The 10 most-cited articles in Academy of Management Journal, 2017

Competing tensions and demands pervade our work lives. Accumulating research examines organizational and leadership approaches to leveraging these tensions. But what about individuals within firms? Although early paradox theory built upon micro-level insights from psychology and philosophy to understand the nature and management of varied competing demands, corresponding empirical studies are rare, offering scarce insights into why some individuals thrive with tensions while others struggle. In response, we contribute to the microfoundations of organizational paradox with a theoretical model and robust measures that help unpack individuals’ varied approaches to tensions. Following rigorous scale development in Study 1, including samples from the U.S., UK, Israel, and China, we test our model in a large firm in the U.S. using quantitative and qualitative methods. We identify resource scarcity (i.e., limited time and funding) as a source of tensions. We also demonstrate that a paradox mindset—the extent to which one is accepting of and energized by tensions—can help individuals…

Male entrepreneurs are known to raise higher levels of funding than their female counterparts, but the underlying mechanism for this funding disparity remains contested. Drawing upon regulatory focus theory, we propose that the gap originates with a gender bias in the questions that investors pose to entrepreneurs. A field study conducted on question-and-answer interactions at TechCrunch Disrupt New York City during 2010 through 2016 reveals that investors tend to ask male entrepreneurs promotion-focused questions and female entrepreneurs prevention-focused questions, and that entrepreneurs tend to respond with matching regulatory focus. This distinction in the regulatory focus of investor questions and entrepreneur responses results in divergent funding outcomes for entrepreneurs whereby those asked promotion-focused questions raise significantly higher amounts of funding than those asked prevention-focused questions. We demonstrate that every additional prevention-focused question significantly hinders the entrepreneur’s ability to raise capital, fully mediating gender’s effect on…

Innovation ecosystems are increasingly regarded as important vehicles to create and capture value from complex value propositions. While current literature assumes these value propositions can be known ex ante and an appropriate ecosystem design derived from them, we focus on generative technological innovations that enable an unbounded range of potential value propositions, hence offering no clear guidance to firms. To illustrate our arguments, we inductively study two organizations, each attempting to create two novel ecosystems around new technological enablers deep in their industry architecture. We highlight how ecosystem creation in such conditions is a systemic process driven by coupled feedback loops, which organizations must try to control dynamically: firms first make the switch to creating the ecosystem, following an external pull to narrow down the range of potential applications; then need to learn to keep up with ecosystem dynamics by roadmapping and preempting, while simultaneously enacting resonance. Dynamic control further entails counteracting the drifting away of…

Job crafting refers to changes to a job that workers make with the intention of improving the job for themselves. It may include structural (i.e., physical and procedural), social, and cognitive forms. We draw on two studies to develop a role–resource approach–avoidance taxonomy that integrates and extends the dominant role- and resource-based perspectives of job crafting according to characteristics of approach and avoidance. Study 1 used both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze job crafting activities described during employee interviews to understand the nature and outcomes of specific job crafting activities. Study 2 provides quantitative support for the specific job crafting types emerging from Study 1, and further explores job crafting outcomes. Approach role crafting includes role expansion and social expansion, while avoidance role crafting includes work-role reduction. Role crafting outcomes include: increased enrichment, increased engagement, and decreased strain through changes in work role boundaries. Approach resource crafting includes work organization,…

Efforts to incorporate external feedback are central to the process of entrepreneurship and to that of creative work more broadly, yet, because individuals may view aspects of their creative ideas as linked to their self-concepts, this can trigger resistance toward revision. Thus, feedback-induced change, while likely intended to increase the viability of creative ideas, might paradoxically undermine that viability by compromising creative workers’ associated identity-based relationships with their creative endeavors. While existing scholarship has established the importance of creative revision, research has largely overlooked how this vital process intersects with creative workers’ identities. Through a field study of 59 founders and their entrepreneurial ideas, I present an identity-based process model of creative revision that highlights differences in founders’ psychological ownership of their ideas and how those differences affect subsequent revision efforts. The emerging findings contribute to existing theory by revealing that the capacity to extend the novelty and usefulness…

