The November-December Issue of Organization Science is out!
Plus reporting back from our Asia-Pacific outreach initiative and the OSWC update
Hello folks! Tomorrow is the beginning of American Thanksgiving Week, with its annual excitement of me forgetting whether my son has school on Wednesday. Everyone is coughing, and Chief Editorial Cat Butterburger is constantly yowling about the cold, the dark, and the apparent shortage of rabbits to chase. But. . . not in Singapore (well I don’t know much about the rabbits there), where I got to see firsthand the significant expansion of scholarship throughout the Asia-Pacific region. This was also evident in the 600 Chinese scholars who joined us for an online editors’ panel. I’ll report on this below, after introducing Issue 6 which has now been posted. I’ll also give an update on the 2025 OSWC in Los Angeles. But first. . . the issue, presented by Outreach and Promotion Editor Shirley Tang.
In addition to the articles in the issue, check out the fantastic set of several dozen Articles in Advance and Recently Accepted articles that you can find here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/toc/orsc/35/5
As always, we’d love it if you shared the Substack with friends, colleagues, and second cousins.
-Lamar
P.S. Yes, I’m well aware that I am incapable of getting Midjourney to spell our journal correctly in images.
The November-December Issue of Organization Science
This new issue covers a broad range of topics. As always, the articles reflect the vibrancy and diversity of our field—with articles by both experienced and first-time authors and a diversity of methods and approaches.
Competition and Collaboration in Crowdsourcing Communities: What Happens When Peers Evaluate Each Other? by Christoph Riedl, Tom Grad, Christopher Lettl
In crowdsourcing contests, higher-skilled participants balance competitive and collaborative motives, using sabotage against close competitors but showing leniency toward non-threats, influencing long-term community participation and structure.
The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market by Xiang Hui, Oren Reshef, Luofeng Zhou
Generative AI reduces employment and earnings for freelancers in affected occupations, with top performers disproportionately impacted, suggesting a shift in the role of human capital and decreased demand for workers.
Group Size and Its Impact on Diversity-Related Perceptions and Hiring Decisions in Homogeneous Groups by Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios, Katherine L. Milkman
Homogeneous groups are more likely to face diversity-related scrutiny and diversification efforts as their size increases, as larger groups signal stronger diversity problems, while smaller homogeneous groups are often overlooked.
CEO Humility and Corporate Social Irresponsibility: Evidence Based on a New Unobtrusive Measure by Amy Y. Ou, Qian Lu, Xina Li, Chung Chi-Nien, Guoli Chen
CEO humility reduces corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR) incidents and enhances corrections, with stronger effects in high-CSIR industries and diverse top management teams, using a novel measure of humility from earnings call transcripts.
Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence From H-1B Visa Denials by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Kirk Doran, Astrid Marinoni, Chungeun Yoon
This study finds that restrictive immigration policies causing the loss of team members have minimal impact on overall performance but significantly reduce the performance of workers who lose peers of the same ethnic background, particularly in small, homogeneous teams or those working on atypical tasks.
“It Takes More Than a Pill to Kill”: Bounded Accountability in Disciplining Professional Misconduct Despite Heightened Transparency by Ece Kaynak, Hatim A. Rahman
This study introduces the concept of bounded accountability, showing that even with transparency measures, professionals disciplining peers for misconduct often impose limited penalties due to field, occupational, organizational, and interpersonal constraints.
Learning from Failures: Differentiating Between Slip-ups and Knowledge Gaps by Gopesh Anand, Ujjal Kumar Mukherjee
Firms learn more from design-related failures (knowledge gaps) than process-related failures (slip-ups), with innovation capabilities like patents and R&D intensity enhancing this learning, advancing theories of organizational learning and absorptive capacity.
Devoted but Disconnected: Managing Role Conflict Through Interactional Control by Vanessa M. Conzon, Ruthanne Huising
Workers managing role conflict use interactional control to balance work and family demands, but this limits workplace belonging and resource exchange, contrasting with those who prioritize availability, fostering stronger workplace relationships.
Motivation and Ability: Unpacking Underperforming Firms’ Risk Taking by Ohad Ref, Songcui Hu, Maxim Milyavsky, Naomi E. Feldman, Zur Shapira
Firms' risk-taking motivation increases with performance shortfalls in a shifting pattern, influenced by focus of attention and concern for survival, while a mismatch between motivation and ability creates an inverted U-shaped relationship between performance shortfalls and risk-taking behavior.
The Humbling Effect of Significant Relationships: A Field Experiment Examining the Effect of Significant-Other Activation on Leaders’ Expressed Humility by Lin Wang, Junchao (Jason) Li, Bradley P. Owens, Lihua Shi, Mo Wang
This study shows that activating significant-other schemas enhances leader humility by fostering interpersonal warmth and psychological safety, with stronger effects for leaders with a strong relational identity, based on a field experiment with leaders and followers.
Temporal Availability and Women Career Progression: Evidence from Cross-Time-Zone Acquisitions by Luisa Gagliardi, Myriam Mariani, Stefano Breschi
Cross-time-zone acquisitions increase the demand for nonconventional work schedules, disadvantaging women in career advancement, with women 9.5% less likely than men to be promoted, highlighting implications for gender equality in the workplace.
