Knowledge that Transforms

The Business Roundtable, a large group of top CEOs, recently issued a statement defining the purpose of the corporation in stakeholder terms, a direct and intended reversal from an earlier statement that defined the duty of directors as serving the interests of stockholders. In this editorial, we briefly describe the major twists and turns in the stockholders-versus-stakeholders debate that make this statement so significant to management theory and practice. We then describe the implications of the statement for scholars and practicing managers. We end with a description of three specific research topics that require more research in light of this statement: firm boundaries, the nature of value creation systems, and theory regarding the destruction of stakeholder value.

Although helping behavior at work is widely studied, little is known about the processes via which help providers increase or decrease their helping behavior. In the current research, we integrated both enrichment-based and depletion-based perspectives on helping with Kahn’s psychological conditions for engagement to offer more comprehensive understanding of how helping behavior may change. Specifically, based on Kahn’s model, we simultaneously consider the beneficial effects of helping on help providers’ psychological meaningfulness and psychological safety along with the detrimental effects of helping on help providers’ psychological resource availability in order to uncover the differential processes through which helping behavior may change. To test our theoretical model, we collected data from a sample of 375 employees using a three-wave time-lagged design. Supporting the enrichment-based perspective, our results demonstrated that employees’ helping behavior was positively related to increases in their psychological meaningfulness and psychological safety. Supporting the depletion-based perspective, results showed that helping behavior was also positively related to increases in emotional exhaustion, an indicator of psychological resource availability. Whereas psychological meaningfulness and psychological safety were, in turn, positively related to increases in job involvement, emotional exhaustion was negatively related to increases in job involvement. Finally, job involvement was positively related to subsequent increases in employee helping behavior. We discuss the implications of our findings for both theories and practices.

Human resource management (HRM) research has broadened its focus beyond the intended HRM designed by executives to include the actual HRM line managers implement. In this study of a global professional services firm, we investigate the content and process of HRM implementation. HRM content refers to the degree or extent to which line managers implement HRM practices. The process of HRM implementation entails two seemingly contradictory dimensions of those practices: consistency (treating team members uniformly) and individual responsiveness (considering individual differences in contributions). Studying 171 employees and their line managers in 60 consulting project teams, we jointly address the effects of consistency and individual responsiveness in line manager HRM implementation. Results indicate that the degree and consistency of HRM implementation by line managers is positively related to individual job performance. In addition, consistency is found to moderate the link between the individual responsiveness of line manager HRM implementation and individual job performance such that the link is stronger when consistency is high. However, no impact is found for team viability. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Despite the long-standing research interest in the pre-deal phase of mergers and acquisitions, many important questions remain unanswered. We review and synthesize the extensive but rather fragmented research on this topic area in the fields of management, finance, accounting, and economics. We organize our review according to six themes, that is, deal initiation, target selection, bidding and negotiation, valuation and financing, announcement, and closure, which represent the main categories of activities performed during the pre-deal phase. Our review shows that most of the existing research relies on a rather high-level, simplified, and static conception of the pre-deal phase. On the basis of our review, we put forward a research agenda that calls for a more granular examination of individual activities and decisions, a more comprehensive analysis of the interplay among the different actors involved in the pre-deal phase, a better understanding of the role of the temporal dynamics, and the extension of the theoretical base from variance-based to process-based theorizing.

Over the past years, media coverage of firms has received significant scholarly attention. However, the resulting literature is spread across multiple disciplines and, therefore, varies with regard to its theoretical underpinnings and contextual settings. This makes it challenging for scholars to understand the contributions of this literature, to identify areas of inquiry, and to develop an encompassing research agenda. In this review, we address these issues by surveying the diverse literature on media coverage of firms to develop an integrative framework of the antecedents and consequences of media coverage that highlights paths for future research. Specifically, we identify the three theoretical perspectives—economic, institutional, and social-psychological—that the literature generally assumes on the news media. In addition, we highlight differences between strategy, finance, governance, and crisis contexts and review results from articles examining media coverage of firms in aggregate. In each context, we identify the primary functions of the news media as well as antecedents and consequences of media coverage. We proceed to develop an integrative framework for media coverage of firms by building on these findings and by examining the empirical methods used to measure media coverage, particularly regarding the measurement of specific coverage attributes. We highlight the gaps in current knowledge that our framework exposes and derive opportunities for future research that can further scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of firm media coverage.

