The challenges of managing the transition to motherhood for working women have been well documented. However, less is known about women whose transition to motherhood is disrupted, stalled, or never realized through complex fertility journeys. This qualitative study explores how 41 working women undergoing fertility treatments experience cross-domain identity challenges that threaten both their desired maternal and professional identities. Through disruptions to initiated identity transitions, participants face three types of cross-domain interferences-embodied, emotional, and cognitive-that create ongoing threats to their desired selves. Unlike typical liminal periods that facilitate identity exploration, we find that repeated fertility treatment disruptions actually erode women's ability to engage in identity play and envision possible selves. This leads to perpetual liminality, where women must make identity trade-offs as their maternal aspirations become increasingly difficult to achieve. Whether fertility treatments succeed or fail, the experience creates a "lingering self" that permanently shapes both personal and professional identities. Our findings extend research on liminality by revealing how extended liminal states can constrain rather than enhance identity exploration, challenging assumptions about the exploratory potential of transitional periods. We also contribute to work-life literature by illuminating how stalled personal identity transitions create unique cross-domain interferences distinct from traditional work-family conflict. These insights suggest organizations need more comprehensive support systems that address the complex, extended nature of fertility journeys while recognizing their lasting impact on employees' sense of self. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Star performers do not always sustain their performance edge after moving to new organizations. We offer an important explanation for whether star performers may flourish or flounder when they join a new team. Integrating insights from attribution theory and social comparison research, we present a process model explaining how incumbents make sense of star newcomer status. We propose that incumbents determine whether the star newcomer attained their star status through internal factors (e.g., ability, grit) or external factors (e.g., luck, affiliation), which gives rise to one of four distinct emotions: optimism, inspiration, shame, or envy. Incumbents who feel optimism or inspiration attempt to enhance their status through learning or helping behaviors that subsequently facilitate star newcomer performance, whereas incumbents who feel shame or envy seek to protect their status through withdrawal or destructive behaviors that hinder star newcomer performance. We further propose that the effect of incumbent behaviors on star newcomer performance is particularly likely when there is a high need for task-related interactions and complementary skills among team members. Our theoretical framework helps to advance the star newcomer literature by examining the largely overlooked influence of incumbents and highlighting the cognitive process that precedes their behavior toward star newcomers.

The literature suggests that the startups of de novo entrepreneurs are disadvantaged, but many of the world's leading firms have been founded by students and recent graduates. We hypothesize that academic and industry-based educational experiences shape the innovative activity of student startups and use patent data to measure technological proximity between the patent portfolios of influencers and startups. We find that indirect exposure to the research and development activities of the students' university departments and work term employers results in technological imprinting. Influencer and entrepreneur capabilities affect the magnitude of the imprinting effect: student ventures are technologically more proximate to highly ranked university departments and to more innovative work term employers, and the students' software skills impact their ability to invent in proximity to their work term employer. We also find that multiple layers of imprints are complements, not substitutes. Exposure to inventive activities, even when indirect and brief, results in multiple capabilities-moderated layers of imprints.

In this symposium, we present research that broadens the notion of motherhood and its intersection with work. While past research has highlighted the many challenges that mothers and pregnant women experience at work, the studies presented in this symposium show that challenges arising from women’s motherhood intentions and the societal expectations of women may reach far beyond pregnancy and actual mothering. We hope this symposium inspires management scholars to pursue questions that tackle the nuanced complexities of a working woman’s life. Single at Home, Single at Work: Marital Status, Motherhood, and Workplace Relationships Presenter: Kerry Roberts Gibson; Babson College Presenter: Danna Greenberg; Babson College Identity Management during the Grief Process in Employees Who Have Experienced Pregnancy Loss Presenter: Sabrina DeeAnn Volpone; U. of Colorado, Boulder Presenter: Liza Yasemin Barnes; U. of Colorado, Boulder Presenter: Kristen Price Jones; U. of Memphis Presenter: Sarah Lurie; U. of Colorado, Boulder Presenter: H. Lena Kim; U. of Colorado, Boulder Walking on Coals: Resource Depletion and Disclosure Decisions of Women Undergoing Fertility Treatment Presenter: Nada Basir; U. of Waterloo Presenter: Serena Sohrab; Ontario Tech U. Maternity Salience: Concerns About Women’s Family Responsibilities Undermine Gender Equity Policies Presenter: Ezgi Ozgumus; London Business School Presenter: Aneeta Rattan; London Business School

Collective identity is important for the cohesion of social movements, yet there is an inherent tension between group unity and heterogeneity when multiple groups are motivated to come together to work for change. Through a three-year investigation of the early stages of a women's rights movement following the Libyan revolution, we explore the dynamics of collective identity development. Our findings capture how two heterogeneous groups, Libyan locals and Libyan diaspora, interact to negotiate and re-negotiate the boundaries of collective identity. We find that this process unfolds through an ongoing struggle where the point of difference between the groups-their uncommon past-is the mechanism first used to ensure inclusion of insiders, and then to exclude outsiders from the collective identity. Our paper contributes to our understanding of the relational process through which collective identity co-evolves, and the challenges faced by heterogeneous groups engaging in collective action.

While star performers are commonly believed to exhibit disproportionally stronger job performance, recent research demonstrates this is not always the case when stars move to new organizations. In this article, we draw insights from attribution and dual envy theories to develop a conceptual framework that investigates how nonstars make attributions about star status and the subsequent effect on star performance. In particular, we develop a typology of four different attributions that nonstars make about how an individual attained their status as a star. In turn, these star status attributions result in either benign or malicious envy. Nonstars who experience benign envy engage in relational-enhancing behaviors that positively affect star performance, whereas nonstars who experience malicious envy engage in relational-inhibiting behaviors that negatively affect star performance. Our conceptual model sheds light into the under-researched role of nonstars in shaping star performance with an elaboration of the critical cognitive-based processes through which nonstars help and harm star performance.

