Knowledge that Transforms

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.

Innate talent and orientation toward hard work are highly important personal attributes with respect to workers’ productive capabilities. In this research, we identify a discrepancy between job candidates and recruiters in their relative valuation of these two attributes. Although innate talent is valued relatively more by job candidates than recruiters, the opposite is true for orientation toward hard work. We propose that the discrepancy is rooted in a misalignment of the fundamental motivations of the two parties in the job market. In seven studies (four preregistered), which include randomized trial experiments and quasi-experiments and use real life recruiters and job seekers (across a total of 112 industries) as participants, we provide evidence of the current effect and its underlying mechanism. Studies 1A–1C demonstrate the negative consequence of the discrepancy on job market efficiency, showing that it can lead candidates to adopt impression management strategies that lower their chance of getting the job. Studies 2A and 2B show that full-time workers consider career potential to be associated with both innate talent and hard work but position performance to be more strongly associated with hard work than innate talent. Finally, Studies 3A and 3B indicate that candidates are relatively more career-focused, whereas recruiters are relatively more position focused and that this difference in their relative focus mediates the current discrepancy. Implications of the present research for both job candidates and recruiters are discussed.

Although employees come up with creative (i.e., novel and useful) ideas, many of those ideas are not endorsed or implemented by managers. In shedding light on this phenomenon, we propose that managers who have lower social status in the organization are more likely to reject employees’ novel (but still useful) ideas. Guided by associative-propositional evaluation theory (AP-E) and the literature on the psychology of having low status, we hypothesize that when employees propose novel (compared with more mundane) ideas, it triggers greater feelings of insecurity and threat in low-status (versus high-status) managers, who perceive that these employees, if successful, could potentially infringe on their own domains at work. In turn, such low-status managers feel the need to be territorial—that is, to maintain and protect their existing work domains from potential infringement by others—and therefore refrain from endorsing their employees’ novel, yet useful ideas. However, we suggest that such negative effects are attenuated when low-status managers have high levels of organizational identification, allowing them to subordinate their self-interest to the interests of the broader organization. We demonstrate these effects in four preregistered studies—three laboratory experiments and a field study (with real employee ideas provided to managers for their assessment). We discuss the implications for the literature on the receiving side of creativity, territoriality, and status in organizations.

This study examines how short selling influences board composition following a tradition in the strategy literature emphasizing the role of the external environment on firms’ strategies. We predict that a short-selling-friendly environment has a negative effect on the number of outside directors, which is supported by our firm and year fixed effect difference-in-differences analysis. We find that the negative effect of a short-selling-friendly environment becomes stronger when outside directors have a larger network and are busy. Furthermore, we investigate the moderating effect of chief executive officer (CEO) influence on the board and find that the negative effect is more pronounced when the CEO serves as the board chair and when the nominating committee is more nonindependent. Our research identifies a novel determinant of board composition and addresses the endogeneity issue in board composition literature.

This paper examines the effects of temporal distance generated by time zone separation on communication in geographically distributed organizations. We build on prior research, which highlights time zone separation as a significant challenge, but argue that employees may time shift—move work-related communication to outside of regular business hours—to counteract temporal distance. We propose a theory in which employees’ tendency to time shift depends on the demands of their tasks and collaborative relationships and individuals’ ability to supply work outside of regular business hours. Analyzing communication-level data from 12,038 employees of a large multinational firm and using cities’ shifts to/from daylight saving time for identification, we find that temporal distance leads to sizable but smaller than expected reductions in volumes of rich, synchronous communication between employees. Consistent with our arguments, increased temporal distance significantly increases time shifting of work-related communication, especially among workers whose jobs are nonroutine and interactions in strong collaborative relationships. We further document that female employees and employees based in countries with stricter legal work hour limits engage in significantly less time-shifted communication. Our study improves understanding of a ubiquitous source of collaboration friction. It also sheds light on a potential source of inequities in workplace outcomes stemming from differences in individuals’ ability to work outside of regular business hours.

