The January-February 2024 of Organization Science

From Passion Fatigue, to Revolving Doors, and Creative Interruptions... do we have some great papers for you!

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the January 2024 issue of So Here's the Idea, the official Substack of Organization Science! 

We hope you are having a fantastic week so far! Before we delve into the next issue, remember to share the substack with your network. Also, if you would like to share any announcements, new teaching materials, data, or any other resources with the community, please send us a note, and we will share these in the next issue.

This issue of Organization Science is a treat! The 18 articles that make up the issue reflect the creativity and diversity of the Organization Science community. The articles use different methodologies—from mathematical models to verbal theory to large-scale observational studies, experiments, and computational methods. The topics are also vibrant and diverse, from work and careers to entrepreneurship, creativity, networks, and non-market strategy. Plus, the titles also have some fantastic puns. Here is a keeper: “Caught Between a Clock and a Hard Place.”

Beyond the articles in the issue, we have a fantastic set of fifty (!!) Articles in Advance, that you can check out here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/toc/orsc/0/0 .

Cheers,

The Organization Science Team

The January-February 2024 Issue

Unexpected Interruptions, Idle Time, and Creativity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment; By Tim G. Schweisfurth, Anne Greul;

“Individuals exposed to such an interruption produce 58% more ideas than uninterrupted employees in the three weeks after the interruption.”

The Motherhood Wage Penalty and Female Entrepreneurship; By Tiantian Yang, Aleksandra (Olenka) Kacperczyk, Lucia Naldi;

“We propose and empirically uncover a novel mechanism driving female entrepreneurship: reduced earnings opportunities in wage employment due to motherhood status.”

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;

“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.”

The Power to Reward vs. the Power to Punish: The Influence of Power Framing on Individual-Level Exploration; By Jonathan B. Evans, Oliver Schilke;

“Supervisor power framing shapes employee exploration...reward (versus punishment) power framing increases employee exploration behavior and that this effect is mediated by perceived trustworthiness of the supervisor.”

How Does Network Structure Impact Socially Reinforced Diffusion?; By Jad Georges Sassine, Hazhir Rahmandad;

“We propose a simplified framework where clustering primarily enables contagion when repetition matters and receivers lose interest quickly; otherwise, diffusion, simple or complex, is faster on random networks than clustered ones.”

Conflict, Chaos, and the Art of Institutional Design; By Scott C. Ganz;

“The biased and chaotic outcomes that emerge as a result of garbage can decision making—the very features of garbage cans that lead them to be perceived to be dysfunctional—can facilitate short-term exploitation and long-term exploration of uncertain technical landscapes when organizations engage in serial judgment of local alternatives if internal conflict over desired outcomes is not too extreme.”

When Does External Knowledge Benefit Team Creativity? The Role of Internal Team Network Structure and Task Complexity; By Vijaya Venkataramani, Chaoying Tang;

“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.”

Unlocking the Inventive Potential of Knowledge Distance in Teams: How Intrateam Network Configurations Provide a Key; By Alex Vestal, Erwin Danneels;

“Our results suggest that teams’ ability to reap the advantages of members’ distinct expertise is shaped by the patterns of members’ prior collaboration ties.”

Opening the Aperture: Explaining the Complementary Roles of Advice and Testing When Forming Entrepreneurial Strategy; By Amisha Miller, Siobhan O’Mahony, Susan L. Cohen;

“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.”

Founder Turnover and Organizational Change; By J. Daniel Kim, Minjae Kim;

“We find that start-ups are less likely to change after losing a founder, especially if the founder loss happens during an economic recession.”

Caught Between a Clock and a Hard Place: Temporal Ambivalence and Time (Mis)management in Teams; By Colin M. Fisher, Sujin Jang, J. Richard Hackman;

“Managing temporal ambivalence effectively is essential for teams to appropriately allocate time to different phases of work.”

Two-Sided Cultural Fit: The Differing Behavioral Consequences of Cultural Congruence Based on Values Versus Perceptions; By Richard Lu, Jennifer A. Chatman, Amir Goldberg, Sameer B. Srivastava;

“We propose that value congruence—the match between one’s values and those that prevail in an organization—relates to the mechanism of group attachment and shapes behavior when one periodically steps back from day-to-day interactions, assesses one’s identification with an organization, and determines whether to stay or voluntarily depart.”

The Fundamental Recruitment Error: Candidate-Recruiter Discrepancy in Their Relative Valuation of Innate Talent vs. Hard Work; By Xianchi Dai, Kao Si;

“Innate talent and orientation toward hard work are highly important personal attributes with respect to workers’ productive capabilities. In this research, we identify a discrepancy between job candidates and recruiters in their relative valuation of these two attributes.”

Looking for Greener Grass? Prior Status and Exploration-Exploitation Decisions in Job Search; By Roxana Barbulescu, Rocio Bonet;

“We introduce in this paper a novel mechanism behind the formation of generalist careers, opportunity-enhancing generalism, whereby workers willingly give up the benefits to specialization to dissociate from a past expertise considered to yield relatively poor future prospects.”

Recruiting Talent Through Entrepreneurs’ Social Vision Communication; By Timo van Balen, Murat Tarakci;

“Both studies show that higher remuneration can compensate the negative effect of social vision communication.”

The Challenge of Maintaining Passion for Work over Time: A Daily Perspective on Passion and Emotional Exhaustion; By Joy Bredehorst, Kai Krautter, Jirs Meuris, Jon M. Jachimowicz;

“Our theory and findings demonstrate the daily interplay between passion and emotional exhaustion and specify why passion may be self-limiting unless employees adequately manage it, reflecting a challenge they need to navigate each day in pursuing their passion.”

The Strain of Spanning Structural Holes: How Brokering Leads to Burnout and Abusive Behavior; By Jung Won Lee, Eric Quintane, Sun Young Lee, Camila Umaña Ruiz, Martin Kilduff;

“We build new theory concerning the extent to which keeping people separated (i.e., tertius separans brokering) relative to bringing people together (i.e., tertius iungens brokering) results in burnout and in abusive behavior toward coworkers.”

Caught in the Revolving Door: Firm-Government Employee Mobility as a Fleeting Regulatory Advantage; By Ivana V. Katic, Jerry W. Kim;

“We argue that the advantages firms can gain from hiring former regulators are bound by the timing of revolving door employment relative to the regulatory process...We find that firms receive better regulatory outcomes (i.e., faster regulatory approval for new crops) only prior to the regulators’ move to in-house lobbying, consistent with the regulatory capture perspective.”