Knowledge that Transforms

In this study, we explore an intriguing yet understudied question: Would top managers decide to activate personal ties to manage their firms’ alliances? We address this question by synthesizing the insights of the research on personal tie activation and resource dependence theory to develop a nuanced theoretical framework on the mechanisms underlying top managers’ personal tie activation decisions in alliance management. We highlight that the interdependence features between two alliance partner firms (i.e., mutual dependence, power imbalance, interpartner competition, and the interactions thereof) together shape the partner firms’ relational dynamics in the value creation and value appropriation in their alliance. Accordingly, these features determine the potential benefits and costs for top managers of the partner firms to activate their personal ties to manage this alliance, both for their firms and for themselves. We draw empirical evidence from a field study with 244 alliances between Chinese firms and an experimental vignette study with 212 real-world managers in China. Results of our analyses support our predictions, with a few intriguing exceptions. We derive valuable implications for theory and practice.

The use of earnings conference calls in management research has exploded over recent years, yet insights remain fragmented due to differing assumptions about how calls should be analyzed and interpreted. To synthesize this work, we review 207 articles across management, accounting, and finance journals and map how prior studies have drawn on specific call components—structural attributes, prepared remarks, and question-and-answer exchanges. Building on this anatomical mapping, we inductively identify three epistemic roles through which earnings calls have been mobilized in management research: communicative disclosure (“window”), performative communication (“stage”), and communicative trace (“fingerprint”). Each role reflects distinct assumptions about how earnings calls reveal, enact, or encode managerial and organizational phenomena, and each highlights different opportunities for future theorizing. By making these inferential logics explicit, our framework provides a conceptual foundation for more precise and cumulative use of earnings conference calls as a data source in management scholarship and outlines promising areas for future research.

How do a country’s digital institutions influence the magnitude of occupational fraud within firms? Leveraging and extending the institution-based view, we address this understudied question by conceptualizing digital institutions as a new genre of institutions that condition the deterrence calculus within firms. We define digital institutions as the foundational structures and resources that shape a country’s digital environment along three key dimensions: (1) digital infrastructure, (2) digital governance, and (3) digital innovation. While strengthening digital institutions has become a priority for policymakers worldwide, the unintended consequences of doing so, such as the potential to facilitate occupational fraud within firms, remain insufficiently understood. Using a unique dataset of 3,974 cases from 41 countries, we find that digital infrastructure is linked to higher fraud magnitude in firms, whereas digital governance is associated with lower occupational fraud magnitude. Our analysis further uncovers the nuanced ways in which digital institutions condition the effectiveness of firm-level internal controls. Overall, policymakers must recognize that digital institutions are a “double-edged sword,” as developing digital infrastructure without reinforcing digital governance can negate efforts to control occupational fraud at the firm level.

Drawing on framing theory, we theorize how social movements affect social movement–driven small businesses over a movement’s lifecycle. We propose three social movement–driven small business types—originals, casual converts, and zealot converts—and argue that social movements’ diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames will affect these businesses differently during different stages of the social movement’s life cycle. Specifically, we explore the degree to which they integrate the social movement’s values into their businesses during different movement stages, their financial outcomes, the extent to which they contribute to the social movement, and whether they maintain or abandon their value integration post-movement. Our theory highlights the ripple effects that social movements can have on firms that are not the movement’s direct targets and enhances our understanding of the relationship between social movements and small businesses in markets unrelated to the social movement.

Organizations must simultaneously ensure “appropriateness” through adherence to rules and norms while promoting novelty through risk-taking. Ethical leadership, characterized by an emphasis on normatively appropriate conduct and the encouragement of ethical behavior through communication, reinforcement, and decision-making, is increasingly viewed as a way to navigate this tension and enhance creativity—the generation of novel and useful ideas. We modify this positive view by investigating two distinct but not mutually exclusive mechanisms underlying the effects of ethical leadership from a certainty perspective. Specifically, we propose that ethical leadership provides employees with relational certainty, which fosters psychological safety and thereby boosts creativity, and with normative certainty, which promotes conformity and hence constrains creativity. We also identify intolerance of uncertainty as a boundary condition for these countervailing explanations. Across three complementary studies, including a meta-analysis (Study 1) and two field studies with multi-source and multi-wave data (Study 2 and Study 3), the results largely supported our hypotheses. Our research contributes to the literature by introducing a certainty perspective that clarifies both the positive and negative relationships between ethical leadership and employee creativity, as well as by identifying a key boundary condition.

