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HR process research was established to explain the 'black box' in the relationship between HR practices and organizational performance. Bowen and Ostroff’s (2004) framework on HRM system strength, along with Nishii, Lepak, and Schneider's (2008) model of HR attributions, have served as foundational pillars that initiated a stream of HR process research. The five papers presented in this symposium conceptually build upon but challenge the core ideas of these two frameworks. They also methodologically advance HR process research by demonstrating its predictive validity, enhancing research designs and analyses, and enriching research contexts. By revisiting these foundational frameworks, the papers in the symposium encourage to apply of novel concepts and rigorous methods to unveil new horizons in HR process research. The symposium will conclude with Prof. Kaifeng Jiang providing insightful feedback on each paper and discussing how these papers contribute to the advancement of HR process research.
The goal of this symposium is to bring together scholars studying the distributional effects of technology to address three questions: (1) For whom can technology democratize access? (2) Can technology exacerbate inequalities? (3) What can managers and policymakers do to facilitate the equitable distribution of technology-enabled opportunities? To this purpose, the symposium consists of four unique papers that study questions around equity and equality related to the diffusion and adoption of various technologies (i.e., sound synchronization technology in movies, mobile money, AI, and crowdfunding platforms). With diverse theoretical perspectives (i.e., organizational technology adoption, industry emergence, labor employment, and social exchange), different levels of analysis (i.e., individual, organizational, market, and country levels) and various methods (i.e., historical and archival, abductive, survey experiments, and matching in large samples), these four studies together represent a thoughtful inquiry into the issue of technology and inequality and shed light on when and under what conditions technology may be more or less likely to foster (in)equity.
The papers in this symposium explore the complex interplay between work experiences and employees' post-work recuperation. Together, this set of research illuminates the intricacies of recovery processes pivotal in the wellbeing of employees and examines the practices and strategies people employ to enable smooth work and non-work experiences. The first paper probes the 'recovery paradox,' spotlighting the significance of psychological detachment in high-stress work scenarios. The second paper proposes after-work rituals as a valuable practice, substantiated by field experiments and surveys. The third paper delves into the often-neglected aspect of reattaching to work, tying it to fundamental psychological needs and work-related outcomes. Lastly, the fourth paper scrutinizes proactive pushbacks against the prevailing 'always-on' work culture, evaluating its work and non-work implications for employees. Together, these papers present novel theoretical insights and empirical evidence, shedding light on the dynamics between work, recovery, and employee well-being. The symposium offers new directions on recovery research and the importance of fostering a more robust and healthier relationship with work.
Sexual harassment (SH) research has recently gone through a resurgence in practical relevance and scholarly interest. While advances have been made in understanding the nature of sexual harassment and its consequences for victims and organizations, much work is still needed to further understand the phenomenon from various cultural (i.e., countries) and work contexts (i.e., industry and job types). Through a collection of five papers representing data from seven countries, this symposium aims to broaden our understanding of SH by 1) examining contextual factors that facilitate, mitigate, and link SH with work outcomes, 2) uncovering similarities and differences in SH research findings from various cultural and industry contexts, and 3) highlighting actionable future research directions and practical evidence-based resolutions. This symposium also offers insights on current conceptual, methodological, and practical issues related to SH research as conducted in various parts of the world. Collectively, the five papers set the stage for further scholarship on SH to aid in the development of programs and policies to help mitigate its negative impact on individuals, teams, and organizations.
There is currently limited understanding of how the shift to hybrid work impacts line managers. This symposium addresses this gap and presents emerging research that explores the roles and experiences of line managers in the hybrid work environment, the challenges they face and the effects of managing in hybrid work environments on their attitudes, behaviors, and well-being. The papers in this symposium examine line managers experiences with both quantitative and qualitative methods with data from different countries. The insights they provide are not only critical for advancing hybrid work research, but also have important practical implications to organizations in training, coaching, and supporting line managers in the hybrid workplace.
In recent years, organizations and government institutions have made significant strides in closing some gender inequalities at work (e.g., gender pay gaps; International Labour Organization, 2022). Despite its importance in shaping other gender inequalities, women’s (reproductive) health is still largely considered a taboo topic in the workplace (Grandey et al., 2020). This is an important oversight considering the significant costs and productivity losses associated with women’s (reproductive) health. Many workplace gender inequalities such as pay and promotions widen at key reproductive junctures and roles (e.g., maternity and motherhood). Thus, our symposium sheds light on the role of reproductive transitions in women’s lives—namely menstruation, (potential) maternity and motherhood, and menopause in shaping their work experiences and career trajectories.
The increasing work digitization (exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic) may have boosted some task-oriented work outcomes, but because work relationships become more instrumental, there may be some unintended yet unexplored relational impacts on employees (e.g., inability to psychologically detach, loneliness). In the current symposium, we bring together scholars across the globe to explore when, why and how work digitization has relational consequences for employees as well as to critically reflect on and discuss current issues in research on workplace relationships in digital work contexts. Drawing upon a variety of methodologies (e.g., experiments, longitudinal dyadic survey, theory piece, and systematic review) and different levels of organizational analysis, our presenters shed light on (a) how expressing solitude (i.e., enjoying working alone) in remote work is evaluated by colleagues, (b) the spillover of always-on culture on partner violence at home, (c) relational crafting in human-AI teaming, and (d) the role of hierarchy and its differentiation in virtual work. We conclude with an integrative summary that showcases key insights from the presentations and important research questions to address moving forward. Finally, we aim to provide practical insights into what both employees and organizations can do to mitigate the unintended relational impacts in today’s digitalized workplaces.
