Knowledge that Transforms

Can reputational threat among coworkers reduce bribery in organizations? I exploit within- and across-organizational variation in bribery to design and implement a field experiment in the maternity wards of five Moroccan public hospitals. I test whether threatening to reveal information about ward workers’ involvement in bribery to their coworkers dissuades them from taking bribes from patients. Healthcare workers cut back on taking bribes in higher-incidence maternity wards but not in lower-incidence wards. Qualitative data show that bribery’s baseline incidence sets the costs of revealing. Workers tolerate only so much bribery in their wards before they face the negative social consequences of belonging to a work group that takes bribes. They thus correct their behavior when it crosses a threshold. Moreover, ineffective applications of the field interventions betrayed welfare-diminishing effects. I furnish evidence for a novel kind of policy lever against workplace bribery and shed new light on the dynamics of bribery inside organizations.

Peer evaluations place organizational members in a dual role: they evaluate their peers and are being evaluated by their peers. We theorize that when evaluating their peers, they anticipate how their evaluations will be perceived and adjust their evaluations strategically to be evaluated more positively themselves when their peers assess them. Building on this overarching claim of role duality resulting in strategic peer evaluations, we focus on a dilemma that evaluating members face: they want to leverage their evaluations of peers to portray themselves as engaged and having high standards, but at the same time, they must be careful not to offend anyone as doing so may cause retaliation. We suggest that organizational members about to be evaluated resolve this dilemma by participating in more peer evaluations but carefully targeting which evaluations they participate in. We test our theory by analyzing peer evaluations on Wikipedia, supplemented by in-depth semistructured interviews. Our study informs research on peer evaluation and organizational design by revealing how being an evaluator and evaluated can make evaluations more strategic.

Starting a business requires investing both money and time in the hope of future financial benefits. Because investments and potential gains happen over time, the way in which individuals value the future relative to the present—that is, their temporal preferences—may be an important driver behind the decision to become an entrepreneur. Whereas existing research examines temporal preferences for financial gains, we advance this research by theorizing about temporal preferences not only for money, but also for the future time commitments that entrepreneurship entails. Results from a laboratory-in-the-field study show that individuals who heavily discount future time investments are more likely to become entrepreneurs. In two follow-up studies, we confirm that recent start-up founders discount future time investments more than salaried workers. We also provide suggestive evidence of the mechanisms at play: recent start-up founders perceive the future differently than salaried workers, both viewing themselves as more agentic vis-à-vis the future and perceiving the future as more distant. We discuss the implications of temporal preferences—not only for money, but also for time—for understanding the behavioral drivers of entrepreneurship.

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.

Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure levels, to meet the new skills needs. However, there is a risk that the new set of lucrative opportunities for employees in these tech-heavy fields will be biased against diverse demographic groups like women. Although much research has examined the experiences of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and occupations, less understood is the extent to which gender stereotypes influence recruiters’ perceptions and evaluations of individuals who are deciding whether to apply to STEM training programs. These behaviors are typically unobserved because they occur prior to the application interface. We address this question by investigating recruiters’ initial outreach decisions to more than 166,000 prospective students who have expressed interest in applying to a midcareer level online tech training program in business analytics. Using data on the recruiters’ communications, our results indicate that recruiters are less likely to initiate contact with female than male prospects and search for additional signals of quality from female prospects before contacting them. We also find evidence that recruiters are more likely to base initial outreach activities on prospect gender when they have higher workloads and limited attention. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for our understanding of how screening and selection decisions prior to the application interface may undermine organizational efforts to achieve gender equality and diversity as well as the potential for demand-side interventions to mitigate these gender disparities.