Persistent and multifaceted gender differences in entrepreneurship, alongside the heterogeneous landscape of women’s entrepreneurial activity worldwide, have attracted increasing scholarly attention. As this body of research has expanded substantially, a comprehensive synthesis is both timely and necessary. To address this need, we adopt an integrative review approach, analyzing 458 studies published in journals ranked 3 to 4* in the 2024 ABS Academic Journal Guide between 1998 and 2025. Drawing on a three-level contextual model, we situate women’s entrepreneurship within institutional (macro), socio-relational (meso), and individual (micro) contexts. We distill four overarching theoretical themes that structure current scholarship: (1) normative and cognitive mechanisms underlying gendered outcomes; (2) tangible structures shaping gendered entrepreneurship; (3) social-relational contexts bridging macro- to micro-level contexts; and (4) women entrepreneurs as agents of contextual change. Within each theme, we synthesize key mechanisms, compare theoretical perspectives, and identify avenues for future research. Our review makes three contributions: first, we advance women’s entrepreneurship research with a framework that captures the multiplicity and interaction of overlapping institutional, socio-relational, and individual contexts in which women’s entrepreneurship is embedded; second, we highlight the multi-level nature of contexts, particularly the mediating role of meso-level socio-relational dynamics between macro-level institutions and micro-level outcomes; third, we position women entrepreneurs as active agents who collectively reshape the meso- and macro-level contexts.

In this study, we examine the relationships between perceived experience and newcomer adjustment outcomes. Drawing from Feedback Seeking Behavior theory, we challenge the assumption that greater perceived experience is universally beneficial during organizational entry. We propose that greater perceived experience could impair adjustment outcomes (i.e., job performance, work stress, and social disconnectedness) through two mechanisms: increased self-reliance beliefs and perceived risk of information seeking. In a field study of 243 new hires, we found evidence consistent with several of our predictions. Additionally, we found that openness to experience significantly weakened the relationships between perceived experience and self-reliance beliefs and risk of information seeking, as well as to subsequent adjustment outcomes (i.e., moderated mediation). Our research highlights the potential liabilities of starting a new job with greater perceived experience, turning attention to the factors that might inhibit proactive socialization efforts, while also examining openness as a key moderator of these effects.

The uniformed personnel who deploy around the world provide a key service to their country and often do so by putting themselves in dangerous situations to defend peace and security for others. After serving, military veterans face a challenging transition into civilian life and workplaces. In this review, we describe the importance of understanding the extreme context of veterans’ transitions and then integrate multidisciplinary research on veterans to identify the conditions under which the transition is successful (or not). Specifically, our review identifies how and under what conditions the knowledge, skills, and abilities of veterans translate to the civilian workforce, the employment outcomes (successes or failures) seen during the transition to the civilian workforce, and how employment opportunities increase the wellness of veterans. Throughout the review, we illustrate how incorporating the experiences of veterans can advance management theory on social identity, stigma, unemployment, intersectionality, and careers. In parallel, we highlight how management theory can help contextualize and enrich the study of veterans. We also distill insights from research into tools and practices that can improve civilian employment outcomes for veterans. Finally, we discuss an agenda for management research that enhances the experience of veterans and management theory by complicating the process of stigmatization and its resolution, positively reframing social identity, learning from veteran employment programs, exploring intersectional identities of veterans, and including veterans in the study of careers.

Employees’ self-initiated and active behaviors to improve organizational change design and implementation (i.e., proactive support) are a critical determinant of effective organizational change. Despite organizational change being an inherently dynamic phenomenon, research has largely adopted a static view with little attention to the temporal development of employee responses to change. We build on appraisal theory to examine how shifts (increases vs. decreases) and stability (consistently high vs. low) in employees’ appraisals of work-related benefits of change are associated with proactive support over time. Using cross-level polynomial regression with two-wave survey data (Study 1; n = 267) from a technology firm undergoing change, we find the highest levels of proactive support when employees experience an increase in work-related benefit appraisals between Time 1 and Time 2, compared to all other patterns including a stable pattern of high benefits over time. Results further show that even a decrease in benefit appraisals, compared to consistently low benefit appraisals, predicts higher levels of proactive support for change. The relationships between shifts in benefit appraisals and proactive support are largely replicated in Study 2, an experiment (n = 523). This study also illustrates that positive emotions help to explain why the experience of shifting appraisals matters for employee proactive support for change. Our research highlights the role of temporal shifts in appraisals and provides important implications for organizational change-related theory, research, and practice.

Although calls for firms to disclose their political spending have intensified, nonmarket strategy scholars have yet to explain why some firms embrace corporate political transparency (CPT) while others remain opaque. We theorize that CEO political ideology serves as a critical antecedent of CPT. We argue that liberal CEOs, valuing stakeholder accountability, favor CPT, whereas conservative CEOs, prioritizing shareholder primacy and reputational control, resist it. We further argue that the effect of CEO ideology on CPT depends on contextual factors that shape the discretion CEOs retain in navigating CPT trade-offs. Using a sample of publicly traded firms covered by the Zicklin CPT Index, we find that CEO liberalism increases CPT, but this effect weakens when firm-specific political uncertainty is high, when industry-level transparency norms are strong, and when industry concentration is high. Our study recasts CPT as a value-infused choice contingent on boundary conditions that influence managerial discretion, extends upper echelons theory into the political arena, and advances political activity research.