CEO activism – CEOs’ personal and public expression of a stance on a sociopolitical debate, aimed at influencing opinions in the espoused direction – is often understood as stemming primarily from CEOs’ political ideology and studied through its effects on distinct audiences such as employees, consumers, and investors. Building on CEO activism research and integrating insights from upper echelons theory, institutional theory, nonmarket strategy, social movements, psychology, and social evaluations, this dissertation unpacks what remains less clear on both sides of this definition. On the “personal expression” side, it introduces CEO narcissism as a complementary explanation, given its prevalence among CEOs, link to attention-seeking, and relevance to a visible act like CEO activism. On the “public influence” side, it examines consequences beyond isolated audience reactions: whether public stances are followed by firm sustainability-related initiatives, and how CEO activism travels through several actors whose interactions can generate social momentum and raise issue salience for policymakers. Across three essays, issue characteristics emerge as central to understanding why CEOs choose particular topics and what follows once they do. The issues CEOs choose shape the attention a CEO’s stance attracts, the conditions for firm follow-through, and the likelihood that a stance travels into public and political debate. Taken together, the essays show that issues most likely to draw attention to CEOs may be least likely to generate firm follow-through, yet still matter for public and political debate.
Most prior research on teams’ responses to failure treats teams as closed systems. However, after failures, teams may seek to improve performance by bringing in new members. Adopting a teams-as-open-systems perspective, we test which teams are more willing to add high-status members following failures and whether doing so improves team performance. Drawing on status hierarchy research, we posit that after a team failure, members will feel uncertain about their own status (particularly those with high status). More importantly, we predict that the impact of this status uncertainty on members’ willingness to add high-status new members depends on teams’ pre-existing status differentiation. Specifically, status uncertainty leads members in low-status-differentiation teams to perceive adding a high-status new member as a potential benefit to collective performance, whereas it leads members in high-status-differentiation teams to perceive the addition as a potential threat to their own status. We theorize that these individual perceptions shape teams’ collective decisions through an emergent process. Taken together, we predict that, at the team level, failure will increase the willingness to add high-status members in teams with low, but not high, status differentiation, and such addition improves subsequent team performance. Using longitudinal archival data on product development teams (Study 1, N = 4,811 teams) and two pre-registered experiments at the individual (Study 2, N = 783 participants) and team levels (Study 3, N = 222 teams), we found support for these predictions. This research advances the literature on team failure and illuminates dynamics between membership change and social hierarchy.
Despite growing interest in the microfoundations of corporate social activities, prior research has not articulated the full chain connecting firm-level conditions to managers’ psychological processes (a top-down pathway) and back to firm-level corporate social behavior (a bottom-up pathway), leaving existing microfoundational accounts incomplete. Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF) and moral self-regulation theory, we develop a cross-level moral feedback model that integrates both pathways by linking firm-level social performance feedback, individual-level managerial cognition, and firm-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). We argue that social performance feedback activates managers’ moral self-regulation. When a firm falls below its social performance aspiration, its managers perceive a diminished firm image, which undermines their moral self-image and triggers moral cleansing behaviors—manifested as increased CSR and/or reduced CSI. Conversely, when a firm exceeds its social performance aspiration, its managers perceive an enhanced firm image, which elevates their moral self-image and activates moral licensing behaviors—manifested as reduced CSR and/or increased CSI. Study 1, using archival data, examines the main effects of firms’ social performance feedback on CSR and CSI. Study 2 uses a series of experiments to examine the proposed micro-level mechanisms, demonstrating how managers’ perceived firm image and moral self-image sequentially mediate the effects of social performance feedback on CSR and CSI. These studies provide complementary evidence for our multilevel behavioral model. Our study contributes to research on the microfoundations of corporate social activities, behavioral strategy, and moral self-regulation.