A Part of, or Apart from, Me?: Linking Dynamic Founder-Venture Identity Relationships to New Venture Strategy by Eliana Crosina, Michael G. Pratt, Hila Lifshitz
This study uncovers how founders' dynamic identity relationships with their ventures—through identification and construals—shape strategic decisions and venture development, contributing to entrepreneurial identity research and construal level theory.
Which Idea to Pursue? Gender Differences in Novelty Avoidance During Creative Idea Selection by Mengzi Jin, Roy Chua
Women exhibit higher novelty avoidance than men during idea selection due to concerns about social backlash, impacting idea success, but this tendency decreases when women evaluators are present, highlighting gender dynamics in creative work.
Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Shadow Options: Emergent Functions of Corning’s Glass-Based Innovations by Pierpaolo Andriani, Gino Cattani
This study introduces a framework for how shadow options—hidden, unrealized functionalities within existing technologies—emerge and transform into real options, using Corning's photosensitive glass as a case. It identifies Schumpeterian and Kirznerian shadow options and outlines organizational strategies for systematically unlocking innovation potential in embedded technologies.
The Impact of a Short-Selling-Friendly Environment on Board Composition by Ribuga Kang, Jingoo Kang
A short-selling-friendly environment reduces the number of outside directors, especially when directors are highly networked or busy, and when CEOs hold greater board influence. It highlights a novel determinant of board composition while addressing endogeneity concerns.
High-Status Teammates: Award Evaluation in the National Basketball Association by Dominika Kinga Randle, Letian Zhang
This study examines how intrateam status asymmetries influence evaluation bias in social judgments, using NBA data to analyze how high-status teammates affect colleagues' chances of winning awards. It finds that high-status teammates increase colleagues' visibility in the initial selection stage but can harm their chances in the final stage by making lower-status individuals seem less deserving when directly compared.
It’s About What Happens in the Meantime: The Temporal Interplay of Individual and Collective Creativity by Benjamin Schiemer
This study examines time as a multidimensional phenomenon in creativity, showing how planned, assigned, and idle time align individual ideation with collective work through artifacts and bodies, advancing a social process perspective on creativity.
-Shirley
Asia-Pacific Outreach: Singapore and a Webinar
I had the pleasure earlier this month to visit Singapore for the first time ever, an epic flight of four hours to San Francisco then 16 to Singapore. I had kindly invited to give a seminar by National University of Singapore (NUS), then was lucky enough to also give talks at Singapore Management University (SMU) and INSEAD (INSEAD). Singapore has a remarkable research community, with all three places full of vibrant and successful scholars who were so gracious in hosting me. I even found a new Analytics Editor, David Daniels at NUS, who introduced me to new estimation procedures for multilevel mixed models with convexity issues, while tried to remember for the umpteenth the difference between convex and concave. If you haven’t been, the city surprised me by how easy and relaxing it is. It doesn’t feel crowded, the traffic in the center is quiet and light, the air quality is perfect, and the food exceptional. And between NUS, SMU, INSEAD, NTU, ESSEC, and others it has a high density of great researchers. Did I mention the food? The gardens were astounding too, probably related to the torrential rain we had one day. I’m not sure why the city has several dozen Jaeger-LeCoultre stores, but I’m guessing there are a bunch of people there with a lot more money than me.
Yanbo Wang opening his editorial inbox on Monday morning
As part of this trip, SMU also hosted our first paper development workshop, attended by over 50 scholars from Asia and Europe. The day included a morning session where Gokhan Ertug, Yanbo Wang, Guoli Chen, and I talked about the journal and scholarship more generally, then broke up into groups to talk about the attendees’ research. Gokhan organized everything, then had to hang out with me for a week. That, my friends, is dedication.
Lamar and Gokhan study a digging monitor lizard for techniques on unearthing non-responsive reviewers
Once I was back, we held a 90-minute webinar hosted by the International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR), and organized by Yun Hou and Runtian Jing. Our editors panel, which included Heather Berry, Rosalind Chow, Hengchen Dai, Andrew Nelson, and Yanbo Wang, was able to discuss a number of important topics based on questions submitted by the 628 attendees. Listening to them talk, I was reminded that the success of this journal is so dependent on this great team we have all over the world. Thank you to everyone who attended, and to IACMR for hosting it for us.
Finally, our burgeoning WeChat account now includes two interviews conducted by Shirley Tang: Xi Kang (Vanderbilt) and me. Shirley happily reports that we’ve had 60,000 people read the interview with Xi Kang. When I asked her how many people how many people had read my interview, there was a long pause. I’ll just say that it’s fewer than the number of followers we have on Substack.
2025 Org Science Winter Conference
After an exciting weekend of reading through our nearly 200 submissions again, we finalized our invite list and made a preliminary schedule. Because we are size restricted, there were many great applications that we couldn’t accept. If you submitted, you should have heard from us by now, so if not, please reach out to me, but first check you spam/junk mailbox. INFORMS is busy getting the registration set up, and I’ve finalized the budget so can send out conference fees shortly. We managed to heavily discount fees this year with generous support from Carnegie Mellon, Washington University in St. Louis, and UCLA. If your institution wants to contribute a small amount more, that would be greatly appreciated. It’s going to be a great program, once I work through negotiations for 32 poster boards and printing.
That’s all for now. We’ll be back soon, and thanks to everyone who contributes to the journal each day.
—Lamar