Trust between partners has become a key construct in interfirm relationship management. However, elucidating the precise nature of the trust-performance link in international strategic alliances remains an important theoretical and empirical challenge for management scholars. Discordant findings evident in existing alliance research raise concerns that interpartner trust does not always enhance venture performance. To investigate this issue, we build and test a theoretical framework that integrates different perspectives of alliance functioning by focusing on the social and bureaucratic forces critical to cooperative processes. The model (1) identifies organizational complexity mechanisms underlying the development of trust in international strategic alliances, (2) points to alliance size as an important factor that conditions the trust-performance relationship, (3) incorporates a new, third-order conceptualization of interpartner trust in alliances, and (4) suggests a theory-based multidimensional assessment of alliance performance. Based on data collected through personal interviews in 177 international strategic alliances, the results suggest that, while interpartner trust is positively associated with alliance performance, this relationship becomes stronger when alliance size declines. We find that both distributive fairness and partner similarity are central to the achievement of a trusting alliance partnership. Managerial insights into developing successful trust-based international alliance exchanges are offered, and fruitful avenues of research are discussed.

On September 11, 2001, the passengers and crew members aboard Flight 93 responded to the hijacking of their airplane by organizing a counterattack against the hijackers. The airplane crashed into an unpopulated field, causing no damage to human lives or national landmarks beyond the lives of those aboard the airplane. We draw on this story of courageous collective action to explore the question of what makes this kind of action possible. We propose that to take courageous collective action, people need three narratives—a personal narrative that helps them understand who they are beyond the immediate situation and manage the intense emotions that accompany duress, a narrative that explains the duress that has been imposed upon them sufficiently to make moral and practical judgments about how to act, and a narrative of collective action—and the resources that make the creation of these narratives feasible. We also consider how the creation of these narratives is relevant to courageous collective action in more common organizational circumstances, and identify how this analysis suggests new insights into our understanding of the core framing tasks of social movements, ways in which social movement actors draw on social infrastructure, the role of discourse and morality in social movements, the formation of collective identity, and resource mobilization.

In this essay, we seek to identify the contributions that strategy and organizational researchers have made, and continue to make, in enhancing our understanding of a wide variety of important corporate governance questions. We begin by discussing how these research contributions stem from a willingness to draw from and contribute to different streams of intellectual thought, and we provide an orienting framework to situate this work.

Entrainment refers to the synchronization of the tempo and/or phase of two or more activities within a system. This article utilizes entrainment theory to develop a conceptual model and related propositions describing and explaining the relationship between temporal fit, misfit, and performance at the organizational level of analysis. Essential to the development of our model is the concept of organization-environment (O-E) temporal fit, which is a state of synchronization or alignment of organization and environment activity cycles. O-E temporal fit is positioned as an important contingency element because temporal misfit implies inefficiencies, substandard performance, and the potential death of the organization over time. Overall, this article offers a theoretical perspective that fills a gap in the extant organizational research literature regarding the elusive and understudied perspective of time and posits its relationship to organizational performance.

In this paper we develop and test predictions regarding the impact of CEO status on the economic outcomes of top management team members. Using a unique data set incorporating Financial World's widely publicized CEO of the Year contest, we found that non-CEO top management team members received higher pay when they worked for a high-status CEO. However, star CEOs themselves retained most of the compensation benefits. We also show that there is a “burden of celebrity” in that the above relationships were contingent on how well a firm performs. Last, we found that, when compared with the subordinates of less-celebrated CEOs, members of top management teams who worked for star CEOs were more likely to become CEOs themselves through internal or external promotions.