Knowledge that Transforms

One of the most important features on which to judge the merit of any academic paper is the strength of its theory. Although commentary about what constitutes strong theory is widespread, there is no holistic account of the full range of existing perspectives. To address this oversight, I construct a typology composed of six dimensions of strong theory: importance, interestingness, actionability, generality, simplicity, and accuracy. This typology provides a lens to examine a vexing problem: the effort to increase the strength of a theory on one dimension will usually compromise its strength on others. Despite this reality, authors experience pressure in the review process to optimize theories on all six dimensions. I explain how the expectation to build theories that cannot possibly be built (what I call the fruitless search for unicorn theories) is driven by historical forces. The study of organizations emerged not from one source, but a half-dozen distinct traditions, including applied scientists who study time-sensitive problems, disciplinary scholars who identify universal laws of human behavior, and empiricists who prefer a tight link between concepts and measures. Review teams are often composed of referees who hail from different traditions and possess divergent views on theory. Even when each reviewer has concerns that are reasonable in isolation, authors often confront unrealistic expectations when reviewers’ preferences are aggregated. To mitigate this problem, I recommend that authors, reviewers, and editors (1) prioritize fewer dimensions in any single theory, and (2) emphasize distinct dimensions in different theories on the same topic.

Meritocracy is widely believed to be a fair system. Although extant literature focuses on managers’ implementation of meritocratic decisions, less attention has been paid to jobseekers’ responses to meritocratic opportunities. This study addresses this gap by examining how aspiring software developers without computer science (CS) degrees respond to the ostensibly meritocratic promise of entering tech through open-access coding skills. Drawing on interview, social media, and ethnographic data, I find that although all aspirants agreed coding skills were the key meritocratic criteria for entering tech without CS degrees, they interpreted the merit threshold (the level of coding competency needed to get their first job) differently and adopted three distinct entry strategies that varied in timing and scope—Early/Broad, Standard, and Late/Narrow. Follow-up data collected three years later revealed that one strategy (Early/Broad) was associated with high employment rates across all subgroups of aspirants and substantially increased employment chances for those historically underrepresented in tech. Yet, most did not opt for it. Indeed, only one group (White men with white-collar/professional backgrounds) clustered in strategies with higher employment rates, resulting in this population securing jobs at a higher rate than others. To explain the variation in merit thresholds and accompanying entry strategies, this study highlights aspirants’ previous encounters with demand-side actors—particularly, their perceptions of whether, and to what extent, employers had previously been willing to give them a chance. These findings contribute to research on meritocracy and labor markets and offer insights into building a more diverse workforce.

Research in advanced economies shows that street protests can indirectly influence untargeted firms through informational spillovers. We propose that, in developing economies, the indirect effects of street protests extend beyond information cues to include a resource spillover effect. Specifically, local officials may be motivated to defuse or redirect the momentum of street protests by appealing to constituents’ aspirations for economic well-being. This middle-ground approach sits between symbolic gestures and targeted policies directly addressing activists’ grievances and can facilitate the creation of new organizations. Using a longitudinal data set organized by city-year observations in China between 2008 and 2019, we examine how street protests over noneconomic issues impact the founding of new ventures. We find that city mayors’ response to street protests indirectly facilitates entrepreneurship by lowering business operating costs and increasing access to capital. Further, the resource spillover effect on businesses is accentuated by a political opportunity structure that enhances the impact of street protests on the responses of local politicians.

Existing evidence demonstrates that an organization’s diversity climate can enhance its bottom line. Though some scholars theorize potential mediators to explain these effects, recent meta-analytic and literature reviews conclude that much remains unknown regarding both why diversity climate influences outcomes and how sociocultural factors within and beyond the organization may shape its implications. We propose that unit-level diversity climate stands to produce more uniformly positive affective commitment levels (i.e., higher commitment mean and lower commitment dispersion), thereby optimizing the returns on human capital investments in the form of greater unit productivity. Data from 738 stores in 48 American states indicate a significant indirect effect of unit diversity climate on productivity through affective commitment mean and dispersion. Moreover, we apply the concept of climate context congruence to extend diversity climate theory and explore the influence of alignment among unit-level diversity climate, unit composition (i.e., racioethnic diversity), and cultural tightness–looseness (i.e., state tightness–looseness) in the geographic region within which the unit is operating. In doing so, we offer a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of the sociocultural conditions wherein supportive diversity climates may be differentially beneficial. Our results support the notion that organizations may reap greater benefits of diversity climate when state culture and unit composition align (i.e., tighter/homogenous, or looser/diverse) to accentuate diversity climate efficacy.

This study moves beyond the traditional atomistic view of firms engaged in alliance agreements. By integrating current research on internal organizational design with research on interfirm collaboration, we investigate the implications of the organizational design of parent firms for the design and governance of technology partnerships. More specifically, we propose that in a research and development (R&D) alliance between a client firm and an R&D firm, the client firm’s internal organizational structure in R&D plays an important role in alliance design and governance. Centralized firms are better able to integrate knowledge in the organization compared with decentralized firms, and hence, we theorize that they will design their technology partnerships for greater knowledge access. Empirical findings from alliances in the biopharmaceutical industry offer support for our predictions: firms with centralized R&D decision making are more likely to capture intellectual property rights. Further, these firms tend to engage in alliances with broader vertical and horizontal scope and greater technological interdependence in order to access, recombine, and distribute knowledge. This study extends research on alliance design and governance by underscoring the important influence of a partner firm’s organizational structure.

