The 10 most-cited articles in Academy of Management Journal, 2019

In this research, we ask whether and how founders bring about business model innovation. Grounded in an in-depth longitudinal multiple-case study, our analysis reveals three practices that help explain how founders’ thinking patterns and behaviors shape business model innovation in their ventures: industry-spanning search, complex system thinking style, and powerful centralized decision making. Three corresponding yet opposing founder practices are present in cases with low business model innovation. When interpreted through the lens of imprinting theory, our findings reveal how founders achieve novelty imprinting, which we conceive as imprinting processes that result in novel imprints. Our emergent theoretical framework affirms the possibility of novelty imprinting, and thus explains a puzzle regarding the coexistence of imprint stability and novel structure. It also delineates the nature of cognitive imprinting and explains how cognitive imprints reinforce structural imprints in the context of business model innovation, thereby expanding the scope of imprinting and business model…

Based on a 24-month ethnographic case study of the opening of the first Islamic bank in Germany, we make three contributions to the institutional theory literature. First, we outline “polysemy” and “polyphony” as mechanisms that dynamically engage conflicting logics through an organizational–individual interplay. Borrowing from paradox theory, we explain how hybrids can empower individuals to fluidly separate and integrate logics when neither structural compartmentalizing nor organizational blending is feasible because management cannot prescribe a specific balance of logics. Second, we explain the state of “elastic hybridity,” constituted through the recursive, multilevel relationship between polysemy and polyphony. Elastic hybrids maintain unity in diversity. They are capable of institutionally bending without organizationally breaking and thus enable individuals to practice more of their personal convictions at work while still experiencing a sense of shared organizational purpose. Third, we show how contested hybrids can be made to last. By dynamically making logics either less…

Heuristics are often viewed as inferior to “rational” strategies that exhaustively search and process information. Introducing the theoretical perspective of ecological rationality, we challenge this view and argue that, under conditions of uncertainty common to managerial decision making, managers can actually make better decisions using fast-and-frugal heuristics. Within the context of personnel selection, we show that a heuristic called Δ-inference can more accurately predict which of two job applicants would perform better in the future than can logistic regression, a prototypical rational strategy. Using data from 236 applicants at an airline company, we demonstrate, in Study 1, that, despite searching less than half of the cues, Δ-inference leads to more accurate selection decisions than logistic regression. After this existence proof, we examine, in Study 2, the ecological conditions under which the heuristic predicts more accurately than logistic regression using 1,728 simulated task environments. Finally, in Study 3, we show in an experiment that participants adapted their…

Building on the literature on optimal distinctiveness, this study explores the effects of conformity versus differentiation in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on evaluations by security analysts and responses of the financial market in general. We develop the argument that while conformity in CSR scope enhances analyst coverage, differentiation in CSR emphasis leads to more-favorable analyst recommendations and higher market value. This suggests that firms may be able to simultaneously conform in CSR scope and differentiate in CSR emphasis to achieve optimal distinctiveness. To further enhance our understanding of the variation in the relationship between conformity and differentiation and the response of analysts and the market, we investigate how some firm- and analyst-level factors moderate this relationship. Using the case of corporate social activities of Chinese listed firms during the period from 2008 to 2014, we show that scope conformity has a stronger effect on analyst coverage for state-owned firms and firms with higher visibility; on the other hand, the…

Many new ventures have to “pivot”—radically transform what they are about—because their original approach has failed. However, pivoting risks disrupting relationships with key stakeholders, such as user communities, who identify with ventures. Stakeholders may respond by withdrawing support and starving ventures of the resources needed to thrive. This can pose an existential threat to ventures, yet it is unclear how they might manage this problem. To explore this important phenomenon, we conduct a qualitative process study of the Impossible Project, a photography venture that encountered significant resistance from its user community as it pivoted from an analog focus to an analog–digital positioning. We develop a process model of stakeholder identification management that reveals how ventures can use identification reset work to defuse tensions with stakeholders whose identification with the venture is threatened. A core finding is that ventures can remove the affective hostility of stakeholders and rebuild connections with many of them by exposing their struggles, thus creating a…

