Journal of Management

Existing research on intrateam helping has predominantly taken a positive view on its impact on teams, overlooking the potential negative consequences that helping may elicit. To account for divergent implications of intrateam helping, we differentiate two types of helping that can manifest during teamwork: team autonomous helping and team dependent helping. Integrating this dual-type view of helping with a role theory perspective on teamwork, we propose a theoretical model that delineates the relationships among team goal orientations, two types of intrateam helping, team role-based functions (i.e., team role overload, team role coordination, and team role breadth self-efficacy), and team effectiveness. To test our model, we conducted two multi-wave survey studies, including 110 student project teams (Study 1) and 80 manufacturing teams in a pharmaceutical company (Study 2). Overall, the results showed that team autonomous helping benefited team role-based functions and ultimately team effectiveness, whereas team dependent helping hindered them. We also found that team learning goal orientation drove the occurrence of team autonomous helping in both studies, while team performance goal orientation drove team dependent helping in Study 1. By distinguishing between autonomous and dependent types of intrateam helping, and examining their unique motivational roots and divergent implications for teams, this research advances the extant literature by providing a more balanced account of the nature of helping in teams.

Many institutional investors are active political donors, but the impact that their political partisanship has on corporate practices and policies has mostly eluded academic examination. As political donations can reflect investors’ views and values, we theorize that the nature of investors’ political donations can shape managerial decision-making in important ways. We test this idea by examining changes in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, an area where managers have a high degree of discretion over how they account for investors’ views and values. Our theory introduces two focal constructs: political position, which captures the average political affiliation of actors within a group, and political dispersion, which captures the variance in political positions across group members. After hypothesizing a positive relationship between liberal-positioned investors and a firm's CSR activities, we argue that political dispersion among investors mitigates this positive effect. To account for between-group dispersion, we also suggest that liberal-positioned investors have a stronger positive effect on CSR in firms with more conservative managers. Our analysis of 19 years of shareholder political donations data for 2,062 U.S.-based firms supports our theory. This paper lays new groundwork for research on shareholder politics in management, and contributes to research on investor influence, political ideology, and CSR.

Extensive research shows that atypical actors who defy established contextual standards and norms are subject to skepticism and face a higher risk of rejection. Indeed, atypical actors combine features, behaviors, or products in unconventional ways, thereby generating confusion and instilling doubts about their legitimacy. Nevertheless, atypicality is often viewed as a precursor to sociocultural innovation and a strategy to expand the capacity to deliver valued goods and services. Contextualizing the conditions under which atypicality is celebrated or punished has been a significant theoretical challenge for organizational scholars interested in reconciling this tension. Thus far, scholars have focused primarily on audience-related factors or actors’ characteristics (e.g., status and reputation). Here, we explore how atypical actors can leverage linguistic features of their narratives to counteract evaluative discounts by analyzing a unique collection of 78,758 narratives from crafters on Etsy, the largest digital marketplace for handmade items. Marrying processing fluency theory with linguistics literature and relying on a combination of topic modeling, automated textual analysis, and econometrics, we show that categorically atypical producers who make more use of abstraction, cohesive cues, and conventional topics in their narratives are more likely to overcome the evaluative discounts they would ordinarily experience.

Although emerging actor-centric research has revealed that performing morally laden behaviors shapes how employees behave subsequently, less is known about what work behaviors may emerge following employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)—a unique behavior with competing moral connotations. We integrate the moral self-regulation literature with research on micro corporate social responsibility (CSR) to develop and test a theoretical framework articulating how perceived CSR initiatives reconcile the morally paradoxical nature of UPB and how people respond to such behavior. We propose that, given its dual moral nature, performing UPB simultaneously increases feelings of moral deficit (which triggers moral cleansing) and psychological entitlement (which triggers moral licensing). Importantly, perceived CSR initiatives moderate these countervailing psychological experiences by strengthening feelings of moral deficit while weakening psychological entitlement, which respectively result in increased service-oriented helping behavior and decreased deviant behavior. Results from a scenario-based lab study, an online experiment, and two field studies largely corroborate our propositions. This research provides a finer-grained understanding of the complex moral self-regulation processes that employees experience at work and highlights why and how organizations’ CSR initiatives affect employees’ moral mindsets and behaviors.

