Knowledge that Transforms

An urgent issue for new ventures is how firms can effectively use human resource policies to promote growth and employee productivity. In this study, we propose a model of how three motivation-enhancing human resource (MHR) practices relate to firms’ subsequent growth and productivity. In addition,<br/>we demonstrate how two temporal factors influence the relationship of MHR practices with subsequent growth and productivity. Specifically, we assess how the initial implementation of MHR practices creates short-term costs and long-term benefits, and we assess how firm developmental stage influences the relationship of MHR practices with subsequent growth and productivity. We test our model by using random coefficient growth modeling with a sample of 677 firms tracked for 6 years.<br/>We found that MHR practices are related to subsequent firm growth and productivity. In addition, we show that the initial use of MHR practices creates inefficiencies that, in the short-term, slow growth and productivity but have positive long-term effects of subsequent growth and productivity. Finally, we<br/>show that the relationships of MHR practices with growth and productivity are much stronger when firms are in a postrevenue, growth goal stage. We conclude with a research agenda and recommendations for how new ventures can make effective use of MHR practices to promote performance.

Interorganizational scholars have long thought about how firms learn through buyer relationships. However, it is not clear whether dyadic learning gains are susceptible to imitation or are only inherited and whether these gains decay over time or are of an enduring nature. In this paper, I import ideas from the organizational imprinting literature into the interorganizational literature and apply the knowledge-based and learning views of the firm to examine how suppliers with differing initial endowments learn to work together with a buyer. The findings from an inductive multiple case study of spinoff and nonspinoff suppliers of an automotive manufacturer parent in Turkey reveal the following three learning mechanisms: informal relationships and social capital, transfer of routines, and shared identity. Although nonspinoff suppliers also exhibit evidence of several learning processes to a certain extent, spinoff suppliers' deeper relationship, in particular their shared identity, with their parent based on their direct parental heritage tends to be more difficult for them to copy. No matter how hard nonspinoff suppliers try, they have "one hand tied behind their back," they remain stepchildren, and they never truly become a biological child. By providing a novel setting and a rich set of qualitative data on the learning behaviors of these two types of suppliers, this study teases apart the knowledge and resources that can be "learned from external sources" versus those that can "only be inherited."

Recent advances in the personality and turnover literatures suggest the importance of expanding current turnover criteria, incorporating dark personality traits, and examining the role of time in these relationships. The present study investigates these issues by considering both the speed and the reasons for leaving, examining a wider range of personality variables as predictors by including both “bright” and “dark” traits, and exploring the potential moderating effect of time in such predictions. Data were collected from a sample of 617 employees working in an electronics manufacturing firm in the United States. Using a Bayesian survival analysis framework, we found that dark traits were just as useful in predicting turnover outcomes as traditional personality traits and best predicted the specific turnover reasons, “deviant behavior” and “no call no show.” Investigating the role of time showed that job satisfaction and intellectual curiosity (i.e., Openness) grew in predictive strength over the course of organizational tenure but that the time-dependent effects of other predictors were negligible.

In this study, we draw upon a social movement perspective to examine how movements and institutional opportunity (political and cultural) influenced a sample of Fortune 500 corporations’ adoption of a controversial organizational practice—same-sex partner health benefits. Our results show that while corporations’ gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) employee resource groups increased the rate of the corporations’ benefits adoption, the effect of the GLBT employee resource groups became weaker when the degree of resource concentration of local GLBT advocacy organizations was high. Political opportunity derived from state legal environments and cultural opportunity derived from the tenor of moral legitimacy in leading national press coverage had little influence on the rate of benefits adoption. Furthermore, the influence of a GLBT employee resource group on the rate of benefits adoption by its corporation became weaker when cultural opportunity, derived from increases in positive tenor of pragmatic legitimacy discourse used by movement and countermovement organizations in the press, was present. Accordingly, our study shows the complicated effects of movements within and outside corporations and cultural opportunity on the adoption of a controversial practice and reveals the importance of mobilizing structure (both internal and external movements) and cultural opportunity in the adoption.

Proxy advisors are information intermediaries that enable shareholders to exercise their voting rights. While proxy advisors’ influence is documented in market-based corporate governance systems, we know little about the corporate governance role of proxy advice in relationship-based governance systems. Drawing on agency theory and the comparative corporate governance literature, we theorize that shareholders are sensitive to the costs and benefits of monitoring by considering internal monitoring capabilities. We also theorize that relative to market-based corporate governance systems, proxy advice is both less influential and has lower predictive quality in relationship-based governance systems. We test our multilevel model using 13,497 voting results from 613 firms in 16 Western European countries and generally find support for our predictions.

This study argues and shows that the extent to which high-technology firms focus efforts by outsourcing production, assembly, and logistics activities enhances the extent of technological knowledge exploration. This occurs through three modalities: (1) intensifying the effect of internal R&D efforts on exploration; (2) intensifying the effect of learning from competing partners, through R&D alliances, on exploration; and (3) intensifying the effect of learning from customers on exploration. Empirical analysis of a panel data set of Israeli high-technology firms supports the view that the combination of these three modalities is associated with greater exploration of new technological knowledge.

Ensuring that managers engage in fair behaviors is critical for the effective functioning of organizations. Previous research has focused on increasing the enactment of interactional justice (i.e., justice as a dependent variable) by enhancing managers’ willingness to be fair. Drawing upon the limited strength model of self-regulation, we argue that the enactment of interactional justice may not depend solely on managers’ willingness or motivation but also on the extent to which managers have the self-regulatory resources required to engage in these behaviors. Using four experimental studies, our results indicate that the depletion of self-regulatory resources is negatively associated with the enactment of interactional justice. Furthermore, we argue that depletion can give rise to self-appraisal gaps (i.e., individuals’ ability to accurately appraise the fairness of their behavior is hampered), which can diminish the impetus to regulate fair behaviors (i.e., diminish interactional justice). Results provide support for self-appraisal gaps as an underlying explanation for why depletion can negatively affect the enactment of interactional justice. Moreover, the negative effects of depletion can be overcome by increasing managers’ awareness that they may be overestimating the fairness of their behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Adopting a signaling theory perspective, we argue that politician stock ownership sends signals of positive predispositions to firms, thereby alleviating some necessity for firms to emphasize lobbying expenditures to influence political action. Using data on congressional stock ownership, we find support for our arguments. We find that as the proportion of Congress owning stock in a firm increases, the firm decreases the intensity of lobbying. Furthermore, we find that the signals associated with stock-holding politicians with greater ability to affect the legislative agenda (i.e., affiliation with the majority party) relates to lobbying intensity. Our findings add to the literature on lobbying while also offering implications for practice and avenues for future research.