Knowledge that Transforms

I am both proud and honored to be writing as the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Management (JOM). Although this is the first JOM issue showing the incoming Editorial Board on the masthead, this and the next several issues continue to represent the strong leadership and dedication of Talya Bauer and her team, as well the support of and collaboration with both the Southern Management Association (SMA) and SAGE Publications. Talya Bauer, Chris Shook, and Layla Mansfield have been instrumental in guiding us through our “baton-passing” period and have left us with a powerful infrastructure for continuing to offer the scholarly community highly influential research on a broad range of management topics including business strategy and policy, entrepreneurship, human resource management, organizational behavior, organizational theory, and research methods. This issue is a testament to this. First, we have a Guest Editorial by Albert Bandura that invites an ongoing discourse on the study of self-efficacy, motivation, and personality in the organizational sciences. Second, January is always our Annual Review Issue, which contains some of the most cutting-edge and high-impact theory pieces available to date. Although this issue bears our names, it is truly a “Team Bauer” product and sets a beautifully high bar for future high-impact research to come. With that, I would like send a heartfelt welcome and statement of appreciation to our incoming team, who are listed and pictured below. I want to especially recognize Senior Associate Editor Pat Wright and the entire Associate Editor Team. This team represents our wide scope and an amazingly deep base of knowledge and expertise. They are already working around the clock to process the large number of submissions and reviewer reports we receive each and every day, and the positive feedback we continue to receive from authors and reviewers illustrates the huge commitment they have already made in the short time we have been up and running. We are further blessed with a literal powerhouse of board members, all of whom are listed on the masthead. JOM runs on the efforts of this volunteer army—we can’t thank them enough. Finally, it is a pleasure to introduce our office staff here at Purdue University, Meghan Thornton (Managing Editor) and Julie Smith (Editorial Assistant). They, too, are superbly qualified for the work they do and are already doing an amazing job facilitating our peer-review and production processes. Finally, we depend on an amazing SAGE team, led by Cynthia Nalevanko, as well as guidance and support from SMA leadership—currently Peg Williams, Mark Gavin, Ben Tepper, Tim Barnett, and Chris Shook. In closing, thanks to all who have been contributing to the continued success of JOM and welcome to those who are new to our team. I look forward to the next three years with all of you.

It has been an honor to serve as the editor of the Journal of Management (JOM) these past three years. I have worked with a dedicated team of professionals who are willing to invest a great deal to our field of management. Thank you to the Southern Management Association for its support, Sage and Cynthia Nalevanko for all they do for the journal, and the School of Business at Portland State University for supporting my term as editor. I also want to thank our amazing editorial board and ad hoc reviewers, the authors who submit to JOM, and Layla Mansfield, who has run the editorial office in an amazingly efficient and professional way as well as Deborah Ford and Brett Guidry who helped me establish the editorial office and launch the new journal submission platform. I especially want to recognize the hard work that Christopher Shook has invested as senior associate editor and the entire team of associate editors, who have worked tirelessly to make sure that the scholarship that appears within the pages of JOM represents high-quality, cutting-edge work. I have received countless e-mails from authors thanking the associate editors for their developmental feedback—even when articles were not accepted for publication. This speaks volumes. Thank you wonderful associate editors and reviewers of the Journal of Management (2009-2011)!

Although considerable research has examined various antecedents of employee absence, relatively little research has examined the effects of organizational absence control initiatives on different types of absence, or how differences in employee perceptions of these initiatives may influence employee absences. Through the lens of organizational justice, the authors address this gap in the literature by tracking absenteeism in two manufacturing plants that implemented, at different times, absence control initiatives designed to increase the salience of absence outcomes via explicit rewards and punishments. Results showed that the policy changes had the intended effect of reducing casual absence, but also the unintended effect of increasing Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) absence. The results for disability-based absence were mixed. Individual employee perceptions of both the salience of absence outcomes and the fairness of the absence policies showed differential effects on casual and FMLA absence. These perceptions interacted such that employees who perceived the policies to be more salient and unfair had the highest instances of FMLA absence. Implications for absence and justice research and practice are discussed.

Successful businesspeople are often attributed somewhat mystical talents, such as the ability to mesmerize an audience or envision the future. We suggest that this mystique—the way some managers are perceived by observers—arises from the intuitive logic that psychologists and anthropologists call magical thinking. Consistent with this account, Study 1 found that perceptions of a manager’s mystique are associated with judgments of his or her charismatic vision and ability to forecast future business trends. The authors hypothesized that mystique arises especially when success is observed in the absence of mechanical causes, such as long hours or hard-won skills. In Study 2, managers who succeeded mysteriously rather than mechanically evoked participants’ attributions of foresight and their expectations of success at visionary tasks yet not at administrative tasks. The authors further hypothesized that as mystique is assumed to spread through contagion, observers desire physical contact with managers who are attributed mystique and with these managers’ possessions. Study 3 found that managers described as visionary as opposed to diligent are judged to be charismatic and ultimately magnetic. The authors discuss the implications of these judgment patterns for the literatures on perception biases and impression management in organizations.

