker will be present via video conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]