Knowledge that Transforms

Market participants, such as producers and audiences, often use a list of categories to label, evaluate, or promote products. Extant category research focuses overwhelmingly on a category's social properties and connectivity to explain why a category is used to describe a product. However, categories often cluster together, and little is known about how this clustering affects the appearance of a category in the description of a product. In this article, we define the easily reproducible clustering of categories as a category bundle and develop a novel measurement, bundle congruence, to measure the fitness of the category bundle. We argue that audiences employ bundle congruence to choose or exclude categories. In markets in which audiences dominate product categorization, a category's bundle congruence in a product's descriptions increases the probability that it is used for the product. Moreover, the overall bundle congruence of a product elevates the economic returns of the focal product. Our arguments are supported by an empirical analysis of feature films produced in North America. This study not only enriches the understanding of the bundle structure of the category system but also provides a novel explanation of why category spanning remains ubiquitous, despite the findings of previous studies, which assert that category-straddling products are prone to be punished financially.

This study examines whether and when, in a stigmatized industry, firms’ negative publicity can lead to the appointment of their CEOs to the boards of directors of other firms within that sector. Building on research on ingroup identification and on stigma, we propose that within a stigmatized industry, when a firm receives negative publicity, its CEO is more likely to join the board of other firms in the industry, possibly because these other firms interpret the negative publicity as a sign of the social identification of the CEO with the stigmatized industry. We also suggest that this relationship is more likely when the negative publicity reveals information otherwise not available about the CEO. We test our hypotheses using a novel, hand-collected dataset of 408 CEOs in 205 firms in the global arms industry, between 1998 and 2017, and find that within this stigmatized industry, when a firm receives negative publicity, its CEO is more likely to join the board of other firms in the industry, and that lower levels of CEOs’ reputational capital and visibility magnify this effect. Our findings advance the conversations in stigma research about upper echelons, highlighting the importance of internal and external actors and of the type of stigma, when investigating the consequences of stigma for upper echelons’ careers.

Unit human capital resources (HCRs) are positively associated with unit performance and developing them is vital to sustaining unit performance. Yet, extant research has focused primarily on formal human resource methods of developing individual and group capacities (e.g., training) and given lesser attention to on-the-job mechanisms and processes impacting unit HCRs. We advance a theoretical framework featuring unit deployments, which reflect the formal or informal configuration of existing unit members’ assignments to unit-relevant tasks at a point in time, as a powerful tool for unit HCR development. We first articulate how deployments can enhance unit HCR by increasing members’ HCRs, cultivating members’ social capital resources, and influencing unit emergence enabling states. We then introduce four types of unit HCR portfolios that differ in resource and coordination flexibility and highlight how units can use distinct deployment strategies to cultivate each type of portfolio. We conclude by detailing when each unit HCR portfolio will likely generate the greatest return for units under varying task dynamism and complexity conditions.

Across academia, there is a series of ongoing and intertwined debates about the need for research transparency, greater confidence in the accuracy of empirical findings, and the overall relevance and credibility of our work (for a summary, see Bergh, Sharp, Aguinis, & Li, 2017). Central to these debates is the idea that, as a field, we need greater confidence in the cumulative body of scientific knowledge created by our research. To make progress toward this goal, we need processes that minimize the publication of flawed results emanating from honest errors; insufficient training; and, in the worst of cases, fraud. Many stakeholders are pressing for initiatives related to these challenges. For example, some journals, and those responsible for their oversight, debate the merits of code and data sharing, whereas others are implementing policies that encourage or even require such practices (for a review, see Dosch & Martindale, 2020). Similarly, some grant-awarding organizations require a level of code and/or data transparency in exchange for funding (for a discussion and examples, see Global Innovation Fund, 2021; Metzenbaum, 2021). There is also a growing recognition that replications are integral to the knowledge generation process (e.g., Köhler & Cortina, 2021). Advocacy organizations have also arisen to facilitate the warehousing of code and data related to research efforts (e.g., FIVES Project; Center for Open Science). In this editorial, the Journal of Management has asked us to discuss and describe a related but slightly different approach. As a means of making the research process more efficient,

Leaders may engage in abusive behaviors due to impulsive or strategic drives, but it is unclear whether impulsive and strategic abuse can be differentiated and if they have distinct outcomes. The current research, framed by self-regulation theory, represents an effort to differentiate impulsive and strategic drives of leaders’ abusive behaviors and examine their effects on subsequent supportive behaviors toward subordinates via goal attainment. Leaders’ abusive behaviors, when driven by impulses (strategic rationales), undermine (promote) their goal realization. Because leaders constantly regulate their interactions with subordinates, once they achieve high (low) goal realization, leaders increase (decrease) their supportive behaviors toward those subordinates. Overall, leaders’ impulsive abuse negatively (strategic abuse positively) relates to their subsequent supportive behaviors toward subordinates, through its negative (positive) effect on goal realization. Moreover, self-regulation theory suggests that the effect of leaders’ strategic abuse depends on subordinates’ ability to understand and meet leaders’ expectations; accordingly, subordinate competence strengthens the positive effect of leaders’ strategic abuse on supportive behaviors toward subordinates via goal realization. We first establish a reliable, valid scale to measure impulsive and strategic abuse, and then conduct two experience sampling studies that offer support for the proposed theoretical model. This article concludes with a discussion of both theoretical and practical implications.

