The July-August Issue of Organization Science is Out!
This issue: The Cancer Tax, Reject and Resubmits, Powerless Lies, and much more
Dear Friends,
Thanks for checking out the third issue of So Here's the Idea, the official Substack of Organization Science!Â
The July-August issue of Organization Science just landed last week, and we're excited to share these thirteen outstanding papers with you! The papers cover a range of topics, from activism to discrimination to collaboration and much, much more!
Also, hot off the press are the ten most recent Articles in Advance at the journal.
Finally, check out the Ethnography Atelier in the PDW in your Inbox section of this issue. Amazing resources for anyone interested in the ethnographic method for studying the world of work and organizations.
As always, we appreciate your feedback and contributions. Please share any resources or ideas with our community by contacting us; we’ll try to include them in our next issue.
Please share our newsletter with colleagues, students, and friends, and we hope to see many of you at AOM later this week!
Best wishes,
The OS Substack Team
Hot off the press
Clean up Your Theory! Invest in Theoretical Clarity and Consistency for Higher-Impact Research by Andrew von Nordenflycht
Uncertainty and Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Brexit by Camilo Acosta, Astrid Marinoni
License to Layoff? Unemployment Insurance and the Moral Cost of Layoffs by Dongil Daniel Keum and Stephan Meier
Mobilizing Conceptual Spaces: How Word Embedding Models Can Inform Measurement and Theory Within Organization Science by Pedro Aceves and James A. Evans
Leveraging Learning Collectives: How Novice Outsiders Break into an Occupation by Ece Kaynak
Nonmonetary Reward Systems, Counterproductive Behavior, and Responses to Sanctions in Open Collaboration Environments by Cassandra R. Chambers
Do Lower-Power Individuals Really Compete Less? An Investigation of Covert Competition by Yufei Zhong and Huisi (Jessica) Li
Strategic Upward Striving Toward $100 Million Revenue: Setting Goals to Attract External Attention by Daniel Dongil Keum and Stephen Ryan
The Consequences of Revealing First-Generational Status by Peter Belmi, Kelly Raz, Margaret Neale, and Melissa Thomas-Hunt
Learning Strategic Representations: Exploring the Effects of Taking a Strategy Course by Mana Heshmati and Felipe A. Csaszar
July-August Issue, 2023
When Less Is More: How Statistical Discrimination Can Decrease Predictive Accuracy by Felipe A. Csaszar, Diana Jue-Rajasingh, and Michael Jensen
We demonstrate that incorporating behavioral realism overturns the predictions of the existing literature on statistical discrimination. In the majority of cases, the principle of "less is more" applies: disregarding discriminatory factors such as race or gender results in more accurate predictions.
Empowerment Mitigates Gender Differences in Tertius Iungens Brokering by Nicos Nicolaou and Martin Kilduff
Our paper focuses on the origins and mitigation of gender differences in the tertius iungens brokering propensity to bring people together. We found that gender differences in brokering propensity were mitigated for empowered samples, such as well-educated or entrepreneurial individuals.
Bridgework: A Model of Brokering Relationships Across Social Boundaries in Organizations by Tiffany D. Johnson, Aparna Joshi and Glen E. Kreiner
So often, members of stigmatized or lower-status groups are deemed as needing to be changed, molded, or fixed in order to fit in organizations. One of the most groundbreaking findings of this work is the ways in which the relational brokers in our study spent a lot of their time working on members from the non-stigmatized group, or groups that are granted more power and privilege in society, and helping them create organizations that fit people.
Can Public Organizations Perform as Private Firms? The Role of Heterogeneous Resources and Practices by Thomaz Teodorovicz, Sérgio Lazzarini, Sandro Cabral, Leandro Nardi
This study examines how resources and practices jointly shape performance differences across public and private schools. Using quantitative and qualitative data from high schools in Brazil, this study shows the importance of human capital resources in narrowing the gap between public and private organizations, particularly in terms of performance levels and the adoption of performance-enhancing practices.
Reject and resubmit: A formal analysis of gender differences in reapplication and their contribution to women’s presence in talent pipelines by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, Brian Rubineau, Venkat Kuppuswamy
In many settings, women are significantly less likely than men to reapply after rejection. Using a 4-parameter mathematical model, we show that these reapplication differences play a big role in gender segregation in high-rejection rate contexts (e.g., labor markets), but a small role in lower-rejection rate contexts (e.g., patenting and crowdfunding). Turning this finding around, reducing overall rejection rates (e.g., via job tryouts) can dampen the segregating effects of gender differences in reapplication.
