Knowledge that Transforms

Research has consistently found that organizational evaluations produce gendered outcomes. We advance understanding of this inequality by examining how multistage evaluations—a common organizational design feature—shape gendered evaluative disparities. We integrate and extend research on evaluations, status, and inequality to theorize how gendered outcomes can vary between stages within a single, unified evaluation process—what we term “stakes-driven gender inequality.” Our theoretical framework centers on a ubiquitous feature of organizational multistage evaluation processes that is missing from prior theoretical accounts: escalating stakes across stages via increasingly binding commitments and rising cost of wrong selections. We conceptualize two stylized stages within the same evaluation process: a shortlisting stage (a preliminary selection of candidates for further consideration) and a winners stage (in which final, binding selections are made). Using data from a large multistage startup competition, we test our theory and find that female-led startups are 18.7 percent more likely than male-led startups to be selected in the shortlisting stage but 30.7 percent less likely to be selected in the winners stage. Mechanism tests in the shortlisting stage are most consistent with female-led startups being assessed as higher quality, whereas in the winners stage, we find evidence consistent with gendered performance expectations and evaluators’ risk aversion.

In this article, we show that remote work is associated with higher skill and qualification requirements in hiring. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we identify several mechanisms through which remote work raises hiring standards. By reducing face-to-face interaction and real-time communication, remote work makes training and employee support more challenging, expands the pool of applicants, and leads employers to rely more on quantifiable metrics. We tested these ideas by analyzing over 50 million job postings from 28 European countries between 2018 and 2021 and found that the shift to remote work is associated with a higher number of required skills and greater work experience for a job. These findings indicate that remote work contributes to skill upgrading in the labor market.

Catastrophic innovation failure derails firms’ innovation process and threatens their legitimacy. Prior research has analyzed internal and external responses to failure separately, focusing either on intra-firm learning and failure remediation or on efforts to sustain stakeholder support. Research on these responses’ co-evolution has been notably absent. We examine how a firm jointly recalibrated internal design choices and external strategic framing following catastrophic innovation failure, through a study of Virgin Galactic’s 2014 test flight crash. We introduce and develop the concept of the “promise–risk balance”: a state in which the uncertainty inherent to innovation and the framing communicated to stakeholders stand in generative tension and jointly support the innovation process. Catastrophic innovation failure disrupts this balance. We map Virgin Galactic’s recalibration of risk via internal design choices and recalibration of promise via external framing as interdependent levers to restore balance. We show that design choices aimed at de-risking technology can have adverse effects on a firm’s capabilities, externally dampening promise. Following failure, strategic reframing must bring the firm’s external message in line with actual capabilities and inspire stakeholder support. Recognizing and managing interdependencies between design choices and strategic framing is crucial to the continuity of the innovation process and firm survival.

Women in masculine-typed roles often experience their gender identity as a barrier to proving themselves by the ideal-worker norms of their male-dominated occupations. Yet, these women often internalize these experiences, blaming themselves for their struggles. They rarely identify as members of a disadvantaged identity group and often distance themselves from other women at work. How and when might such women externalize their struggles as gendered and collective? Drawing on data from a qualitative field study of staff working in many masculine-typed roles across various male-dominated occupations at a U.S. public-lands management organization, I develop grounded theory suggesting when and how some women might come to reappraise some of their struggles as rooted in the gendered cultures of their occupations rather than in their own deficiencies or idiosyncratic circumstances. I find that “parallel-peer connections” between similarly situated women outside their local tokenized work groups can spark transformative mindset shifts when these encounters occur under the right conditions: during a window of sensemaking about a career impasse and in a less competitive context that is conducive to sharing confidences. Some women credited these shifts with prompting them to shed years of self-doubt and to promote gender equality at work. This study contributes to our understanding of supportive workplace relations among tokenized women and mindset shifts at work.

Many organizations want to increase diversity among their workforce, but employees from marginalized groups consistently face uncertainty about how to navigate their identities at work, which can lead to high turnover among these employees. To highlight the unexpected ways in which such risks can arise for employees and organizations, we investigate the intrapersonal consequences of a curation approach to navigating social identities in the workplace. Curation involves frequent identity expression (integrating an identity into the workplace, such as discussing identity-based traditions) and frequent identity suppression (concealing aspects of an identity at work, such as hiding concerns about discrimination). Given that expression and suppression both have benefits and risks, combining these behaviors into a curation approach could be seen as a socially adept and professionally beneficial solution. However, focusing on the intrapersonal experiences of employees of color, we argue that, compared to primarily expressing or primarily suppressing a minority identity, curation is more psychologically detrimental to these employees. Combining expression and suppression fosters ambivalence—conflicting thoughts about whether one’s identity is a resource or a liability—which is psychologically aversive. In two surveys and an internal meta-analysis (of the two studies in the manuscript and a supplemental study reported in supplementary online materials), curation was associated with greater ambivalence and psychological strain, which, in turn, were associated with greater turnover intentions. While our core findings emerge with employees of color, we also provide exploratory evidence that the costs of curation extend to women. Our findings regarding curation reveal a previously unrecognized well-being risk for employees from marginalized groups and a retention risk for organizations. We offer recommendations for future research and practice to address the conditions that lead employees to engage in curation.

How does the process of identity formation unfold in emerging occupations? While extant research has focused primarily on occupational identity formation through differentiation from other occupational groups, we theorize identity formation in occupations that emerge in unsaturated spaces, where competitive dynamics are less salient. We address this question through a qualitative historical analysis of American astronauts at the inception of space exploration (1958–1974). Our work theorizes layered accretion as a distinct identity formation process whereby a new occupation’s identity begins with importing an identity from an existing occupation (proto identity), refinement of the identity through work–identity alignment (core identity), and subsequent layering of new, distinct identities that are accreted on to the core. We specify the mechanisms underpinning layered accretion and contribute to deeper understanding of how multiple identities are managed in the early stages of identity formation in new occupations.