Using three years’ data from more than 1,000 employees at a large professional services firm, we find that adopting an expertise search tool improves employee work performance in billable revenue, which results from improvements in network connections and information diversity. More importantly, we also find that adoption does not benefit all employees equally. Two types of employees benefit more from adoption of digital collaboration tools than others. First, junior employees and women benefit more from the adoption of digital collaboration tools than do senior employees and men, respectively. These tools help employees overcome the institutional barriers to resource access faced by these employees in their searches for expertise. Second, employees with greater social capital at the time of adoption also benefit more than others. The tools eliminate natural barriers associated with traditional offline interpersonal networks, enabling employees to network even more strategically than before. We explore the mechanisms for these differential benefits. Digital collaboration tools increase the volume of communication more for junior employees and women, indicating greater access to knowledge and expertise than they had before adoption. The tools also decrease the volume of communication for people with greater social capital, indicating more efficient access to knowledge and expertise. An important implication of our findings is that digital collaboration tools have the potential to overcome some of the demographic institutional biases that organizations have long sought to change. It does so, however, at the expense of potentially creating new biases toward network-based features—a characteristic we call “network-biased technical change.”

Many studies have examined the relationship between employee ownership and firm productivity. However, research is lacking on how this relationship is strengthened or weakened by environmental characteristics. This is a critical oversight in the employee ownership literature because industry characteristics can significantly influence employees’ expected gains from their firm ownership. Thus, based on agency theory and expectancy theory, we develop a multilevel contingency model of employee ownership with industry growth and instability as boundary conditions. We test the proposed model with a sample of 573 firms in South Korea (Study 1: 1,415 firm years) and a sample of 892 firms in 28 European countries (Study 2: 4,768 firm years). In both studies, we find that employee ownership does not significantly contribute to firm productivity on its own. However, we find a significant three-way interaction effect of employee ownership, industry growth, and industry instability on firm productivity. Specifically, employee ownership is most effective at improving firm productivity when both industry growth and industry instability are high. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

We connect two distinct streams of research on categories to study the role of within-category typicality in the context of legitimacy shocks. We argue that, following a legitimacy shock, member organizations of the tainted, focal category suffer equally, irrespective of their typicality. However, only the typical members of the newly favored, oppositional category benefit. Therefore, the effects of legitimacy shocks are asymmetrically influenced by typicality. We argue this pattern is the result of a two-stage process of categorization by audiences, whereby audiences prioritize distinctions between organizations in a newly favored category and spend limited efforts considering distinctions in the tainted, focal category. We examine our theory in the context of the U.S. financial services industry, where four different kinds of organizations engage in competition: traditional commercial banks, community banks, single-bond credit unions, and multibond credit unions. Consistent with our theory, we show that both traditional commercial banks and community banks suffer in terms of deposit market share following the legitimacy shock of the 2007 financial crisis, but the relative gains to credit unions are strongest for single-bond credit unions.

We explore how members of a community of practice learn new tools and techniques when environmental shifts undermine existing expertise. In our 20-month comparative field study of medical assistants and patient-service representatives learning to use new digital technology in five primary care sites, we find that the traditional master-apprentice training model worked well when established practices were being conferred to trainees. When environmental change required introducing new tools and techniques with which the experienced members had no expertise, third-party managers selected newer members as trainers because managers judged them to be agile learners who were less committed to traditional hierarchies and more willing to deviate from traditional norms. This challenged community members’ existing status, which was based on the historical distinctions of long tenure and expertise in traditional tasks. In three sites, the introduction of this illegitimate learning hierarchy sparked status competition among trainees and trainers, and trainees collectively resisted learning new tools and techniques. In the other two sites, managers paired the new, illegitimate learning hierarchy with the opportunity for trainee status mobility by rotating the trainer role; here, trainees embraced learning in order to exit the lower-status trainee group and join the higher-status trainer group. Drawing on ideas of status group legitimacy and mobility, we suggest that managers’ pairing of an illegitimate learning hierarchy with the opportunity for trainee status mobility is a mechanism for enabling the situated learning of new techniques when traditional expertise erodes.