This paper explores how governance form affects the organizational capacity for adaptation. We make a general case about the importance of governance in adaptation, and we identify three mechanisms through which governance form may affect organizations' ability to manage the competency and failure traps that often frustrate the process. We look for evidence of these mechanisms through a study of the U.S. Savings and Loan (S&L) industry in the 1980s. This is an apt context because S&Ls were confronted by severe environmental changes that suggested a need for change of a relatively radical sort during this decade and because the industry contains a mix of governance forms (stock form firms and mutual associations). We examine whether mutuals and stocks differed in their propensity to move away from their traditional business and mission of residential mortgage lending in response to the challenges of the 1980s. We also consider whether stocks and mutuals differed in their performance outcomes during this decade. Results indicate that mutuals were slightly less prone toward change but were in no sense inertial. They also show that mutuals performed better overall and appeared to change more successfully than did stock firms. The overall pattern of results suggests that mutual governance was a resource that allowed S&Ls to better balance exploration and exploitation in the face of a changing and ambiguous environment. We consider the broader implications of these findings for research on organizational adaptation, governance form, and governance more generally.

In this paper we argue that task design affects rule breaking in the workplace. Specifically, we propose that task variety activates deliberative (Type 2) processes as opposed to automatic/intuitive (Type 1) processes, which, in turn, helps prevent individuals from breaking rules in order to serve their own hedonic self-interest. We use data from the home loan application processing operations of a Japanese bank to establish the phenomenon in the field. We document that increased task variety at a daily level is associated with lower levels of rule breaking in the form of violating corporate break time policies (Study 1). We further explore the relationship between task variety and rule breaking in three lab experiments, using different operationalizations of rule breaking (Studies 2, 3a, and 3b) and provide direct evidence for the mediating effect of deliberative thinking in this relationship (Studies 3a and 3b). We discuss implications for rule compliance in organizations, behavioral ethics, and work design.

This paper documents egocentric biases in market-entry decisions. We demonstrate self-focused explanations for entry decisions made by three groups of participants: actual entrepreneurs (founders), working professionals who considered starting their own firms but did not (nonfounders), and participants in a market-entry experiment. Potential entrants based their decision to enter primarily on evaluations of their own competence (or incompetence) and paid relatively little attention to the strength of the competition. Our results suggest that excess entrepreneurial entry is more complicated than simple overconfidence, and can help explain notable patterns in entrepreneurial entry.

High-potential programs offer a swift path up the corporate ladder for those who secure a place on them. However, the evaluation of “potential” occurs under considerable uncertainty, creating fertile ground for gender bias. We document that men are more likely than women to be designated as high potential, and unpack how gendered responses to employees’ expressions of passion—one of the most commonly used criteria used in evaluating potential—both penalize women and advantage men in high-potential selection processes. First, and based on prior research on gender display rules, we suggest that expressions of passion are viewed as a less appropriate emotional display for women than men, giving rise to a female penalty. Second, and drawing on shifting standards theorizing, we posit that expressions of passion shift evaluators’ predictions of candidates’ diligence more meaningfully for men than women, creating a male advantage—particularly for men who are reasonably high but not exceptional performers. We provide supporting evidence across two studies examining placement into high-potential programs in a real talent review setting (N = 796) and a preregistered experiment that uses videos featuring trained actors (N = 1,366), supported by two supplementary studies (N = 1,590). Taken together, this work sheds light on the ways the increasing emphasis on passion in contemporary workplaces may exacerbate gender inequalities. Progressing our understanding of gender bias beyond gendered reactions to criteria that penalize women (i.e., backlash), our work also unveils a novel and particularly pernicious form of gender bias driven by gendered inferences about passion that advantage men. Supplemental Material: The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18018 .

Although researchers have devoted considerable attention to assessing how organizations benefit from ascriptions of high status, relatively little research has analyzed the financial costs that organizations may incur in actively managing such ascriptions. In this study, we analyze how and why organizations may pay a relatively steep economic price for the attainment and/or maintenance of social status. Specifically, we advance an original theoretical perspective, which suggests that firms engaged in economic competition are simultaneously engaged in social ceremony and that these dual processes can generate a combination of social gains (in terms of status) and economic losses (in terms of profitability). We theorize and test our perspective in the context of competitive bidding ceremonies using a unique, decade-long data set on repeated competitive market interactions among firms in the U.S. construction industry. We find support for our prediction that firms’ participation in bidding ceremonies can generate divergent outcomes, that is, higher social status and diminished economic performance. We discuss the implications of our theoretical and empirical analysis for the existing literature on social status, competitive bidding, and—more generally—on the role social forces play in competitive market behaviors and outcomes.