Happy New Year! Here are some articles, in advance.
10 Studies That Will Make You Say 'I Knew It!' (But Really, You Didn't)
Welcome to So Here's the Idea, the official Substack for Organization Science.
Happy New Year to everyone and welcome back to reality!
In this issue, we introduce 10 studies that are “Articles in Advance.” These studies cover a range of topics, including creativity in teams, covert competition, founder presence in start-ups, first-gen disadvantage in the labor market, learning outcomes of strategy courses, legitimating illegitimate practices, antithetical role expectations, value dissimilarity in the workforce, self-organizing dynamics of attention networks, and coproducing advice in entrepreneurial strategy. Now that’s a lot of Organization Science!
As always, we’d love it if you would share our newsletter with friends, students, and colleagues, especially those outside of the United States.
and..
10 Articles in Advance
When Does External Knowledge Benefit Team Creativity? The Role of Internal Team Network Structure and Task Complexity by Vijaya Venkataramani, Chaoying Tang
Creativity in teams is spurred by members’ access to diverse knowledge, often from interactions with external sources. However, not all teams that have the capabilities to acquire such external knowledge are equally creative. Integrating theories of absorptive capacity and creative synthesis in teams, we propose that teams’ external knowledge acquisition capabilities in securing a wide variety of knowledge resources need to be complemented by internal knowledge integration capabilities that facilitate balanced/equal participation of all team members in the creative problem-solving process. In turn, this combination enables effective information elaboration processes underlying the generation of truly creative team outcomes. We test these ideas in two field studies. First, in a sample of 81 research and development teams in three organizations in science and technology fields, we find that teams’ connections with a wide range of external parties—indicating their external knowledge acquisition capability—benefit their creativity, but only when the team’s internal team member problem-solving network structure—an indicator of the team’s knowledge integration capability—is less centralized (i.e., not controlled by one or few members). We further demonstrate that these effects are more salient when the team’s task is more complex. Replicating these findings in a second sample of 57 project teams in an energy manufacturing and services firm, we show that these effects are mediated by the team’s information elaboration processes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Do Lower-Power Individuals Really Compete Less? An Investigation of Covert Competition by Yufei Zhong, Huisi (Jessica) Li
Competition is one of the defining features of organizational life. In this research, we identify a prevalent but overlooked type of competition—covert competition, which we define as behaviors with the intention to win (i.e., advancing one’s interest/position while disregarding or hurting the other party’s interest/position) that are unclear to or hidden from the other party. We argue that one’s relative power in dyadic social relationships influences covert competition. Based on the theory of power dependence, we expect that lower-power individuals are more likely than higher-power individuals to compete covertly. This is because lower-power individuals fear the potential negative repercussions of revealing their competitiveness, which motivates them to engage in more covert competition. Lower-power individuals’ ability to escape from the current relationship mitigates the effects of having lower power on such fear and on their subsequent covert competition. With five experiments and a three-wave longitudinal survey study, we find support for our hypotheses. This research calls attention to the understudied covert form of competition and emphasizes the nuanced relationships between power and competitive behaviors.
Founder Turnover and Organizational Change by J. Daniel Kim, Minjae Kim
Why might start-ups not change even when doing so may enhance firm performance? It seems reasonable to point to founder presence as a potential culprit given founders’ cognitive myopia and/or commitment to the status quo. However, founder presence may instead be a facilitator of change in response to environmental uncertainty because founders can uniquely coordinate resources needed for organizational change. We empirically address these two opposing views on the impact of founder presence (versus loss) on organizational change by using a comprehensive administrative data set of start-ups in the United States. Correlational analysis shows that start-ups generally become less likely to change following founder turnover. Given the potentially endogenous nature of founder turnover, we exploit premature deaths as a natural experiment that suddenly removes some founders from their start-ups while leaving others intact. We find that start-ups are less likely to change after losing a founder, especially if the founder loss happens during an economic recession. At the same time, the effect is attenuated when losing a founder with more experience in the same industry, suggesting that founder presence can also contribute to reinforcing the status quo under some conditions. Broadly, these results not only show that founders tend to facilitate change in their organizations but also identify when founders are merely subject to organizations’ bureaucratic forces that they themselves may have imprinted originally.