We propose a symposium exploring the debates among “labor intellectuals.” By “labor intellectuals," we mean activists and policymakers who sought to develop and implement a sustainable model for labor power. US examples include Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor, left wing New Deal critic Mary Van Kleeck, Walter Reuther's strategist Nat Weinberg, labor lawyer and sociologist Staughton Lynd, among more contemporary figures. Andre Gorz and Ken Coates are European exemplars. In New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills (2001) defined the “labor intellectuals” as researchers associated with unions or labor-based organizations. One fundamental axis upon which to compare these thinkers is their perspectives on state capacity to guarantee worker rights (the Wagner Act framework in the US.).While Perkins built on her experience in New York State regulating labor standards and played a leadership role on New Deal labor policy, Mary Van Kleeck opposed the Wagner Act and wrote presciently about the ease with which its support for labor might be undermined. We will employ a “critical biography” template. This approach suggests five emphases for research: the subject’s values and background, considerations of personal identity, important roles, contributions to theory and practice, and the social and historic context. For labor studies questions, one issue is the subject’s expectations of the likely performance of public and private hierarchies. We will investigate the process by which each individual learned to imagine an alternative to unaccountable hierarchies and turned to organizing these alternatives. A prerequisite for assuming the labor advocate role is consciousness of the contingency of organizational hierarchy.
Although much research exists on the antecedents and consequences of voice aimed at improving organizational efficiency, we know relatively less about antecedents of ethical voice. Ethical voice likely has a unique set of antecedents and consequences, due to its focus on societal ethical principles or super organizational interests that may conflict with organizations’ bottom-line goals. The purpose of this symposium is to advance our understanding of antecedents of ethical voice (and silence) and the underlying mechanisms by highlighting limitations of existing research and providing new insights.
Identity work—or the processes by which people form, repair, maintain, strengthen, or revise their sense of self at work—indicates, at least implicitly, agency or intentionality on the part of the individual engaged in these processes. This stream of research implies individuals to be identity-makers, who play an active role in determining their identities, and in prioritizing identities at work. Yet, research has also shown that external entities such as interaction partners, organizational or occupational norms, or even implicit or subconscious processes can influence or even force individuals to adopt or enact certain identities, suggesting that individuals are also identity-takers in the identity construction process. To systematically examine individuals as identity makers and takers, our symposium brings together four papers that explicate these questions: (1) What are the constraints upon agency in identity work processes and how do they operate? (2) Is agency in identity construction always desired? (3) Is agency in identity construction always individual- or self-focused? To encourage meaningful discussions on the topic between presenters and the audience, our symposium will adopt a roundtable format rather than feature a discussant, after the paper presentations.
In recent years, research in intragroup conflict has embraced a paradigm shift, advocating for the focus on the microfoundations of intragroup conflict. This symposium aims to spotlight this “new lens” for a deeper understanding of interpersonal conflict in teams. Four multi-method studies delineate the cognitive and affective processes shared among the individuals, and their attitudinal and behavioral patterns during and after conflict situations. Through these diverse works, this symposium aims to open a forum for thought-provoking exchanges that would nourish the microfoundations of interpersonal conflict, and ultimately, of team phenomenon.
This symposium aims to advance understanding of presenteeism through innovative discussions and research. It includes papers using person- centered approaches to analyze decision-making and attendance behavior patterns, alongside studies on gender, health, and the impact of organizational practices during COVID-19 on presenteeism. Additionally, it explores the consequences of presenteeism, using a blend of quantitative and qualitative methods to examine individual experiences within organizations.
This symposium examines the dynamic landscape of multicultural virtual teams in the post-COVID-19 era, advocating for a re-examination of research on virtual communication in multicultural teams. Established findings, rooted in the contrast between text-based and face-to-face communication, may not generalize to the new normal in which digital communication tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams Slack, or Basecamp offer media-rich communication channels that make nonverbal behaviors and cultural differences in these behaviors much more salient. Accordingly, the key question that guides this symposium is: How can multicultural virtual teams thrive in a world where technological advances enable rich verbal and nonverbal communication among team members? To answer this question, we bring together four evidence-based papers that explore new frontiers in virtual communication and multicultural teams. Two of the papers explore a new cultural dimension of high/low-context communication and associated nonverbal behaviors in the context of virtual teams and two papers examine team processes and outcomes in global virtual teams. Collectively, the papers provide timely insights into various aspects of nonverbal communication, as well as the social, cultural, cognitive, and metacognitive skills required in media-rich digital and culturally diverse environments. In doing so, this symposium offers a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by virtual teams, aiming to pave the way for improved teamwork in the future.
To explore the diverse mechanisms of how power influences trust, this symposium includes studies that introduce diverse perspectives using diverse methodological methods. The research questions answered in these studies consider how the power and trust of a buyer-supplier dyad influence each other, if and why power influences trust after third-party trust violations, how power influences self-disclosure which then influences trust, and when people are more trusting of those with power and those with more power are more trusting of others. These studies examine questions in various contexts including interpersonal relationships, buyer-supplier relationships, supervisor and subordinate relationships, and third-party relationships. They also utilize diverse research designs and statistical methods including lab experiments, field surveys, meta-analysis, and Actor-Partner Interdependence Model. Following the study presentations, Dr. Sim Sitkin will serve as the symposium’s discussant. Renowned for his seminal contributions to the field including numerous influential journal articles and books on the topic of trust and control, Dr. Sitkin will comment on the four presentations and offer an analysis on trust and power in organizational contexts. His insights promise to deepen the discourse of this symposium and enrich our understanding of the interplay between power and trust.
