Journal of Management

We extend the business group (BG) literature by combining the knowledge-based perspective and the dynamic capabilities view to explain the benefits of group affiliation. In the BG context, group affiliates can use not only their own firm-level knowledge-based assets (KBAs), but also group-level KBAs. While prior research examines the efficiencies of BG affiliation by comparing BG affiliates to non-affiliated firms, we ask to what extent affiliate-specific rents from group-level KBAs vary among affiliate firms and why. To explain this variation, we identify affiliate-specific rents generated by the complementarity between firm- and group-level KBAs. Drawing from the dynamic capabilities view, we developed a framework to explain the sources of such complementarity and tested a series of hypotheses. This study provides empirical evidence using firm-level data on 524 affiliates of keiretsu groups in Japan from 1985 to 2015. To measure KBAs and their characteristics, we use data on 11.5 million patents matched to the sample firms. This study provides a knowledge-based perspective to explain BG affiliation benefits and the persistence of BGs as an organizational form of economic activity.

While extensive research has examined the relationship between human resource management systems and organizational performance, the impact of organizational-level training—defined as the quantity and quality of training that an organization provides to its employees—remains less understood. In this article, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between organizational-level training and organizational performance to determine the magnitude of the relationship and test a set of moderators of the relationship. Grounded in human capital theory, our meta-analysis employs a theoretically driven moderator analysis to identify the conditions under which organizational-level training significantly influences organizational performance. The results from 159 studies (N = 75,033) show that the relationship between organizational-level training and organizational performance is positive and significant (ρ = .13, SD_ρ = .17, 95% CI [.11, .16]). More importantly, the effect size differs significantly across several theoretical (e.g., training dimensions, type of human capital, outcome dimensions, and timing of measurement) and contextual (e.g., industry knowledge intensity, firm age, and region) moderators. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Why do so many responsible business initiatives fail? While earlier studies have stressed the lack of commitment, we know little about the ways in which prosocial firms seek to secure the requisite resources to accomplish such practices. This study investigates how the management of multiple resource dependencies impacts the (non)accomplishment of a firm’s aspired responsible practices. A granular, comparative study of six prosocial firms embarking on voluntary environmental practices over a decade shows that mainstreamed development resulted from securing the full-fledged and sustained support of all complementary resource providers over a longer period, whereas practices facing constrained or missing resources turned into partial or outright failures. Securing multiple resources involves several problems (resource inaccessibility, resource dispersion, and resource instability), which firms address through different mechanisms. They empathically mobilize resources to overcome resistance from reluctant actors, enact integrative structures to secure resources from dispersed actors, and reshuffle resources to respond to fluctuations in availability and need. The combined use of these mechanisms does not guarantee success but is imperative to overcome the barriers that threaten the mainstreaming of responsible practices. These insights have implications for the corporate responsibility, resource dependence, and ecosystem literatures.

Organizations rely on employees to report problems that hinder organizational effectiveness and on supervisors to resolve those problems. Although prohibitive voice is generally thought to help organizations avoid costly and tragic outcomes, the voice literature has also demonstrated that supervisors respond more negatively to prohibitive voice than promotive voice. This tension motivates our inquiry into a fundamental but overlooked reason as to why supervisors might implement prohibitive voice. Drawing upon theoretical distinctions between prohibitive and promotive voice articulated in the voice literature and regulatory focus theory, we propose that supervisors tend to implement prohibitive voice episodes because they elicit an urgency to respond. We find support for our theoretical model in a field study of 555 discrete voice episodes delivered over the course of four years in a high-speed transit system (Study 1). We reproduce and extend these findings—that supervisors implement prohibitive voice because it triggers an urgency to respond—in a recall experiment in which we find that prevention focus enhances supervisors’ response urgency toward prohibitive voice (Study 2). Taken together, our findings demonstrate that despite the potential negative consequences voicers may incur for speaking up with prohibitive voice, a primary function of prohibitive voice is to elicit response urgency that ultimately generates real change.