The Consequences of Revealing First-Generational Status by Peter Belmi, Kelly Raz, Margaret Neale, Melissa Thomas-Hunt
College is regarded as the great equalizer. People with four-year degrees expect to reap the rewards of their education. This paper examines the pivotal transition from college to the labor market. How do candidates fare when they reveal to prospective employers that they are “first-gen”? Based on the literature, one may advance two competing predictions. One perspective predicts the possibility of a first-gen advantage. This view predicts that revealing one’s first-gen status can help applicants, by making them seem motivated, committed, responsible, and hardworking. It also makes for a compelling narrative; many Americans love stories of “bootstrapped” success. In contrast, a competing perspective predicts the possibility of a first-generation disadvantage. According to this view, there are forces that block decision makers from recognizing the strengths of first-gen students. We tested these two perspectives with an audit study (n = 1,783) and four follow-up studies (n = 4,920). The results supported the first-gen disadvantage hypothesis. Even in the mainstream labor market, first-gen students were evaluated less favorably. We traced this bias to the impact of one possible mechanism: deficit thinking. Despite overcoming hardships, first-gen students were often viewed through the lens of deficits. As a consequence, they were often denied opportunities to gain entry into organizations. Importantly, we found that a mindset shift can help ameliorate the problem. When we nudged decision makers to adopt a strengths-based lens, they became more receptive to hiring first-gen applicants. This work extends knowledge on the mechanisms that drive social class gaps in hiring. It also invites a reassessment of how to study social class in organizations. Deficit models dominate the study of social class. However, as we demonstrated, focusing on deficits can exacerbate inequality. It is important to consider people’s experiences and humanity holistically.
Learning Strategic Representations: Exploring the Effects of Taking a Strategy Course by Mana Heshmati, Felipe A. Csaszar
Despite the popularity of strategy courses and the fact that managers make consequential decisions using ideas they learn in such courses, few studies examine the learning outcomes of taking a strategy course—a research gap most likely the result of the methodological challenges of measuring these outcomes in realistic ways. This paper provides a large-sample study of what individuals learn from taking a strategy course and how those learning outcomes depend on individual characteristics. We examine how 2,269 master of business administration (MBA) students evaluate real-world video cases before and after taking the MBA core strategy course at a large U.S. business school. We document several changes in their performance, mental representations, and self-perceptions. Among other findings, we show that taking a strategy course improves strategic decision making, increases the depth of mental representations and the attention paid to broader industry and competitive concerns, and boosts students’ confidence, while making them more aware of the uncertainty pervading strategic decisions. We also find that the magnitude and significance of these changes are associated with individual characteristics, such as cognitive ability, prior knowledge, and gender.
Legitimating Illegitimate Practices: How Data Analysts Compromised Their Standards to Promote Quantification by Ryan Stice-Lusvardi, Pamela J. Hinds, Melissa Valentine
Prior studies that examine how new expertise becomes integrated into organizations have shown that different occupations work to legitimate their new expertise to develop credibility and deference from other organizational groups. In this study, we similarly examine the work that an expert occupation did to legitimate their expertise; however, in this case, they were legitimating practices that they actually considered illegitimate. We report findings from our 20-month ethnography of data analysts at a financial technology company to explain this process. We show that the company had structured data analytics in ways similar to Bechky’s idea of a captive occupation: They were dependent on their collaborators’ cooperation to demonstrate the value of data analytics and accomplish their work. The data analysts constantly encountered or were asked to provide what they deemed to be illegitimate data analysis practices such as hacking, peeking, and poor experimental design. In response, they sometimes resisted but more often reconciled themselves to the requests. Notably, they also explicitly lowered their stated standards and then worked to legitimate those now illegitimate versions of their expert practices through standardization, technology platforms, and evangelizing. Our findings articulate the relationship between captive occupations and conditions wherein experts work to legitimate what they consider illegitimate practices.
Being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Role-Based Identity Foils in Organizational Life by Blake E. Ashforth, Beth S. Schinoff, Kristie M. Rogers, Donald Lange
Soldier-medic. Undercover police officer. Collaborative divorce attorney. Certain jobs require an individual to enact antithetical sets of role expectations (to do X and not-X), such as saving a life and taking a life, in the case of a soldier-medic. Despite their important consequences, we lack a unifying framework for such antithetical expectations and their implied identity foils—where one is expected to be both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a life-saver and a life-taker). To this end, we build theory on how and why antithetical expectations and their implied identity foils arise in organizations. We offer a model of the responses through which individuals tend to manage these seemingly impossible binds—avoidance, favoritism, gray compromise, black-and-white compromise, and holism—and discuss the conditions under which a given response is likely. We conclude that this respective order of responses predicts more positive outcomes (i.e., clarifying the identities, fostering resources, enabling complementary or synergistic solutions) and less negative outcomes (i.e., impaired jobholder performance and credibility, increased cynicism) for individuals and their organizations. We theorize that, given certain conditions, the extreme role-based conflict caused by identity foils is best addressed by the response of holism.
Self-Disclosure and Respect: Understanding the Engagement of Value Minorities by Tracy L. Dumas, Sarah P. Doyle, Robert B. Lount, Jr.
