Knowledge that Transforms

For-profit social ventures are proliferating. They often communicate social visions, presenting an ideal future where the ventures resolve environmental or societal issues. We study whether social vision communication helps a startup to recruit talent—a fundamental problem for growth. We argue that jobseekers are less likely to apply to ventures communicating a social vision as they perceive reduced career advancement opportunities. We conducted two complementary studies to test our theory. Study 1 enlisted data from a job board for startups to show that ventures communicating a social vision receive 46.3% fewer job applications. Study 2 replicated this finding in a field experiment that further reveals the underlying mechanism: social vision communication limits jobseekers’ perceived career advancement opportunities. Both studies show that higher remuneration can compensate the negative effect of social vision communication. Our findings advance research on purpose-driven organizations, human resources, entrepreneurship, and vision communication to caution entrepreneurs against social vision communication as a recruitment strategy. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1671 .

This study presents moral cost as a novel behavioral constraint on firm resource adjustment, specifically layoff decisions that can cause severe harm to employees. Revising the prevailing negative view of managers as purely self-interested, we propose that managers care about their employees and incur moral cost from layoffs. We leverage expansions in unemployment insurance as a quasi-natural experiment that reduces economic hardship for laid-off workers and, in turn, the moral cost of layoffs to managers. We find that these expansions license larger layoffs. The effects are stronger for chief executive officers (CEOs) with stronger prosocial preferences who dismiss fewer workers despite low performance, such as non-Republican, internally promoted, small town, or family firm CEOs, and weaker for CEOs who lack the discretion to avoid moral cost due to shareholder or financial pressures. Our findings suggest that the role of moral cost is substantial but also highly heterogeneous and readily suppressed by external pressures. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16734 .

How does network structure impact the speed and reach of social contagions? The current view holds that random links facilitate “simple” contagion, but when agents require multiple reinforcements for “complex” adoption, clustered networks are better conduits of social influence. We show that in complex contagion, even low probabilities of adoption upon a single contact would activate an exponential contagion process that tilts the balance in favor of random networks. On the other hand, underappreciated but critical to the race between random and clustered networks is how long agents engage with contagion. Switching back to prior practice and the inactivation of senders and especially receivers shorten the window of engagement for convincing distant contacts and weaken the reach of diffusion on random networks. We propose a simplified framework where clustering primarily enables contagion when repetition matters and receivers lose interest quickly; otherwise, diffusion, simple or complex, is faster on random networks than clustered ones. These mechanisms can inform designing social networks, structuring groups, and seeding of ideas and innovations at a time when the increasing inflow of content from various media limits actors’ engagement with each item, whereas expanding network size and connections speeds up diffusion through distant contacts. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1658 .

Organizing work around specialized professionals leverages their deep expertise and mastery of particular skills. However, as work becomes more flexible, organizations often require specialists to perform some work outside their specialization. These tasks, which distance specialists from the area of their greatest contribution, could diminish their performance by being distracting or tiring or by creating negative comparisons with others who are more proficient in that work. Contrary to these perspectives, we find robust evidence that specialists’ performance can be enhanced, rather than diminished, after work outside their specialization. Using archival data from 22 years of Major League Baseball (MLB) games and interviews with former MLB players and coaches, we find that specialized players perform better in their specialty after obligatory tasks outside of their specialization. We argue that this occurs through a process we call forced task inferiority, in which underperformance in tasks outside their specialty frustrates specialists, generating heightened arousal and drive that they can channel into better performance in their specialty work. The results are robust to alternative mechanisms, such as tasks outside a specialist’s area of specialization leading to learning, breaking monotony, or threatening the specialist’s professional identity. This research advances knowledge about managing specialists and flexible work arrangements by showing that when tasks are particularly sequenced, specialists’ performance can be enhanced, rather than diminished, by doing work outside their specialty. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1680 .

Organizations benefit from including employees with dissimilar values and perspectives, but their ability to realize these benefits is constrained by the degree to which those holding the dissimilar values (i.e., value minorities) feel comfortable engaging with their colleagues and the work of the collective. We extend theory on value dissimilarity by directly examining the experience of individuals whose values are dissimilar from those of their colleagues, and factors driving their engagement in work. Our examination spanned three studies: a laboratory experiment, a vignette study of employed adults, and a three-wave survey of student project groups. We found that the negative relationship between holding dissimilar values from one’s colleagues and engagement was lessened when value minorities disclosed personal information unrelated to their dissimilar values (Studies 1–3). Self-disclosure also moderated the negative relationship between value dissimilarity and feeling respected by one’s colleagues (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, felt respect mediated the effect of value dissimilarity on engagement, and this indirect effect was moderated by self-disclosure (Studies 2 and 3). Overall, this research is relevant to organizations seeking to capitalize upon the benefits of minority perspectives in the workforce but suggests that a critical first step is to prioritize the experience of value minorities and the decreased sense of social worth that can accompany this experience. By fostering an environment conducive to self-disclosure, organizations can help to alleviate the discomfort associated with value dissimilarity, thereby ensuring that all people, including the value minority, feel respected and are maximally engaged at work. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15768 .

Although scholarship has established how people with a partner, child, or other domestic obligations account for these responsibilities when making career decisions, we lack conceptual apparatus around how career decision making is informed by personal aspirations. Following a cohort of 89 international aid workers over eight years, I draw on in-depth interview (n = 126), survey (n = 551), and job transition data (n = 228) to detail how career decision making serves as a platform for identity management for single professionals who have aspirations for a long-term intimate relationship. I introduce the possibility space, which conveys how the ability to realize relationship aspirations is constrained for work-devoted professionals, especially for straight women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) people. Yet, they resist scaling back work. I detail why, presenting the three types of career decisions they made: (1) work devotion as identity armor, protecting and affirming their current aid worker identity; (2) temporary work alterations as identity diversification, carving out time to hopefully realize their desired relationship while postponing the affirmation of their aid worker identity; and (3) durable work alterations as identity restructuring, removing the aid worker identity from their identity network. This article’s model of career decision making as identity management and the broader theoretical explanation of how different behavioral practices can manage temporally distinct identities offers important contributions to scholarship on identity, the work-nonwork interface, labor market inequalities, and career decision making. Funding: This research was supported by the University of Minnesota’s Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship and a Stanford University Dissertation Support Grant.