A temporary workgroup of trained British soldiers fractured and nearly lost members’ lives when it encountered unexpected adversity in Low’s Gully, Borneo. Although demography-oriented theories of group faultlines and diversity types offer useful cross-sectional baselines for predicting and explaining workgroup fracture, the authors examine the Low’s Gully expedition to build theory exposing the longitudinal microfoundations of workgroup fracture under adversity. The authors incorporate the long-established concept of common ground among parties—information that is both mutually held and mutually understood to be mutually held—to uncover changes in group members’ communications success, intragroup trust, tacit coordination, and fracture likelihood as the expedition’s situation became increasingly tenuous. Their study of how this diverse workgroup faced extreme adversity shows how group trust can dissolve under adversity in a sequence moving from initial trust, to trust-with-trepidation, and then to distrust. Theoretical insights indicate that common ground arising from shared positive experiences increases workgroup resistance to fracture under adversity more than does common ground arising from similar backgrounds; a trust violation occurring among highly similar group members is perceived to be more severe and results in a greater increase in group fracture likelihood than does the same trust violation among dissimilar group members; perceived leader benevolence and integrity are more vital than ability for maintaining intragroup trust, even when ability is necessary for task success; and finally, distrust can sometimes be warranted and even vital for a workgroup’s task accomplishment. The authors discuss the implications for future research and practice.

The relationship between product architecture (PA) and a firm’s make or buy (M-B) sourcing decision has been a topic of interest over the past several years. However, the interplay between PA and a firm’s M-B decision and its impact on performance is still underexplored. This study draws on transaction cost economics and the knowledge-based view within the framework of the PA and sourcing strategy literature to develop a causal model concerning the relationship between PA and the M-B sourcing decision and its implication for technological and financial performance via an investigation of the bicycle freewheel and derailleur markets from 1980 to 1995. The study readily provides theoretical reasoning as to why firms should choose an M-B sourcing strategy in the context of integral-modular PAs. It also suggests the need for further theoretical and empirical investigation of the relationships between PA type and the M-B choice and of the resulting impact of the sourcing decision on performance.

An integrative self-definition model is proposed to improve our understanding of how procedural justice affects different outcome modalities in organizational behavior. Specifically, it is examined whether the strength of different levels of self-definition (collective, relational, and individual) each uniquely interact with procedural justice to predict organizational, interpersonal, and job/task-oriented citizenship behaviors, respectively. Results from experimental and (both single and multisource) field data consistently revealed stronger procedural justice effects (1) on organizational-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves strongly in terms of organizational characteristics, (2) on interpersonal-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves strongly in terms of their interpersonal relationships, and (3) on job/task-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves weakly in terms of their distinctiveness or uniqueness. We discuss the relevance of these results with respect to how employees can be motivated most effectively in organizational settings.

The authors develop a model of investor reactions to new product development (NPD) failures in high technology firms. They propose that a firm’s financial and managerial capabilities, and its strategic focus on R&D, influence investors’ perceptions of the firm’s market value after NPD failure and that these effects are contingent on the development stage of the failed product. Using data on 148 NPD failures of publicly traded biopharmaceutical firms and an event study methodology the authors find support for their hypotheses. They show that the relationships between a firm’s (a) financial capabilities, (b) managerial capabilities, and (c) strategic focus on R&D, respectively, and the decline of firm market value after NPD failure are more negative for products that fail in late development stages than for products that fail in early development stages. The authors’ results highlight the importance of a conjoint consideration of product-level and organizational-level effects in explaining investor reactions to NPD outcomes.

In many industries, for-profit business organizations make decisions that critically impact the safety of their employees and the public. Managers in such organizations often argue that there is no trade-off between profitability and safety because “safety is good business.” However, prior studies examining the profitability–safety relationship report inconsistent and conflicting results. In the present study, the author reexamines this issue, building on insights into managerial risk taking from the behavioral theory of the firm and hypothesizing that the slope of the profitability–safety relationship reaches an inflection point at the organizational profitability aspiration. Using data from the U.S. airline industry, the author finds support for this hypothesis, with results indicating a positive association between airline profitability and airline accident rates for airlines performing below their aspirations but a negative association for airlines performing above their aspirations.