The 10 most-cited articles in Academy of Management Journal, 2022

Hype is a collective vision and promise of a possible future, around which attention, excitement, and expectations increase over time. Within nascent markets, hype can thus serve as a cultural resource by which entrepreneurs might encourage greater early stakeholder support and resources. And yet as hype-driven support couples with mounting temporal and categorical expectations, this can also limit ventures’ flexibility during the entrepreneurial process. Drawing on an inductive, longitudinal, and comparative study of three new ventures within the much-hyped nascent market of impact investing, we develop an emergent theory of hype management, illustrating the field organizing practices that give rise to different forms of social proof, thereby allowing new ventures sufficient flexibility to convert hype into a sustained entrepreneurial opportunity. Our account contributes directly to contemporary public conversations of hype by revealing how entrepreneurs might engage with and indeed live up to the hype surrounding nascent markets without succumbing to the deceit and disappointment…

While pay for performance (PFP) is widely adopted in organizations to boost employee performance, the empirical evidence on its incentive effect has been mixed. Based on Park and Sturman’s (2021) PFP perception framework, we integrated two motivation theories—transactional theory of stress and role engagement theory—to delineate two countervailing mechanisms that explain how individuals appraise and react to perceived PFP. Our study considers employees’ perception of PFP-I (perceived PFP based on individual performance) and highlights leader competence and warmth as critical contingencies. We propose that perceived PFP-I is appraised by employees as a challenge when leader competence is high, which leads to employees’ work engagement and enhanced task performance, but is appraised as a threat when leader warmth is low, which leads to employees’ work withdrawal and decreased task performance. In two three-wave survey studies, we found support for our model. The present research advances our knowledge regarding the incentive effect of PFP-I by emphasizing the importance of perceived…

In this study we consider whether 1) image- and word-based communication modes and 2) warmth and competence cues vary in their relative influence on different levels of stakeholder engagement on social media. Specifically, we explore social media fitness Influencers’ abilities to attract followers and get them to positively interact with them via posts and comments. We theorize that differences in the ways each communication mode is processed, and differences in how competence and warmth cues are perceived, will lead to different relative effects on lower- and higher-engagement behaviors. Using the social media platform Instagram, we followed 488 social media entrepreneurs in the fitness and nutrition industry for six-months, and found that images have a positive relationship with less cognitively effortful engagement (following) whereas words do not have a significant relationship, and words have a stronger relationship than images with more cognitively effortful engagement (positive interactions). We also found that competence cues have a stronger positive relationship than warmth…

While there have been several studies on overt forms of marginalization, few have examined benevolent marginalization, where people may unquestioningly participate in their own paternalistic subjugation by following a prescribed identity. How might such individuals end up achieving emancipation from an infantilizing identity? To address this puzzle, we conducted a longitudinal study of a German sheltered workshop, an organization providing employment for disabled people. We observed that workers with disability initially maintained a regulating organizational identity based on paternalistic segregation. However, over time, they constructed their own self-determining identity and coproduced a change in the workshop’s identity from “shelter” to “inclusion.” First, we show that in order to coconstruct their preferred self-concept, benevolently marginalized individuals need to gain the support of those in power, who change their role from a guardian to an ally. Second, while achieving liberation from overt marginalization is likely to involve confrontation with one’s oppressors, we…

Grand challenges are system-wide problems. While top-down approaches to mitigating grand challenges may have potentially far-reaching impact, such initiatives from the higher scales can fail because of limited knowledge of ground realities. At the same time, resilient local efforts to address societal challenges can have limited reach. How can a grassroots organization work across locations and scales to address a grand challenge? We report the findings of a longitudinal case study of the Child In Need Institute (CINI), a non-profit organization that successfully scaled its impact to reach over seven million beneficiaries. Based on 40 years of archival data and four years of intensive fieldwork, our findings reveal “double weaving” as a recursive process of diagnosing and addressing problems by connecting actors and resources across locations and scales. The double-weaving process gives researchers a framework to explore the complex interplay between locations and scales that is necessary to address grand challenges. Our study contributes to research on grand challenges and scaling,…

By integrating the intersectional invisibility hypothesis with the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes map framework, we examine the extent to which Black women’s dual-subordinated identities render them nonprototypical victims of discrimination, relative to White women and Black men, and the corresponding consequences. We predicted that Black women’s categorical nonprototypicality would reduce the believability of their discrimination claims, but that their nonprototypical attributes would lead to divergent treatment, depending on the type of discrimination alleged. Our predictions were supported across six experimental studies (Studies 1–4b). Specifically, Black women’s gender and racial discrimination claims were believed less compared to those made by White women and Black men, respectively. Moreover, after they alleged discrimination, Black women received less financial remedy versus White women, but more financial remedy versus Black men. Mediation testing revealed that the mechanisms underlying the believability and treatment of Black women were their…

Myriad cross-sector initiatives seek to remake capitalism into a more just, sustainable, and inclusive system. But how do these distributed efforts—which often vary in strength—interact? We contribute by attending to the interaction between weak and strong governance reforms. Drawing on longstanding research on organizational values and the sociology of law, we theorize how the enactment of weak and broad sustainability legislation is likely to increase pressure on values-driven businesses to pursue both values authentication and material authentication by way of strong third-party certification. We test our conceptual model by examining the effects of the frequently criticized benefit corporation legislation passed in 36 U.S. jurisdictions on the related B Corporation certification. We find that both new certifications and recertifications increase in states with such legislation, and that these effects are amplified or attenuated depending on corporate sustainability norms in the region. Taken together, our findings contribute to the intensifying societal conversation regarding…

To what extent are multinational corporations (MNCs) able to address grand social challenges through corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the context of a dominant market logic? Based on an in-depth qualitative study of how apparel MNCs have addressed labor standards violations since the deadly 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse, we show how CSR managers navigate the tension between the emerging responsible management logic and the highly institutionalized market logic, revealing how some go beyond accommodating responsible management within the market by prioritizing responsible management in market-protected spaces. We theorize the construction of market-protected spaces as a multilevel mechanism for institutionalizing an emerging logic in the context of a field dominated by the market logic via three forms of institutional work: restraining the jurisdiction of the market logic, infusing the responsible management logic with nonmarket elements, and maintaining market-protected spaces against resistance. A market-protected space is an institutionally bound space that suspends the…