The path between the patenting of an innovation and the actual commercialization of a new product or technology can be long and costly. Research shows that more than half of issued patents lapse before the end of their term due to missed maintenance fees. Since patents can help overcome the liabilities of newness faced by new ventures by reducing information asymmetries, pre-IPO firms may apply for patents as they near their IPO date as a reputation-enhancing strategy. Once a firm IPOs, it may no longer require the patent, thus letting it lapse. Drawing on the reputation literature and signaling theory, this study investigates whether there is a relationship between lapsed patents and a firm’s IPO date. The results suggest that as a company gets closer to its IPO date, the more likely it is to increase its patenting activity, but the more likely it is for these patents to lapse.

Although numerous studies have focused on spinoffs started by university faculty, there has been growing evidence that these ventures are limited both in terms of numbers and returns. Research has pointed towards the entrepreneurial activities of students and graduates as playing a much more important role in generating local economic activity and growth than faculty and staff. This paper explores the role cooperative education plays in student spinoff success. We propose that the cooperative experience will have an imprinting effect on an entrepreneur and their venture. We test this hypothesis on a sample of 314 relationships between the patent portfolios of alumni ventures and the patent portfolios of their co-op employers or control group firms, and find a positive effect. We find a positive relationship between the patent portfolio of a student's cooperative education employer and the technological distance of their venture. Our findings have important implications and contributions to research and practice in the area of imprinting and opportunity recognition, and university policy.

A key assumption in the field of strategic management is that strategic fit or alignment of a firm's internal strategy, structure, capabilities and resources with the external environment is beneficial and positively related to performance. As external environments have become more turbulent and unpredictable, the notion of fit embedded in equilibrium assumptions has evolved from strategic fit to dynamic strategic fit to strategic fitness to incorporate this increased complexity and uncertainty. Recent work reconceptualizes the firm, its context, the drivers and outcomes to allow more in-depth examination of the emergent dynamics underlying the relationship between fit(ness) and performance.

We explore the resources, actors and processes involved in the rapid emergence of civil society in Libya after the fall of a dictator regime. We conceptualize this context as one of institutional chaos, where political oppression suppressed civil society institutions, and the revolution then created an upheaval, a moment of instability and unpredictability. A multi-level process framework emerged from the findings, highlighting the important role of institutional brokers, actors embedded in multiple established institutions and the emerging field. These institutional brokers link actors and also transform ideas from other fields. We found that brokers engaged in a process of creative translation, recombining, transposing, and recasting institutional resources from other fields. However, once the resources were at play in the emerging field, brokers faced resistance, a not-invented-here syndrome. To overcome this barrier, brokers engaged in collaborative transmission, creating spaces to develop shared meanings and practices with grassroots organizations. This research contributes to our understanding of institutional work required in different contexts, and addresses a grand challenge of our time-creation of civil society after extreme political oppression.

This paper replicates and extends the empirical work of Boyd’s 1995 article: CEO Duality and Firm Performance: A Contingency Model. We retest Boyd’s hypotheses using a database of over 11,000 Swedish firms from the year 2005 to 2009. Similar to Boyd, we find that CEO duality is positively correlated to firm performance and the effect varies across environmental dimensions of munificence, dynamism and complexity. Using quantile regression, we also show that the positive impact of CEO duality increases by firm performance. Our findings hold after we control for potential endogeneity concerns.

In this paper, we study how R&D investment affect financial analyst’s earnings forecasts and how intellectual capital endowments moderate this effect. We argue that high information asymmetry and uncertainty associated with R&D investment increase a financial analysts’ earnings forecast error. Patents can remedy this relationship by signaling the ability of a firm in transforming research investments into new and valuable knowledge. Using a panel of 2,253 publicly listed U.S firms, we find that higher R & D intensity is positively correlated with financial analysts’ earnings forecast error. The endowment of intellectual capital (i.e. patents) moderates this relationship negatively. However we do not find any moderating effect for the value of patents measured as forward citations.

Middle managers provide a powerful conduit for strategy execution particularly in fast paced environments. Their knowledge of strategy is critical for strategic change to be successful. Yet, little research directly examines how aware middle managers are of corporate strategy and how accurate they are in their understanding of how that strategy translates into divisional goals. Framed in cognition theory, this exploratory study uses qualitative and quantitative analysis to investigate the antecedents, accuracy and self-awareness of middle managers' knowledge of strategy within a large North American financial firm (N = 294). Implications for research and practice are highlighted.

Building on the renewed interest in middle managers' knowledge of strategy, this multi-method case study explores gaps in middle managers' actual and perceived strategy knowledge of both corporate and division level strategy. Hypotheses derived from interviews with middle managers and extant literature are tested within a large North American bank (n=294). The findings reveal that middle managers have a tendency to underestimate their knowledge of corporate strategy and overestimate divisional strategy knowledge. Strategy communication, particularly informal communications, and organization tenure emerge as the strongest factors influencing strategy knowledge, although their effects on actual knowledge and perceived knowledge vary.

Teams are considered a powerful means of creating and circulating innovative ideas as organizational members combine and exchange knowledge. This paper explores the relationship between dissent and team diversity and the resulting type of innovation. Building on the team and group research, I bridge the dissent literature with research on innovation to develop a conceptual framework based on an input-process-output model. The framework presented looks at the presence of dissent as a moderator in the team diversity and innovation relationship. Unlike prior work in teams and innovation, this paper distinguishes between the type of innovation, arguing that the type of dissent present and the degree of diversity within a team should depend on whether a team is pursuing an incremental or radical innovative outcome.