Knowledge that Transforms

Prior research has identified the value of reconnecting dormant ties (i.e., people you used to know), allowing individuals to refresh relationships and mobilize the value inherent in a tie (i.e., its social capital). However, less well understood is how this reconnection process occurs, including how it can be done well or poorly. To address this lack of knowledge, we conducted multi-organizational research combining an inductive, qualitative field study of professional reconnections by individuals in the North Italian textile district (Study 1) and, to validate our findings, a vignette-based experiment with U.S. workers (Study 2). We find that the process of reconnecting dormant ties can and does fail, sometimes dramatically, when people do not refresh the tie and, as a result, do not trust where they stand with each other. Specifically, we find that three elements—remembering, catching up, and perceiving the tie similarly—are key to successfully mobilizing the value of a dormant tie.

The discussions of organizational politics and processes of organizational adaptation have developed as largely independent streams of work. However, we suggest that organizational politics—in particular, the power dynamics of the dominant coalition—can be a driver for patterns of both “continuity and change” within organizations. Continuity is maintained by two inertial forces. First, a corporate strategy that conforms to the interest of the dominant coalition will tend to reinforce the power of that dominant coalition—an entrenchment effect. Second, even organizational units that were not initially part of the dominant coalition adapt their policies to that corporate strategy and, as a consequence, may come to support this status quo strategy. However, the political dynamics within the organization can also facilitate strategic change because shifts in the environment can alter the power structure of the organization, resulting in a new dominant coalition with a different agenda. The underlying basis is that organizations are multilevel systems in which subunits adapt to the organization’s strategy, and that strategy, in turn, adapts to the subunits’ current policies. We find that a self-interested political process can help “unfreeze” the alignment between subunit policies and an organization’s strategy in a changing environment, facilitating a more timely adaptive response than a strategy process based on the perceived collective interest of the organization as a whole. However, under high levels of goal conflict among subunits, coalitional power inhibits, rather than facilitates, adaptive change because of the entrenchment effect of power. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16995 .

Existing theory suggests that professionals are ineffective at regulating the work of their peers, especially when it comes to disciplining misconduct, because of professional norms of collegiality. In response, transparency measures have been put in place over the years to increase accountability toward key external audiences, such as the public, and to ensure that professionals hold guilty peers accountable for misconduct. Few studies, however, have sufficiently investigated how professionals discipline peer misconduct in the face of transparency measures. We gained access to a state medical board’s internal deliberations about how to discipline physicians guilty of overprescribing opioids, endangering public health. We found that even in the most egregious cases, the board predominantly refrained from implementing stringent disciplinary action despite extensive transparency measures. Our data allow us to theorize what we call bounded accountability, which refers to individuals charged with holding guilty actors accountable for their misconduct instituting only limited discipline. We found four mechanisms that constrained the exercise of accountability: information asymmetries between regulatory bodies, bureaucratic inefficiencies of the disciplinary apparatus, shared professional beliefs among decision makers, and interpersonal emotions between decision makers and the guilty professionals whom they are put in charge of disciplining. We found that these mechanisms operated at the field, occupational, organizational, and interpersonal levels, respectively. Utilizing a highly consequential study context, our findings suggest that when professional misconduct is disciplined by members of the same occupation, bounded accountability is the most likely outcome, even with extensive transparency measures in place. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17932 .

Word embedding models are a powerful approach for representing the multidimensional conceptual spaces within which communicated concepts relate, combine, and compete with one another. This class of models represent a recent advance in machine learning allowing scholars to efficiently encode complex systems of meaning with minimal semantic distortion based on local and global word co-occurrences from large-scale text data. Although their use has the potential to broaden theoretical possibilities within organization science, embeddings are largely unknown to organizational scholars, where known they have only been mobilized for a narrow set of uses, and they remain unlinked to a theoretical scaffolding that can enable cumulative theory building within the organizations community. Our goal is to demonstrate the promise embedding models hold for organization science by providing a practical roadmap for users to mobilize the methodology in their research and a theoretical guide for consumers of that research to evaluate and conceptually link embedded representations with theoretical significance and potential. We begin by explicitly defining the notions of concept and conceptual space before proceeding to show how these can be represented and measured with word embedding models, noting strengths and weaknesses of the approach. We then provide a set of embedding measurements along with their theoretical interpretation and flexible extension. Our aim is to extract the operational and conceptual significance from technical treatments of word embeddings and place them within a practical, theoretical framework to accelerate research committed to understanding how individuals, teams, and broader collectives represent, communicate, and deploy meaning in organizational life. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1686 .

Entrepreneurs often struggle to add cofounders who are both interpersonally compatible and who possess complementary resources (i.e., hybrid ties). In this paper, we suggest that there are cognitive and motivational differences between lead entrepreneurs and potential cofounders that complicate the formation of hybrid ties. We propose that lead entrepreneurs prioritize resources, whereas potential cofounders prioritize interpersonal compatibility, because of differences in construal level and utilitarian motives during the team formation process. Although these differences can complicate the formation of hybrid ties, we posit that lead entrepreneurs can overcome these differences by communicating in ways that highlight their interpersonal compatibility with potential cofounders. We find support for our theory across three studies with data from (1) the Y Combinator Co-Founder Matching online platform, (2) an online experiment with entrepreneurs, and (3) a networking event at an incubator. Our findings add novel contributions to the entrepreneurial team formation, entrepreneurial networking, and social networks literatures. Funding: This work was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation [2016 Dissertation Fellowship Award]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16693 .