Drawing on a multi-year, qualitative study of a promising venture in a nascent industry, we develop a process model tracing how future-oriented narratives can transform into deception. In the venture we studied, the founder’s future-oriented narratives were initially viewed as evidence of his visionary foresight. As these narratives traveled downward through the organization, employees responsible for operations translated the founder’s broad vision into specific targets and metrics. Some details described an attainable future; others reached so far beyond the attainable that they became liminal, occupying a grey zone between right and wrong. Over time, growing internal and external demands for tangible progress created an expectations-reality gap, prompting employees to engage in temporal reorientation, shifting statements from “we will” to “we have.” Their statements crossed from liminal to deceptive, now asserting as fact something that did not exist. Once formalized in presentations, websites, and other artefacts, the claims became dominant deceptions: codified, specific, past- or present-tense deceptions deliberately reproduced across the organization. In this codified form, the deceptions became misconduct that, if detected, could have been acted on by social control agents. We propose that three enabling conditions sustained this transformation: visionary attribution (belief in the founder’s unique foresight), interpretive flexibility (the ambiguity of new technologies that allows multiple plausible meanings), and moral justification (the framing of deception as serving a higher mission). Because the process unfolded diffusely and incrementally, the transformation could only be observed retrospectively, in the accumulation of actions across individuals, artefacts, and time. By tracing this process, we extend research in narratives and in organizational misconduct.
The extant literature on task motivation has generally demonstrated its beneficial effects on workplace outcomes. Although some evidence has raised concerns about the potential link between task motivation and maladaptive behaviors, this line of work has been grounded in an intrapersonal perspective that focuses on employees’ internal regulation. Guided by motivated information processing theory, we adopt an interpersonal perspective to examine how task motivation may, under certain conditions, lead to interaction avoidance, a maladaptive workplace behavior with downstream implications for job performance. We theorize that, when perceiving a lower level of task interdependence, employees with higher task motivation are more likely to engage in interaction avoidance. This avoidance, in turn, is negatively related to job performance. Across an online experiment with a U.S. sample, a field experiment with a Chinese sample, and a survey with a Chinese sample, our hypotheses are supported. This research builds a more balanced understanding of how task motivation influences employee behavior and performance. In practice, managers should actively channel the effort of highly task-motivated employees to ensure their motivation translates into effectiveness rather than counterproductive avoidance.
I theorize that candidate filters, a core technology in digital labor markets considered central to cost-effective matching, redistributes costs from the search-and-screening stage to the job-offer stage of hiring. Filters cause employers to focus on applicants who display common preferred characteristics. At the search-and-screening stage, filters reduce the number of applicants interviewed and alter the composition of the interviewed pool by removing both lower- and higher-quality candidates. At the job-offer stage, filters lead employers to make job offers to candidates with easily observable signals of quality and higher wage demands. Additionally, I theorize that if many firms target the same signals of quality, they may all pursue similar candidates. This increases bargaining power for those applicants, leading to more rejected job offers and higher wage demands. A randomized field experiment in a large online labor market confirms that filters redistribute hiring costs. The experiment shows that employers with access to filters interview 3.4% fewer applicants. Using a machine learning algorithm to proxy for unobservable-to-the-employer applicant quality, I show that filters cause employers to interview 28.9% fewer lower-quality applicants and 36.9% fewer high-quality applicants per job. Among employers who actively used filters, I find suggestive evidence of worse job-offer outcomes: offers are 8.9% more likely to be rejected, and contracted wages are 2.5% higher. I discuss the implications of this cost redistribution for organizations, labor markets, and strategy research.