We draw on a three-year qualitative study of the processual dynamics of implementing a sustainability strategy alongside an existing mainstream competitive strategy. We show that, despite the legitimacy of the sustainability strategy at the organizational level, actors experience tensions with its implementation at the action level vis-à-vis the mainstream strategy, thus creating the potential for decoupling. Our findings show that working through these tensions on specific tasks enables actors to legitimate the sustainability strategy in action and to co-enact it with the mainstream strategy within those tasks. Cumulatively, multiple instances of such co-enactment at the action level reinforce the organizational-level legitimacy of the sustainability strategy and its integration with the mainstream strategy. We draw these findings together into a dynamic process model that contributes to the literature on integration of dual strategies at the action and organizational levels as a process of legitimacy making.

Little is known about how social entrepreneurs try to induce enactment of their cause, especially when this cause is difficult to embrace. Through a longitudinal study, we analyze how anti-plastic pollution social entrepreneurs use multimodal (visual and verbal) interactions to influence their targets and promote their cause. Our findings reveal that these social entrepreneurs use what we call “emotion-symbolic work,” which involves using visuals and words to elicit negative emotions through moral shock, and then transforming those emotions into emotional energy for enactment. The emotional transformation process entails connecting target actors to a cause, a collective identity, and the social entrepreneurs themselves. Our exploration of emotion-symbolic work offers new ways of seeing by emphasizing the use of multimodal interactions to affect emotions in efforts to influence target actors to enact a cause.

Findings from prior studies regarding the relationship between government corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and firm CSR performance have been mixed. To address this research gap, we developed a dual-agency model incorporating both public agents (government officials) and private agents (corporate CEOs) to investigate when firms respond to government initiatives by increasing their CSR. We tested our model in a sample of 746 Chinese listed firms during the period 2009–2014 when a national CSR initiative, the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, took place. Our results show that firms responded positively to the plan by increasing their CSR performance, but their response varied according to the incentives of both public and private CSR agents. Firms were more likely to increase CSR when public agents were more motivated to seek promotion to the central government or when private agents had greater concerns for legitimacy. Our examination of the role of two different types of CSR agents within institutions contributes to the institutional view of CSR by highlighting the interplay…

The increasing presence of women in upper echelon positions draws attention to the possible effects of executive gender on corporate decisions and actions. In this study, we formulate theory about the impact of CFO gender on financial misreporting to generate two key insights. First, we hypothesize that firms with female CFOs will have a lower likelihood of financial misreporting than comparable firms with male CFOs. Second, we argue that the relation between CFO gender and financial misreporting will be contingent on governance mechanisms (e.g., institutional ownership and analyst coverage) such that misreporting of firms with male CFOs will differ more from that of firms with female CFOs when governance is weak. Our results, based on a novel leading indicator of the likelihood of financial misreporting, provide support for our predictions. Various alternative econometric specifications, including (but not limited to) exogenous shocks, propensity score matching, and modeling treatment-effects, random effects, firm-fixed effects, and hybrid effects provide general support for our…

The unique and complex experiences of and challenges for Black women, which are tied to their intersecting marginalized identities, have largely been overlooked in management research. Although Black women are physically visible in that they are different from most of their colleagues, intersectional invisibility research suggests that they can be simultaneously invisible—easily overlooked or disregarded—because they are non-prototypical members of their gender and racial identity groups. To shed new light on the role that intersectional invisibility plays in Black women’s perceptions and experiences, we conducted two waves of in-depth interviews across seven years with 59 Black women who occupy senior-level positions in organizations. We develop a theoretical model to explain the paradoxical effects of executive Black women’s “outsider within” status in which they simultaneously experience opportunities and constraints associated with two forms of intersectional invisibility: benign and hostile. To manage both forms of intersectional invisibility, executive Black Women adopt a…