The presence of independent directors on corporate boards is often seen as an important means of monitoring to address principal-agent problems and of providing external resources and advice to management. In joint ventures (JVs), however, shareholder-management frictions can be lessened by appointing insiders to management and board positions, whereas access to valuable expertise, resources, and networks are provided by the partners themselves. A natural question, then, is why and when do partners appoint independent directors to JV boards? We argue that the appointment of independent directors to joint venture boards is primarily driven by principal-principal conflict considerations, which are unique in the joint venture context compared with conventional widely held corporations. Consistent with this argument, we find that the likelihood of appointing independent directors increases when JVs face more exchange hazards due to the competitive overlap between partners and the broader functional scope of the JV. However, given that JVs also have alternative governance mechanisms to mitigate shareholder conflicts, we also find that more complex contractual agreements can potentially substitute for independent directors on JV boards. Although relational governance is often highlighted as a key facet of JV governance, we do not find such a substitution effect for this supporting governance mechanism. Overall, our research therefore highlights several interesting domain translation issues when applying existing corporate governance insights to the joint venture setting. Our paper concludes with a call for future research on independent directors serving on JV boards, as JVs represent an organizational form that has been neglected in corporate governance research.

Connecting otherwise disconnected individuals and groups—spanning structural holes—can earn social network brokers faster promotions, higher remuneration, and enhanced creativity. Organizations also benefit through improved communication and coordination from these connections between knowledge silos. Neglected in prior research, however, has been theory and evidence concerning the psychological costs to individuals of engaging in brokering activities. We build new theory concerning the extent to which keeping people separated (i.e., tertius separans brokering) relative to bringing people together (i.e., tertius iungens brokering) results in burnout and in abusive behavior toward coworkers. Engagement in tertius separans brokering, relative to tertius iungens brokering, we suggest, burdens people with onerous demands while limiting access to resources necessary to recover. Across three studies, we find that tertius separans leads to abusive behavior of others, mediated by an increased experience of burnout on the part of the broker. First, we conducted a five-month field study of burnout and abusive behavior, with brokering assessed via email exchanges among 1,536 university employees in South America. Second, we examined time-separated data on self-reported brokering behaviors, burnout, and coworker abuse among 242 employees of U.S. organizations. Third, we experimentally investigated the effects of the two types of brokering behaviors on burnout and abusive behavior for 273 employed adults. The results across three studies showed that tertius separans brokering puts the broker at an increased risk of burnout and subsequent abusive behavior toward others in the workplace. Funding: E. Quintane received funding from Ernst & Young GmbH Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft.

Inspired by research on social movements, we extend the idea that activists look for opportunities to target firms to the realm of financially motivated shareholder activists. Focusing on activist hedge funds, we argue that hedge fund campaigns are more likely to succeed when boards are slow and less united and that, compared with more homogeneous boards, demographically diverse boards tend to act more slowly and with less unity. Although these attributes make demographically diverse boards more effective under “normal” circumstances, they become a liability in confrontations with activist hedge funds. We, therefore, hypothesize that when subject to governance and performance problems, firms become more likely targets of activist hedge funds when they also have demographically diverse boards. To further probe our theory, we explore the opportunity recognition of activist hedge funds in two ways. First, we posit that this opportunity will be recognized and exploited primarily by experienced activist hedge funds. Second, we argue that activist hedge funds’ opportunity recognition is correct in so far that demographically diverse boards respond to activism campaigns in ways that are likely to benefit activist hedge funds. Using data on United States-based activism campaigns, we find support for our theory. By simultaneously studying problems and opportunities, this study establishes a foundation for examining when the disciplinary effect of shareholder activism may go awry and reveals why a strict business case for demographic diversity may be insufficient to align all shareholders behind board diversity. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1679 .

Steering committees are pivotal for governing complex collaborations by consensus to facilitate coordination and knowledge sharing. Although consensus-based governance promotes mutuality, it can also cause deadlocks, stalling expeditious decision making. We examine the conditions under which alliance partners delegate decision-making authority to steering committees as well as the conditions under which authority over discordant matters can be relocated to one of the alliance partners. We argue that joint coordination concerns increase the likelihood of authority delegation, whereas the higher costs and stakes associated with decision stalemates provide grounds for authority reversion. Empirical analyses of strategic alliances in the biopharmaceutical industry support our arguments. Our paper demonstrates the versatility of contractually defined administrative interfaces in alliance governance, allowing partners to coordinate bilaterally and adapt hierarchically as and when required.

With the growing complexity of social and environmental issues, there has been a blossoming of hackathons and open innovation challenges. This push to accelerate innovation embraces a perspective of time as clock time—conceived as objective, linear, measurable, and therefore, rather easy to compress. Such a view of time conflicts with the emergent nature of idea generation and the indeterminate process that leads to social impact, which both rely on event time. Drawing on a 40-month ethnographic study of OpenIDEO, an open social innovation platform, I examine how, in designing open innovation challenges, the OpenIDEO team interwove clock time and event time in order to foster idea generation and support social impact. Through inductive analysis, I identify three practices—mapping, stretching, and squeezing time—enacted by the OpenIDEO team to “make time” and thus, continuously engage participants and sponsors in the challenges as well as to allow participants to implement their ideas. My findings demonstrate how organizations can intentionally use time to nurture collaborative innovation and yield sustainable social impact. My study questions the traditional interpretation of clock time as the foundation of all temporalities as it shows how temporal work can be grounded within event time. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [NSF VOSS Grant 1122381]. The research was partially funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 951735.