We explore how minority- and women-owned suppliers lacking hard power manage asymmetric relationships with larger, more powerful buyers in the context of supplier diversity relationships. We examine how these suppliers create and use soft power to manage the opportunities and challenges they encounter trying to maintain their positions in large buyers’ supply chains. We find that these easily substitutable firms use a variety of information sources to identify and make themselves cognitively central to individuals inside and outside the buyer organizations who can serve as functional and political influencers. They then employ these influencers to affect the buyer’s decisions when their position in the supply chain is threatened, largely without the buyer noticing. Our study contributes to the literatures on the use of soft power buyer-supplier power relationships and supplier diversity.
参考文献：Kisha Lashley , Timothy G. Pollock. (2020). Dancing with Giants: How Small Women- and Minority-Owned Firms Use Soft Power to Manage Asymmetric Relationships with Larger Partners, 31(6), 1313-1335. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1353
Viewing entrepreneurship as a form of collective action, this paper investigates the tension between an entrepreneurial team’s reliance on collective efforts for achieving success and individual members’ tendencies to withhold their personal resources. We argue that the precarious nature of the early founding stage and the difficulty of redeploying some resources for other uses amplify the risk of early-stage resource contributions and may lead to team members withholding resources or even free riding. Two conditions may help overcome such collective action problems: adopting a formal contract to specify rewards and sanctions and encouraging reciprocal exchange among team members through the lead entrepreneur’s voluntary contributions. Analyzing a nationally representative multiwave panel study of entrepreneurial teams in the United States, we show that early-stage team members are reluctant to provide resources tailored to the business, even though such resources are critical to venture survival. We find that presigned formal contracts and founding entrepreneurs’ initial contributions make members’ contributions of such resources much more likely. Lead entrepreneurs’ voluntary contributions to their businesses, signified by their provision of resources that impose high risks on themselves but increase the viability of the business, help mitigate collective action problems within entrepreneurial teams.
参考文献：Tiantian Yang , Jiayi Bao, Howard Aldrich. (2020). The Paradox of Resource Provision in Entrepreneurial Teams: Between Self-Interest and the Collective Enterprise, 31(6), 1136-1358. doi:10.1287/orsc.2019.1354
Although the diversity of cultural expectations for different corporate governance practices has been acknowledged, our understanding of how companies use cultural differences to legitimize their governance practice choice and facilitate their resource acquisition remains limited. Building on the literature on cultural entrepreneurship, we theorize how foreign-listed firms engage in global framing in tailoring the description of their new governance practice to the host country investors. Our empirical study examines the relative emphasis of monitoring over resource-providing roles by the U.S.-listed Chinese companies’ independent directors when their roles are understood differently in the home and host countries. Our study finds that exposure to the alternative cultural repertoire of a host country via overseas education of board members and foreign institutional ownership enhance a firm’s organizational resources available to engage in global framing. The likelihood of global framing, however, is constrained by the home country’s institutional environment, which is characterized by local business history and connections to strong local resource providers such as the state. We also find that the effectiveness of global framing to obtain investor recognition in the host country is restricted when the company lacks the capacity to implement the declared role of independent director-as-monitor in its home country.
参考文献：Sun Hyun Park , Yanlong Zhang. (2020). Cultural Entrepreneurship in Corporate Governance Practice Diffusion: Framing of “Independent Directors” by U.S.-Listed Chinese Companies, 31(6), 1359-1384. doi:10.1287/orsc.2019.1355
Novel external partnerships are valuable but risky, and scholars have examined the organization- and individual-level determinants of firms’ decisions to pursue these new relationships. Yet, in organizations performing complex and knowledge-intensive work, decisions about interorganizational relationships are often made within teams. We characterize these decisions as a two-stage process in which a team member proposes a partner and other team members respond, supporting or challenging the proposal. As novel partnerships are risky, and power is a key determinant of risk-taking propensity, we argue that the power of team members—both those who initiate proposals and those who respond—will shape the likelihood that the team will pursue a novel external partnership. Using personnel data from project teams in an automated equipment design and build firm, we find that the effect of power on the likelihood of novel partner adoption depends on both the type of power and the role of the person in the decision process. Novel partner selection is more likely when those initiating proposals hold formal structural power but less likely when initiators hold informal power. Both the formal and informal power of the initiator’s teammates attenuate the effect of initiator power, such that the more power one’s teammates have, the less one’s own power will affect the likelihood of novel external partner selection. Finally, we provide evidence that these effects on likelihood of novel partner adoption are as materially consequential for project outcomes as other strategic choices available to project teams. These findings have implications for the intraorganizational determinants of interorganizational networks.
