Knowledge that Transforms

This research investigates whether and when a job applicant’s unemployment status (i.e., employed, short-term unemployed, or long-term unemployed) affects the probability of receiving an interview request by examining interview request rates in the presence of versus absence of unemployment status antidiscrimination legislation. In response to 3,335 fictitious resumes sent to 1,237 online job postings in Los Angeles and New York City, we received an overall interview request rate of 10.37. Long-term unemployed applicants were less likely to receive an interview request than short-term unemployed applicants in Los Angeles but not in New York City, which has unemployment status antidiscrimination legislation. These findings are supplemented with self-report survey data about perceptions of the unemployed from 200 hiring personnel in New York City and Los Angeles. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed for the unemployment, job search, and selection literatures.

Organizational theory recognizes reputation as a central element to understanding the firm. Examining investor valuations of 1,676 initial public offerings (IPOs) in the United States from 1990 to 2011, we find that reputation transfer through an association of an IPO firm with a venture capital (VC) firm represents a resource whose value can increase/decrease over time depending on investors’ valuations of prior IPOs funded by a VC firm. We conclude that the impact of reputation transfer through association is not unidirectional but, instead, is to be viewed in the context of prior reputational development of organizations the focal firm is associated with. Furthermore, we find that three “transfer enhancers” can improve the impact of VC firm reputation transfer on IPO valuations, including the VC firm’s past experience intensity, the diversity of IPO experiences, and the number of prior syndicated IPOs involving the VC firm as a lead investor.

Business and demographic trends are conflating to bring language issues at work to the forefront. Although language has an inherent capacity for creating interpersonal bonds, it can also serve as a means of exclusion. The construct of linguistic ostracism encapsulates this phenomenon. Drawing on ethnolinguistic identity theory, we identify how linguistic ostracism influences two interpersonal work behaviors: interpersonal citizenship and interpersonal deviance. We conduct a set of studies that uses multisource data, data across time, and data from three countries. Our results reveal that linguistic ostracism was associated with the enactment of lower interpersonal citizenship behaviors and higher interpersonal deviance behaviors. We find that disidentification served as a mechanism to explain why linguistic ostracism resulted in interpersonal citizenship behaviors and interpersonal deviance behaviors. Furthermore, linguistically ostracized employees with low (vs. high) social self-efficacy engage in fewer interpersonal citizenship behaviors and greater interpersonal deviance behaviors. We discuss theoretical implications associated with the phenomenon of linguistic ostracism and the implications for managers working in linguistically diverse organizations.

We theorize that female candidates considering CEO roles will perceive greater termination vulnerability in such roles than their male counterparts. We further theorize that indicators of recent organizational distress will exacerbate female CEO candidates’ perceptions of termination vulnerability, while the presence of female leaders will mitigate these concerns. To test our arguments, we examine the initial values of newly appointed female and male CEOs’ severance agreements from 2007 to 2014. Results support our arguments and begin to shed light on the factors that influence female executives’ concerns about CEO roles and ultimately firms’ ability to appoint female CEOs.

To shed light on the paradoxical phenomenon that third parties of interpersonal mistreatment are motivated to restore justice but often engage in unethical actions, this research differentiates between destructive and constructive punitive reactions while testing the different moderating roles of moral identity and moral thinking orientation. From two studies using different methods and samples from different cultures, we obtained consistent findings that witnessed peer-to-peer incivility triggered moral outrage, which in turn led to both types of punitive reactions. Moral identity strengthened the relationship between witnessed incivility and moral outrage, while rule-based moral thinking orientation weakened the relationship between moral outrage and destructive punitive reaction. Moral identity strengthened the relationship between moral outrage and constructive punitive reaction. The indirect effect of witnessed mistreatment on destructive punitive reaction through moral outrage was strongest among participants with higher moral identity but lower rule-based moral thinking orientation. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

We use human resources (HR) system strength theory to argue that transformational leadership leads to employee consensus on a unit’s high-performance work system (HPWS), that consensus helps align employee attitudes, and that a compression in attitudes facilitates strategy execution and unit-level outcomes. Empirical tests based on a 4-year linked employee–customer panel data set, involving 255 do-it-yourself stores, support our predictions. Transformational leadership is positively related to HPWS consensus. Consensus is negatively associated with unit-level job satisfaction dispersion, which in turn relates positively to unit-level customer satisfaction. Our study makes important contributions to the strategic HR and HR system strength literatures, highlighting the roles of leadership and employee consensus in strategy execution.

As employees are among firms’ most important resources and labor markets are facing serious labor shortages, firm-level collective turnover is one of the most important challenges facing organizations. Context-emergent turnover theory provides a theoretical framework for the performance implications of collective turnover and argues that context, and in particular, firm size, plays a crucial role in the collective turnover–performance relationship. Yet, the moderating role of firm size remains undertheorized, empirically understudied, and thus, unclear. Based on the resource-based view of the firm, we develop a theoretical framework for two competing perspectives (a negative and a positive one) on the role of firm size and put forward the firm’s knowledge intensity as a crucial additional moderator. The main premise is that whereas firm size determines what resources firms have to successfully cope with turnover, knowledge intensity determines the resources firms need to do so. We propose a three-way interaction, suggesting that firm size reinforces the harmful effect of turnover in highly knowledge-intensive firms and buffers it in firms with low levels of knowledge intensity. Using a unique multi-industry and longitudinal administrative data set of 6,913 Belgian firms (2012–2016), we find support for these assumptions. This study highlights the importance of the context in which firms have to deal with turnover, and it spurs researchers to go beyond studying turnover in narrow study contexts, to take into account the interplay among different but intertwined organizational contingencies, and to acknowledge both the quantitative (how many employees leave) and qualitative components (who leaves) of turnover.

Causal ambiguity relates to ambiguity as to how organizational actions and results, inputs and outcomes, or competencies and advantage are linked. Causal ambiguity is important because of its organizational performance implications. Over the last 25 years, research has analyzed the concept from various theoretical angles. As a result, the literature is fragmented and presents different, and sometimes contradictory, views on the concept. In this article, we systematically review the literature on causal ambiguity and develop a framework incorporating the types, antecedents, and consequences of causal ambiguity for both organizational performance and organizational learning. We disentangle the arrays of conceptualizations and operationalizations present in the literature, and we isolate distinct streams in causal ambiguity research. One stream of research concentrates on causal ambiguity as an interfirm barrier to imitation, a second relates to causal ambiguity as an intrafirm barrier to factor mobility, and a third focuses on causal ambiguity as a potential trigger for intrafirm learning. Our review also helps to consolidate research on the substitution dilemma, the causal ambiguity paradox, and the challenge of learning under causal ambiguity. Finally, we develop a coherent set of implications for management practice, and we provide an agenda for further research.

Twenty years ago, conditional reasoning (CR) was presented as a technology for assessing the implicit aspects of personality. Although this assessment method has been lauded as an advance for organizational scholarship, relatively few CR tests have been developed and validated. We argue that a major impediment to the broader implementation of this technique has been the disproportional emphasis by researchers on measurement-related issues at the expense of better describing the core theoretical processes that underlie CR—namely, justification mechanisms (JMs). In an effort to rectify this problem we (a) explain the differences between implicit and explicit individual differences, (b) introduce the key psychological mechanism associated with these implicit individual differences as conceptualized through CR (JMs), (c) describe how researchers can identify JMs, and (d) discuss how JMs may be measured with CR items. Our work is intended to serve as a catalyst for future CR initiatives by refocusing the attention of researchers on the theoretical underpinnings of CR, thus enabling researchers to build more theoretically sound tests.