The strategy-by-doing perspective argues that firms operating in highly dynamic environments can benefit from taking strategic actions in lieu of advance planning because such actions have learning effects that help the firm keep pace with changes in the environment. The implicit assumption is that strategy by doing is effective in dynamic environments but likely not in stable environments. This study challenges this notion and expands the purview of the strategy-by-doing perspective. We first argue that strategy by doing is generally an effective strategy due to the organizational learning it facilitates. We next discuss how environmental dynamism is multidimensional, encompassing both market and technological dynamism. The positive effects of strategy by doing on product-market performance are amplified in highly dynamic environments that feature high levels of both market and technological dynamism. We go on to argue that stable environments are also suitable for strategy by doing, where it can facilitate opportunity creation. However, strategy by doing may hinder performance in mixed environments where one form of dynamism is present and the other is not. Focusing on strategy by doing in the form of product changes, our analysis of 4,000 firms over a period of 20 years shows support for our arguments about environmental contingencies affecting the relationship between strategy by doing and performance. We discuss how these findings have implications for theory and practice.

Supervisors directly influence employees’ perceptions of supervisor justice and subsequent supervisor-supportive behaviors by displaying just treatment through ongoing work interactions. Using a two-study design, we build on this target similarity approach by examining the potential for an indirect actor to be held accountable when a direct offender is acting on the indirect actor's behalf. Integrating fairness and role theory perspectives, Study 1 shows that the relationship between coworker injustice and supervisor-supportive citizenship behavior is mediated by supervisor blame and supervisor justice. Further, these linkages are strengthened when the offending coworker is delegated additional authority by the supervisor. Delegation more clearly connects the supervisor to the coworker's unjust behavior because the coworker is seen as an intermediary for the supervisor (i.e., perceived intermediary delegation-PID). In a constructive replication, Study 2's results support the basic mediation model from Study 1 but also show that the PID effect is influenced by victims’ relative standing with the supervisor compared with their offending coworkers (i.e., relative status). PID's strengthening effect as a result is most pronounced when victims of coworker injustice hold lower relative statuses than offenders. We conclude with implications of our findings and areas for future research.

This conceptual paper presents the analytical theory of agency (ATA), an overlooked philosophical approach to the concept of action, to develop its theoretical basis in routines research in which the constructs of action and agency play crucial roles. It expounds, in the framework of ATA, the ideas of the spectrum of intentionality, kinds of action, and collective agency, which help advance the rigor of action-theoretical concepts in routines research as well as reveal the rationale of the microfoundational approach to routine actions. To uncover the developmental potential of ATA, the article discusses the most crucial conceptual challenges for routines research; it also briefly examines the limitations and future work related to using ATA in the management field.

We advance a socio-cognitive explanation of the grouping of a firm's activities into distinct divisions, each responsible for a specific set of activities. We argue that categorization creates expectations regarding which activities should be bundled, and grouping decisions that are inconsistent with these expectations are sanctioned. Hence, organizational grouping and reconfiguration decisions of multidivisional firms are influenced by categorical expectations, in addition to the interdependencies and shared external contingencies underlying a firm's activities and their perceptions and interpretations among managers. We also expect that the illegitimacy discount and associated performance penalty resulting from a firm's divergence in organizational grouping choices from categorical expectations will be lower for firms that span multiple categories or belong to an incoherent category. The socio-cognitive explanation we develop informs four theoretically relevant topics—labelling of organizational units, analogical reasoning, organizational identity, and categorical expectation violations—and has implications for future empirical research on organization design.