Who Pays the Cancer Tax? Patients' Narratives in a Movement to Reduce Their Invisible Work by Melissa A. Valentine, Steven M. Asch, and Esther Ahn
This study explores the influence of client-led movements on organizational change, using an academic cancer center (ACC) as a case study. Patients and their families were found to bear a significant burden of coordinating their treatments, a responsibility they dubbed the "Cancer Tax". These patients leveraged their personal narratives to shed light on this issue, amassing a collection of stories which they widely disseminated across the ACC. This movement fostered a supportive coalition of staff allies who used these stories to recognize the problem and propose solutions. As a result, a new program was created to assume some of the patients' coordination tasks, demonstrating how clients can effectively spur organizational change through personal narratives.
Powerlessness also Corrupts: Lower Power Increases Self-Promotional Lying by Huisi (Jessica) Li, Ya-Ru Chen, and John Angus D. Hildreth
This study counters the conventional belief that power increases unethical behavior, arguing that lower power individuals are more prone to lying for self-promotion. Drawing from compensatory consumption theory, the researchers suggest that lower power individuals, feeling less esteemed in their organizations, tend to inflate their accomplishments. This hypothesis is backed by four studies, showing that lower power individuals, such as lower-ranking executives, Ph.D. students, and employees, were more likely to lie about their work achievements, publication records, and contract signings. The tendency to lie was linked to these individuals' need to feel esteemed within their organizations. Moreover, a self-affirmation intervention diminished the effect of lower power on self-promotional lying. Thus, the study posits that when it comes to self-promotional lying, lower power can be more corruptive than higher power.
Effective Information Infrastructures for Collaborative Organizing: The Case of Maasai Mara by Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, Erik Reimer Larsen, and Jacob Kjær Eskildsen
To ensure the success of collaborative organizing, it is essential not only to share collaborative values but also to have well-designed infrastructures that facilitate coordination among actors. Our findings demonstrate significant potential in utilizing organizational design to address challenges related to natural resource commons.
"Dear CEO and Board": How Activist Investors’ Confidence in Tone Influences Campaign Success by Matthias Brauer, Margarethe Wiersema and Philipp Binder
How are activist investors able to persuade management and the board to accede to their demands despite holding only a small ownership stake? This study finds activist investors have greater campaign success when they use verbal impression management, in form of confidence in tone, to convince management and other shareholders that their demands have merit.
The Downside of Displaying Agentic Values: Evidence from Shareholder Activism by Mark R. DesJardine and Wei Shi
Activist shareholders identify companies to target based on their CEOs’ language. Analyzing the communication patterns of thousands of CEOs, we find that CEOs that overemphasize their independence and control from shareholders increase their odds of being targeted by activist shareholders by nearly 30%. This effect is even stronger when those CEOs spend more on corporate social responsibility or new capital projects.
Variations in the Corporate Social Responsibility-Performance Relationship in Emerging Market Firms by Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Saptarshi Purkayastha, Kannan Ramaswamy
This study examines the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the performance of emerging market firms, contending that CSR helps mitigate market and governmental failures. The authors assert that the three dimensions of CSR (environmental, social, and governance) have varying impacts on performance. Specifically, social CSR, which helps to build capabilities and reduce the negative effects of government failures, is found to have a greater impact on performance than either governance or environmental CSR. The study further proposes that firm-level business group affiliation and country-level government policy nudges, which are mechanisms used to mitigate market failures, amplify this differential influence of each CSR dimension on performance.
Executives' Prior Employment Ties to Interlocking Directors and Interfirm Mobility by Joseph S. Harrison, Steven Boivie, Michael C. Withers
This paper investigates the influence of executives' previous employment ties with interlocking directors on their interfirm mobility. It reveals a positive correlation between such ties and executives' movement to outside firms, especially where these directors serve. However, the strength of this relationship depends on the interlocking directors' roles, being weakened by lead positions on the focal firm's board, but strengthened when the director is CEO of the outside firm.
A Real Utopia Under What Conditions? The Economic and Social Benefits of Workplace Democracy in Knowledge-Intensive Industries by Trevor Young-Hyman, Nathalie Magne, and Douglas Kruse
Workplace democracy is held up as a welfare-enhancing organizational alternative, but its market viability remains unclear. Using French tax data on worker cooperatives and conventional firms, our study shows that, in knowledge-intensive contexts, workplace democracy increases both worker welfare and firm productivity.
PDW in your Inbox
Organization Science publishes some of the best ethnographies in the field. If you are a budding ethnographer or a seasoned pro, check out The Ethnography Atelier. It is a collaborative space that promotes ethnographic and other qualitative research in work and organizations. They organize on-line and off-line opportunities for researchers to discuss and develop each other’s work and share resources to foster engagement with a variety of qualitative methods.Â
Well, that’s all folks. See you at AOM!
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