This study examines the performance consequences of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) successions, focusing on the types of board chairs and firm ownership structures. While CEO successions can bring adaptation benefits and performance gains through strategic realignment, they can also cause disruption costs and performance losses by disturbing stakeholder relationships. We examine how the presence of a predecessor CEO or an independent individual as board chair affects postsuccession performance differently depending on the level of family control. Our analysis of a panel dataset of S&P 1500 firms from 2003 to 2022 and a series of robustness tests provide strong support for our predictions. We found that with increasing family control, predecessor CEOs as board chairs have a more positive effect on postsuccession performance, while the opposite holds true for independent board chairs. Further, within family-controlled firms, the effect of predecessor retention is stronger for outside than inside CEO successions. Our findings expand CEO succession and board chair research by demonstrating that the value of a board chair type after a CEO succession depends on a firm’s ownership structure, particularly the degree of family control.

Leader emergence is a critical organizational phenomenon, influenced by various individual attributes. One such attribute—often overlooked by scholars and practitioners—is physical attractiveness. This study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis of the beauty bias and its relationship to leader emergence. We first review implicit leadership and status generalization theories as the dominant frameworks explaining this bias. Next, we assess the magnitude of the physical attractiveness–leader emergence relationship and test the “beauty is beastly” effect by evaluating leader gender as a moderator. We also identify two key mechanisms—perceived warmth and perceived competence—that explain this relationship. Additionally, we explore the robustness of the beauty bias across different contexts, including observer characteristics, leadership roles, and national culture. Our findings confirm that physical attractiveness is significantly related to leader emergence, primarily through perceptions of warmth, but also through perceptions of competence. This relationship holds equally for male and female leaders and is stronger in informal leadership contexts. It is slightly more pronounced among college students than full-time employees and in collectivist rather than individualistic national cultures, yet remains equally strong across executive and non-executive leadership roles. Overall, our findings highlight the strength and consistency of the physical attractiveness–leader emergence relationship, underscoring the need for organizations to mitigate the beauty bias from influencing decisions around leader emergence.

While many boards adopt technology committees to support firm innovation, the impact of such committees is largely unexplored. We draw on agency and resource dependence theories to suggest that technology committees can improve firm innovation (patenting and new product introductions). We further hypothesize that relevant committee expertise (technology and executive expertise) enhances the effectiveness of the committee, and that the benefit of committee expertise is strengthened when coupled with financial resource provision. Our results support our theorizing about the impact of technology committees—they positively impact new product introductions, although they had no impact on patenting. We also found that committee expertise enhances committee effectiveness, but only when accompanied by greater financial resources. We discuss the implications of optional board structures, such as technology committees and their composition, on firm innovation.

Existing research assumes that supervisors invariably feel bad after engaging in abusive behaviors. We challenge this assumption by proposing that supervisors’ motives of abusive supervision shape their post-abuse experiences. Drawing on the social interactionist theory of aggression and theories of self-regulation, we suggest that instrumental (or goal-driven) abusive behaviors provide a temporary sense of fulfillment, whereas spontaneous (or reactive, emotionally-driven) abusive behaviors diminish need satisfaction and foster negative outcomes. Using an exploratory study and an event-contingent experiencing sampling study, we found that supervisors may justify their abuse with effecting compliance motives when subordinates perform poorly, which fulfills task achievement needs and increases next-day work engagement. Similarly, supervisors may also justify their abuse with identity maintenance motives when subordinates are disrespectful, thus enhancing social identity needs and next-day organizational-based self-esteem. We also found that when supervisors justify their abusive behaviors with spontaneous motives (i.e., depletion and negative affect), it has negative implications for need satisfaction and outcomes. Lastly, we highlight supervisor’s psychological power as a boundary condition of these effects. All told, our findings indicate that, at the within-person level, supervisors’ daily motives for abusive behaviors matter, given that certain motives actually yield short-term benefits for supervisors.

