The January-February Issue of Organization Science is Out!
I’m just back from a grand European tour. Well, actually it was just London and Paris, but with lovely seminar hosts like LBS and ESSEC, it felt grand. I’m always amazed at how I can present a paper for the twelfth time and still hear so many great new ideas and angles. I was also amazed by the gross incompatibility between Paris metro ticket machines and older British gentlemen (not to mention me).
I had a couple of free nights in Paris, so in my typical fashion I put on an overcoat and scarf and walked through the 6th Arrondissement in the (constant) rain humming Sting’s Englishman in New York (which of course made no sense) until I found a French/Japanese restaurant with a bar where my grand-tour party of one could occupy the end. Restaurants are fascinating organizations: half art, half operations, half strategy, half. . . well that’s too many halves but you get the idea. I coauthored a 2015 paper and a different 2020 case on them, but that’s a small sliver of the research by orgs and operations scholars across the years. We just accepted a restaurant paper by Giada Di Stefano and Saverio Favaron (see below), and I had the pleasure of handling their 2022 Management Science paper with Rodolphe Durand. Other recent Org Science papers include Daphne Demetry’s 2019, 2021 (with Todd Schifeling), and 2024 papers as well as Lakhani and Ouyang (2022), Mazmanian and Beckman (2018), and others I’m sure I’m missing. But what fascinated me at the bar that Friday, with the open kitchen five feet (1.524m), was the choreography of the staff as the restaurant transformed from me (embarrassingly early) to a full house. Maybe I should have felt weird sitting there by myself, with the temptation to emulate the guy at the other end of the bar staring at his phone, but I just put it away and watched the dance: the timing, the bodies in motion, the coordination, and the apparent ease of it to the casual observer—all with burning hot pans, knives, and clumsy patrons waiting to cause injury and disaster. As organizational scholars, we understand the intense design, planning, practice, creativity, and culture behind such a successful production, which is why we study what we do and hope to facilitate such art in our future.
Today we have the new issue of Organization Science, with its typical wide variety of fields, methods, settings, and paper types. This new issue again covers how top performers resist integrating powerful AI aids, how unexpected financial windfalls reduce misconduct, how greater gender diversity in the workforce increases firm valuation, and a lot more. We hope you’ll enjoy it. And as always, scroll to the bottom of the page. The last paper in sequence is one of the last publications coauthored by the late Sigal Barsade, a giant in organizational psychology who helped us understand emotions in organizations and changed lives through teaching, mentorship, theory, and practice. Her former students, Jacob Levitt and Constantinos Coutifaris led this project with Paul Green, Jr., and are great examples of her legacy.
-Lamar
Organization Science Volume 36, Issue 1
More to Lose: The Adverse Effect of High Performance Ranking on Employees’ Preimplementation Attitudes Toward the Integration of Powerful AI Aids by Ilanit SimanTov-Nachlieli
Drawing on a social comparison perspective, this article demonstrates that employees with high-performance rankings are more resistant to powerful AI aids because they fear losing their advantage over peers, underscoring a novel social-based mechanism of algorithm aversion.
Attention Focus and New Opportunities: The Moderating Role of Managerial Attention to Alternative Issues by John Eklund, Manav Raj, J. P. Eggers
In the U.S. electric utility industry, this study shows that while managerial attention to a new business model is crucial, attention to competing issues and broader strategic agendas can hinder the translation of such attention into organizational action—especially for smaller firms with more limited attentional capacity.
Opportunistic Change During a Punctuation: How and When the Front Lines Can Drive Bursts of Incremental Change by Elisabeth Yang, Julia DiBenigno
During environmental jolts, frontline staff can rapidly implement premeditated “shovel-ready” ideas by leveraging temporary decreases in constraints and heightened managerial receptivity, thus highlighting an alternative, bottom-up pathway for organizational change beyond top-down punctuated equilibrium models.
CEO Initial Contract Duration and Corporate Acquisitions by Guoli Chen, Ronghong Huang, Shunji Mei, Kelvin Jui Keng Tan
CEOs with shorter initial contract durations face greater time pressure, prompting them to pursue quicker, lower-risk M&As to achieve rapid growth—an effect confirmed by both robust and causal evidence.
Measure Twice, Cut Once: Unit Profitability, Scalability, and the Exceptional Growth of New Firms by Ron Tidhar, Benjamin L. Hallen, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
By examining three venture pairs, this study shows that new firms grow successfully into maturity by first focusing on unit profitability, broad learning, and delayed scaling—then building capabilities for profitable growth—whereas peers that prioritize early rapid expansion often fail.
The Double-Edged Sword of Exemplar Similarity by Majid Majzoubi, Eric Yanfei Zhao, Tiona Zuzul, Greg Fisher
Firms that position themselves more similarly to recognized category exemplars gain analyst coverage (due to enhanced legitimacy) but risk lower recommendations in later assessments (due to unfavorable comparisons), with category coherence, distinctiveness, and exemplar typicality further shaping these effects.
The Effect of Financial Resources on Misconduct: Evidence from Lottery Ticket Sales by Justin Frake, Heejung Byun, Jihyeon Kim
Leveraging quasirandom financial windfalls from selling winning lottery tickets, this study finds that an increase in financial resources reduces retailers’ propensity for misconduct (e.g., selling tobacco to minors), providing causal evidence in support of strain theory and offering policy insights.
How Mixed Performance Feedback Shapes Exploration: The Moderating Role of Self-Enhancement by Franziska Lauenstein, Daniel A. Newark, Oliver Baumann
Providing decision-makers with information about a high-performing peer generally increases exploration, but individuals with high self-enhancement tendencies resist this effect—leading, at the organizational level, to potential decreases or no net change in exploration when peer performance information is provided.