Despite recognizing potential ramifications for employees who protest in the workplace, researchers rarely explore the career consequences that stem from such instances of workplace protest participation. We integrated research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers to theorize that workplace protest represents a perceived deviation from workplace norms that can influence an individual’s organizational and labor market mobility outcomes. We investigated this premise with the 2016 National Football League “take a knee” protests as a strategic research setting. The results indicate that protesting is associated with an increase in organizational exit although this effect is moderated by the degree to which the organization is sensitive to the underlying social movement (with an organization’s movement sensitivity operationalized with a four-part index composed of the team’s managers, personnel decision makers, owners, and customers). Protesting also is associated with labor market sorting across organizations as players who protest are more likely to make subsequent transitions to more movement-sensitive teams compared with players who do not protest. Overall, our findings offer contributions for research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers.

Building on the literature on resource reconfiguration theory, we formulate a new theoretical framework that explains how executive redeployment within a diversified firm transfers different types of human capital embodied in executives to different units facing specific business challenges. In the empirical context of Korean business groups, we find that executives with unit-specific human capital, like turnaround experience, competitive experience, and international expansion experience, are redeployed to units with corresponding business challenges like financial difficulties, intensifying competition, and early-stage international expansion, respectively. We also show that executives with unit-generic human capital, like corporate management practices and interunit coordination experiences, are redeployed to younger units seeking to establish corporate-level policies and practices. Additional analyses also show that the value of firm-specific human capital in driving the redeployment of executives is contingent on their functional orientation and seniority.

We extend research on stakeholder orientation by introducing and conceptualizing “organizational benevolence”—a notion that refers to a firm’s inclination to pursue the welfare of an external stakeholder group as an end in itself manifested in a behavioral tendency in which benefiting the “other” is the ultimate goal of action. Employing a microfoundational approach, we propose a theoretical framework and a process model that explain how firms develop such a posture and how it eventually can become an enduring feature of these organizations. We build our framework on the core notion of collective commitment to the well-being of an external constituency by elaborating on the processes through which such collective commitment is mobilized, translated into collective intention, and stabilized in a behavioral tendency. Our article develops several propositions highlighting the crucial roles that emotionality and rhetoric play in these processes, alongside an enabling sociocognitive infrastructure. Overall, our work goes substantially beyond current theorizing and provides a detailed account for why some firms not founded with a prosocial mission nonetheless act consistently to benefit an external constituency in the absence of instrumental reasons to do so.

A growing body of research documents that audiences reward organizations perceived to be authentic with positive evaluations. In the current work, we adopt a mixed-methods approach—using data collected from Glassdoor.com and two experiments—to establish that perceptions of authenticity are elicited by perceived congruence between an organization’s stated values (i.e., the values it claims to hold) and its lived values (i.e., values members perceive as embodied by the organization), which in turn lead to more positive organizational evaluations. We then explore the conditions under which audiences are less likely to respond favorably to organizational authenticity, finding that the positive effects of stated-lived value congruence on evaluations are attenuated when audiences have a lower preference for stated values. Although scholars have often explored whether and how organizations can successfully make themselves appear authentic to reap rewards, our findings suggest that the perceived authenticity that results from stated-lived value congruence may not prove fruitful unless the audience holds a higher preference for an organization’s stated values. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory.

We investigate how the relationship between status and performance decouples over time by addressing two questions: (1) how performance affects the likelihood that an actor achieves high status and (2) how achieving high status affects the actor’s subsequent performance. In doing so, we focus on the role repeated certification contests play, where evaluators assess actors’ performance along particular dimensions and confer high status on the contest winners. Using the context of sell-side (brokerage) equity analysts and the “All-Star” list from Institutional Investor magazine, we first investigate whether analysts who make the All-Star list are more likely to produce accurate and/or independent forecasts. Then, we investigate analyst performance after recent and multiple wins. Our results demonstrate the decoupling of status and performance over time and the roles played by both the high-status actor and the social evaluators conferring their status. Whereas analyst performance increases the likelihood of being designated an All-Star, recent and multiple All-Star designations differentially affect both how subsequent performance is assessed, and how the All-Star analysts subsequently perform. In the short term, achieving high status can increase performance and solidify an analyst’s status position; however, in the long term, it can lead to lower performance and eventually result in status loss, which further erodes performance.