Wild Wisdom from Star Teams in the May-June Issue of Organization Science
This issue: From Contract Combat to Blame Games to when Normal Rules Don't Apply
Dear Friends,
Introducing the second issue of So Here's the Idea, the official Substack of Organization Science! Our community has curated an outstanding collection of research articles on vital organization science topics.
Explore sixteen insightful articles in this issue, covering team dynamics, innovation, non-market strategy, organizational learning, leadership, and more. This time, the authors provided concise descriptions and shared their favorite figures.1 Get inspired by their thought-provoking work!
We have also made the decision to spin off the "Oldies but Goodies" virtual special issues into their own alternating issues of this newsletter, which will be released between the launch of each new Organization Science issue. Look for it next month!
This issue also features valuable content on Organization Design and Trust, useful for both research and teaching. Thank you, Phanish and Oliver for sharing these materials with us!
As always, we appreciate your feedback and contributions. Please share any resources or ideas with our community by reaching out to us, we’ll try to include them in our next issue.
Please share our newsletter with colleagues, students, and friends. We're particularly interested in reaching colleagues in New Mexico (we love Santa Fe and Complexity!), Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alaska, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Vermont. If you have co-authors from any of these places, encourage them to subscribe!
Wondering about our global subscriber base? Here's the update. Unfortunately, Substack is blocked in Mainland China. We are exploring alternative outreach strategies. If you have any ideas for expanding our global reach, do let us know.2
Finally, we are pleased to introduce Christine Isakson as the new Digital Media Editor for Organization Science. Christine is a faculty member at California State University, Maritime Academy, and specializes in studying entrepreneurship and peer effects. Welcome to the team, Christine!
Have a wonderful May!
Cheers,
Sharique Hasan, Lamar Pierce, and Christine Isakson
—
May-June Issue, 2023
Informal legacy and exporting among Sub-Saharan African firms
Marcus M. Larsen, Caroline T. Witte
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of firms operate in the informal economy. We examined data from 7,223 firms across 27 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and discovered that firms that initially began operating informally but later registered (an informal legacy) have a higher likelihood of starting to export compared to firms that initially started their operations formally.
Luis Diestre, Martina Montauti, Helena Pinto de Sousa
We investigated the effectiveness of two impression management tactics: egocentric tactics, which claim the absence or low presence of a negative attribute, and alter-centric tactics, which claim a competitor's higher presence of a negative attribute. Through analyzing the impact of nutrient content claims on product sales in the U.S. food retail industry, we observed that alter-centric tactics are more effective for high levels of contestation.
Riccardo Fini, Julien Jourdan, Markus Perkmann, Laura Toschi
Candidates with an unfocused identity face a valuation penalty because they challenge social boundaries. This penalty is most severe for high-performing individuals in small, distinctive disciplines. Maintaining social boundaries influences evaluators' decisions alongside cognitive and capability considerations.
Patrick Bergemann, Brandy Aven
Using comprehensive data on behavioral and hypothetical whistleblowing along with a vignette experiment, we demonstrate the role of workgroup membership in whistleblowing. Our study reveals that workgroup membership influences whistleblowing behavior. Higher group cohesion reduces whistleblowing when wrongdoing involves the same group but increases it when wrongdoing involves external individuals.
Value Creation Trade-off in Business Ecosystems: Leveraging Complementarities while Managing Interdependencies3
Shiva Agarwal, Rahul Kapoor
This study examines the role of ecosystem-level complementary assets in shaping an innovation’s commercialization success. We distinguish between complementary assets that are specialized to the focal ecosystem and the ones that are available in multiple ecosystems. Specialized complementary technologies enhance value creation but can introduce performance bottlenecks as the ecosystem evolves. Our analysis of 244,034 apps in Apple's iPhone ecosystem highlights the tradeoff between leveraging complementarities and managing technological interdependencies in business ecosystems.
John Joseph, Luke Rhee, Alex James Wilson
This study examines how turnover within a corporate hierarchy affects organizational learning and innovation. We find that corporate departures have a greater impact on recombinant innovation more than that of the subunit members; reflecting corporate staff members’ slower individual learning and their ability to update the organizational code more quickly.
Sarah P. Doyle, Robert B. Lount, Jr.
How do status changes within a group influence people's willingness to help each other? We focus on how individuals react to gaining or losing status and how it affects their sense of responsibility and concern for others. We find that status changes impact helping behavior through changes in how much people care about others. The legitimacy of status changes also plays a role in shaping these effects. Interestingly, we find that the negative impact of losing status is stronger than the positive impact of gaining status on caring for others and helping behavior. These findings have practical implications for understanding interpersonal dynamics in various settings.
Do employees work less for female leaders? A multi-method study of entrepreneurial firms.
Olenka Kacperczyk, Peter Younkin, Vera Rocha
This study investigates the lower amount of employee labor received by female-founded ventures compared to male-founded ones. Using longitudinal data and online experiments, we confirm that employees contribute fewer regular hours and less overtime work to female-founded firms. The disparity is partly driven by employees perceiving female founders' requests for additional labor as unfair and challenging. These findings provide insights into the gender gap in entrepreneurship beyond the initial stages and shed light on the underlying mechanisms.