This proposed symposium aims to bring together prominent scholars who explore the modeling of firm growth and organizational design. The study of firm growth and organizational design has a long history within the management literature, and formal modeling has served as a useful methodological approach to generating meaningful insights on these topics. The scholars invited to participate in this symposium will share their cutting-edge research and insights into questions such as the interplay of centralization and knowledge complexity in decision-making, the effects of stress accumulation on organizational performance, the challenges and implications of scaling in digital platforms, and the evolution of hierarchy and span of control in new ventures. Overall, the symposium aims to shed light on the contingencies that improve or worsen decision quality, prevent organizational members' exhaustion, and provide practical implications for managers responsible for designing their organizational structures and scaling their new ventures.
In their 2023 introduction to a special issue on novel research on creativity published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, “Escaping irony: Making research on creativity in organizations more creative,” Berg and colleagues argued that “Like most literatures as they mature, the creativity literature has become—ironically—less creative.” They maintain that while novelty exists in creativity research, there is a shift to incrementalism. Lua, Liu, and Shalley (2023) echoed Berg and colleagues’ call for new directions in creativity research and highlighted underdeveloped areas in creativity research in their review and synthesis of creativity research. Consistent with this theme and to answer recent calls for novelty and more radical approaches to creativity research, our symposium brings together five papers that push the field forward by looking at underexamined and newer forms of creativity such as creative reputation and unexpected precursors to creativity such as genetics. Utilizing various methodologies (e.g., experimental, survey-based, longitudinal), the studies included in this symposium explore a diverse set of contexts and conditions that examine creativity in new ways, thus demonstrating the novelty and significant advancements in creativity research.
Entrepreneurial firms have long been hailed as the force that stimulates innovations, employment, and economic growth writ large. For these reasons, organization and entrepreneurship scholars have long been interested in the growth of technology firms. Considerable research over the past two decades has drawn scholarly attention to issues relating to how entrepreneurial firms emerge and grow their capabilities through specific organizational structure and processes, which have been found to exert enduring influences on subsequent organizational development. More recently, an emerging body of research has sought to understand the growth and strategy of young firms’ organizational capabilities by examining their human capital growth as well as their strategic moves. In recent years, novel, large-scale, longitudinal datasets have emerged that enabled researchers to adequately track firms’ historical growth trajectories beyond what small hand-collected samples of entrepreneurial firms can reveal. This symposium intends to gather a group of papers that have leveraged such novel, large-scale data to address unanswered questions in the literature regarding the founding patterns of entrepreneurial firms as well as growth strategies adopted by entrepreneurial firms.
To contribute to the advancement of allyship theory and practice, we propose a symposium centered on new research addressing perceptions and misperceptions of allyship motivations and behavior, unintended consequences of allyship efforts, and underutilized approaches to allyship. Through this initiative, we aim to shed light on factors that can help organizations harness positive allyship intentions, ensuring the promotion of productive allyship behavior in organizational settings.
This symposium delves into the dynamics of migration and forced displacement, emphasizing challenges and opportunities in the inclusion of refugees and migrants in organizations, society, and the labor market. As migration reaches historic highs, with 108 million forcibly displaced, and a surge in global migration, achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal #16 for inclusive societies is critical. Despite benefits, challenges persist, such as discrimination and inequality, revealing an ambivalent and paradoxical inclusion experience. The symposium, spanning diverse contexts, migration states, and inclusion needs, explores belonging, integration struggles, and challenges in agency, representation, and labor market discrimination. The goal of the symposium is to provide insights on the benefits and challenges of inclusion, and to connect these findings with wider discussions and future research opportunities in organization and management theory.
This symposium presents an in-depth exploration of the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on business and organizational operations. This symposium brings together a diverse range of research that delves into the multifaceted relationship between AI and various business aspects, including corporate social responsibility, human resource management (HRM) practices, and employee psychological experiences. Li, Zhu, and Yang's presentation initiates the symposium with an investigation into the U-shaped relationship between AI adoption growth rate and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Chinese firms. Utilizing the resource-based view and data from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR) database, this study reveals the nuanced evolution of AI integration and its implications for CSR. Ge, Song, Zhang, Zhong, and Tian follow with an examination of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT, in HRM practices focusing on age-diverse workforces. This study compares ChatGPT’s responses in HR decision-making scenarios with those of human professionals, highlighting the potential of AI in enhancing HRM efficiency and reducing age-based biases. Klonek and Hirschi's presentation shifts the focus to AI’s rapid integration into workplaces and its impact on work design and employee outcomes. Analyzing a vast dataset of tweets related to ChatGPT and work experiences, this research quantifies key work design experiences and employee attitudes, revealing both positive and negative effects of AI on job design and employee wellbeing. Lastly, Wu, Liu, Ruan, and Chen’s presentation investigates the augmentation effect of generative AI collaboration on human task performance and its psychological impacts. Through an experimental design involving tasks with and without ChatGPT assistance, this study uncovers the nuanced psychological effects of AI-human collaboration, highlighting the importance of balancing AI benefits with human psychological wellbeing. Overall, the symposium underscores the necessity of understanding the complex dynamics between AI and business to effectively navigate the evolving landscape of AI in the business world. It offers valuable insights for policymakers, corporate leaders, and stakeholders in harnessing AI's potential while addressing its challenges and ethical considerations.
Management research on humility and humble leadership has greatly increased over the past decade (Kelemen et al., 2023). Research has shown that humility has a variety of beneficial effects on individuals, teams, organizations, and even individuals themselves. This growing research on humility in the workplace has sparked additional research questions and study ideas. Acknowledging this backdrop, this symposium looks at humility from a range of areas including CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders, and followers/employees. Examining humility from multiple perspective and levels of analysis can help scholars gain a better overall picture of the current state of the humility literature and help move this important area of research forward.