Workplace humor is ubiquitous, yet scholars know little about how it affects employees’ behaviors in organizations. We draw on an emerging psychological theory of humor—benign violation theory—to suggest that a leader’s sense of humor often conveys counter-normative social information in organizations. We integrate this theory with social information processing theory to develop hypotheses about the effects of a leader’s sense of humor on follower behavior. We suggest that although a leader’s sense of humor is positively associated with leader−member exchange and ultimately work engagement, it can also signal to followers the acceptability of norm violation at work. These perceptions in turn are positively associated with followers’ deviance. Furthermore, we propose that these indirect effects are moderated by leader aggressive humor. Data from two three-wave field studies in China and the United States provide support for our hypotheses. Taken together, our results suggest that a leader’s sense of humor can be a mixed blessing and elicit unforeseen negative behaviors from their…

This paper explores the impact of two types of voice and gender on peer-rated social status and subsequent leader emergence. Across two studies—a three-wave field study and an experiment—we find that speaking up promotively, but not prohibitively, is positively and indirectly related to leader emergence via status, and that this relationship is conditional on the gender of the speaker. Specifically, men who spoke up promotively benefited the most in terms of status and leader emergence, not only compared to men who spoke up prohibitively, but also compared to women who spoke up promotively. This research extends our understanding of the outcomes of voice by articulating how it impacts one’s place in his or her group’s social structure, and ultimately whether he or she is seen as a leader. We also add to our understanding of leader emergence by suggesting that talking a lot or participating at a high level in a group may not be enough to emerge as a leader—it also depends how you do it and who you are.

There are competing theoretical explanations and conflicting empirical evidence for the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing phenomenon in family firms. The behavioral agency model predicts that loss-averse family firms discount their shares more than nonfamily firms to minimize losses of socioemotional wealth (SEW). Conversely, the endowment effect in prospect theory suggests that family owners maximize their financial wealth (FW) by including SEW in perceptions of firm value and demanding a higher IPO price to relinquish it. We reconcile these seemingly incompatible predictions by examining dynamic properties of the reference point in decision framing. Conceiving IPO pricing as a two-stage gamble, we theorize that initial SEW losses entailed by the listing decision increase the disposition of family owners to underprice IPO shares to possibly offset these losses, or “break even.” We thereby advance the behavioral agency model with the aversion to loss realization logic to explain how family owners’ decision frames and preferences change during the IPO process, depending on…

We integrate theoretical perspectives on humor to test the processes through which leader humor (LH) facilitates subordinate organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). In doing so, we argue that humor is a key interpersonal resource for leaders and derive our comprehensive model with logic from three individual-resource-related theories—social exchange theory, conservation of resources theory, and broaden-and-build theory. Leader-triggered positive emotion and subsequent social exchange, operationalized as leader–member exchange (LMX), functioned as key sequential mechanisms mediating the relationship between LH and subordinate OCBs. LH induced positive emotion in subordinates, which fostered high-quality LMX and, in turn, OCBs. Contrary to expectations, the stress relief explanation of LH was not supported. This research contributes to knowledge of humor in organizations, and particularly LH, as it is the first to establish a link between LH and OCBs and also represents the first integration and concurrent examination of three functions of humor. We additionally offer empirical…

Family firms employ about 60% of the global workforce. While it is widely assumed that they are good employers, data about their conduct are mixed. In this study, we extend stewardship and agency theories to test competing propositions about the impact of family on employment practices using data from 14,961 private Belgian firms over a 19-year period. Higher investments, lower dividend payout, and higher risk tolerance indicate that family firms are better financial stewards of their companies than nonfamily firms. However, family firms are worse organizational stewards than nonfamily firms: they offer lower compensation, invest less in employee training, and exhibit higher voluntary turnover and lower labor productivity. Further, and contrary to earlier research, we find that financial practices in private family firms do not change over time, and that the deleterious influence of family on employment practices rises with both firm age and with heightened family involvement. Together, our findings suggest that a more nuanced understanding of stewardship and agency theory is needed…