参考文献：Trevor Young-Hyman, Adam M. Kleinbaum. (2020). Meso-Foundations of Interorganizational Relationships: How Team Power Structures Shape Partner Novelty, 31(6), 1385-1407. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1356
A key assumption in past literature has been that human services workers become emotionally distant from their charges (such as clients or patients). Such distancing is said to protect workers from the emotionally draining aspects of the job but creates challenges to feeling and behaving compassionately. Because little is known about when and how compassion occurs under these circumstances, we conducted a multiphased qualitative study of 119 correctional officers in the United States using interviews and observations. Officers’ accounts and our observations of their interactions with inmates included cruel, disciplinary, unemotional, and compassionate treatment. Such treatment varied by the situations that officers faced, and compassion was surprisingly common when inmates were misbehaving—challenging current understanding of the occurrence of compassion at work. Examining officers’ accounts more closely, we uncovered a novel way that we theorize human services workers can be compassionate, even under such difficult circumstances. We find that officers describe engaging in practices in which they (a) relate to others by leveling group-based differences between themselves and their charges and (b) engage in self-protection by shielding themselves from the negative emotions triggered by their charges. We posit that the combined use of such practices offsets different emotional tensions in the work, rather than only providing emotional distance, and in doing so, can foster compassionate treatment under some of the most trying situations and organizational barriers to compassion.
参考文献：Katherine A. DeCelles ，Michel Anteby. (2020). Compassion in the Clink: When and How Human Services Workers Overcome Barriers to Care, 31(6), 页码范围1408-1431. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1358
To better understand the origins of sustained superior firm performance, we consider processes of entrepreneurial creation and discovery. Discovering new opportunities requires speed and flexibility, and although many discoveries are easy to implement, this makes them easy to imitate. By comparison, creation is more complex, iterative, and cumulative, making these opportunities slower to implement yet harder to copy. In formal simulation modeling and analyses of the U.S. Compustat population from 1966 to 2015, we found a bimodal pattern of entry into golden eras of sustained superiority. One peak consisted of an initial spike as firms went public, and evidence suggests this was driven by entrepreneurial discovery. The other peak involved a long-term inverted U-shaped trajectory that reached its high point about 17 years later. Evidence suggests this was driven by entrepreneurial creation, which first enabled then later constrained durable superiority. Our results have implications for research on sustained superiority, entrepreneurial opportunities, and strategic renewal.
参考文献：Andrew D. Henderson, Melissa E. Graebner. (2020). Entering a Golden Age of Sustained Superiority: Entrepreneurial Creation or Discovery? 31(6), 1432-1451. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1357
Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that corresponds to a gain in responsibility. There is evidence, however, that some individuals experience “managerial blues,” or disenchantment with their managerial jobs after being promoted. Although past scholarship points to individual differences (such as skills inadequacy) or the promotion circumstances (such as involuntary) as possible explanations for such blues, less is known as to how the expectations that people carry with them from past jobs—such as expectations about what responsibility entails—may shape their first managerial experience. To answer this question, we compare the experiences of supervisors coming from different jobs—that is, former Paris subway drivers (working independently and impacting the lives of others) and station agents (working interdependently with limited impact on others’ lives)—that left them with distinct sets of expectations around responsibility. Drawing on interviews and observations, we find that former drivers developed a deep sense of “personal” responsibility. After promotion, their perceived managerial responsibility paled in comparison with their expectations of what it felt like to have personal responsibility, leading the majority to experience managerial blues. In contrast, former agents had few expectations of what responsibility entailed and reported no disenchantment once they joined the managerial ranks. Overall, we show how imprinted expectations shape people’s future managerial experiences, including their managerial blues, and discuss the implications of our findings for literatures on job mobility and job design.
