Knowledge that Transforms

Tertius iungens brokering that brings together people who might not otherwise meet is crucial for organizational effectiveness. But we know little about whether and why women and men differ in their propensity to engage in this brokering. Our paper focuses on the origins and mitigation of gender differences in the propensity to bring people together. In study 1, we showed that the Totterdell et al. (2008) propensity-to-join-others scale that we used in study 2 and the Obstfeld (2005) tertius iungens scale overlapped not only conceptually, but also empirically, and that these measures of tertius iungens were distinct from mediation- and separation-brokering propensities (Grosser et al. 2019). In study 2, we used a natural experiment to examine the tertius iungens brokering propensities of 876 identical and 625 fraternal same-sex twins. We found that brokering propensity was lower for women than for men, although the propensity toward sociability in terms of making friends and acquaintances was lower for men. We also found that for women, relative to men, tertius iungens brokering propensity was largely affected by environmental influences, such as the experience of stereotyping and discrimination, rather than representing an inherited disposition. Moreover, the differences between men and women with respect to brokering were mitigated for empowered samples, such as well-educated or entrepreneurial individuals. Our research asks new questions about how environmental pressures and empowerment affect social networking. Gender differences in brokering may be amenable to mitigation through empowering practices that include education and entrepreneurial experience.

Technological breakthroughs, institutional disruptions, and natural disasters often alter the course of organizations and entire industries. Such discontinuous changes threaten organizations’ survival by affecting the value of the knowledge accumulated in routines and capabilities. Although it is widely acknowledged that managerial cognition is a critical antecedent of organizational responses to discontinuous change, the role of type 1 (intuitive) and type 2 (reflective) processing in the adaptation of shared patterns of behavior, that is, routines, remains understudied. Drawing on dual-process theory, we propose that particular features of type 1 processing render this approach superior to type 2 processing, especially in highly ambiguous environments in which information is limited and difficult to verify. We tested our hypotheses in a longitudinal experiment linking individual-level factors with organizational-level practices of routine adaptation. Experienced managers, paired in 80 groups, developed routines in a first round of a simulation game; in a second round, we then introduced a discontinuous change making previous routines obsolete in order to observe how they adapted. The data show that priming type 1 processing facilitates organizational adaptation more than type 2 processing by providing faster, more routinized, efficiently coordinated, and optimal responses. In addition, type 1 appears to be more functional in highly ambiguous environments, whereas type 1 and type 2 processes yield similar levels of performance under low levels of ambiguity. Overall, our study advances the understanding of the nondeliberative dimension of organizational adaptation to discontinuous change. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory.

Why do leaders of organizations cooperate with players with whom they may never transact again? Such transactions can involve the incentives to exploit the other party because these interactions are not recurrent or embedded in networks. Yet, in a market economy, organizational actors learn to cooperate with strangers; otherwise, they risk closure from new ideas and business opportunities outside of their local community. With a large random sample of CEOs of manufacturing firms in the Yangzi River Delta region of China, we measured social norms using vignettes that describe hypothetical situations illustrating the social mechanisms of norm enforcement in respondents’ local communities. Several years later, in a laboratory-in-the-field experiment, we asked the same participants to play a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game with a complete stranger. Our findings suggest that belief in the reliability of robust norm enforcement is positively associated with a higher probability of cooperation with strangers. To our knowledge, this mixed-method study is the first to explore the relationship between social norms and cooperation with strangers using a large sample of leaders of organizations outside the environment of the laboratory. Finally, to explore the generalizability of our behavioral findings, we experimentally manipulated norm vignettes and study the PD game in online experiments with managers in the Yangzi River Delta region. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its impact on performance have generated a debate that has evolved across several perspectives (shareholder, stakeholder, resource-based, and contingency). Building on the resource-based and contingency perspectives, we shed new light on this debate by analyzing the impact of CSR on performance in emerging market firms, advancing the idea that CSR is a mechanism that helps address market and government failures. We first argue that CSR’s three constituent dimensions (environmental, social, and governance) vary in their impact on performance because each dimension has a different mitigating effect on contextual failures that hobble emerging market firms. Specifically, we contend that social CSR has a larger effect on performance than either governance CSR or environmental CSR for emerging market firms, because the former helps build capabilities that more directly reduce the negative consequences of government failures in the provision of public goods and services that firms need to operate efficiently. We then provide additional depth to this idea by arguing that other mechanisms used for mitigating market failures in an emerging market context, namely firm-level business group affiliation and country-level government policy nudges, strengthen this differential influence of each of the three dimensions of CSR on performance. Analyses of a sample of 89 publicly traded Indian firms from 2007 to 2017 support these arguments.

A common explanation for women’s underrepresentation in many economic contexts is that women exit talent pipelines at higher rates than men. Recent empirical findings reveal that, in male-dominated selection contexts, women are less likely than men to reapply after being rejected for an opportunity. We examine the conditions under which this gender difference contributes to women’s underrepresentation in talent pipelines over time. We formally model and analyze the population dynamics of a generic selection context, which we then ground using three distinct empirical settings. We show that gender differences in reapplication are an important mechanism of gender segregation in some selection contexts but negligible in others. The extent to which gender differences in reapplication contribute to women’s underrepresentation is driven in part by the rejection rate. Higher rejection rates increase the stock of rejected applicants, which in turn enables gender differences in reapplication to disproportionally reduce women’s representation. The results demonstrate that interactions between individuals’ choices on the supply side and screeners’ behavior on the demand side may have consequences for gender inequality, even if we were able to fully eliminate demand-side biases. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our research for understanding women’s underrepresentation in talent pipelines. We also interrogate the effectiveness of common interventions focused on encouraging women to apply for opportunities in male-dominated domains.