Alex Ning Li, Elad N. Sherf, Subrahmaniam Tangirala
Existing theories on team adaptation have overlooked the impact of discontinuous task change. This study proposes that teams are more effective when they prioritize rebuilding individual task capabilities before focusing on team-level capabilities. Additionally, reward fairness plays a crucial role in motivating members to develop both individual and collective task capabilities in uncertain contexts. Empirical data from manufacturing teams support these findings, with implications for research and practice.
Wisdom in the Wild: Generalization and Adaptive Dynamics4
Jaeho Choi, Daniel Levinthal
While much of our literature on learning has focused on situations in which actors are facing a repeated event, the more general and arguably more typical setting poses the challenge of generalization: what can be gleaned from prior experience that is distinct from, but related to, one’s current circumstance. In the article, we develop a formal computational model to explore the general issue of category-based generalization in experiential learning. Results show the benefits of learning through generalization in a novel environment and identify factors that may limit its effectiveness.
From compliance to progress: A sensemaking perspective on the governance of corruption
Stefan Schembera, Patrick Haack, Andreas Georg Scherer
Based on the findings of our case study, we suggest that a sensemaking perspective is crucial to overcome the fundamental tension between the enforcement of organizational compliance and the achievement of social ends in the governance of corruption in global business. In particular, the emergence of four locally contingent and open-ended sensemaking processes (localized theorizing, leveling, recalibrating, and public criticizing) explains how and why the focus of the actors ultimately shifted away from a compliance-based approach toward a new shared understanding of progress as achievement.
Joey van Angeren, Arvind Karunakaran
Platform owners increasingly invest venture capital in some of their own complementors. We find that other complementors seek out the areas of the platform where the platform owner makes such investments. We suggest that this is because complementors use the platform owner’s venture capital investments as learning devices to make inferences about the strategic direction of the platform.
Mirzokhidjon Abdurakhmonov, Dinesh Hasija, Jason W. Ridge, Aaron D. Hill
Our findings reveal that building relationships with politicians and government officials yields positive outcomes for both firms aiming to maintain the status quo and those seeking to alter it. However, these relationships have a stronger positive impact for firms striving to maintain the status quo. Furthermore, we observe that the effects of a relational approach on achieving desired outcomes are influenced by (1) prior experience in the political arena where competition occurs and (2) the social reputation of the firm.
Michael C. Campion, Emily D. Campion, Michael A. Campion, Talya N. Bauer
This study applies real options theory to leadership pipelines, showing that executives make risky staffing decisions for leaders in stepping-stone positions, focusing on future potential over current productivity. They frequently transfer and promote these leaders, even with lower short-term performance. High-performing leaders are transferred more often in destination positions, except when still improving their current unit. The study provides empirical evidence from a large retail organization and offers practical implications for executives.
Collective attention and collective intelligence: The role of hierarchy and team gender composition
Anita Williams Woolley, Rosalind M. Chow, Anna T. Mayo, Christoph Riedl, Jin Wook Chang
We conducted an experiment to examine the impact of team hierarchy on collective intelligence (CI). Our findings indicate that a stable hierarchy fosters higher CI, while an unstable hierarchy (where the leader can be replaced) encourages more competitive behavior, such as team members interrupting each other. Interestingly, in predominantly female teams, this competitive behavior resulted in lower CI, whereas in all-male teams, it led to higher CI.
Note: Only the line for "0 women" has a slope that is significantly greater than 0
Team Performance: Nature and Antecedents of Non-normal Distributions
Kyle J. Bradley, Herman Aguinis
An analysis of 274 team performance distributions and 200,825 teams reveals that only 11% of the distributions follow a normal pattern. This finding challenges the common assumption of similar performance levels across teams. It highlights the significant variation in team performance and emphasizes the importance of forming and acquiring star teams, rather than relying solely on individual stars.
PDW in your Inbox
Our friends in the community have graciously shared some excellent resources with us. If you have any resources you would like to share, please feel free to send them our way.
Phanish Purinam has a wonderful free online, asynchronous course based on The Microstructures of Organizations. Also, check out his syllabus and embedded set of video recordings by session for his Ph.D. course on Modeling Organizational Learning.
Oliver Schilke shared his fantastic resources on Trust, including videos of talks that he hosted as well as some excellent teaching materials.
Finally, if you’re curious about using Field Experiments to study issues in entrepreneurship, innovation, organizations, or strategy, sign up for the 4th Annual Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy. It will be held this summer in Cambridge, MA, right before AOM.
Also, if you’re wondering about the image, it is called: “Anonymous Peer Reviewers in the Style of Rene Magritte.” Because, yes, sometimes the reviews are surreal.
These were slightly edited for the Substack format.
Bonus points to anyone who can get Greenland to light up.
By special request. We have a Longest Title winner for this issue. Our AI helper suggests “Anchored Inferential Learning: Platform-Specific Uncertainty, Venture Capital Investments by the Platform Owner, and the Impact on Complementors” →bleep, bloop, bleep→ “How App Developers Play 'Follow the Money' on Platforms."
We have the shortest title winner too. We decided to ask ChatGPT to help “make this title sound long and nuanced”: “Wisdom in the Wild: Generalization and Adaptive Dynamics”→bleep, bleep, bloop→ “Navigating the Untamed Terrains of Wisdom: Exploring the Multifaceted Interplay of Generalization and Adaptive Dynamics in Dynamic Ecosystems of the Wild.”