The interplay between moral capacities and career development represents a vital, yet often overlooked, dimension in organizational research. While existing literature underscores the significance of ethical behavior and moral competencies in organizations, their specific impact on individual career paths remains unclear. Behavioral ethics research has traditionally concentrated on ethical decision- making within organizations, exploring the factors that drive these decisions and their implications for both the organization and its employees. However, this line of inquiry tends to overlook the personal consequences of these ethical behaviors. In contrast, career research primarily focuses on aspects such as human capital, organizational support, and personal attributes, only occasionally intersecting with moral considerations and seldom examining the role of specific moral capacities in career advancement. This symposium aims to address this disconnect by merging insights from behavioral ethics and career research. It delves into the nuanced ways in which individual moral capacities influence career processes. By synthesizing these two fields, the symposium seeks to enhance our understanding of moral capacities in career trajectories, thereby contributing to the broader social mission of fostering meaningful work and careers in an increasingly complex world.
Research and drug development within the life sciences has increasingly relied on advances in genomics to generate new outcomes and treatments. New technologies such as CRISPR offer tremendous opportunities for new therapeutics and treatments. Not surprisingly, new institutions, policy changes towards intellectual property protection, and firm strategies have arisen to facilitate and govern innovative activity within this emerging sphere. This presenter symposium assembles three studies that provide new and complementary vantage points on the emergence of institutions, policies, and firm strategies for the development and commercialization of genomics-based therapeutics.
This presentation will delve into the dynamics of local leadership as we explore the ripple effects of governor charisma, the effectiveness of experienced leaders in crisis management, the complex relationship between political corruption and public trust, and the evolving concept of government accountability in our increasingly digital society.
This presentation will examine the complex interactions between nonprofit and for-profit entities, delving into the identity tensions of corporate volunteering, mandatory cross-sectoral CSR initiatives, collaborative approaches to providing social goods, and the effects of government support on social entrepreneurship outcomes.
This session focuses on examining the historical dimensions of governance and strategic decision-making, aiming to uncover the factors that shape organizational behavior and performance over time.
Centered on digital transformation, this session discusses strategies for leveraging digital empowerment in firms of all sizes, factors influencing digital adoption in public administration, and the role of consulting in navigating the digital landscape.
This session explores innovative methodologies in management consulting. Topics include academic engagement in consulting practices, the hybridization of traditional management approaches, and the application of agile methods in project environments.
This session explores various factors influencing employee well-being, engagement, and resilience in the face of workplace challenges, such as incivility, career transitions, and paradoxical demands.
This symposium aims to bring together pioneering studies that delve into the intricate relationship between immigration and firm strategy, taking into account the evolving socio-political dynamics and delivering valuable insights to inform firm strategic decisions. In recent years, the intersection of immigration and firm strategy has been a subject of growing interest and extensive research. Existing literature has contributed significantly to our understanding of the profound impacts of immigration on knowledge transfer (e.g., Wang, 2015; Yang, Mudambi & Meyer, 2008), entrepreneurship (e.g., Kulchina, 2016, 2017; Lee & Eesley, 2018), and firm strategy and performance (e.g., Hernandez, 2014; Kulchina & Hernandez, 2016; Glennon et al., 2022; Li, Hernandez & Gwon, 2019). However, the current global landscape is witnessing dramatic changes in the socio-political environment for migration and mobility of talents across borders. Shifting demographics in the labor market, resurgence of protectionism (e.g., Yue, et al., 2022), and changing immigration policies, among other factors, have introduced new challenges for firms seeking to harness the potential of talents from around the world. Given these transformative developments, there is an urgent need for further investigation into how businesses can craft effective strategies in this new era.
The goal of the proposed symposium is to provide new insights into the decisions that creators and evaluators make during the creative process: Decisions about which ideas are more and less creative, decisions about whether to withdraw (vs. engage) in creative work, and decisions about which creative process behaviors to enact. Taken together, these four papers- two empirical and two conceptual- broaden areas of research for the growing literatures on creativity evaluation and decision-making. Ultimately, this symposium promotes innovation for the future and society by examining the decisions creators and evaluators make to advance (or not) creative ideas.
Organization design is concerned with understanding and improving how organizations work through their crucial elements of structure, sorting of actors (into/out of the system), and collective sensemaking. However, observing such constituents of organization design at scale is often challenging. Archival data sets that capture these elements in a granular and reliable manner across firms and over time do not readily exist, and surveying firms about their organization design choice at scale and repeatedly is not only financially taxing but often challenging due to low response rates. This symposium showcases recent empirical efforts to overcome such limitations. These include manual data collection through large-sample surveys and online archives, the use of third-party commercial digital big data comprising firms’ job postings and employee social profiles, the access to granular country-level census data, and the collection of internal data for novel forms of organizing such as open-source and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). These data sets and empirical approaches push the frontier of empirical organization design research and allow us to re-examine old questions as well as tackle new ones through a granular view across large numbers of firms and industries over time. With this symposium, we aim to share these empirical advances, through presentations and active interactions between the speakers and audience, with other members of the academic community interested in organization design within strategic management, technology and innovation management, entrepreneurship, as well as broader organizational and management areas.
This symposium aims to bridge the gap in applying the 5M framework— comprising Money, Market, Management, Motherhood, and Meso/Macro Environment—to individual cases of female entrepreneurs. Historically, the significant contributions of female entrepreneurs have been underrepresented in the literature despite their crucial role in shaping new business landscapes. This symposium addresses this by exploring the entrepreneurial journeys of four female entrepreneurs from Greece, China, Colombia, and the USA. It will examine how the 5M framework, which extends the traditional "3M" model by adding dimensions of "Motherhood" and "Meso/Macro Environment," can illuminate the factors contributing to the creation and sustainability of female-owned and managed firms. By doing so, the symposium will not only contribute to the existing literature but also open new avenues for understanding and supporting female entrepreneurship globally.
