The 10 most-cited articles in Academy of Management Journal, 2016

“Grand challenges” are formulations of global problems that can be plausibly addressed through coordinated and collaborative effort. In this Special Research Forum, we showcase management research that examines societal problems that individuals, organizations, communities, and nations face around the world. We develop a framework to guide future research to provide systematic empirical evidence on the formulation, articulation, and implementation of grand challenges. We highlight several factors that likely enhance or suppress the attainment of collective goals, and identify representative research questions for future empirical work. In so doing, we aspire to encourage management scholars to engage in tackling broader societal challenges through their collaborative research and collective insight.

Climate change represents the grandest of challenges facing humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, with devastating consequences. Business organizations are central to this challenge, in that they support the production of escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also offer innovative ways to decarbonize our economies. In this paper, we examine how businesses respond to climate change. Based on five in-depth case studies of major Australian corporations over a 10-year period (2005–2015), we identify three key stages in the corporate translation of climate change: framing, localizing, and normalizing. We develop a grounded model that explains how the revolutionary import of grand challenges is converted into the mundane and comfortable concerns of “business as usual.” We find that critique is the major driver of this process by continuously revealing the tensions between the demands of the grand challenge and business imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature on business…

In this paper, we use a social identity theory perspective to study the mechanisms through which internal and external corporate social responsibility (CSR) influence employee identification and its subsequent outcomes, as well as the boundary conditions on these effects. We posit that CSR actions focusing on external stakeholders enhance perceived prestige whereas CSR actions focusing on employee welfare enhance perceived respect—both of which are argued to influence employee organizational identification but differentially impact different forms of employee citizenship. These relationships were predicted to vary in strength, however, due to individual differences in social (local vs. cosmopolitan) and cultural (individualist vs. collectivist) orientations. Data are presented from 408 employees of a fast-moving consumer goods conglomerate operating in South Asia (Study 1) and from 415 employees spanning nine companies in two culturally distinct regions (France and Pakistan, Study 2). The results, which largely support our theoretical framework, are discussed in terms of their…

While research on the disclosure of CSR (corporate social responsibility) recognizes the influence of government regulations and guidelines, less attention has been given to the co-existence of conflicting pressures from the state. We develop a framework wherein CSR reporting is viewed as an organizational response to institutional complexity that arises from the conflicting demands from the central government and local governments, and apply it to publicly listed firms in China after the central government agencies issued guidelines on CSR reporting. Some provincial governments’ high priority given to short-term GDP growth created tension with the central government’s expectations on CSR reporting. Firms with attributes that increase scrutiny from both institutional constituencies experienced heightened tension, and they responded with early adoption but low-quality reports. Our framework was supported through a longitudinal analysis between 2008 and 2011. Our study contributes to the literature on CSR disclosure by uncovering the impact of conflicting government pressures, and…

Disaster events threaten the lives, economies, and wellbeing of those they impact. Understanding the role of emergent organizations in responding to suffering and building resilience is an important component of the grand challenge of how to effectively respond to disasters. In this inductive case study we explore venture creation initiated by locals in response to suffering following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In exploring six ventures we found that two distinctive groups emerged in terms of their identification of potential opportunities to alleviate suffering, their access to and use of key resources, the action they took, and ultimately their effectiveness in facilitating resilience. We offer an inductive, grounded theoretical model that emerged from our data that provides insight into and an extension of literature on resilience to adversity and the disaster literature on emergent response groups, opening pathways for management scholarship to contribute in a meaningful way to this grand challenge.

Africa is beginning to capture the imagination of entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and scholars as an emerging market of new growth opportunities. Over 15 years, the continent has experienced an average growth rate of 5% (World Economic Forum, 2015: v). Out of its 54 countries, 26 have achieved middleincome status, while the proportion of those living in extreme poverty has fallen from 51% in 2005 to 42% in 2014 (African Development Bank, 2014a: 49). Although there are regional differences, the primary drivers of growth have been rapidly emerging consumer markets, regional economic integration, investment in infrastructure, technological leap-frogging, and the opening up of new markets, especially in the service sector. African economies also face commensurate challenges. Across the continent, economies remain largely agrarian, underpinned by resource-driven growth and still dominated by the informal sector. But what is it about the context that makes Africa such fertile territory for management scholarship?

We conduct a comprehensive synthesis of the research on how female representation in the upper echelons (i.e., top management teams and chief executive officer positions) might affect firm performance. To help resolve longstanding theoretical, empirical, and substantive debates, we present an integrative conceptual framework based on the overarching concepts of unique resource portfolios, team decision-processes, and role incongruence perceptions. We test predictions from this framework using meta-analytic techniques on a sample of 146 primary studies conducted in 33 different countries. We find that female representation in the upper echelons in general is positively and weakly related to forms of long-term financial performance, but negatively and weakly related to short-term stock market returns. We observe that reduced strategic risk-taking is a mediating mechanism that explains why financial performance is improved. We also show that financial performance improvements are accentuated in environmental and organizational contexts that provide greater decision latitude to…