Identification is a person's sense of belonging with a social category. Identification in virtual organizational teams is thought to be especially desirable because it provides the glue that can promote group cohesion despite the relative lack of face-to-face interaction. Though research on virtual teams is exploding, it has not systematically identified the antecedents or moderators of the process by which identification develops, leaving a number of gaps and apparent contradictions. The purpose of this paper is to begin to untangle the contradictions and address some of the gaps by tracing the mechanisms and moderating processes through which identification develops in hybrid and pure virtual settings, and the ways that these processes differ from face-to-face settings.

A group's tendency to protect its identity often inhibits it from initiating radical change. For this reason, external interventions are typically needed to engage a group in reexamining and moving beyond its current identity. If threatened by these external interventions, however, identity beliefs can become emotionally heated and resistant to the cognitively rational efforts of outsiders. At the same time, the insider group's emotional energy is essential to mobilize and sustain radical change. This paper draws on community development theories and practices, as well as identity theories, to develop a model that traces the dynamic processes by which hot emotional interpretations and relatively colder cognitive interpretations interact to initiate, mobilize, and sustain radical change. It highlights the roles that emotion and cognition play as both barriers and essential facilitators of the change at different stages of the process, and proposes a set of strategies for managing them.

This paper considers the role of team learning in organizational learning. I propose that a group-level perspective provides new insight into how organizational learning is impeded, hindering effective change in response to external pressures. In contrast to previous theoretical perspectives, I suggest that organizational learning is local, interpersonal, and variegated. I present data from an exploratory study of learning processes in 12 organizational teams engaged in activities ranging from strategic planning to hands-on manufacturing of products. These qualitative data are used to investigate two components of the collective learning process—reflection to gain insight and action to produce change—and to explore how teams allow an organization to engage in both radical and incremental learning, as needed in a changing and competitive environment. I find that team members' perceptions of power and interpersonal risk affect the quality of team reflection, which has implications for their team's and their organization's ability to change.

The prevailing theory of mergers is that firms emphasize considerations of “strategic fit” in discussions prior to merger activity, and neglect considerations of “organizational fit”. The result is that immediately following a merger dysfunctional organizational behaviours occur. The number of empirical studies of mergers, however, is relatively modest and there are few case studies of the merger process. The present paper studies the merger involving two large accounting firms, over a period of four years. The unique features of accounting firms—in particular, their organization as professional partnerships—and of the accounting industry, make the case study an appropriate “tough” test of the general theory. Accounting firms are likely to take account of organizational fit in merger discussions. The case study rehearses the careful attention to issues of strategic and organizational fit (contrary to the general theory) but also maps the unfolding behavioural problems that followed formal merger. Interestingly, the specific difficulties observed in previous studies were less salient in the present case: problems and difficulties were of a kind peculiar to the type of organization, which suggests that theories of mergers should be sensitive to the context and setting of merger activity. The paper concludes by elaborating elements of a more systematic model of the merger process. These elements include the difference between mergers and acquisitions, the structure of governance, organizational capacity, sector cohesiveness and technology.

It is customary among contemporary organization theorists to equate North American and European scholarship with objectivist and subjectivist metatheoretical positions (respectively), treat these positions as mutually exclusive alternatives, and debate which is best suited to understanding organizational phenomena. Fueled by this dispute, questions of bias and fears of colonization are readily apparent in academic reviews of three recent “handbooks” of organizations. Caught in the current of these tensions, I was prompted to assess the status of this “Atlantic divide.” To do so, I examined the three recent compendia in terms of the rhetoric academic reviewers employed to characterize them and the geographic locations, preferred journals, and university affiliations of scholars who refer to them. The results are striking. Despite the unanimous typecasting of the volumes as epitomizing either objectivist North American or subjectivist European traditions, the geographic distributions of researchers citing them are indistinguishable. Citations to each compendium are, however, clustered within particular journals and among authors with particular university affiliations—but neither the journals nor universities are neatly North American or European. Current associations of these traditions with North American and European scholarship thus seem driven more by academic rhetoric than authentic continental distinctions. I examine the roots of this rhetorical mapping and explore its implications for the field. I advocate abandonment of the myth of the Atlantic divide and exploitation of perspectives that do not privilege the subjectivist–objectivist dichotomy.