We are at a critical juncture in the study of entrepreneurial teams, as much work has emerged in the last few years. While scholars have defined what an entrepreneurial team is, the field lacks a standard definition of what it means to be a founder, an integrative theory of how cofounders come together, and an understanding of the implications of different approaches to forming and adapting a founding team. With these gaps in mind, we have convened scholars doing important research addressing these key topics to present their cutting-edge work.
Workplace gossip, defined as the evaluative talk initiated by one employee (gossiper) to another (recipient) about an absent colleague, is widespread. Research indicates that over 90% of employees engage in gossip. Despite recent advancements in research on workplace gossip, two key challenges persist, hindering a comprehensive understanding of its harms and benefits. First, recent work tends to focus on the impacts on gossipers, with less known on how and why gossip may affect other stakeholders including gossip targets, gossip recipients, work groups, or the organization. Second, while there is an acknowledgment of the importance of differentiating gossip based on valence (positive vs. negative gossip), content (work vs. non-work-related gossip), and target (gossip about the supervisor vs. coworkers), it remains a theoretical and empirical challenge to encompass all these dimensions in a single study. This symposium aims to address these two critical issues by presenting four papers that contribute to a more holistic understanding of the harms and benefits of workplace gossip. These papers not only expand our insights into the consequences for gossipers but also delve into the impact on gossip recipients, work groups, and the organization. Moreover, the four papers employ novel theoretical perspectives and empirical methods to allow the simultaneous examination of multiple dimensions of gossip and their integrative impacts.
Organizations crucially rely on knowledge and innovation. It represents the commercial potential of firms’ research and development (R&D) activities (Katila and Shane 2005) and is thus a source of competitive advantage and profits (Utterback 1994). Further, scientific methods can be applied to processes of creative search within organizations to create new business opportunities (Li et al. 2013; Rosenberg and Nelson 1994). Innovative products may open new markets and drive long-run economic growth (Hasan and Tucci 2010), and novel research may open new paradigms and fields and lead to scientific breakthroughs (Kuhn 1962). Breakthrough inventions create “Schumpeterian rents” (Schumpeter 1939), on which the entry, growth and survival of firms hinge. Yet, innovation is invariably unpredictable (Katila and Chen 2008). Novel products, processes and theories are developed through an inherently complex and ambiguous process. The path to an innovation is a tortuous one, ripe with dead- ends and pitfalls, and the scientific, technical, and commercial promise of an innovation is rarely understood in advance. At the heart of these search paths lies a tension: knowledge is built cumulatively (Merton 1973) and the search for innovation inherently relies on this wealth, yet innovative knowledge breaks with prior work (Hargadon and Sutton 1997; Uzzi et al. 2013a). What is the cartography of those search paths? Does divergence from mainstream knowledge implies low reliance on prior work? How can external audiences evaluating innovation influence these search paths, at times in biased ways? How can innovators find breakthroughs in well-defined but understudied technological spaces? These questions are important to craft strategy processes for managers and resources allocation for policymakers. To answer them, we turn to science (and scientists) as one of the prime search spaces for innovation and breakthroughs. This presenter symposium will assemble four papers on search, innovation, and breakthroughs to further our understanding of these topics.
Innovation has been a significant and widely studied topic in strategy and management research for decades, yet certain crucial phenomena and related theoretical questions remain unexamined, creating opportunities to explore new frontiers in innovation studies. This symposium brings together a unique set of papers that explore new perspectives on understanding various aspects of innovation, providing implications for both future research and practice. Specifically, the first paper differentiates between research and development to discern the distinct impacts of organizational structure on R&D: centralization of development is related to reduced duplication of development effort; however, the likelihood that a given invention being commercialized is lower in centralized development compared to decentralized development. The second paper proposes managerial prosocial preferences, specifically the inclination to avoid harming employees, as a negative antecedent to firm investment in automation and AI innovation. The third paper studies the fast-growing call for firms’ environmental innovations and delves into a paradox concerning the effect of institutional pressures—normative institutional pressures incentivize firms to innovate, but they also motivate them to shift focus toward short-term “brown” innovations, rather than long-term “green” innovations. The last study moves beyond the conventional binary choice between trade secret and patent protection, investigating vagueness as a novel patenting strategy in response to the desire to withhold technological information. As a set, these papers offer fresh insights into understanding the creation, adoption, commercialization, and protection of innovation, shedding new light on expanding the frontier of innovation research.
Significant efforts have been devoted to understanding negative types of leadership, including unethical supervisory behaviors. Despite these efforts, much of the research in this area is focused on harmful interpersonal behaviors (e.g., abusive supervision). Yet, unethical leadership entails much more, such as breaking or contravening rules and employing unethical means to influence employees. This symposium aims to present new insights and perspectives from recent empirical research that advances our understanding of unethical leadership and how and why it occurs.
Across four unique empirical papers from different parts of the world, we will explore empirical research on others' perceptions of a focal individual's work-family (WF) experiences. Scholars have used others’ perceptions of WF 1) as a methodological tool to enhance the rigor of model testing, and 2) more theoretically, as a means to understand the quality and outcomes of relationships between people at work and at home. Because others’ WF-related perceptions is now a burgeoning research area, we propose this symposium as a way of 1) naming this heretofore rather segmented area of scholarship under the same topical umbrella, and 2) beginning to take stock of findings from this sub-area of work and family research en route to building new research agendas.