We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which presumes a uniform march toward professionalization as ventures scale and complete developmental milestones, we advance a contingent perspective, distinguishing between the development of external interface functions (marketing & sales and customer development) and internal process functions (accounting, human resources, and finance). Specifically, we argue that positioning in an unconventional market space raises demand for external engagement that focuses ventures’ attention and resources toward developing external interface roles. At the same time, such unconventional ventures are less apt to elaborate their internal process roles relative to more conventional peers. We test these predictions using a novel longitudinal data set on the internal organizations of 3,748 U.S.-based entrepreneurial ventures. In contrast to common assumptions of convergent professionalization, our theory and findings advance the perspective that ventures pursue divergent professionalization paths based on their initial market positioning as they scale up.

When a problem leaves decision makers uncertain as to how to approach it, observing others’ decisions can improve one’s own decisions by promoting more accurate judgments and a better insight into the problem. However, observing others’ decisions may also activate motives that prevent this potential from being realized, for instance, ego concerns that prompt excessive risk taking. Our experimental study investigates how two features of the social environment influence the effect of observing others’ decisions on individual risk taking and performance. We manipulated (1) the psychological distance to others whose decisions could be observed (and thereby the tendency to seek self-enhancing social comparison) and (2) the opportunity for interaction (and thereby for a cumulative effect of any such tendency on decisions over time and for an effect on social information itself). Because the two features covary in real-world settings, we designed two treatments corresponding to the two natural combinations. Both treatments provided participants with two other participants’ period decisions in a multiperiod problem under uncertainty. No new objective information about the problem could be inferred from these decisions. We predicted that participants who observed the decisions of distant others (who had solved the same problem earlier) would perform better than participants in a control sample without any information about others’ decisions and that participants who observed the decisions of proximal others (with whom interaction could arise) would take more risk and perform worse than those who observed distant others’ decisions. The data corroborate our predictions. We discuss implications for organizational learning. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory.

Social movements seek allies as they campaign for social, political, and organizational changes. How do activists gain allies in the targeted institutions they hope to change? Despite recognition of the importance of ally support in theories about institutional change and social movements, these theories are largely silent on the microdynamics of ally mobilization. We examine how the labeling of organizational policies that benefit women influences potential workplace allies’ support for these policies. We theorize that one barrier to mobilizing workplace allies is a misalignment of the labels that activists use to promote new policies and employees’ affiliation with collective identities. We conducted five experiments to test our hypotheses and 26 qualitative interviews to provide illustration of our core concepts. We demonstrate that employees high in feminist identification are more likely to support feminist-labeled (feminist and #MeToo) than unlabeled policies, whereas those low in feminist identification are less likely to support feminist-labeled than unlabeled policies (Studies 1–3). However, we find that participants for whom organizational identification was high (whether measured or manipulated) and feminist identification was low supported organizationally labeled policies more than feminist-labeled polices (Studies 4 and 5). This illustrates that policies whose aims may not align with one collective identity can still garner support by activating another relevant collective identity. Within our studies, we provide evidence that these effects are mediated via feelings of pride in the organization (and not fear or anger), suggesting that positive emotions are a central mechanism in mobilizing workplace allies. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory.

Organizations tout the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet, when hiring it remains unclear how they evaluate entrepreneurial human capital—namely, job candidates with founder experience. How hiring firms evaluate this experience—and especially how this evaluation varies by entrepreneurial success and failure—reveals insights into the structures and processes within organizations. Organizations research points to two perspectives related to the evaluation of founder experience: Former founders may be advantaged, due to founder experience signaling high-quality capabilities and human capital, or disadvantaged, due to concerns related to fit and commitment. To identify the dominant class of mechanisms driving the evaluation of founder experience, it is important to consider how these evaluations differ, depending on whether the founder’s venture failed or succeeded. To isolate demand-side mechanisms and hold supply-side factors constant, we conducted a field experiment. We sent applications varying the candidate’s founder experience to 2,400 software engineering positions in the United States at random. We find that former founders received 43% fewer callbacks than nonfounders and that this difference is driven by older hiring firms. Further, this founder penalty is greatest for former successful founders, who received 33% fewer callbacks than former failed founders. Our results highlight that mechanisms related to concerns about fit and commitment, rather than information asymmetry about quality, are most influential when hiring firms evaluate former founders in our context.

Research suggests that women negotiators tend to obtain worse outcomes than men; however, we argue this finding does not apply to all women. Integrating research on social hierarchies, gender in negotiations, and intersectional stereotype content, we develop a theoretical framework that explains the interactive effect of race and gender on offers and outcomes received in distributive negotiations. With a focus on Black and White women and men negotiators, we predicted that stereotypes related to their race and gender lead Black women negotiators to receive more favorable negotiation offers and outcomes than White women and Black men negotiators and this effect is explained by ascriptions of dominance and prestige, respectively. Results of three experimental studies involving diverse samples—online panel participants, individuals selling items on Craigslist, and MBA students—support these predictions. More specifically, we find that Black women negotiators are perceived as more dominant than White women negotiators, and Black women negotiators are ascribed greater prestige than Black men negotiators. These ascriptions allow Black women negotiators to receive more favorable negotiation offers and outcomes compared with White women and Black men. These findings highlight the importance of jointly considering the influence of race and gender in negotiations.