During mixed-motive intrateam conflicts, wherein members must balance cooperative and competitive motives, negative emotions, such as anger and frustration, often arise and derail effective conflict resolution. To help teams navigate this important challenge, we develop and test theory about how, why, and when responses to expressed emotions can enable effective resolution of intrateam conflict. Although prior intrateam conflict research has shown that managing these emotions is critical for conflict resolution, the focus has been on broad conceptualizations of team emotion management that aggregate across discrete emotion-response strategies with both potentially divergent effects (e.g., acknowledgment, reframing, and suppression) and different actors (e.g., members and leaders). This aggregation masks tensions and trade-offs between different strategies and actors, and it offers team members limited guidance on how to respond to emotions during conflict. Therefore, responding to calls to focus on discrete emotion-response strategies, we identify emotional acknowledgment (i.e., the verbal recognition of another member’s emotional display) as a particularly effective strategy within intrateam conflicts because it addresses simultaneously cooperative motives by helping expressers feel seen and valued and competitive motives by creating an opportunity for expressers to advocate for their unique interests and priorities. We propose and find in two laboratory experiments of 496 three-person teams that emotional acknowledgment, particularly when coming from team leaders, reduces the intensity of negative emotional expression, thereby improving team conflict resolution. Funding: The authors thank the University of Michigan and INSEAD for research funding. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19578 .
Many workers have the flexibility to work across different work locations, and some choose to join coworking spaces, where they work alongside others with different employers, occupations, and backgrounds. Yet, little is known about the nature of relationships formed within this type of work location, where individuals lack shared goals and a common organizational umbrella. Thus, we ask: How do workers manage and find value from relationships within coworking spaces? Applying grounded theory techniques to collect and analyze observational, archival, and interview data collected from 80 workers in 21 coworking spaces, we derive a theoretical model that centers around the novel construct of work companions – individuals who work alongside one another with a shared focus on work but without family, friendship, or employment relationship obligations. The coworking space environment, overseen by one or more space managers, provides favorable conditions for the formation of work companions. Through interaction flexibility, coworking space members socially engage or parallel work with work companions, extracting both personal and professional value. Relational embeddedness, defined as the existence of family, friendship, or employment relationships, imposes obligations that make work companion interactions less flexible, creating a boundary condition to these findings. Introducing the work companion construct and elaborating relationships among coworking space members offers promising avenues for future research and informs management practice on work companions, coworking, and remote work.
This study focuses on the role of mindfulness in organizational leaders’ responses to paradoxical tensions. We arrive at this focus by interpreting the organizational paradox literature as suggesting two primary ways that leaders mindfully engage paradoxical tensions, which work in tandem. There is an absorbed mode implied in embracing tensions and finding energy in them and a more deliberative mode in weighing tensional poles to formulate more adaptive responses. Although not designed for paradox study per se, Kudesia’s (2019) metacognitive mindfulness practice skillfully captures both absorbed and deliberative aspects, offering a way to understand the role of mindfulness in responding to paradoxical tensions. In this qualitative study, we explore how leaders with and without a regular mindfulness practice deploy these dual approaches in their sensemaking accounts of paradoxical tensions. Findings suggest that leaders who do not practice mindfulness relied heavily on deliberative engagement and pivoted less often between absorbed and deliberative modes. Leaders who practice mindfulness focused on absorbed engagement and pivoted more often between modes. Our analysis suggests that absorbed and deliberative practices together provide mindfulness trained leaders with just enough structure to cope with paradoxical tensions by turning them into focused learners with flexible processing, expanded repertoires, and holistic engagement.
As the AI Task Force for Organization Science, we provide an early account of artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on both submissions and reviews at a major academic journal. Submission volume has risen 42% since the late 2022 release of ChatGPT, while writing quality has declined. The rise in AI-generated writing accounts for nearly all of these trends. AI-generated writing in reviews has also increased, and is characterized by lower writing quality and less topical diversity than human-generated writing. We are, to our knowledge, the first journal to report these early impacts of AI in the review process. Conversations with editors across scientific disciplines, however, suggest that what we observe is not limited to our journal or to the social sciences. At this early stage of AI adoption, we cannot make a normative assessment about appropriate or ideal levels of AI usage. We can, however, conclude that the current state of AI tools, amplified by existing publish-or-perish incentives, appears to be pushing the system toward an equilibrium of more rather than better research. Reaching an equilibrium in which AI serves as a critical engine of innovation will require that our institutions and the incentive structures they create adapt. Funding: S. Hasan used research funding from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. C. Gartenberg used research funding from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2026.ed.v37.n3 .