This symposium examines and promotes positive organizational change within law enforcement agencies. Its main goal is to advance the understanding and application of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) principles in the complex landscape of policing by bringing together various perspectives, experiences, and research findings. Since its inception, Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) has emphasized the importance of building strengths, fostering positive relationships, and initiating substantial changes in organizations. Based on this philosophy, the symposium adopts a POS approach, acknowledging that organizations thrive when they prioritize what works. This perspective offers a valuable lens to explore novel strategies and interventions that cultivate positivity, resilience, and flourishing in the face of work challenges within the law enforcement context. Ultimately, the symposium highlights innovative strategies, interventions, and approaches that facilitate positive transformations, improve relationships, and tackle challenges within law enforcement organizations. Through an in-depth examination of various initiatives, including procedural justice training, implicit bias training, and the restructuring of specialized units, as well as the negotiation of collective bargaining agreements, this symposium aims to contribute meaningful insights and promote positive change practices in law enforcement.
How can organizing for projects contribute to organizing for grand challenges? This is the question at the core of this presenter symposium which invites project scholars and management scholars to contribute to tackling grand challenges with projects. The symposium is proposed as a forum or “stage setter” to open up new areas of management inquiry on the topic of organizing projects to tackle grand challenges. It is preceded and followed by special issues in different journals including International Journal of Project Management and Journal of Operations Management, respectively.
In the ever-evolving landscape of organizations, the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought forth a dynamic interplay of opportunities and challenges. A pressing challenge in this context is the phenomenon of "Quiet Quitting" (QQ), where employees silently disengage while technically remaining employed. AI plays a pivotal role in QQ, capable of both exacerbating and alleviating this disengagement trend. Thoughtfully employed, AI-powered solutions can enhance worker satisfaction and engagement by enabling more equitable performance assessments, delivering real-time feedback, and offering tailored learning and development opportunities. Furthermore, addressing algorithmic biases in AI systems can promote fairness and inclusivity in the workplace, thus mitigating the factors contributing to QQ. Ethical and effective integration of AI is paramount for organizations in the current HRM landscape. Building trust and assuaging employee concerns about job security and skill obsolescence through transparent communication and active involvement are essential steps. This proposal seeks to comprehensively explore how AI influences QQ, providing valuable insights and novel management strategies relevant to HRM professionals, addressing the multifaceted impact of AI on QQ and its significance in optimizing HR practices and consulting strategies in the AI-driven workplace.
Decades of research have emphasized the critical role of effective communication between leaders and their teams in shaping the leader-follower relationship and team performance (Riggio, Riggio, Salinas, & Cole, 2003). What leaders communicate and how they do so are often crucial to how their followers evaluate and perceive them differently (Kim, David, Chen, & Liang, 2023). Various forms of verbal and non-verbal expressions by leaders have also been observed to manifest as distinct leadership styles (Choudhury, Starr, & Agarwal, 2020), which in turn affect how members of the team may feel and behave (Antonakis, d’Adda, Weber, & Zehnder, 2022; Erez, Misangyi, Johnson, LePine, & Halverson, 2008). Given the multifaceted nature of leader-team communication and the evolving expressions of leadership, there is a continuous need to examine the consequences of how and what leaders communicate to their followers. This symposium brings together scholars to examine the effects of leaders’ expressions across various units of analyses, from individual-level perceptions of leadership effectiveness and individual career outcomes to team-level outcomes of peer-monitoring and performance.
Intelligent machines are transforming the nature of knowledge, skills, and expertise, challenging many of our assumptions about work and organizing. Researchers have long emphasized the impact of emerging technologies on reshaping interactions within organizations and occupational communities. From paper mill operators with software systems (Zuboff, 1988), radiologists with computerized CT scanners (Barley, 1986), librarians with internet search (Nelson & Irwin, 2014), and NASA scientists with open-source innovation (Lifshitz- Assaf, 2018) scholars have found that the introduction of digital technologies can occasion changes to occupational identities and trouble the boundaries of domain knowledge within and between organizations. However, our understanding of expertise in the era of machine learning, algorithms, and AI is still nascent. Unlike previous digital technologies, intelligent machine applications can handle complex decision-making tasks and analysis of large amounts of structured and unstructured data, disintermediating the tasks of managers and workers (Kellogg et al., 2020; Murray et al., 2021; Faraj et al., 2018). As such, recent calls for research emphasize the need for more theorizing on expertise and more empirical studies on how workers, occupational communities, and organizations can adapt to and cultivate the skills needed in this new world of work (Heimstädt et al., 2023; Nicolini et al., 2022). Therefore, this symposium provides new perspectives and insights at the nexus of intelligent machines and the evolving nature of knowledge, skills, and expertise. It will consist of two conceptual and three empirical papers that grapple with differing forms of intelligent technologies and their impacts. In concert, these presentations foreground and question the assumptions and heuristics that scholars of work, management, and organizing have traditionally held preceding the proliferation of intelligent machines. This symposium is designed to encourage discussion and integrate diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the evolving landscape of work and technology.
“Innovating for the future” is implicit as scholars seek to find alternative ways of being that challenge the current dualistic approach to organising. This symposium thus offers a unique lens based upon a wholism that characterises diverse spiritual traditions to counter this separation, while also extending our understanding of the importance of alternative ontologies. Humans are embedded in an interconnected dynamic universe where the human and the more-than-human co-exist in an entangled web of relationships. Thus, how may life-sustaining meshed webs of relations include the health and well-being of humans, animals, mountains, rivers, the sky, carbon and indeed the larger cosmological whole? (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022). How can engagement with a supreme being – that could be nature itself (Navarro et al., 2020) – unfold and how could this relationship contribute to working in harmony with the earth? This symposium assists in reconciling the nature-economy dualism through relational ontologies, recognising the earth as a living system in which humans and the economy are but a part. As Banerjee and Arjaliès (2021, p. 16) note, a relational perspective is “fundamentally animated and spiritual, immersed in a life force that transcends time, human and non-humans.” Thus, this symposium challenges how we may innovate for the future, with a fresh perspective from relational ontologies that challenge and question the status quo to reimagine organising among diverse but interconnected perspectives that include the more-than-human.
The Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTOF) explains the processes with which firms set aspirations, evaluate firm performance relative to those aspirations, and change their strategies in response to attainment discrepancies. While foundational work acknowledged the important role of firms’ executives, few papers have theorized and studied when and how they matter. This is remarkable, considering that the BTOF’s processes require cognitive efforts, including retrieving external information and interpreting feedback, in which executives will likely differ. At the same time, scholars have raised their concerns on contrasting findings reported by prior research. Extending and testing theory on the role of executives through consideration of their individual attributes and biases may help bring reconciliation. This symposium showcases four studies, aiming to facilitate knowledge sharing and discussions on the role of executives in the BTOF. This symposium aspires to appeal to behavioral strategy researchers and other scholars interested in understanding how cognition shapes strategic decision-making.
The trust literature is at a mature stage of development, which can largely be attributed to the presence of clear conceptual models (e.g., Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995) that have received strong empirical support (Colquitt, Scott, & LePine, 2007). Although a strong conceptual consensus brings many benefits, an unintentional side effect is that scholars can become hesitant to look outside that paradigm. In recent years, trust scholars have increasingly observed that current models are silent on many critical trust dynamics at work and in society more generally (Baer & Colquitt, 2018; Dirks & de Jong, 2022; van der Werff, Legood, Buckley, Weibel, & de Cremer, 2019). Given these trends, a clear understanding of the causes and consequences of trust is more important than ever – not solely for academics, but also for practitioners and society as a whole (Dirks & de Jong, 2022). This symposium will highlight research on individual differences in trustors that affect their perceptions of trustworthiness, the potential benefits of distrust, the mechanisms of trust velocity for new hires, and the effects of gender on trust and trustworthiness. The purpose of our symposium is to extend established trust theory with new perspectives that use a variety of methodologies, hopefully inspiring scholars to take trust research into new directions.
Mental illness is a common health impairment, and in a given year, 1 in 5 North Americans will experience a mental-health-related concern. Although prevalent, stigma surrounding mental health remains a pervasive workplace challenge which negatively impacts employment for those facing mental-health challenges, such as mental illness. In addition, a lack of mental-health related support in the workplace contributes to lost productivity which can be costly to organizations. Given the pervasiveness and costs associated with mental health, there is a need to better understand employees' mental health experiences in the workplace context. The papers in our symposium contribute to the prominent body on mental health in the workplace, emphasizing employees' experience of mental health at work and the implications on job attitudes and performance. Each paper provides a unique perspective, including how experiencing mental-health-related stigma can affect leader emergence, how mental health can affect leadership pursuit, why managers' responses to poor mental health are essential to enhance employees' well-being, and what organizations can do to cultivate a supportive mental health environment. The symposium will conclude with a discussion on what organizational leaders can do to promote good mental health and prevent poor mental health, providing valuable insight for practitioners and researchers.
This symposium seeks to understand the strategies related to sociopolitical activism inside of firms as well as the consequences of that activism. In recent years, organizational leaders have publicly expressed positions on social and political matters not directly related to the firm’s primary business activities (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019), while employees have raised social, political, and moral concerns at work and protested a myriad of their organization’s practices and policies (e.g., Briscoe & Gupta, 2021; Davis & Kim, 2021). For this symposium, we curated four papers that contribute to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of sociopolitical activism inside firms. These papers provide new insights into how employee activists use contentious activism to target their own firms and how they react to leadership responses to this activism, how organizational leaders frame public stances on sociopolitical topics, and stakeholder reactions to such activism. The papers selected for this symposium shed new light on the complexity of how employees protest their own firms as well as the tradeoffs firm leaders experience when deciding how to express positions on sociopolitical matters.
This symposium explores repair and institutional healing, marked by longer-term change efforts that blend emotions, multimodality, and broader societal impact. Institutional repair work aims to preserve valued aspects of institutions while modifying other aspects that are unwanted or unsustainable. Collectively, the presentations in this symposium explore how repair work represents one approach to reclaiming an institution’s integrity by rebuilding, renewing, or healing it, leading to positive societal outcomes.
In this symposium, we bring together leading and emerging scholars to explore how decision makers assess competence in uncertainty environments. Specifically, the papers explore (1) how people develop beliefs about skill in environments that are either devoid of skill signals or in which signals of skill are noisy, (2) the decisions people make based on their attributions of skill, and (3) how managers are perceived when they communicate uncertainty in their decisions. Together, the papers in this symposium offer important empirical insights into the difficulty managers face in accurately assessing skill in uncertain environments. Practically, the collection of papers offers guidance to decision makers tasked with interpersonal decisions like whom to hire, fire, promote, and demote or which leaders to follow or to ignore.