参考文献：Nishani Bourmault , Michel Anteby. (2020). Unpacking the Managerial Blues: How Expectations Formedin the Past Carry into New Jobs, 31(6), 1452-1474. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1361
We develop and test a theoretically informed and generalizable empirical framework for evaluating the performance gap between internally and externally hired workers. First, human capital theory predicts that internal hires will be immediately more productive than external hires. Second, contextual learning predicts that internal hires will be more productive with time. Finally, theories of commitment, which are rarely applied to this literature, predict that internal advancement enhances retention among high performers (“positive retention”). Applying a general empirical framework for quantifying the relative contributions of these mechanisms to a retailer with 109,063 commissioned salespeople and their 12,931 managers, we find that the gap in our setting is primarily driven by positive retention: High performers and internal hires are less likely to quit, and crucially, high-performing internal hires are especially unlikely to quit. When high-performing internal hires do quit, they tend to cite reasons unrelated to work rather than advancement opportunities. By typically examining performance and retention in isolation, researchers and organizations may be underestimating the importance of internal advancement as a means of retaining of high performers.
参考文献：Alan Benson , Ben A. Rissing. (2020). Strength from Within: Internal Mobility and the Retention of High Performers, 31(6), 1475-1496. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1362
A crucial challenge for organizations is to pool and aggregate information effectively. Traditionally, organizations have relied on committees and teams, but recently many organizations have explored the use of information markets. In this paper, the authors compared groups and markets in their ability to pool and aggregate information in a hidden-profiles task. In Study 1, groups outperformed markets when there were no conflicts of interest among participants, whereas markets outperformed groups when conflicts of interest were present. Also, participants had more trust in groups to uncover hidden profiles than in markets. Study 2 generalized these findings to a simple prediction task, confirming that people had more trust in groups than in markets. These results were not qualified by conflicts of interest. Drawing on experienced forecasters from Good Judgment Open, Study 3 found that familiarity and experience with markets increased the endorsement and use of markets relative to traditional committees.
参考文献：Boris Maciejovsky, David V. Budescu. (2020). Too Much Trust in Group Decisions: Uncovering Hidden Profiles by Groups and Markets, 31(6), 1497-1514. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1363
Despite substantial scholarly attention to workforce demographic diversity, existing research is limited in understanding whether or in what contexts firm-level racial diversity relates to performance and workforce outcomes of the firm. Drawing on social interdependence theory along with insights from social exchange and psychological ownership theories, we propose that the use of broad-based stock options granted to at least half the workforce creates the conditions supporting a positive relationship between workforce racial diversity and firm outcomes. We examine this proposition by analyzing panel data from 155 companies that applied for the “100 Best Companies to Work For” competition with responses from 109,314 employees over the five-year period from 2006 to 2010 (354 company-year observations). Findings revealed that racial diversity was positively related to subsequent firm financial performance and individual affective commitment and was not significantly associated with subsequent voluntary turnover rates, when accompanied by a firm’s adoption of broad-based stock options. However, under the nonuse of broad-based stock options, racial diversity was significantly related to higher voluntary turnover rates and lower employee affective commitment, with no financial performance gains. By documenting the beneficial effects of financial incentives in diverse workplaces, this paper extends theory asserting the value of incentives for performance.
参考文献：Joo Hun Han, DuckJung Shin, William G. Castellano, Alison M. Konrad, Douglas L. Kruse, Joseph R. Blasi. (2020). Creating Mutual Gains to Leverage a Racially Diverse Workforce: The Effects of Firm-Level Racial Diversity on Financial and Workforce Outcomes Under the Use of Broad-Based Stock Options, 31(6), 1515-1537. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1360
In this paper, we apply a core/periphery framework to an intraorganizational context to study the interplay between formal and informal core/periphery structures. Specifically, we consider how core positions occupied by inventors in the corporate research and development division of a large multinational high-tech company affect their ability to generate incremental innovations. We theorize and empirically observe that formal and informal core positions have positive and independent effects on the generation of incremental innovations. These effects have a multiplicative impact on innovative productivity when inventors who are core in the informal knowledge-sharing network are also affiliated with a core organizational unit. We also observe, however, that the positive effect of being located at the core of both the informal and formal structures is negatively moderated by individuals’ distribution of knowledge ties when these reach outside the core of their informal knowledge-sharing network.