Employee misconduct is costly to organizations and has the potential to be even more common in gig and remote work contexts, in which workers are physically distant from their employers. There is, thus, a need for scholars to better understand what employers can do to mitigate misconduct in these nontraditional work environments, particularly as the prevalence of such work environments is increasing. We combine an agency perspective with a behavioral relationship-based perspective to consider two avenues through which gig employers can potentially mitigate misconduct: (1) through the communication of organizational values and (2) through the credible threat of monitoring. We implement a real effort experiment in a gig work context that enables us to cleanly observe misconduct. Consistent with our theory, we present causal evidence that communication of organizational values, both externally facing in the form of social/environmental responsibility and internally facing in the form of an employee ethics code, decreases misconduct. This effect, however, is largely negated when workers are informed that they are being monitored. We provide suggestive evidence that this crowding out is due to a decrease in perceived trust that results from the threat of monitoring. Our results have important theoretical implications for research on employee misconduct and shed light on the trade-offs associated with various potential policy solutions.

When organizations strategically adopt cultural elements—such as a name, a color, or a style—to create their products, they make crucial choices that position them in markets vis-à-vis competitors, audiences, and other stakeholders. However, although it is well understood how one specific cultural element gets adopted by actors and diffuses, it is not yet clear how elements fare when considered within an industry choice-set of elements. Their popularity depends on idiosyncratic features (such as the category they belong to), or on structural factors such as their embeddedness (through connections to producers, audiences, or even other cultural elements). We develop an integrated perspective on the popularity of cultural elements in markets. We use a network perspective to show that the popularity of elements is fostered by being structurally embedded among many unconnected elements, in addition to not being affiliated to actors widely exposed in the media. We develop our study by using a unique data set of fashion stylistic elements in the global high-end fashion industry from 1998 to 2010.

We use computer simulation to study how different allocations of decision rights give rise to different organizational abilities to maintain and act upon accurate maps of a changing environment. We compare the performance of three archetypal organizational forms as we vary the dynamism and complexity of the environment and the rates at which individuals can observe the environment and imitate each other. We find that teams in which actions are based on plurality votes excel when the task is relatively easy—that is, the ability of individual members to observe the environment is high compared to the environment's dynamism and size. Markets in which all agents act independently perform well when the task is difficult and the agents can easily imitate each other. Hierarchies in which agents in the upper echelons impose actions on their subordinates outperform the other two forms when the agents' abilities to observe the environment are heterogeneous, the task is difficult, and imitation among the agents is moderate. The analysis has implications for the relationship between centralization and the notions of exploitation and exploration in March's influential work [March JG (1991) Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organ. Sci. 2(1):71–87].

The initial public offering (IPO) is one of the most critical events in the lifetime of a young firm. Prior research has shown that firms tend to have successful IPOs if they go public with the endorsement of a prestigious lead underwriter. This paper examines the antecedents to receiving endorsement by a prestigious underwriter and links this to the experience base of a firm's upper echelon. We theorize that the amount and type of upper echelon experience serve as important symbols of a young firm's legitimacy to critical outsiders. We introduce a typology of upper echelon experience that distinguishes between upper echelon upstream, horizontal, and downstream employment-based affiliations and suggest that these different types of upper echelon affiliations allay different types of endorser concerns regarding firm legitimacy, affecting the endorsement process. Further, we theorize that the relationships between upper echelon experience and investment bank prestige will be moderated by technological uncertainty. We test our assertions on a comprehensive sample of public and private biotechnology firms that were founded between 1961 and 1994 and that went public between 1979 and 1996. Analyses of the five-year career histories of the over 3,200 executives and directors that make up the upper echelons of these firms show that firms with upper echelons with affiliations with prominent downstream organizations (i.e., pharmaceutical and/or healthcare companies) and with prominent horizontal organizations (i.e., biotechnology companies) are more likely to attract the endorsement of a prestigious investment bank. We also find that the greater the range of upper echelon affiliations across the categories of upstream, horizontal, and downstream affiliations, the more prestigious the firm's lead underwriter. We also find that these latter results are moderated by technological uncertainty. The present research has implications for the study of organizational legitimacy, interorganizational endorsements, and entrepreneurship.

Strategic learning aims to generate learning in support of future strategic initiatives that will, in turn, foster knowledge asymmetries that can lead to differences in organizational performance. From a case study of a unique organization whose purpose is to facilitate strategic knowledge distillation, it was found that this process is characterized by targeted information gathering that relies on diverse experts for interpretation as well as validation. It also embodies the organizational capability to leverage information technologies in the distillation effort, integrating them with processes for generating, storing, and transporting rich, de-embedded knowledge across multiple levels of the organization. As a result of the case study, a model of the strategic learning is developed and a series of propositions regarding its context and processes are presented based on this model. The model highlights key dimensions of strategic learning that suggest design parameters for organizations building strategic learning systems.