In this study, we explore an intriguing yet understudied question: Would top managers decide to activate personal ties to manage their firms' alliances? We address this question by synthesizing the insights of the research on personal tie activation and resource dependence theory to develop a nuanced theoretical framework on the mechanisms underlying top managers' personal tie activation decisions in alliance management. We highlight that the interdependence features between two alliance partner firms (i.e., mutual dependence, power imbalance, interpartner competition, and the interactions thereof) together shape the partner firms' relational dynamics in the value creation and value appropriation in their alliance. Accordingly, these features determine the potential benefits and costs for top managers of the partner firms to activate their personal ties to manage this alliance, both for their firms and for themselves. We draw empirical evidence from a field study with 244 alliances between Chinese firms and an experimental vignette study with 212 real-world managers in China. Results of our analyses support our predictions, with a few intriguing exceptions. We derive valuable implications for theory and practice.
How do a country's digital institutions influence the magnitude of occupational fraud within firms? Leveraging and extending the institution-based view, we address this understudied question by conceptualizing digital institutions as a new genre of institutions that condition the deterrence calculus within firms. We define digital institutions as the foundational structures and resources that shape a country's digital environment along three key dimensions: (1) digital infrastructure, (2) digital governance, and (3) digital innovation. While strengthening digital institutions has become a priority for policymakers worldwide, the unintended consequences of doing so, such as the potential to facilitate occupational fraud within firms, remain insufficiently understood. Using a unique dataset of 3,974 cases from 41 countries, we find that digital infrastructure is linked to higher fraud magnitude in firms, whereas digital governance is associated with lower occupational fraud magnitude. Our analysis further uncovers the nuanced ways in which digital institutions condition the effectiveness of firm-level internal controls. Overall, policymakers must recognize that digital institutions are a "double-edged sword," as developing digital infrastructure without reinforcing digital governance can negate efforts to control occupational fraud at the firm level.
This research examines how organizations contribute to the perpetuation of means–ends decoupling (MED) within issue-based fields organized around societal problems, under conditions of heightened field scrutiny. In such settings, organizations often profess commitment to field goals and visibly comply with institutionally prescribed practices to satisfy monitoring, reporting, and public evaluation requirements. However, many adopted goals remain underachieved, raising questions about how compliance without progress endures and how claims of commitment remain credible under transparency regimes intended to spur substantive goal pursuit. Our data came from 75 interviews with 68 brands, suppliers, and third-party organizations pursuing worker well-being in global fashion supply chains. We unveil auditability-based goal replacement as an organizational-level mechanism through which actors rhetorically foreground compliance as public evidence of commitment while narrowing internal goal pursuit to auditable thresholds that serve their core goals, thereby allowing shortfalls to persist. Self-silencing about this substitution and the instrumentalizing of shortfalls close the configuration into a self-reinforcing loop. The study advances MED scholarship by (i) showing how organizations leverage field conditions and appropriate the existing scrutiny infrastructures to advance their core goals while reproducing the means–ends gap, (ii) problematizing the authenticity of commitment claims, and (iii) explaining how goal-ineffective compliance prevails as a credible substitute for adopted goals. It also extends research on organizational responses to institutional complexity and calls for greater attention to institutional impact—that is, the realized advancement of the societal aim an institution emerged to address.