Organizations benefit from including employees with dissimilar values and perspectives, but their ability to realize these benefits is constrained by the degree to which those holding the dissimilar values (i.e., value minorities) feel comfortable engaging with their colleagues and the work of the collective. We extend theory on value dissimilarity by directly examining the experience of individuals whose values are dissimilar from those of their colleagues, and factors driving their engagement in work. Our examination spanned three studies: a laboratory experiment, a vignette study of employed adults, and a three-wave survey of student project groups. We found that the negative relationship between holding dissimilar values from one’s colleagues and engagement was lessened when value minorities disclosed personal information unrelated to their dissimilar values (Studies 1–3). Self-disclosure also moderated the negative relationship between value dissimilarity and feeling respected by one’s colleagues (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, felt respect mediated the effect of value dissimilarity on engagement, and this indirect effect was moderated by self-disclosure (Studies 2 and 3). Overall, this research is relevant to organizations seeking to capitalize upon the benefits of minority perspectives in the workforce but suggests that a critical first step is to prioritize the experience of value minorities and the decreased sense of social worth that can accompany this experience. By fostering an environment conducive to self-disclosure, organizations can help to alleviate the discomfort associated with value dissimilarity, thereby ensuring that all people, including the value minority, feel respected and are maximally engaged at work.
A Microstructural Approach to Self-Organizing: The Emergence of Attention Networks by Marco Tonellato, Stefano Tasselli, Guido Conaldi, Jürgen Lerner, Alessandro Lomi
A recent line of inquiry investigates new forms of organizing as bundles of novel solutions to universal problems of resource allocation and coordination: how to allocate organizational problems to organizational participants and how to integrate participants’ resulting efforts. We contribute to this line of inquiry by reframing organizational attention as the outcome of a concatenation of self-organizing, microstructural mechanisms linking multiple participants to multiple problems, thus giving rise to an emergent attention network. We argue that, when managerial hierarchies are absent and authority is decentralized, observable acts of attention allocation produce interpretable signals that help participants to direct their attention and share information on how to coordinate and integrate their individual efforts. We theorize that the observed structure of an organizational attention network is generated by the concatenation of four interdependent micromechanisms: focusing, reinforcing, mixing, and clustering. In a statistical analysis of organizational problem solving within a large open-source software project, we find support for our hypotheses about the self-organizing dynamics of the observed attention network connecting organizational problems (software bugs) to organizational participants (volunteer contributors). We discuss the implications of attention networks for theory and practice by emphasizing the self-organizing character of organizational problem solving. We discuss the generalizability of our theory to a wider set of organizations in which participants can freely allocate their attention to problems and the outcomes of their allocation are publicly observable without cost.
Opening the Aperture: Explaining the Complementary Roles of Advice and Testing When Forming Entrepreneurial Strategy by Amisha Miller, Siobhan O’Mahony, Susan L. Cohen
Forming entrepreneurial strategy is difficult, as the future value of strategy alternatives is uncertain. To create and capture value, firms are advised to consider and test multiple alternative strategy elements. Yet, how firms generate and test alternatives remains understudied. As entrepreneurial firms lack resources for broad search, they often draw upon advisory resources from outside the firm. However, advice can be difficult to extract, absorb, and apply. Although scholars have examined static attributes of the entrepreneur or advisor to explain whether advice is used, a dynamic explanation of how advice is produced and informs strategy testing and formation is missing. In an 11-month field study, we observed 25 founders of 12 food and agriculture firms interacting with a common pool of 34 advisors in an entrepreneurship training program. Leveraging the program’s structured design, we observed 165 advice interactions over three phases. No firm took advice and applied it directly to firm strategy. When entrepreneurs engaged literally with advice, they later discounted it—distancing advice from strategy. In contrast, entrepreneurs that coproduced advice challenged advisors to craft novel advice relevant to their strategy, translated it to make it actionable, and tested it—integrating advice into strategy. Firms that distanced advice from strategy did not test strategy alternatives, whereas firms that integrated advice into strategy tested multiple alternatives, explored broader markets, and adapted their strategies. We contribute a grounded process model that explains how coproducing advice opens firms’ apertures to consider strategy alternatives, whereas testing informs the strategy elements chosen.
Academic New Year Resolutions:
Resolution to Attend Fewer Meetings: "I resolve to believe that every meeting could have been an email, especially if my spam filter catches it."
Commitment to Jargon Reduction: "This year, I'll use plain language in my papers. 'Synergistic paradigmality' will now just be 'teamwork'."
Pledge to Embrace Technology: "I vow to finally understand how to use all the features on Zoom, instead of accidentally leaving on a cat filter during my executive MBA teaching."
Resolution for Conference Networking: "I aim to actually network at AOM instead of just hovering around the snack table."
Commitment to Realistic Timelines: "I shall stop saying 'I'll finish the paper this weekend' and start being honest: 'I'll add three sentences to the introduction in the next month'."
Pledge to Limit Academic Rivalries: "This year, I'll limit myself to only one imaginary argument a day with my academic nemesis."
Promise to Avoid Overcommitting: "I will learn to say no to new projects, or at least mumble it unconvincingly."
Resolution to be Less Obsessive about the Review Process: "I'll try to not refresh Manuscript Central more than three times in a day. What does `Awaiting SE Decision Assignment Review’ mean anyway??"
Commitment to Work-Life Balance: "I'll remember there's more to life than research... like teaching, reviewing papers, and committee meetings."