Knowledge that Transforms

Individuals in impoverished communities often face considerable adversity. Under such circumstances, they can turn to illegal entrepreneurship. However, from a gendered perspective, women are typically considered incongruent with the masculinity of crime and entrepreneurship and, thus, illegal entrepreneurship. In this study, we were interested in exploring how women navigate their society’s gender role expectations to engage in illegal entrepreneurship. We adopted a qualitative, inductive approach to explore the cognitive processes through which women entrepreneurs navigate these tensions to manufacture and sell illegal alcohol within their impoverished communities throughout India. Our resulting gendered model of the cognitive processes underlying illegal entrepreneurship in impoverished communities offers new insights into how women entrepreneurs use cognitive carve-outs to navigate potentially conflicting societal expectations regarding gender and entrepreneurial roles. Further, we explore how entrepreneurship is influenced by construals, particularly in contexts of resource scarcity and gendered constraints. Finally, in line with the dark side of entrepreneurship, we shed light on how women can justify to themselves and others entrepreneurial action that, while shielding themselves from immediate personal repercussions, imposes substantial costs on many members of their impoverished communities.

Interorganizational alliances have been extensively studied as strategic arrangements that enable firms to manage risks arising from their embeddedness in external relationships. However, the unique dynamics of business-to-government (B2G) relationships, where firms often face regulatory and political risks, remain underexplored. In this study, we examine how firms reliant on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) contracts use strategic alliances to mitigate these challenges. Drawing on resource dependence theory and the resource-based view of the firm, we theorize that firms with higher government contract value are more likely to form alliances with other government contractors to help share risk and navigate government contracting challenges. We further identify two boundary conditions—an internal buffer (whether a firm operates as a generalist or specialist contractor) and an external buffer (the level of market-demand risk)—that moderate this relationship. Our analysis of 339 U.S. publicly traded DoD contractors from 2001 to 2019 provides robust support for our hypotheses. A post hoc mediation analysis further shows that alliances partially mediate the relationship between government contract value and market performance. Our study contributes to interorganizational relationships and business-government interface literatures by articulating the unique dynamics of B2G alliances and offering nuanced insights into how firms manage their relationships with powerful government buyers.

Recent workplace trends reveal that workers frequently discuss and engage in deliberate underperformance, underscoring the growing relevance of intentional underperformance at work. Although various disciplines have long studied purposeful reductions in work effort, these investigations have remained largely siloed, hindering conceptual clarity. In this scoping review, we integrate perspectives from management, social and educational psychology, and economics to establish a unified conceptualization of intentional underperformance (i.e., the deliberate suppression of task contributions, such that contributions fall below a relevant benchmark). In doing so, we make five primary contributions to the performance literature. First, we review and consolidate 36 related constructs to develop an umbrella conceptualization that can promote cumulative scientific understanding. Second, based on our review, we present an organized view of the antecedents and proximal motives of intentional underperformance. Third, we introduce the Intentional Underperformance Framework, a two-by-two that organizes forms of intentional underperformance, and organize the associated outcomes of these different forms. Fourth, we identify cross-disciplinary patterns in operationalizations, summarizing prevailing methods and their implications. Fifth, we outline a research agenda to guide future inquiry into when, why, and how intentional underperformance arises, as well as how organizations can constructively intervene. By integrating disconnected literatures and promoting a shared language, this review provides a foundation for more integrative theoretical and empirical inquiries. Ultimately, we aim to equip scholars and practitioners with a clearer, more comprehensive understanding of intentional underperformance in today’s workplace.

Whether more information available in capital markets fosters or hinders corporate innovation—and ultimately long-term firm value—remains a contentious question. Does enhanced transparency discipline managerial decision-making, or does it induce short-termism? This study addresses this tension by proposing that firms’ R&D capabilities critically moderate these opposing effects. Leveraging the European Union’s mandate for quarterly reporting as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a difference-in-differences design to a panel of EU-listed manufacturing firms. We uncover a dual pathway: For firms with weaker R&D capabilities, greater transparency exerts a disciplining effect, leading to reduced R&D investment and enhancing firms’ value. Conversely, firms with stronger capabilities reallocate R&D toward more familiar domains to deliver quicker returns, consistent with a myopic response that limits exploration and undermines long-term value. Our findings contribute to management theory by unpacking how capital market pressures differentially affect the “whether” and “where” of innovation decisions and offer policymakers important insights into the unintended consequences of disclosure regulation.

Affective polarization, a division marked by animosity between members of opposing political groups, has dramatically increased, particularly in the United States. This paper examines the extent to which affective polarization may spill over into organizations and influence strategic outcomes—specifically, corporate innovation. I theorize how politically balanced organizations, that is, those that lack a prevailing political ideology and have workforces that are more evenly divided between opposing political stances, are less innovative due to heightened animosity and reduced collaboration. Furthermore, I propose that the negative relationship between political balance and innovation intensifies at higher levels of partisan animosity in society and political engagement among organizational members. Conversely, I theorize that the relationship weakens when a firm is led by a CEO who does not overtly signal a clear political leaning. I test and find support for these predictions using a novel donation-based index of organizational political balance for 744 publicly traded U.S. companies from 2002 to 2015. This paper highlights the role of political balance as a potential conduit of intrafirm rivalry that hinders innovation. The findings advance our understanding of the mechanisms and conditions through which political polarization may influence organizations and their outcomes.