Location-Specificity and Relocation Incentive Programs for Remote Workers by Thomaz Teodorovicz, Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Evan Starr
Relocation incentive programs, exemplified by Tulsa Remote, can help localities attract and retain remote workers with high general human capital by leveraging location-specific attributes to foster community engagement and embeddedness, ultimately benefitting both the workers and the host community.
The Relative Effects of a Scandal on Member Engagement in Rites of Integration and Rites of Passage: Evidence from a Child Abuse Scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia by Bryan K. Stroube, Anastasiya Zavyalova
Examining a child abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, this study finds that parishes experienced a steeper decline in “rites of passage” (marriages, baptisms, funerals) than “rites of integration” (mass attendance) following scandal exposure—though this effect reversed with greater scandal prevalence and was mitigated by parish age and size, revealing how scandal impacts can differ by engagement type and organizational context.
Regulation and Innovation Revisited: How Restrictive Environments Can Promote Destabilizing New Technologies by Michael Park, Shuping Wu, Russell J. Funk
This study reconciles conflicting perspectives by showing that regulatory restrictiveness can either curb or boost firm innovation—depending on the level of regulatory uncertainty and the specific type of innovation pursued.
Bridging the Chasm Between Intentions and Behaviors: Developing and Testing a Construal Level Theory of Internal Whistle-Blowing by Abhijeet K. Vadera, Ann E. Tenbrunsel, Kristina A. Diekmann
Grounded in construal level theory, this study shows that abstract, values-based communication systems foster whistle-blowing intentions, while concrete accountability and retaliatory systems help translate those intentions into actual whistle-blowing behaviors.
Temporal Miscoupling: The Challenges and Consequences of Enacting a Practice in Decline by Samantha Ortiz Casillas, Ruthanne Huising
Drawing on a Canadian labor strike, this study introduces “temporal miscoupling,” showing how organizations continue using a declining practice (like striking) by relying on improvised local resources, which sustain the practice but reshape its historical meanings and future enactments.
Do Investors Value Workforce Gender Diversity? by David P. Daniels, Jennifer E. Dannals, Thomas Z. Lys, Margaret A. Neale
Using event studies and experiments, this study finds that investors reward major technology and financial firms for higher workforce gender diversity, reflecting beliefs about its potential upsides (e.g., reduced risks, increased creativity) and translating into substantially higher valuations.
Through the Narrows: The Meaning and Enactment of Interpersonal Holding by William A. Kahn
Through interviews with professionals assisting distressed individuals, this study develops a model of “interpersonal holding”—a process of coming alongside, linking up with, and guiding those “in the narrows” (i.e., limited in their responses to distress)—that helps individuals surface, expand, and integrate receded aspects of themselves, thereby advancing scholarship on distress helping and resilience.
A Buddhist Mindfulness View of Paradox: Silence and Skepticism of Language to Dismantle Paradoxes by Hee-Chan Song
Drawing on a nine-month ethnographic study of three Korean Buddhist temples grappling with financial-spiritual tension, this research shows how a mindfulness practice (characterized by silence and skepticism of language) ultimately dissolves paradoxical perceptions, yielding a “nonexperience” of paradox.
Organizational Selection of Innovation by Lucas Böttcher, Ronald Klingebiel
This study’s organizational portfolio selection model reveals that delegating project evaluation works best when specialized experts are properly assigned, but in most cases—especially under tight budgets—aggregating multiple evaluators’ rankings yields superior innovation portfolio performance compared to averaging scores or counting approval votes.
Cultural Spawning: Founders Bringing Organizational Cultures to Their Startup by Yeonsin Ahn, Henrich R. Greve
This study shows that new ventures often inherit cultural elements from the founder’s previous organization—particularly when the founder has longer tenure there and the parent culture is more internally coherent or atypical—highlighting how cultural spawning helps explain persistent differences among organizations.
Improving Virtual Team Collaboration Paradox Management: A Field Experiment by Margaret M. Luciano, Jean B. Leslie, John E. Mathieu, Emily R. Hoole, RebeccaAnderson, Virgil W. Fenters
Using a paradox-focused intervention with follow-up, this study shows that effectively managing the “team collaboration paradox” (balancing unity and individual perspectives) improves virtual team performance over time, revealing the critical role of sustained training support in achieving these gains.
The Indirect Effect of Entrepreneurship on Pay Dispersion: Entry Cost Reduction, Mobility Threat, and Wage Redistribution Within Incumbent Firms by Francesco Castellaneta, Raffaele Conti, Aleksandra Joanna Kacperczyk, Samir Mamadehussene
Drawing on Portugal’s entry reform reducing new venture costs, this study shows that making entrepreneurship more accessible raises incumbents’ outside-option value—leading high-earning, more entrepreneurially inclined employees to secure disproportionate pay gains and widening overall wage inequality.
Trailblazing Motivation and Marginalized Group Members: Changing Expectations to Pave the Way for Others by Karren Knowlton
When employees from marginalized groups face low performance expectations yet have strong group belonging and core self-evaluations, they develop “trailblazing motivation”—striving not only to prove themselves but also to expand opportunities for their entire marginalized group through advocacy and riskier change-oriented behaviors.
Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance by Jacob S. Levitt, Constantinos G. V. Coutifaris, Paul I. Green, Jr., Sigal G. Barsade
Across two longitudinal studies of consulting teams and collegiate sports teams, this research shows that leaders’ positive emotional expressions early on can “imprint” respect in team members, and when combined with negative emotional expressions in the midpoint—filtered through that earlier positivity—they signal opportunities for status gains, ultimately boosting individual performance.