We examine industry and technology (non)emergence by integrating actorcentric and systems perspective literature streams. We use historical methods to analyze rich data tracking investments by actors spanning private, public, and academic sectors in the solar photovoltaics context. The industry took several decades after commercialization to emerge; moreover, silicon and thin film technologies experienced divergent fates despite firm takeoff. By uncovering critical interdependencies across activities by different actors, we show that, whereas attention by all actors to developing various elements of technological systems is necessary for emergence, it may not be sufficient. The industry emerged after activities by technology producers, industry associations, and government agencies ensured stable institutional support that stimulated latent demand (by utilities and end consumers) and created reinforcing loops among activities by technology producers and research institutes for solar technologies to become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Moreover, silicon experienced additional reinforcing loops in demand-side and supply-side ecosystems, wherein technology producers and equipment manufacturers leveraged adjacent mature supply chains to meet demand-side scale and reliability requirements in fast growing markets. In contrast, thin film experienced balancing loops wherein nascent firmspecific supply side alliances could not address these demand side needs. These findings showcase how dominant designs may emerge even when there is no ex ante competitive dynamics among technology producers: Although silicon may have benefited from first mover advantage at the technology level, our study highlights that ecosystem first mover advantages of silicon relative to thin film were particularly salient in their divergent fates.
As the prevalence and allowance of remote and hybrid work evolves, research has shown consistently mixed findings about how work location is related to worker energy and perceptions of daily performance. We aim to resolve this ambiguity by integrating Affective Events Theory with ideas about emotion dynamics to develop new theorizing explaining why energy variability, rather than mean energy level, is an important predictor of daily goal progress. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 219 employees from one organization allowing remote and hybrid work, capturing individual hourly energy levels for five consecutive workdays (4,812 hourly observations). Our results show that on days when employees work from home (vs. onsite), they have lower energy variability, which enables them to make more progress towards their goals and achieve their goals at a faster rate than expected that day. Moreover, we show that this effect is stronger when employees have higher remote work intensity (i.e., work from home more often). Our findings are robust to a number of controls (e.g., children at home, work location choice, industry). Practically, workers experience about 33% less energy variability on days working from home compared to onsite, and a one-point reduction in energy variability yields 26% higher goal progress and 31% higher goal progress velocity. Overall, this study advances theory on the relationship between daily work location, human energy, and goal progress, and has immediate practical implications for employees, teams, and organizations as they continue to navigate the remote and hybrid era of work.
Organizations often struggle to deploy specialized expertise where it creates the most value. We argue that specialized roles help address this challenge by codifying expertise into formal positions that function as allocative infrastructure, channeling work to appropriate professionals. We test this argument in Brazilian maternity wards that introduced a new specialized nursing role. Using data on more than 15 million births and a difference-in-differences design, we show that the introduction of this role is associated with improved matching between expertise and client needs. These effects are stronger when client demand is higher, workflows are more predictable, and organizational experience is greater. A simulation analysis indicates that these improvements go beyond compositional changes, reflecting the system's enhanced ability to route patients to appropriate providers. Improved matching is also linked to better maternal and newborn outcomes. Together, our findings extend research on task allocation by theorizing roles as allocative infrastructure and identifying organizational conditions under which specialization improves matching in professional work.