We provide large-scale empirical evidence of how much chief executive officers (CEOs) change corporate culture. To do this, we use employee reviews to measure corporate cultural change in S&P 1500 firms. In a variance decomposition analysis, we find a modest effect of CEOs on corporate cultural change. The effect of CEOs on cultural change is larger than industry effect but smaller than firm effect. Regression analysis in the context of CEO succession further shows consistent evidence of a modest effect of CEO succession on corporate cultural change. In addition, the relationship between CEOs and cultural change is not likely to be fully explained by time trend, reverse causality, sample selection bias, and omitted variable bias. An investigation into the contextual contingencies of the CEO-cultural change relationship suggests that succession characteristics, such as predecessor influence and turnaround situation, weaken postsuccession cultural change, but industry task environment has a weak moderation effect. Overall, our study contributes to the literature on strategic leadership and corporate culture.

Knowledge work—frequently characterized as nonroutine and complex—requires individuals to be deeply engrossed with or “absorbed” in their work. Notwithstanding, organizations tend to put knowledge workers in multiple teams, undermining their ability to achieve the level of absorption required to realize their full potential. We examine how knowledge workers who are operating in multiple team contexts navigate competing demands on their time on a daily basis. Based on conservation of resources theory, we posit that the time devoted to the focal team—that is, the primary team in which knowledge workers are most actively involved—fosters absorption. However, this positive relationship is moderated by the number of different team contexts and problem-solving demands that knowledge workers experience daily, as together, these contextual conditions block optimal resource utilization. To test our hypotheses, we apply hierarchical linear modelling to experience-sampling data from 140 knowledge workers surveyed over 10 consecutive working days. Our findings support the hypothesized model, suggesting that daily involvement in multiple team contexts hinders full absorption, especially if daily problem-solving demands are high. Our insights emphasize the importance of the role and potential cost of multiple team membership (MTM) for understanding knowledge workers’ optimal functioning.

How do people establish and maintain cultural fit with an organization? Prior research has offered two perspectives that have heretofore been conceptually disconnected. One focuses on personal values, whereas another emphasizes perceptions of the cultural code. We develop a theoretical account that integrates these approaches by linking them to distinct mechanisms and behavioral consequences of cultural fit. We propose that value congruence—the match between one’s values and those that prevail in an organization—relates to the mechanism of group attachment and shapes behavior when one periodically steps back from day-to-day interactions, assesses one’s identification with an organization, and determines whether to stay or voluntarily depart. In contrast, we argue that perceptual congruence—the degree to which one implicitly understands an organization’s prevailing values and norms—relates to the mechanism of interpersonal coordination and influences behavior when one engages in routine peer interactions. Accordingly, we theorize that these two forms of cultural fit relate to distinct behaviors, voluntary exit and linguistic conformity with peers, respectively. Drawing on email and survey data from a midsized technology firm, we find support for our theory and discuss the implications of our findings for research on person-culture fit, dual-process models of culture and cognition, and the pairing of surveys with digital trace data.

Based on a three-year inductive field study of first-time founders, we reveal the dynamic identity relationships that tie founders to their ventures: what such relationships comprise, how they evolve over time, and with what strategic implications for the development of new businesses. Specifically, we found that such relationships comprise both identification and construals, which capture the degree to which founders saw their ventures as self-defining and founder-venture psychological distance. Construals, and shifts in construals over time, were critical in explaining how entrepreneurs handled venture-related challenges, as well as how they strategically (re)focused their ventures in terms of scope, whether by diversifying or specializing. By explaining these dynamics, we contribute to research on entrepreneurial identity as well as to construal level theory. In addition, as we distinguish construals from identification, we highlight the importance of construals for understanding identity relationships beyond entrepreneurship.

This inductive study of 44 consultants in a prominent consulting firm examines how consultants set work-life boundaries without getting stigmatized and how they develop their workplace relationships into sources of help for this process. Within this organization, dominated by the ideal worker norm, we found a hidden, self-sustaining network of consultants who delivered excellent work while violating the ideal worker norm without stigmatization. Their way of working was based on a coherent set of beliefs about work and the work-life interface we named the sustainable worker schema, which contrasted with the ideal worker schema in all ways except in the ultimate goals: high performance and excellent work. Essential to this way of working was not only effective management of boundaries between work and life outside of work (work-life boundaries) but also effective management of boundaries around each work task or project (work boundaries). Consultants who embraced the sustainable worker schema worked fewer hours and achieved higher satisfaction with work-life balance than their counterparts. Together, these findings highlight the importance of embracing the centrality of work in work-life research; underscore the power of invisibility when challenging the ideal worker norm; and paint a rich picture of boundary work as a network-level phenomenon.