The 10 most-cited articles in Academy of Management Journal, 2024

While scholars have explored how focal firms harness demand-side value through ecosystem development, less emphasis has been placed on understanding how peripheral complementors become competitive. Unlike focal firms, complementors can seldom set value extraction rules. How can complementors lacking critical supply-side resources establish themselves as ecosystem leaders? We conducted a longitudinal analysis of Xiaomi, which began life as a smartphone software complementor within the Android ecosystem but ultimately gained architectural control by orchestrating the creation of a derivative ecosystem. We elucidate how these resource-disadvantaged firms may begin with fueling an “identity movement” among underserved users centered around a pivotal “foothold resource.” This movement serves as their entry point into an ecosystem and enables them to build a demand-side community. They then employ “demand pull” as concrete evidence to substantiate their vision, coalesce supply-side resources, and ultimately become an orchestrator. While conventional strategy research emphasizes…

One of the most significant challenges of pursuing distant-future goals is sustaining a course of action toward a future with solutions that do not yet exist. We address this challenge in a real-time study of a sustainability workstream’s collective activities to develop a sustainability strategy toward a net-zero carbon future. We observed how the participants in the core team engaged in an iterative three-phase process that we call path enactment. Path enactment evolved from (a) imagining how solutions could connect into paths to (b) integrating emerging paths into configurations, and then (c) stretching these new path configurations toward the company’s distant-future goals. We identified three mechanisms, bracketing, narrating, and calculating, which combined in different ways throughout the phases to enable path enactment. Based on our findings, we develop a process model to explain how these paths become increasingly stretched toward distant-future goals and embedded as a sustained course of action in a sustainability strategy. Our research significantly extends theories of…

Are firms led by liberal versus conservative CEOs more likely to engage in corporate misconduct? This study unearths the ideological bases of misconduct by distinguishing the values and identity perspectives of political ideology. Rather than attributing misconduct to liberal or conservative values, we introduce and examine CEO political partisanship—that is, the strength of a CEO’s identification with political and ideological groups. We hypothesize and find robust evidence for a positive relationship between CEO political partisanship and corporate misconduct in a sample of Fortune 500 CEOs from 2010 to 2018. Our findings thus contribute to the conversation on the role of political ideology in organizations by unearthing the organizational implications of political identities. As CEOs increasingly engage in political discussions and political divisions grow stronger, our study offers a timely warning about the harmful link between CEO political partisanship and corporate misconduct.

Most scholarly work concludes that leader humor positively affects emotional outcomes for followers. However, two interrelated issues with past research make this view incomplete: (a) studies often conflate the act of expressing humor with the humor’s effectiveness, and (b) existing research overlooks follower emotion regulation. In addressing these issues, we generate and test new theory that challenges the theoretical consensus, highlighting why and when leader humor expression has emotional costs for followers. Specifically, we theorize that leader humor quantity, irrespective of its quality, puts pressure on followers to engage in “surface acting” to fake or exaggerate positive emotions. We further propose that these surface acting responses are more likely to occur when followers hold high power distance values, such that followers more willingly comply with expectations to display positive emotions in response to leader humor expression. This increase in surface acting then leads to more emotional exhaustion and less job satisfaction for followers. Results from three…

Drawing on video recordings, interviews, and first-hand observations of a strategic project team at an electronic bank, we explore the role of atmosphere in collective sensemaking. By analyzing collective entanglements of bodily tonality and interaction, we show how distinctive atmospheres in strategy-making workshops are closely associated with different sensemaking styles that shape not only how but also what sense is constructed. Our findings show that in group settings, participants’ immanent sensing of atmospheric dynamics serves as an affective and affecting background that enables and constrains collective sensemaking in relation to an issue. We also find that atmosphere can shift as dissonant moments accumulate and reach an atmospheric tipping point that enables a change in the group’s sensemaking style. These dissonant moments manifest as subtle changes in one or more participants’ bodily orientation, speech content, or vocal characteristics. The concept of atmosphere enables us to extend emotions research in sensemaking and strategic management by offering a better…

This study proposes that CEO attentional vigilance, defined as maintaining a consistent level of attention over time, can contribute to a firm’s pursuit of exploration. Using data from new product introductions in the software industry, along with a text-based measure of attentional vigilance derived from earnings conference calls, I find that CEO attentional vigilance to exploration has a positive effect on the firm’s rate of exploration. Additionally, I observe that this positive impact is more pronounced when a firm’s financial performance falls below aspiration levels. Furthermore, based on an analysis of Glassdoor review data, I demonstrate that the level of satisfaction among employees in explorative units partially mediates the effect of CEO attentional vigilance on the firm’s pursuit of exploration. The findings hold significant implications for research in the attention-based view, performance feedback, and micro-foundations of strategy.

The current research proposes and tests a novel model explaining how job insecurity shapes well-being and has consequences for stratification and inequality. I draw on evolutionary life history theory, which proposes that growing up in a poorer versus wealthier environment impacts the sense of control people feel when exposed to threat in adulthood. I integrate this perspective with transactional stress theory to propose that job insecurity has a disproportionately negative effect on employees from poorer backgrounds, leading to lower engagement and higher emotional exhaustion among such employees, while those from wealthier backgrounds are buffered against these effects. These responses to job insecurity, in turn, amplify job loss risk for employees from poorer backgrounds, regardless of employees’ current job or financial situation. A preregistered, multisource, five-wave longitudinal study conducted at the height of the COVID-19 crisis in India found support for these predictions. A follow-up quasi-experiment conducted in India and the United States replicated the effects on…