How do small firms overcome regulatory constraints despite opposition from entrenched interests? Micro entry strategies enable small firms to compete with larger incumbents in markets, but exploration of such strategies in nonmarket arenas is limited. Existing research suggests that when firms face regulatory constraints, they often venue shift upwards, for example overturning a local ban by lobbying for statewide legislation. This article uses qualitative data on craft breweries to identify and analyze a set of micro entry nonmarket strategies through which firms engage locally, venue shifting downwards from state to local regulators, to successfully ease state-level constraints from the bottom-up. In public hearings with city officials, entrepreneurs aligned local investment tactics and supportive coalitions with an iterative approach that motivated city-based regulators to challenge state-level restrictions on direct-to-consumer (DTC) business models that are favorable to smaller firms. Experimenting locally with the discretionary use of “event” licenses for ongoing DTC beer sales led to an accumulation of bottom-up support across locales. This support included relational infrastructure and policy-relevant information that enabled entrepreneurs to work through city officials to overcome incumbent opposition. By elaborating how small firms and local officials together create punctuations in a state-level policy monopoly and analyzing both the antecedents and consequences, this study builds a theory of micro entry nonmarket strategy and bottom-up policy change. Even in a mature industry with well-institutionalized regulations, powerful incumbents opposing changes, and minimal technological change, small businesses reshaped the policy environment of an entire state from the bottom up.
In a world of increasingly numerous and contradictory constraints, this study reveals how individuals can navigate hyper-constrained contexts to rapidly develop new deployable products. We draw on an in-depth field study of seven projects developing affordable, open-source ventilators in just 75 days during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis shows that innovation outcomes are fundamentally shaped by what we call "constraints work"—how individuals actively deal with and manage constraints—and find two types of constraints work that lead to divergent processes and outcomes. Four projects conducted “reductionist constraints work,” as they scanned, prioritized, and sequenced the key constraints. They then followed the well-known lean innovation process to sprint to a functioning minimum viable product (MVP). In contrast, three projects counterintuitively slowed down at the outset to conduct “generative constraints work,” extreme-mapping the full landscape of constraints and loading the design space even with additional hidden constraints. They then followed a “multiplex innovation process,” surfacing interdependencies among constraints and treating the resulting contradictions as design problems to be solved simultaneously. This process resulted in deployable products that went beyond the MVP, surpassing experts’ expectations. Regarding temporal pace, the multiplex innovation process entailed V-shaped acceleration—braking at the start, resisting the time pressure, to confront the full complexity of tensions, then sharply accelerating to resolve them in parallel, while the lean innovation process entailed a linear acceleration. Our findings contribute to theories of innovation and new product development processes and temporality, advancing understanding of how individuals can successfully navigate an excess of multiple, contradictory constraints.
We examine how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts three core pillars of collaboration-performance enhancement, expertise integration, and social engagement- through a preregistered field experiment with 791 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a global consumer packaged goods company. Working on real product innovation challenges, professionals were randomly assigned to work either with or without AI, and either individually or with another professional in new product development teams. Our findings show that (1) AI significantly enhances performance: individuals with AI matched the performance of teams without AI, suggesting that AI can effectively replicate certain benefits of human collaboration. Moreover, (2) AI helps bridge functional silos: without AI, research and development professionals tended to suggest more technical solutions, whereas commercial professionals leaned toward commercially oriented proposals. Professionals using AI produced more balanced solutions, regardless of their professional background. (3) AI's language-based interface prompted more positive self-reported emotional responses among participants, suggesting it can fulfill part of the social and motivational role traditionally offered by human teammates. Finally, decomposing the innovation process suggests that AI primarily enhances the quality of generated ideas, shifting the distribution of creative output upward, whereas human judgment retains value in evaluative selection. This finding highlights the multiple and complementary roles that human and AI partners can play in new product development tasks and creative problem solving. More generally, our results suggest that AI adoption in knowledge work affects not only performance but also how expertise and sociality appear within teams, offering insights into the impact of generative AI on collaborative work within organizations.