Though we know racioethnic diversity can impact team functioning, much remains unclear about when and how it affects performance. Extending dyadic theory on interracial interactions, we develop and test predictions about how participation diversity (i.e., the distribution of team member temporal involvement in task functions) influences the racioethnic diversity–performance relationship. We theorize that racioethnic diversity is motivational, prompting self-enhancement goals that are best achieved via cooperation, but are impeded by anxiety that often accompanies racioethnic dissimilarity. Heightened participation diversity provides structure (by clarifying behavioral scripts) that should reduce interracial anxiety, thereby resulting in positive effects of racioethnic diversity on performance through cooperation. Such performance benefits of racioethnic diversity are lower in likelihood in less structured interracial, work-related encounters. Results from a field study and two archival datasets indicated that when there are more clearly differentiated temporal roles, greater racioethnic diversity corresponded with higher performance. Cooperation helped to account for this relationship, as greater differentiation facilitated the positive effect of racioethnic diversity on cooperation, thereby enhancing team performance. This relationship is significantly smaller or nonsignificant when participation diversity is lower. Collectively, our theory and results help to reconcile prior inconsistent effects of racioethnic diversity on team performance.

Few studies have focused on how power influences an idea receiver's endorsement of creative ideas. By integrating associative evaluation theory with insights from the power literature, we identify power as an important receivers’ factor that accentuates the relation between an idea's creativity level and receivers’ endorsement. We contend that the idea generator's status is a boundary condition and, together with creativity level, the idea generator's status jointly influences the degree to which idea receivers’ power affects idea endorsement. We conducted four studies to test our hypotheses. Study 1 was a laboratory experiment. It found a two-way interaction of receiver power and creativity level, showing that compared to low-power receivers, high-power receivers expressed stronger endorsement of ideas with high levels of creativity. Study 2 was a field study in a manufacturing company. It replicated Study 1's findings and further found a three-way interaction showing that the moderating effect of receiver power was strengthened when the generator had higher rather than lower status. Studies 3 and 4 respectively replicated the two-way and three-way interactions using experiments and demonstrated positive associations as the theorized mediator, providing empirical support for the positive association account. We discuss implications of these studies and call for future research to deepen our understanding of how creative ideas are endorsed in the workplace.

Though organizational scholars have studied punishment for decades, recent examples of punishment in organizations cannot be fully explained by the scholarly literature. This may be because much of our prior understanding of punishment has been based on studies in highly bounded organizations, but with the shift to remote work arrangements and contract or freelance work, modern organizations are becoming increasingly boundaryless. Does punishment in bounded organizations look different than punishment in boundaryless organizations? To answer this question, we review and categorize the literature on punishment in organizations according to the boundedness of the organization it examined. We find that though there are similarities in punishment in bounded and boundaryless organizations, punishment in boundaryless organizations involves different actors, punishing different situations, for different reasons, using different methods. However, many questions about punishment in boundaryless organizations remain, including about the pervasiveness, motivations, and impacts that punishment has in boundaryless organizations.

Terminating franchisees is a challenging decision every franchisor faces, yet its effect on franchisor performance remains unknown. We examine the effect of franchisee termination on a franchisor’s profitability (i.e., return on asset) in this study. Applying agency theory to franchisee termination, we posit that termination enables a franchisor to uphold a chain’s uniformity among stores through the dual functions of enforcement and deterrence. Weighing the benefits against the costs of termination, we predict a contemporaneous effect and a long-term effect of franchisee termination on franchisor profitability. We then contextualize the contemporaneous effect of termination. We postulate the alleviating or exacerbating influences of three conditions—new franchisee addition, customer mobility, and chain maturity—that may change the importance of benefits or costs of termination. We test our predictions with multiyear census data on franchising in South Korea. The results support our predictions except for the moderating effect of customer mobility. We discuss limitations and further research directions as well as implications of the study results.

Growing interest in network dynamics has led to insights about patterns of network change, drivers of tie formation, and the temporal unfolding of the consequences of networks. To this area of inquiry, we introduce networking speed—the time that it takes for individuals to form a network tie—as an important but so far largely overlooked aspect. We develop a theory of networking speed that explains how different catalysts enable professionals to introduce variation into the speed with which they form interpersonal network ties. We discuss how such variation in the speed with which ties have been formed influences relational outcomes and the network returns that these ties generate. This discussion illustrates that high networking speed can entail advantages as well as pitfalls. We also explore temporal implications of networking speed—for instance, the persistence of the effects of speed over time. Overall, we conceptualize networking speed as a constitutive element of how interpersonal networks function in professional settings, and we propose a future research program for the integration of this novel concept into organizational network research.