Commonly reported statistics, such as the t value and p value, contain useful information about the cumulative probability of finding statistical significance based on the properties of the sample being analyzed. Unfortunately, converting t values and p values into this form of information is not intuitive and is often done incorrectly. We show how the bootstrap can provide a way to understand the cumulative probability of finding significance based on the characteristics of a specific sample and the statistical model being used. We also provide a simple way to estimate this probability from t values without having to rely on the bootstrap. Reporting sample-based probabilities can help promote robust and reliable research by conveying appropriate levels of uncertainty into discussions of results. We provide recommendations to authors, editors, reviewers, readers, and educators to help counter origination bias (i.e., how much a single-study finding should be viewed as solid or sacred) and other biases tied to misunderstanding the variability inherent associated with reporting “statistically significant” findings.

Collaboration, coordination, and cooperation lie at the core of interorganizational activities. To address the confusion regarding the definitions of these three terms, recent works have proposed redefinitions. Although these proposals address an important concern, we believe that they might be premature because (1) they do not build on a systematic examination of how these terms have been used in the literature and (2) they seem to narrow the focus to a given theory and alliances only, which might unduly restrict the meaning of the terms defined. In this paper, we review the definitions of the three terms as they appear in nine top journals in the general management literature (1948-2017). By studying the definitions, we identify three interactional dimensions that are present to different extents in collaboration, coordination, and cooperation: attitude, behavior, and outcome. Our systematic review confirms the confusion and lack of parsimony in the extant definitions. The overlap in the content of these dimensions across the three terms does not provide a basis for distinctively defining collaboration, coordination, and cooperation. Thus, we further draw on our review to identify two discriminating dimensions that allow us to distinguish these three terms: the temporal stage and the type of goal. Our review contributes to theoretical development by offering a conceptual redefinition of the three terms that renders them distinct and thus facilitates knowledge accumulation and theory development. Moreover, the set of interactional and discriminating dimensions generates a host of managerially relevant research questions about a wide range of interorganizational relationships.

Network brokerage research has grown rapidly in recent decades, spanning the boundaries of multiple social science disciplines as well as diverse research areas within management. Accordingly, we take stock of the literature on network brokerage and provide guidance on ways to move this burgeoning research area forward. We provide a comprehensive review of this literature, including crucial dimensions of the concept itself in terms of brokerage structure and behavior, a set of key categories of factors surrounding the brokerage concept (antecedents, outcomes, and moderators), and an overview of brokerage dynamics over time. We use these dimensions and categories to depict network brokerage’s theoretical and empirical underpinnings as well as evaluate prior research efforts. In so doing, we offer a means to summarize and synthesize this large, interdisciplinary literature, identify important research gaps, and offer promising directions for future research.

Both macro- and micro-oriented researchers frequently use panel data where the outcome of interest is measured repeated times. Panel data support at least five different modeling frameworks (within, between, incremental/emergent, cross-level, and growth). Researchers from macro- and micro-oriented domains tend to differentially use the frameworks and also use different analytic tools and terminology when using the same modeling framework. These differences have the potential to inhibit cross-discipline communication. In this review, we explore how macro- and microresearchers approach panel data with a specific emphasis on the theoretical implications of choosing one framework versus another. We illustrate how fixed-effects and random-effects models differ and how they are similar, and we conduct a thorough review of 142 articles that used panel data in leading management journals in 2017. Ultimately, our review identifies ways that researchers can better employ fixed- and random-effects models, model time as a meaningful predictor or ensure unobserved time heterogeneity is controlled, and align hypotheses to analytic choice. In the end, our goal is to help facilitate communication and theory development between macro- and micro-oriented management researchers.

In North America and Western Europe, women now compose almost half the workforce but still face disparities in pay and promotions. We suggest that women’s natural experiences of the three Ms (i.e., menstruation, maternity, and menopause) are taboo topics in ways that may constrain women’s careers. We propose that the three Ms are particularly incongruent with expectations at intersecting career stages (i.e., a job market newcomer having menstrual discomfort, an early career professional breastfeeding, a company leader getting hot flashes), with implications for work outcomes. In this review, we tackle the taboo of the three Ms by reviewing the evidence for how menstruation, maternity, and menopause are each linked to (1) hormonal and physiological changes, (2) societal beliefs and stereotypes, and (3) work affect, cognition, and behavior. We conclude by proposing novel implications for incorporating the three Ms into existing theoretical frameworks (i.e., work-nonwork spillover; stigma and disclosure; occupational health) and presenting new research questions and practices for understanding and addressing the ways that women’s health intersects with career trajectories.