Research documents that firms targeted by financially motivated shareholder activists often reduce spending in areas with uncertain or delayed payoffs. Yet, it is unclear whether this pattern extends to corporate political activity (CPA), particularly lobbying- an investment that is relatively inexpensive and can generate substantial benefits in the short run. We investigate how governance conditions shape the influence of block-holding activism on firm lobbying expenditures. Drawing on an emerging systems perspective on shareholder activism, we theorize how boards (as capability providers) and nonactivist shareholders (as sources of support) shape firms' lobbying behavior amid shareholder activism. Using panel data on 4,991 U.S. public firms, we find that the influence of block-holding activism on lobbying depends on the governance context; firms with more political directors and greater ownership by lobbying-active shareholders sustain their lobbying following activism, whereas firms without these governance features reduce it. The influence of political directors is amplified when they have greater bandwidth, and the influence of lobbying-active shareholders is strengthened when they have held their positions longer. Our study contributes to CPA research by demonstrating that governance systems determine how activism shapes firms' political strategies and extends the systems perspective on activism into nonmarket domains of strategy.
Corporate political activity (CPA) research often focuses on single-government interactions, overlooking the complexities of distributed government authority. Drawing from contracting literature, our study explores the implications of distributed government authority for firm outcomes in the CPA arena. Specifically, we investigate how different types of contractual arrangements with resource-granting agencies-fixed-price contracts (which allocate risk to firms) versus cost-plus contracts (which shift risk to resource providers)-affect the frequency of discretionary oversight by independent regulatory agencies. Fixed-price contracts, with their predefined budgets and extensive preaward vetting, alleviate oversight agencies' concerns about contractor opportunism, leading to reduced oversight intensity. In contrast, cost-plus contracts, with their reimbursement-based structure and operational flexibility, necessitate increased oversight due to risks of contractor opportunism. We further examine how two situational factors-contract duration and negative media coverage of labor issues-moderate these relationships. Using data on U.S. Department of Defense contracts and Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversight, our study advances the CPA literature by highlighting the importance of considering the intricate dynamics of distributed authority in shaping the returns from corporate political activities.
Extant research finds that workers often develop negative or ambivalent perceptions of organizational monitoring and thus engage in acts of resistance. However, this work largely assumes that organizational monitoring occurs in isolation, overlooking how the growing presence of external monitoring may fundamentally alter how workers experience organizational monitoring. To investigate this dynamic, we conducted a qualitative study of a U.S. police department where officers faced both organizational monitoring via body cameras and external monitoring via citizens' cell phones. In the context of external monitoring, we find that officers experienced organizational monitoring as both unreasonable scrutiny and insulating protection that buffered against external scrutiny. To manage their resulting ambivalence toward organizational monitoring, officers disassociated their perceptions of the monitoring technology from policies, which enabled them to repurpose the technology. Officers' uses of the monitoring technology triggered them to reevaluate the organizational monitoring system as legitimate within the context of external scrutiny. Based on our findings, we develop theory of how control is relationally constituted and legitimated, showing how control mechanisms such as organizational monitoring may shift from coercive to enabling in the context of ubiquitous external scrutiny. We also contribute to extant literature by identifying how workers may manage ambivalence toward organizational monitoring through functional disassociation, separating their perceptions of monitoring policies and technology. Further, we extend existing theory by unpacking how workers' use of the monitoring technology, combined with external scrutiny as a comparative frame, may facilitate workers' reevaluation of the organizational monitoring system as a legitimate source of oversight.
We theorize that competing with an interpersonal rival from another organization has a divergent cross-level effect: employees increase their visible individual contributions, but their total contributions to the organization decrease. Striving to outshine their rivals, employees focus on visible individual contributions that are easily observable and readily attributable. We advance three mechanisms through which this focus can reduce employees' total contributions to the organization: crowding out of less visible contributions, excessive risk taking, and organizational overreliance. Using data from the National Basketball Association, we find support for the hypothesized divergent effect and show that the results are robust to multiple model specifications, operationalizations, and alternative explanations. Our results suggest that employees respond to their rivals' visible contributions, using them as a benchmark for social comparison. Exploring the mechanisms, we find support for excessive risk taking and organizational overreliance, but mixed evidence for crowding out of less visible contributions. Our study advances emergent cross-level perspectives on rivalry by highlighting that its positive and negative effects are unevenly distributed across organizational levels-the rivalry-induced focus on visible individual contributions comes at the organization's expense.