The current research examines a potential implication of having a high-status minority member in organizations—a “star” athlete, professor, or lawyer. Building on the literature on organizational diversity, individual status, and licensing effects, we suggest that having a minority member with high status can license organizational decision makers to reduce their effort in increasing diversity compared with having a minority member with relatively low status. We analyzed the hiring outcomes of Major League Baseball teams from 1988 to 2019 and found that the teams with a higher-status minority player hired fewer minority players in the next draft compared with the teams with a lower-status minority player. This effect was moderated by role prototypicality and group membership—the attributes that would further increase the saliency of a high-status minority player. We then corroborated these findings in a laboratory experiment showing that participants were less willing to invest effort in hiring minority candidates when a company already had a high-status (versus low-status) minority member. These findings extend existing literature by demonstrating when and how the presence of a prominent minority member might inadvertently diminish organizational efforts to increase diversity.

Negotiations have consequences for people’s career trajectories, wealth, and well-being. Yet we still have a limited understanding of how demographic characteristics such as sexual orientation and race influence distributive negotiation outcomes, much less the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. To contribute to (1) our understanding of how identity influences negotiations and (2) research on intersectionality, we test how race (Black versus East Asian versus White) and sexual orientation (gay versus straight) influence distributive negotiation outcomes for men in a field experiment. We conducted a large-scale (n = 3,000), preregistered audit experiment involving (fictitious) buyers negotiating for cars on Craigslist. Sellers were 7.7 percentage points (22.4%) less likely to respond to gay versus straight White men. Sellers were also less polite in responses to Black and East Asian men (of any sexual orientation) than to straight White men. In a preregistered follow-up experiment (n = 500), we show that impoliteness in negotiation responses reduces positive expectations about negotiations and behavioral intentions to negotiate in the future, suggesting that differences in politeness may have consequences for racial minorities’ willingness to initiate future negotiations. Our work illuminates how identity-based biases manifest in negotiations, offers insights into theories of intersectionality, and underscores how demand-side biases can lead to supply-side differences in negotiation propensity.

In recent years, many firms have prioritized both pay equity (i.e., closing pay gaps associated with target groups such as women and racial minorities) and equitable representation (i.e., ensuring these target groups are fairly represented across a firm’s hierarchy). We use formal modeling and simulations to show how efforts to close pay gaps across multiple groups can undermine equitable representation. Specifically, our analysis suggests that pressure for pay equity creates a cost-based financial incentive to enact a subtle form of tokenism: A firm may minimize the cost of closing pay gaps if it maintains a workforce with a small number of minority women whom it pays well in order to compensate for underpaying larger numbers of majority women and minority men who resemble each other in terms of job attributes and personal qualifications. A firm can avoid these outcomes if it focuses on ensuring that employees from target groups are equitably rewarded for job attributes and personal qualifications rather than minimizing cost. But an equitable-rewards approach can be substantially more expensive than a cost-minimization approach, especially if pay gaps are larger in high-wage jobs or if there are many target groups. We conclude by offering testable empirical predictions and recommending a practical solution, namely to include terms for intersectional categories (e.g., minority women) in the regressions used to estimate pay gaps.

Why do women and men approach the same work differently? Prior research across occupations shows that men tend to emphasize quantity and produce more, whereas women prioritize quality. Researchers have attributed these differences to individual-level factors, such as gender-specific preferences, caregiving responsibilities, and evaluator biases. We propose that organizational practices, specifically production incentives and quality monitoring, also influence these patterns. Using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), we conceptualize the quantity-quality tradeoff using examiner leniency and leverage discontinuities in incentives and monitoring to assess their effects. We theorize and find that stronger production incentives lead men to be more lenient than women, prioritizing quantity. Under heightened monitoring, women are less lenient than men, emphasizing quality. Further, monitoring moderates the relationship between incentives and gender differences in leniency such that the largest gender gap occurs under strong incentives and weak monitoring. Our study demonstrates that organizational practices interact with worker gender to shape the quantity-quality tradeoff, indicating that incentive and monitoring systems—though not designed to affect gender inequality—produce distinct and unintended effects that are essential to understanding and addressing workplace disparities.

Occupational subgroups with similar training often develop differing work practices within their local settings. These differences may create inconsistencies when organizational change brings subgroups together to work alongside each other. Based on a two-year qualitative study of a hospital merger combining two neonatal intensive care units, we consider how differing expert practices may be challenged, preserved, or reconciled when subgroups are brought together. We find that reconciliation processes are unexpectedly triggered by novice newcomers who struggle to socialize into a consistent way of working. Comparing five expert practices over time, we also find that when groups are able to converge around the type of knowledge that should apply to expert practices (abstract versus experiential knowledge), a form of reconciliation is possible, but when there is divergence around the type of knowledge that is relevant to the situation, reconciliation fails. Converging on experiential knowledge implies a simplified process of reconciliation that preserves expert autonomy while masking residual differences. Converging on abstract knowledge involves a complex, multilayered process in which expert subgroups need to revert in part to mechanisms resembling those that underpinned their initial socialization into the discipline. These mechanisms include mobilizing evidence to update abstract knowledge, situated mentoring with respected experts, and authoritative reinforcing via interventions from high-status professionals. Our study highlights the challenges of changing expert practices that are rooted in ingrained experiential knowledge. It reveals that abstract knowledge alone is insufficient and that reconciliation invariably involves settlements and agreements on what form of knowledge matters.