According to family business theory and practice, family firms often face a paradoxical tension between their anchorage to the past and the need to renew and innovate to remain competitive, which often hampers innovation. Given that innovation is inherently a social process that depends on the knowledge and creativity of an organization’s people, employee incentives may be key to managing the tradition–innovation paradox and unlocking a family firm's innovation potential. However, current research has not addressed how family firms can effectively configure incentives to promote innovation. Drawing on a configurational approach and the unique properties of the qualitative comparative analysis method, our study reveals that the set of incentives that family firms use to motivate their employees toward innovation differs in relation to whether they are more or less attached to tradition. As such, in line with the principle of equifinality, family firms with high attachment to tradition can be as innovative as those with low attachment to tradition by implementing the right configuration of incentives. Thus, we offer a human resource management perspective on innovation that advances knowledge on how family firms can unlock their innovation potential.

Decisions in organizations are often made by individuals acting as members or representatives of teams, and such decisions may be unduly influenced by the preferences of people outside their teams. In these instances of external conformity pressure, we argue that the familiarity of the decision maker's team provides social belonging and affiliation that alleviates this pressure. Whereas previous research has argued that social belonging from familiarity may drive within-group conformity when pressure comes from other team members (e.g., groupthink), we highlight that familiarity can instead help team members withstand pressure to conform when this pressure comes from outsiders. Moreover, we expect team familiarity to be especially important in high-stakes conditions, in which there are significant consequences associated with decisions. We examine our predictions in an archival sample of officiating crews making decisions about penalty calls during National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) American football games and in a laboratory experiment of team members making decisions about the quality of someone else's work product. Findings from these studies suggest that: (1) members of familiar teams are less likely to conform to the preferences of outsiders than those in unfamiliar teams; (2) team familiarity is particularly important when making high-stakes decisions; and (3) team familiarity gives team members a greater sense of belonging, which enables them to better withstand external conformity pressure.

The role of organizational resilience enabling firms to respond to adversity and survive has become ever more critical in the wake of an increasingly unpredictable external environment. Yet, while we understand the importance of resilience in responding to a major adversity, we have little appreciation for how firms are affected and react when facing multiple adversities over time, or how multilevel factors might impose on this process. These are crucial issues given that adversities are not necessarily single, isolated, or infrequent episodes. By studying a long-established family firm in the United Kingdom that experienced four major adversities, we identify the process that enabled it not only to survive but also to thrive. In this qualitative study, we introduce the notion of organizational fortitude to describe the approach that a firm develops to cope with the challenges of multiple unexpected adversities and highlight how multilevel factors combine to foster organizational fortitude.

As the target of employee voice, supervisors have been depicted as the driving force behind enacting employee input. In reality, voicing employees often remain key players in the enactment process as supervisors may delegate implementation responsibilities to voicers. Although the voice literature suggests that voice enactment promotes subsequent voice by giving employees evidence that their voice fosters improvements, we suggest that supervisor delegation following employee voice can, instead, turn enactment into an unintended deterrent to voice. Integrating conservation of resources theory with theory on counterfactual thinking, we argue that supervisor delegation following employee voice elicits employee overload. Subsequently, counterfactual thinking about an avoidable increase in workload evokes regret for having spoken up. This regret leads to decreased voice as employees intentionally withhold input to protect personal resources. However, we theorize that supervisor consultation represents a cost-offsetting resource that attenuates the negative effects of supervisor delegation following employee voice. We find converging support for our theoretical model in a multi-wave field study and two experimental studies. This research offers novel insights into the personal costs of voice for employees by contextualizing voice within the voice-enactment process and revealing supervisor delegation as an unforeseen impediment to employee voice.

How private firms can overcome their unique governance challenges remains an important but understudied topic. Using novel data on more than 28,000 private firms in India from 1988 to 2017, we examine whether private firms can improve their survival prospects by having board interlocks with public firms and, specifically, interlocks whereby a public firm director subsequently joins the private firm's board. In our data, we found a U-shaped relationship between the number of incoming board interlocks and the probability of private firm exit. We also found that board interlocks formed by public firm directors of public firms audited by Big Four companies improve private firms’ survival more than other interlocks, consistent with the notion that such interlocks improve monitoring at private firms. Overall, our study points toward the importance of considering the role of incoming board interlocks when explaining private firm survival.