参考文献：Massimo Maoret , Marco Tortoriello , Daniela Iubatti. (2020). Big Fish, Big Pond? The Joint Effect of Formal and Informal Core/Periphery Positions on the Generation of Incremental Innovations, 31(6), 1538-1559. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1365
Socially and educationally disadvantaged entrepreneurs often lack the knowledge and prior experience to develop and scale their businesses. Owing to limited educational and employment opportunities, poverty, and discrimination, these entrepreneurs frequently experience low business growth and performance. What factors influence the effectiveness of early-stage venture incubation and mentoring for promoting learning, scaling, and profitability among these entrepreneurs? Two studies in a business incubator serving low-income, underprivileged entrepreneurs in South Africa evaluate this question. Study 1 uses a matched, two-period case-control design to investigate the effects of incubation on business growth by comparing selected and incubated companies to similar also-selected but not incubated ones. The findings show that incubated companies grew 22% more in revenue and 15% more in employment than not incubated companies over the six months between applying to and graduating from the incubator. Study 2 uses instrumental-variable models to evaluate the role that mentoring played in improving business performance by analyzing data from seven cohorts of participants in the incubator randomly assigned to mentors. The findings show that participants assigned to high-ability (versus low-ability) mentors had 3.2% higher revenue and 3.5% higher profits one year after incubation. Further, the benefits of being mentored were more significant for businesses whose entrepreneurs had less pre-entry knowledge and experience, suggesting that mentoring supplemented gaps in human capital. These findings have implications for ways to support disadvantaged entrepreneurs and their businesses through mentoring and early-stage venture incubation.
参考文献：Valentina A. Assenova. (2020). Early-Stage Venture Incubation and Mentoring Promote Learning, Scaling, and Profitability Among Disadvantaged Entrepreneurs, 31(6), 1560-1578. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1367
In this study, we build on the foundational observations of Selznick and Stinchcombe that organizations bear the lasting imprint of their founding context and explore how characteristics shaped during founding are coherently carried forward through time. To do so, we draw on an ethnography of a social venture where the entrepreneurs left soon after founding. In examining how an initial organizational imprint evolves beyond a venture’s founding phase, we focus on the actions and interactions of organizational members, the founders’ imprint, the venture’s new leadership, and the external environment. The process model we develop shows how the organizational imprint evolves as a consequence of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up forces. We first find that the initial imprint is transmitted through a bottom-up mechanism of imprint reinforcement, and second, that the venture is reimprinted after the founding period through two processes which we call imprint reforming and imprint coupling. The result of this is the formation of a sedimented imprint. Our findings further illuminate that, although the initial imprint sticks, its function and manifestation changes over time.
参考文献：Lien De Cuyper , Bart Clarysse, Nelson Phillips. (2020). Imprinting Beyond the Founding Phase: How Sedimented Imprints Develop over Time, 31(6), 1579-1600. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1372
This study advances understanding of the conditions under which a new worker improves organizational performance. We argue that the extent to which new group members have experience working as specialists or generalists is a critical factor in explaining performance after the new member joins. We conceptualize specialists as those who concentrate on a particular component of an organization’s task, whereas generalists perform all components of the task. As such, a specialist must coordinate with other group members to complete the group’s task, which makes a specialist more interdependent with other members and in possession of more organization-specific knowledge than a generalist. We predict that (1) groups receiving specialist new members do not perform as well after the new member joins as compared with groups receiving generalist new members and (2) groups with new members whose work experience and recipient group structure are aligned (i.e., generalist movers into generalist groups and specialist movers into specialist groups) perform better than groups with new members whose experience and recipient group structure are not aligned. We test our hypotheses using a laboratory study in which we manipulate the extent to which new members and incumbent members of recipient groups work as specialists or generalists. Participants work as generalists or specialists in three-person groups and receive a new member who acquired experience as a specialist or generalist in another group. We find support for our hypotheses and provide evidence on mechanisms through which potential new members’ backgrounds enable them to contribute significantly to their recipient groups. New members who acquire experience in a structure similar to that of their recipient organizations report that they experience greater fit with their new groups, which enables their recipient groups to perform better than groups where new members’ experience and recipient group structure are not aligned. Additionally, our results suggest generalists may be more likely than specialists to transfer knowledge to their new groups.
参考文献：Erin Fahrenkopf , Jerry Guo , Linda Argote. (2020). Personnel Mobility and Organizational Performance: The Effects of Specialist vs. Generalist Experience and Organizational Work Structure, 31(6), 1601-1620. doi:10.1287/orsc.2020.1373
