Knowledge that Transforms

This article examines emotion management ability (EMA) as a theoretically relevant predictor of job performance. The authors argue that EMA predicts task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and workplace deviance behavior. Moreover, to be practically meaningful, managing emotions should predict these important organizational outcomes after accounting for the effects of general mental ability and the Big Five personality traits. Two studies of job incumbents show that EMA consistently demonstrates incremental validity and is the strongest relative predictor of task performance, individually directed OCB, and individually directed and objectively measured deviance.

In the 20 years since the last review on organizational decline and turnaround, the scope of turnaround research has expanded dramatically; however, research on this phenomenon remains empirically and theoretically fragmented. Recent research has incorporated managerial cognition, strategic leadership, and stakeholder management and has identified simultaneous and complex resource-based actions beyond the two-stage model developed in the last review by Pearce and Robbins two decades ago. Thus, herein we build from Pearce and Robbins’ review by cataloguing the past 20 years of empirical evidence related to turnaround, developing a descriptive model of organizational decline and turnaround, and concluding with a theory-based research agenda for organizational decline and turnaround. In doing so, this article summarizes what we know about organizational decline and turnaround, and proposes what we need to study, while providing a theoretical road map to guide this future research.

Determining the appropriate level of integration is crucial to realizing value from acquisitions. Most prior research assumes that higher integration implies the removal of autonomy from target managers, which in turn undermines the functioning of the target firm if it entails unfamiliar elements for the acquirer. Using a survey of 86 acquisitions to obtain the richness of detail necessary to distinguish integration from autonomy, the authors argue and find that integration and autonomy are not the opposite ends of a single continuum. Certain conditions (e.g., when complementarity rather than similarity is the primary source of synergy) lead to high levels of both integration and autonomy. In addition, similarity negatively moderates the relationship between complementarity and autonomy when the target offers both synergy sources. In contrast, similarity does not moderate the link between complementarity and integration. The authors’ findings advance scholarly understanding about the drivers of implementation strategy and in particular the different implementation strategies acquiring managers deploy when they attempt to leverage complementarities, similarities, or both.

This research contributes to institutional theory by examining the influence of informal institutions on formal institutions and the effects of formal institutions on inward foreign direct investment. In particular, the authors integrate prior research from multiple disciplines to identify and to examine the roles of a country’s formal regulatory, political, and economic institutions. The results suggest that the country’s informal institutions, in the form of the cultural dimensions of collectivism and future orientation, shape the country’s formal institutions. In turn, each of the three formal institutions affects the country’s level of inward foreign direct investment differently. To facilitate future research, the authors also provide a set of measures for formal institutions in 50 countries.

Although strategic human resource (HR) management research has established a significant relationship between high-performance HR practices and firm-level financial and market outcomes, few studies have considered the important role of employees’ perceptions of HR practice use or examined the more proximal outcomes of high-performance HR practices that may play mediating roles in the HR practice–performance relationship. To address recent calls in the literature for an investigation of this nature, this study examined the relationships between employees’ perceptions of high-performance HR practice use in their job groups and employee absenteeism, intent to remain with the organization, and organizational citizenship behavior, dedicating a focus to the possible mediating role of affective organizational commitment in these relationships. Data in this study were collected from surveys of employees at a large multiunit food service organization. The model was tested with CWC(M) mediation analysis (i.e., centered within context with reintroduction of the subtracted means at Level 2), which accounted for the multilevel structure of the data. Results indicate that employees’ perceptions of high-performance HR practice use at the job group level positively related to all dependent variables and that affective organizational commitment partially mediated the relationship between HR practice perceptions and organizational citizenship behavior and fully mediated the relationship between HR practice perceptions and intent to remain with the organization. The discussion reviews the implications of these results and suggests future directions for research in this vein.

Existing research suggests that relationships among organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), task performance, and individual career outcomes are necessarily positive. The authors question this assumption and hypothesize that in organizations with outcome-based control systems, time spent on OCB comes at a cost to task performance. Building on this idea, the authors propose not only that time spent on task performance is more important than time spent on OCB in determining career outcomes (i.e., performance evaluation, salary increase, advancement speed, promotion) in an outcome-based control system but also that time spent on OCB may negatively impact career outcomes. Results based on archival data from 3,680 employees in a professional services firm lend some support for these ideas. Specifically, time spent on task performance was more important than OCB in determining all four career outcomes. Further, controlling for time spent on task performance, employees who spent more time on OCB had lower salary increases and advanced more slowly than employees who spent less time on OCB. These findings suggest that relationships between OCB and outcomes are more complex than originally thought and that boundary conditions may apply to conclusions drawn about the outcomes of OCB.

The authors develop the argument that the establishment of good stakeholder relations is influenced not only by a firm’s having a high level of corporate social performance but also by its ability to deliver consistent social performance. Therefore, both level and consistency in corporate social performance should have significant financial implications. More specifically, the authors suggest that level and two types of consistency in corporate social performance—temporal consistency and interdomain consistency—interact positively to influence a firm’s financial performance. Using a sample of 622 firms and 2,365 firm-year observations based on the Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini, & Co. data, the authors found empirical results supporting this argument. In addition, they found that maintaining consistently good social performance is more important for firms with high levels of knowledge intensity.

Exporting is a critically important strategy for firms to grow, yet research in this area has tended to ignore how firms can leverage resource-based capabilities to improve export performance. Building on the resource-based view and institutional theory, the authors develop a novel perspective to explain how a firm can improve export performance by aligning its export channel with its level of market orientation capabilities, contingent on the institutional distance between home and export markets. Using a unique database of Chinese exporters, the authors find that exporters with strong market orientation capabilities prefer hierarchical export channels, while those with weak market orientation capabilities prefer hybrid channels. The analysis also indicates that the institutional distance between China and the export market moderates this relation. Moreover, the authors find that aligning export channel choice with firm-level market orientation capabilities and institutional distance yields better export performance.

This collection of studies tested aspects of Cortina’s theory of selective incivility as a “modern” manifestation of sexism and racism in the workplace and also tested an extension of that theory to ageism. Survey data came from employees in three organizations: a city government (N = 369), a law enforcement agency (N = 653), and the U.S. military (N = 15,497). According to analyses of simple mediation, target gender and race (but not age) affected vulnerability to uncivil treatment on the job, which in turn predicted intent to leave that job. Evidence of moderated mediation also emerged, with target gender and race interacting to predict uncivil experiences, such that women of color reported the worst treatment. The article concludes with implications for interventions to promote civility and nondiscrimination in organizations.

Resource dependence theory (RDT) has long been a premier framework for understanding organization-environmental relations, but an empirical synthesis of its predictions is still lacking. Using meta-analysis, we consolidate 157 tests of RDT and corroborate its main predictions: organizations respond to resource dependencies by forming interorganizational arrangements like interlocks, alliances, joint ventures, in-sourcing arrangements, and mergers and acquisitions. In turn, these arrangements make them more autonomous and more legitimate. We also extend RDT in three ways. First, we “unpack” the theory by showing that the mechanisms linking arrangement formation to organizational autonomy and legitimacy differ across arrangements. Second, we address the question whether RDT is also a theory of organizational performance. We find that whereas autonomy positively mediates the relationship between arrangement formation and performance, legitimacy does not. This suggests that RDT can also explain organizational actions that have societal acceptance rather than economic performance as an ulterior motive. Third, we assess whether competition law is a boundary condition to RDT’s prescriptions. Specifically, we show that the adoption of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines in the U.S. has caused organizations to “flee” from mergers to less regulated arrangements like alliances and joint ventures, and has hurt the profitability of the remaining mergers.