This study examines shareholder activism and its consequences for corporate directors’ career trajectories. We begin by highlighting that the inherent ambiguity surrounding activist interventions implies variation in director careers beyond an overall negative effect. Specifically, we posit and test the notion that the director labor market will differentiate between financially based versus socially based shareholder unrest, with the latter having a stronger negative effect based on (1) its greater information value above and beyond what is already knowable about the firm, and (2) heightened recognition of the need for directors to balance financial performance pressures with responsiveness to evolving environmental, social, and governance concerns. Empirically, we analyze U.S. shareholder activism events between 2014 and 2018, and using Coarsened Exact Matching combined with a Difference-in-Differences approach, we find evidence consistent with our disambiguation perspective on shareholder activism. Our theoretical and empirical analyses also further disambiguate whether director exits reflect market or/and director preferences, and we find evidence for both. We conclude by discussing how our theoretical perspective and empirical findings contribute to research on shareholder activism, director labor markets, and corporate governance.

Inventor rewards—monetary compensation for employees who generate patents—are widely used to promote innovation. Yet the same incentives can steer innovation toward productivity (quantity) or toward inventiveness (quality). Based on social identity theorizing, we argue that inventors’ social identity order—lower versus higher—explains this heterogeneity. Lower-order identities, exemplified by technological specialists, are tightly constructed around exclusive, proximal membership with actively policed expectations—such as strict inventiveness norms—whereas higher-order identities, exemplified by generalists, are more distal and loosely policed, providing limited social constraints on behavior. Rewards activate identity, and the desire for incentive-identity alignment then guides behavior, with stronger pressures to conform to ingroup standards under lower-order than higher-order identities. Hence, we predict that, in response to inventor rewards, specialists produce fewer but more-inventive patents whereas generalists increase productivity at the expense of inventiveness, defaulting to prototypical reward-maximizing behavior. Further, in mixed-identity teams, specialists’ norms are projected onto generalists, raising their inventiveness in response to inventor rewards. We test these predictions using a difference-in-differences estimation and matched inventor-patent data from before and after a regulatory change in China mandating inventor rewards in state-owned enterprises. Consistent with our theory, after the mandate, generalists filed more but less-inventive patents, specialists produced fewer but more-inventive patents, and generalists in mixed teams became more inventive. By linking social identity order to reward responses, we clarify how to align incentives and the R&D workforce with desired innovation outcomes.

Feeling appreciated is integral to developing and sustaining high-quality relationships, yet many employees do not feel appreciated at work. Drawing on risk regulation theory for interdependent relationships, we developed a risk regulation model of supervisor gratitude expression, felt appreciation, and subordinate voice. We propose that when a supervisor’s agentic or communal gratitude expression aligns with a subordinate’s preference, the subordinate will experience greater felt appreciation and thus engage more in voice—a relationally risky behavior. First, we followed a five-step scale-development process using four distinct samples to create and validate measures of supervisors’ agentic and communal gratitude expression and subordinates’ corresponding preferences. We then tested our model in a multiwave, multisource field survey with 124 supervisor–subordinate dyads. We found that the congruence (incongruence) between supervisor gratitude expression and subordinate preference was positively (negatively) related to subordinate felt appreciation and subsequent voice, with distinct patterns emerging for supervisor agentic and communal expression. Further, in two supplementary experiments, we demonstrated that felt appreciation promotes voice via perceived regard and perceived reduction of relational risk. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications, highlighting the importance of distinguishing the two types of supervisor gratitude expressions and their responsiveness to subordinate preferences while outlining promising avenues for research on gratitude and felt appreciation at work.

While those transitioning into a new work role often rely on others to assist them, over time they are likely to also provide assistance to others. Accordingly, we examine the trajectories that the provision of such help by those transitioning take over time, as well as key trajectory determinants and socialization-related outcomes. Extending the Temporal Theory of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (TTOCB), we argue and find that such trajectories vary as a function of both the nature of the transition (i.e., transitioning as an organizational incumbent versus as an organizational newcomer), as well as the leadership and normative characteristics of the unit joined. Specifically, we propose and find that both newcomers and transitioning incumbents exhibit an inverted U-shaped helping trajectory, with the trajectory being significantly flatter for transitioning incumbents. Moreover, unit-level supportive leadership and peer descriptive helping norms moderate these trajectories. For both newcomers and transitioning incumbents, the helping trajectory is flatter in units with higher levels of supportive leadership or peer descriptive helping norms. Consistent with these dynamics, we hypothesize and find that variations in helping trajectories are associated with different levels of task performance, social integration, and turnover intentions one year after role entry. Specifically, individuals exhibiting higher and flatter helping trajectories demonstrate higher task performance, greater social integration, and lower turnover intentions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Despite the recognition that newcomers’ ego networks facilitate their adjustment, little is known about changes in their ego-network structures over time and potential drivers for the network changes. Drawing on coevolutionary theory of network dynamics and integrating insights from research on socialization dynamics, we examine the change-related, reciprocal relationships between perceived supervisor behaviors—specifically support and undermining—and structural holes in newcomers’ ego networks (i.e., the extent to which newcomers connect otherwise disconnected individuals). Using latent change score (LCS) modeling in a longitudinal study of new employees, we found evidence of coevolution: perceived supervisor undermining hindered their development of ego networks with increasingly more structural holes; in turn, newcomers who spanned structural holes in their ego networks experienced increasingly more supervisor undermining. Additionally, those whose networks are rich in structural holes perceived increasingly less supervisor support over time. These findings have implications for research on socialization and structural holes.