Prior literature in agency theory assumes that when incentives decrease, agents may shirk and reduce effort. We extend this work to multiple career tracks and suggest that a salary decrease may not necessarily lead to effort reduction, but instead may redirect efforts across multiple career tracks. Using an exogenous salary-cut policy shock levied on top executives of Chinese central state-owned enterprises (SOEs), our difference-in-differences analysis reveals that salary cuts motivate SOE top executives to redirect efforts from improving internal management (i.e., operational efficiency) to political objectives (i.e., job creation). A further test reveals that job creation mediates the relationship between salary cuts and SOE top executives’ political appointments. Moreover, top executive age, as an indicator of political incentive, and media coverage, which reflects external monitoring, weaken the impact of the salary-cut policy on effort redirection between the two career tracks. These findings provide implications for research on agency theory, SOEs, and public policy.

The internationalization of emerging market firms (EMFs) has attracted substantial research attention. Yet, how EMFs engage in diversification and innovation during internationalization remains underexplored. Drawing insights from a geographic relational perspective, we perform a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of EMFs. Our findings suggest that EMFs can choose from multiple equifinal internationalization pathways to capture growth opportunities in diversification and/or innovation. These new insights emphasize that achieving diversification or innovation requires a combination of organizational contextuality, international path dependence, and geographic practice attributes. We further develop a taxonomy of five EMFs’ geographic relational configurations for diversification and/or innovation: entrenching specialist, niche explorer, global adapter, transnational agent, and strategic aspirant. Overall, by unleashing the power of configurational analysis, this paper reveals what is behind the intriguing internationalization of EMFs with a focus on diversification and innovation.

The view that a business unit can better compete against product-market rivals if granted funding from its parent firm’s internal capital market (ICM) has lost traction within strategy, despite conflicting evidence. We develop a theory to explain when funding from a parent firm’s ICM should enable a business unit to more effectively capture value (i.e., profit) from its investment opportunities under product-market competition. We depart from prior theories by examining how opportunities relate to competition. Specifically, we propose a typology of opportunities along two strategic dimensions. The first dimension is firm-specificity, a concept derived from the resource-based view. It refers to whether an opportunity stems from unique firm resources and capabilities and is therefore exclusive to a business unit rather than shared with (and contestable by) its product-market rivals. The second dimension is uncertainty about the investment path, a concept derived from the literature on investment under uncertainty and real options. When present, it is impossible (and undesirable) to commit upfront to a fully predetermined set of investments in an opportunity. These dimensions imply that different opportunities may have distinct critical needs in terms of funding—such as secrecy, timeliness, and reliability—that must be satisfied for a business unit to capture value. Ultimately, our theory indicates that receiving funding from a parent firm’s ICM increases a business unit’s chances of capturing value when those critical needs are present, suggesting that units with ICM funding may prevail in some competitive environments.

Mounting information processing demands in contemporary organizations spotlight the need to better understand how to maintain and improve performance without increasing cognitive load. Research in organizational behavior suggests that primed goals provide performance benefits similar to assigned goals but with little cost to attention. Yet, some research in social psychology suggests that any form of goal use, including primed goals, usurps attention. To reconcile these viewpoints, we examined the relationships among assigned and primed goals, performance, and demands on attention (measured as cognitive load) in three experiments. Experiment 1 (n = 233) showed that when a primed goal is aligned with an assigned goal, performance improved without increasing cognitive load. In contrast, Experiment 2 (n = 515) demonstrated that when a primed goal is misaligned with an assigned goal, performance worsened and cognitive load increased. Study 3, a quasi-field experiment with 315 working professionals, added internal and external validities to the prior experiments. We also examined task novelty and complexity as boundary conditions. For novel tasks (Experiments 1 and 2), when perceptions of task complexity increased, the positive effect of an aligned primed goal diminished. However, for a well-practiced task (Experiment 3), increased task complexity did not diminish the positive effect of aligned goals.