Innovation research has long shown that firms depend on their R&D personnel to strengthen their innovation capabilities, sparking scholarly interest in how to best staff R&D departments for competitive advantage, with a focus on gender diversity. However, left unexamined are the mechanisms linking gender diversity in R&D departments and firm-level innovation. Further, despite growing interest in the conditions under which diversity may enhance innovation, researchers have not adequately addressed how department-level gender rank inequality-the disproportionate concentration of men and women at various hierarchical ranks-interacts with numerical diversity to affect innovation outcomes. We address both limitations by integrating insights from the information/decision-making perspective on diversity and research on inequality with research on innovation capabilities. Specifically, we develop and test a model explaining how R&D department gender diversity and gender rank equality jointly affect three firm-level innovation capabilities: breadth of external knowledge search, use of external knowledge, and quality of the innovation implementation process. We also examine the indirect effects of gender diversity on firm-level innovation, conditional on gender rank equality, via these capabilities. Our analyses of 552 corporate R&D departments over 12 years show how gender diversity and gender rank equality in R&D departments jointly relate to higher levels of all three firm-level innovation capabilities and, indirectly, to greater firm-level innovation. Our findings suggest that improving a firm's innovation capabilities and performance requires both increased representation of women in R&D departments and proportional representation of men and women at all ranks of R&D departments.
This study employs the attention-based view (ABV) to examine the impact of regulatory focus dispersion on family and non-family firms. Guided by the socioemotional wealth framework, family firms face challenges as diverse regulations threaten family firm performance. Family firms (non-family firms) realize negative (positive) performance with increasing regulatory focus dispersion. This research contributes by integrating ABV with family firm characteristics and regulatory focus dispersion, offering implications for increasingly regulatory environments. Modern businesses must simultaneously comply with diverse regulations spanning financial reporting, environmental rules, labor law, and trade restrictions. This study examines how this complexity affects family-owned versus non-family businesses differently. We find a contrast: when businesses navigate more diverse regulatory requirements, family firms experience declining market valuations while non-family firms perform better. Family businesses concentrate decision-making among a few family members, juggling business and family priorities. Diverse regulations overload this structure. Non-family firms, with professional management teams and distributed authority, assign specialists to different regulatory areas without overwhelming any single decision-maker. Policymakers should recognize that regulatory complexity imposes unequal burdens. Family businesses should consider strategic governance changes like specialized compliance officers while maintaining family control.
Racialized and religious emotions can challenge or perpetuate the racial structure. Racial pessimism can play a significant role in how people perceive, respond to, and engage with racial inequality. We examine how religion shapes racial pessimism among Christians with a focus on congregational and leadership racial composition. Across racial groups, the perceived importance of faith is inversely associated with racial pessimism. While attending a more racially diverse congregation is negatively associated with racial pessimism, attending a congregation with more racially diverse leadership is positively associated with racial pessimism. Intra-racial group models provide nuance to the strength and direction of these patterns. Both evangelical orthodoxy and Christian nationalism are positively associated with racial pessimism. Our findings have implications for understanding how religion may facilitate racialized emotions through varying contexts, and how these contexts may have differing influences across and within racial groups.
Urban air mobility (UAM) leverages advanced air transportation systems to facilitate efficient and reliable air travel within and around urban areas. It involves the use of electric aircraft capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), such as air taxis, which navigate urban airspace to transport passengers quickly between locations. High-speed rail (HSR) service, on the other hand, is a rail transport system that utilizes trains operating at higher speeds than traditional rail services, providing rapid connectivity between major metropolitan areas. In this study, we aim to develop a hub-and-spoke network design (HSND) problem that integrates UAM and HSR (UAMHSR–HSND) to improve the efficiency of multimodal transportation systems. The hub-and-spoke model captures the interfacility interactions between passenger flows and vertiport–station assignments via a semi-quadratic assignment model, which poses significant computational challenges. To address this challenge, we compare different linearization models that leverage the special network configuration of UAMHSR–HSND and allow the problem to be solved using off-the-shelf solvers. We further propose a hybrid solving strategy that uses NET-QAP to generate warm-start solutions and then refine them with stronger linearization models, thereby enhancing scalability for large instances. Numerical results show that the NET-QAP model consistently solves large-scale cases with reasonable optimality gaps, and that integrating it with the multicommodity-flow linearization can obtain optimality (GAP = 0
