The 10 most-cited articles in Academy of Management Journal, 2020

Scholars continue to debate whether voice and silence are opposites or distinct constructs. This ambiguity has prevented meaningful theoretical advancements about employees’ voice and silence at work. We draw on the behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition systems perspective to provide a conceptual framework for the independence of voice and silence and explicate how two key antecedents—perceived impact and psychological safety—more strongly relate to voice and silence, respectively. We further differentiate voice and silence by identifying their distinct effects on employee burnout. In Study 1, a meta-analysis, we demonstrate that voice and silence are independent (Mρ = −.15) and that perceived impact (psychological safety) relates more strongly to voice (silence) than to silence (voice). We also find that silence has a significantly stronger association with burnout compared to voice. In Study 2, we constructively replicate these findings in an interval-contingent panel study across six months. Taken together, this article helps shift the conversation of whether voice and…

How do new ventures gain legitimacy and attract critical resources? An increasing body of cultural entrepreneurship research has highlighted an “optimal distinctiveness” trade-off: new ventures need to be distinctive from their peers to stand out, yet distinctiveness counteracts the attainment of organizational legitimacy. In this paper, we challenge the underlying assumption that distinctiveness necessarily counteracts the attainment of legitimacy and propose that distinctiveness can become a source of legitimacy. This proposition matters because it fundamentally alters the relationship between distinctiveness and resource acquisition from certain audiences. We build on these theoretical arguments to examine new ventures’ resource acquisition from crowdfunders, one of the most important audiences for new ventures. Analysis of 28,425 crowdfunding campaigns across 39 market categories strongly supports our arguments, showing that higher levels of distinctiveness lead to superior crowdfunding performance. We further demonstrate that the legitimating effect of distinctiveness…

We develop and test a theory of how unintended audiences create reaction costs for firms that use corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a signal. We introduce and define reaction costs as costs that signal senders incur when unintended audiences react negatively to a true signal that was intended for another audience. We argue that activist hedge funds—an unintended audience—treat CSR as a signal that firms have wasteful intentions and capabilities, which prevent firms from maximizing shareholder value in the short term. On that basis, we hypothesize that activist hedge funds are more likely to target firms with higher levels of CSR, thus imposing reaction costs on these firms. We further argue that this relationship is weaker when firms operate in industries with high levels of CSR, and stronger when firms’ financial communication is vague. Using data on activist hedge fund campaigns in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016, we find supporting results. Our study shows that CSR signals may be costlier than previously assumed and contributes to research on CSR, signaling, and corporate…

Small talk-trivial communication not core to task completion-is normative and ubiquitous in organizations. Although small talk comprises up to one-third of adults' speech, its effects in the workplace have been largely discounted. Yet, research has suggested that small talk may have important consequences for employees. Integrating theories of interaction rituals and microrole transitions, we explore how and why seemingly inconsequential workday conversations meaningfully impact employees' experiences. In a sample of employed adults, we used an experience sampling method to capture within-individual variation in small talk over a three-week period. Given that we are the first to examine small talk as an episodic phenomen on, we also conducted a validation of our daily small talk measure with master's students and two samples of employed adults. Using multilevel pathanalysis, results show that small talk enhanced employees' daily positive social emotions at work, which heightened organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and enhanced well-being at the end of the workday;…

It is unclear why, despite the increasing emphasis on innovation in modern business, firms are still myopic in their search efforts. Although prior studies have examined the role of supply-side fac...

The question of what changes when women enter upper-echelons teams has long frustrated upper echelons and gender researchers. We build on the dynamic strategic renewal literature, combine it with upper echelons theory insights, and integrate knowledge about female executives' career strategies to theorize how and when female appointments into top management teams (TMTs) cause firms to change their approach to knowledge-related strategic renewal. In doing so, we reconcile the tension among extant mediating processes invoked to explain how female TMT representation might affect strategic decisions: change orientation and risk-taking propensity. Estimating a dynamic ordinary least squares model on panel data from 163 multinationals, we find that following female (but not male) TMT appointments, TMT cognitions shift, becoming more change oriented and less risk seeking. Subsequently, these TMT cognitive shifts cause a decrease in mergers and acquisitions and an increase in research and development. Our model of female TMT appointments as catalysts that cause shifts in TMT cognitions,…

This paper offers a novel theoretical account of why and when top management team (TMT) gender diversity lends strategic advantage. Building on social role theory, we develop a moderated-mediation model showing: a) TMT psychological safety mediates the effect of TMT gender diversity on firm ambidextrous strategic orientation (ASO) (why) and b) firm slack moderates this mediated effect (when). We tested our model in the context of Chinese high-tech small- and medium-sized enterprises. After confirming gender differences in social role-based proclivities at the TMT level, a multi-wave survey study of 373 members from 120 TMTs showed that TMT gender diversity positively affects ASO via TMT psychological safety, and this mediated effect is stronger when firm slack is lower than higher. We further interviewed 23 top managers to supplement key quantitative results. Our study advances upper echelons research on TMT gender diversity in two ways. First, it highlights the gender-specific interpersonal benefit of TMT gender diversity, which is markedly distinct from the cognitive-variety…

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Academy of Management via the DOI in this record

Scholars have highlighted executive attention as a vital organizational resource. However, as prior studies have examined different facets of attention, a theoretical tension has emerged as to whet...

Research into boards of directors has provided mixed support for the view that outside directors’ independence or leadership by an independent chair improves monitoring. In this study, we use a micro-level approach to provide a better understanding of why outside directors have difficulty in monitoring the CEO. We highlight that an important reason for this lies in the boardroom dynamics associated with (a) outside directors’ cognitive conflict with the CEO and (b) the chair’s leadership of the board. Our inductive analyses of video observations of board meetings in five Australian corporations revealed the importance of chair participative leadership during disagreement episodes in the boardroom. Follow-up in-depth interviews of board meeting participants highlighted the importance of psychological safety as a key mechanism explaining why participative board chairs appear so effective in dealing with board–CEO cognitive conflict. We corroborate these results with a second, large-scale survey study involving data on 310 outside directors from 64 Dutch boards. Whereas prior work has…