The 10 most-cited articles in Academy of Management Journal, 2021

Over the past century, conscientiousness has become seen as the preeminent trait for predicting performance. This consensus is due in part to these employees’ ability to work with traditional 20th-century technology. Such pairings balance the systematic nature of conscientious employees with the technology’s need for user input and direction to perform tasks—resulting in a complementary match. However, the 21st century has seen the incorporation of intelligent machines (e.g., artificial intelligence, robots, and algorithms) into employees’ jobs. Unlike traditional technology, these new machines are equipped with the capability to make decisions autonomously. Thus, their nature overlaps with the orderliness subdimension of conscientious employees—resulting in a non-complementary mismatch. This calls into question whether the consensus about conscientious employees’ effectiveness with 20th-century technology applies to 21st-century jobs. Integrating complementarity and role theory, we refine this consensus. Across three studies using distinct samples (an experience sampling study, a…

The strategy literature views novel business model design as a universally positive antecedent of high performance in entrepreneurial ventures. Not only do scholars emphasize novelty as a necessity, but they almost consider it a sufficient condition for performance. Challenging this assumption, we hypothesize that novelty can produce high performance only in combination with specific configurations that feature other value drivers such as efficiency, lock-in, and complementarity, which help firms not only create value but also capture more of it. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of two samples of Internet-enabled firms largely supports our hypotheses. We find that novelty alone is insufficient for high performance, even when it appears as a necessary condition for very high performance in new technological environments. Our results highlight how novelty combines effectively with other value drivers (in particular with efficiency) and strategies (in particular with differentiation) contingent on the intensity of competition, firm size, and firms’ technological…

In light of ever-increasing demands for innovation in work teams, we recommend paradoxical leadership to manage team and individual innovation. Integrating the paradox perspective and ambidexterity...

In this paper we adopt a dynamic perspective on networks and creativity to propose that the oft-theorized creative benefits of open networks and heterogeneous content are less likely to be accrued over time if the network is stable. Specifically, we hypothesize that open networks and content heterogeneity will have a more positive effect on creativity when network stability is low. We base our prediction on the fact that over time network stability begets cognitive rigidity and social rigidity, thus limiting individuals’ ability to make use of the creative advantages provided by open networks and heterogeneous content. On the contrary, new ties bring a positive “shock” that pushes individuals in the network to change the way they organize and process knowledge, as well as the way they interact and collaborate – a shock that enables creators to accrue the creative advantages provided by open network structures and heterogeneous content. We test and find support for our theory in a study on the core artists who worked on the TV series Doctor Who between 1963 and 2014.

The average employee feels burnt out, a multidimensional state of depletion likely to persists without intervention. In this paper, we consider compassion as an agentic action by which employees ma...

AbstractWe integrate political psychology and upper echelons research to introduce an alternative conceptualization of executive political ideology by separating the two distinct ideologies: social...

Job demands-resources research has largely adopted a variable-centered approach to test main and interactive effects of demands and resources on employee outcomes. However, this approach cannot det...

Nurturing venture-capital-backed, high-growth entrepreneurship has been strongly promoted as an effective means to achieve local development in impoverished places. Yet growing evidence suggests that, despite its notable successes in resource-rich regions, this approach creates limited impact in economically challenged locales. We address this conundrum by calling into question the crux of high-growth entrepreneurship – the pursuit of quick scaling through venture capital financing. Our field research in two entrepreneurship-nurturing organizations in Detroit reveals important heterogeneity in resourcing modes and venture growth in time and space. Specifically, we find that ventures developed through different modes of resourcing (financing vs. local bricolage) grow at different spatiotemporal scales (scaling up towards fast geographical expansion vs. scaling deep towards locally anchored endurance), and consequently generate distinctive yet complementary contributions to their depleted place of origin. Unlike scaling-up ventures whose local impact was explosive yet short-lived,…

Research on CEO political ideology has demonstrated the construct’s impact on many firm outcomes. Yet, political ideology does not exist in a vacuum; beyond representing a CEO’s values, political i...

We extend the field’s understanding of voice recognition by examining peer responses to voice. We investigate how employees can help peers get a status boost from voicing, while also raising their own status, by introducing the concept of amplification—public endorsement of another person’s contribution, with attribution to that person. In two experiments and one field study, we find that amplification enhances status both for voicers and for those who amplify voice. Being amplified was equally beneficial for voicers who framed their ideas promotively (improvement-focused) and prohibitively (problem-focused; Study 1), and for men and women (Study 2). Furthermore, amplified ideas were rated as higher quality than nonamplified ideas. Amplification also helped amplifiers: participants reading experimentally manipulated meeting transcripts rated amplifiers as higher status than those who self-promoted, stayed quiet, or contributed additional ideas (Studies 1 and 2). Finally, in an intervention in a nonprofit organization, select employees trained to use amplification attained higher…