A recent line of inquiry investigates new forms of organizing as bundles of novel solutions to universal problems of resource allocation and coordination: how to allocate organizational problems to organizational participants and how to integrate participants’ resulting efforts. We contribute to this line of inquiry by reframing organizational attention as the outcome of a concatenation of self-organizing, microstructural mechanisms linking multiple participants to multiple problems, thus giving rise to an emergent attention network. We argue that, when managerial hierarchies are absent and authority is decentralized, observable acts of attention allocation produce interpretable signals that help participants to direct their attention and share information on how to coordinate and integrate their individual efforts. We theorize that the observed structure of an organizational attention network is generated by the concatenation of four interdependent micromechanisms: focusing, reinforcing, mixing, and clustering. In a statistical analysis of organizational problem solving within a large open-source software project, we find support for our hypotheses about the self-organizing dynamics of the observed attention network connecting organizational problems (software bugs) to organizational participants (volunteer contributors). We discuss the implications of attention networks for theory and practice by emphasizing the self-organizing character of organizational problem solving. We discuss the generalizability of our theory to a wider set of organizations in which participants can freely allocate their attention to problems and the outcomes of their allocation are publicly observable without cost. Funding: Financial support for this work was provided by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [Grant 100018_150126] (“Relational event modes for bipartite networks with application to collaborative problem solving,” P.I. Alessandro Lomi) and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant 321869138] (“Statistical analysis of time-stamped multi-actor events in social networks,” P.I. Jüergen Lerner). Supplemental Material: The supplemental video containing the dynamic visualization of the data is available at https://zenodo.org/record/7564503 and in the e-companion (available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1674 ).

Prior work has emphasized the role of positive attention spillovers in driving cost advantages for high-status firms, with exchange partners offering preferential terms to high-status organizations because they anticipate benefits. Yet, spillovers from a client to a supplier may also be negative. These negative spillovers can be exacerbated when high-status actors are involved, because of the high level of publicity they attract. In this paper, we propose that suppliers’ concerns about negative attention are an important contingent factor determining whether high-status firms enjoy cost advantages or, instead, pay a premium. We expect that when suppliers anticipate that negative spillovers are more likely than positive ones and when they enjoy some bargaining power over their clients, a positive relationship between status and costs will result. To test this argument, we analyze fees paid by clients of varying status levels in the U.S. market for audit services. Consistent with our theory, we find that (1) high-status clients are charged more than their lower status peers and (2) the media attention clients receive does mediate this relationship. Indicative of the role of the supplier’s expectation of negative spillovers and their bargaining power, we also demonstrate that the positive relationship becomes stronger when auditors view clients as presenting a greater risk of future negative events and when clients have more bargaining power. Our efforts at theoretical integration result in a fuller picture of the role of status in shaping a firm’s costs, suggesting that status involves advantages in some settings but disadvantages in others. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15814 .

Collective evaluation processes, which offer individuals an opportunity to assess quality, have transcended mainstream sectors (e.g., books, restaurants) to permeate professional contexts from within and across organizations to the gig economy. This paper introduces a theoretical framework to understand how evaluators’ visibility into prior evaluations influences the subsequent evaluation process: the likelihood of evaluating at all and the value of the evaluations that end up being submitted. Central to this discussion are the conditions under which evaluations converge—are more similar to prior evaluations—or diverge—are less similar—as well as the mechanisms driving observed outcomes. Using a quasinatural experiment on a platform where investment professionals submit and evaluate investment recommendations, I compare evaluations that are made with and without the possibility of prior ratings influencing the subsequent evaluation process. I find that when prior ratings are visible, convergence occurs. The visibility of prior evaluations decreases the likelihood that a subsequent evaluation occurs by about 50%, and subsequent evaluations become 54%–63% closer to the visible rating. Further analysis suggests that peer deference is a dominant mechanism driving convergence, and only professionals with specialized expertise resist peer deference. Notably, there is no evidence that initial ratings are related to long-term performance. Thus, in this context, convergence distorts the available quality signal for a recommendation. These findings underscore how the structure of evaluation processes can perpetuate initial stratification, even among professionals with baseline levels of expertise. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.11285 .

Although scholarship has highlighted how stakeholders can influence business outcomes, few studies have examined how simultaneous, different tactics interact to impact firms. Critical to understanding this interaction is the radical flank effect, which asserts that the moderate and radical elements of social activist tactics can interact to either enhance or diminish a movement’s ability to accomplish its goals. However, research is unclear about when and whether the radical flank effect enhances or diminishes activist influence, nor has it empirically analyzed factors that influence the direction of the effect. To address these limitations, we explore one such factor—regulatory agency discretion, or regulators’ flexibility to interpret and implement public policies. Drawing on management and political sociology studies, we argue that discretion affects the salience of regulatory accountability to the public and thereby alters the radical flank effect on business outcomes in regulated markets. We analyze stakeholder opposition to U.S. hydroelectric power facilities from 1987 to 2019. The results show that high discretion enhances the radical flank effect and detrimentally affects business outcomes, whereas low discretion reverses the radical flank effect and favorably affects business outcomes. Funding: This work was supported by the Kauffman Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the Harvard Business School Division of Research. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16104 .