The networks we build have immediate effects on our professional well-being. Individuals with fruitful networks tend to get more job offers, higher salaries, and better post-hiring outcomes such as fit, socialization, and mentorship opportunities (e.g., Bartus, 2001; Castilla, 2005; Fernandez et al., 2000; Granovetter, 1973). However, there are multiple socio-cultural and demographic factors that affect people’s intentions to network, the networking strategies they employ, and the way they utilize their networks for professional advancement. For instance, prior studies indicate that high-power individuals tend to express greater comfort with networking, whereas low-power individuals may view it as unacceptable behavior (Casciaro et al., 2014). People with high socioeconomic status also tend to rely on their networks during job searches, while others prefer to avoid mobilizing their social capital and secure a job on their own (Cao & Smith, 2021). Considering gender as a categorizing characteristic, past research shows that men tend to mobilize their networks during job search or broker successfully, while women can get penalized for agentically utilizing contacts (Brands & Kilduff, 2013). Although the right strides have been made to identify key demographic characteristics such as socio-economic status and gender and the role they play in social networks and networking, a lot remains misunderstood. Namely, do individuals’ perceptions of their own prestige affect how they create, maintain, and utilize their networks during job search? Do the motives that observers hold towards individuals who network and their intentions to help such individuals professionally impact social networking? The factors shaping individuals' experiences in forming, sustaining, and utilizing social networks continue to be elusive, with scientists grappling to comprehend the underlying reasons and devise interventions to mitigate differences that may arise from these different approaches to networks. This symposium takes a process perspective and explores the journey the ego and alters undergo during the social network evolution. Our session delves into the mechanisms that elucidate the diverse utilization of network ties, leading to distinct network evolutions. Moreover, we explore how these mechanisms vary across social or demographic characteristics to understand sources of inequality shaped in social networks and their evolution over time. The papers included explore how social comparisons at work affect job search intentions; how third-party attributions to why people network affect collaboration patterns, leadership perceptions, and likelihood to help; how third-party attributions to the merit of people who utilize their networks for job advancement determine third party’s subsequent behavior towards them at work, and finally, what social interventions can organizations perform to design the networks of their employees such that it enhances their search process and promotes inclusivity. In all, this symposium looks at the effects of various socio-cultural factors such as gender, motives, social standing, and prestige to commence to discern the complex patterns of networking and network evolution in the workplace.
Although bibliometric methods have recently become popular in organizational behavior literature, not all are created equally. This symposium highlights best practices in applying bibliometric methods across three research fields: work motivation, self-leadership, and emotions in entrepreneurship. The first study, analyzing 28,498 documents on work motivation, uses historiography to reveal 20 distinct literature clusters and emergent themes. The second study traces the evolution of self-leadership, employing historiography and bibliographic coupling to uncover areas for advancing the topic. The third study delves into emotions in entrepreneurship, scrutinizing over 2,000 articles to outline the field's development and pinpoint trends like emotional intelligence and mindfulness. These studies exemplify how bibliometric methods provide deep insights into organizational behavior, offering symposium attendees a comprehensive understanding of these techniques for navigating and interpreting extensive research landscapes.
Award Winners will be announced at the IM Division Awards and Recognition session.
This presentation will navigate the landscape of philanthropy, exploring the inequalities in American giving, the influence of religion on nonprofit dynamics, the coordination of philanthropic efforts in regions facing historical stigma, and competition in donation markets.
This presentation will share research on how stakeholder engagement strategies evolved during COVID-19, analyze government communication to moderate financial uncertainty, examine resilience within small island developing states, and explore global responses to international rankings and feedback.
This session delves into the historical dimensions of organizational narratives, memory construction, and the enduring legacies that shape organizational identities.
This session explores innovative collaboration, mentoring, and remote work approaches, focusing on the psychological, social, and value-based factors that shape these experiences.
As research on affect has gained popularity in organizational behavior over the past several decades, several challenges have emerged. This symposium is designed to address several of these in four presentations that represent advances to the affective literature. More specifically, the presenters will discuss research designed to challenge assumptions related to: (a) the elicitation of discrete emotions in experiments, (b) the nature and effects of emotional contagion on individuals observing the emotions of others, and (c) the conceptualization and operationalization of deep acting as a form of emotional labor and its effects on employee affect. The symposium contains a variety of different approaches including state-of-the-method review, experiments, and cross-sectional and longitudinal field studies to examine these phenomena. Taken together, these presentations challenge several assumptions in affect-related literatures and have potential implications for management scholars and/or practitioners.
In this symposium, we will examine a wide array of questions and hypotheses that focus on the people who conduct science -- as a complement to more established research traditions that focus on the publications and patents that people produce. Talks will cover topics that relate to a variety of career stages and background characteristics such as: What are the characteristics of scientists who are also inventors? How is Artificial Intelligence being integrated into crowd science projects? How does media coverage about research variably impact the authors of the research? Talks will also feature innovative data resources including one presentation that is able to examine the ways in which External Letters variably influence academic careers with respect to tenure and promotion decisions (particularly in relation to faculty who seek and gain one or more patents).
To truly bring a conflict to an end, it is important for disputants to reconcile through conversations, yet navigating the discussion of conflict is not a trivial pursuit. This symposium brings together four presentations exploring how beliefs, motives, and the way people communicate about conflicts impact conflict resolution. In the first presentation, Yeomans and colleagues offer an important advance in methods for detecting linguistic features of conflict expression. Using real conflict conversations, they show the precision of their coding manual and Natural Language Processing model in forecasting conflict dynamics and provide empirical support for conflict expression theory. In the second presentation, Chen and Chaudhry examine a novel psychological motive in conflict conversations: establishing a shared reality over relative blame. They demonstrate that whether disputants agree with the counterpart’s relative blame perception impacts how disputants respond after being blamed (i.e., apologizing or blaming). In the third presentation, Li, Batista, and Schroeder investigate how different perceptions of responsibility division arise in miscommunication. They test whether people hold speakers as more responsible than listeners, and whether people consider their counterparts to be more responsible than themselves. In the final presentation, Boland and Davidai explore how specific beliefs can lead people to avoid potentially conflictual conversations and find that people who hold zero-sum beliefs about politics are more likely to avoid political conversations. Taken together, this symposium highlights how conflict dynamics are affected by what people believe, what they want, and what they say in conversations, providing insights into actionable recommendations for conflict resolution.
In recent years, we have seen increasing interest in deglobalization in the global economy, accompanying major disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S.-China trade conflict. Yet much less scholarly effort has been spent on understanding this grand shift from globalization toward de-globalization. In particular, what factors triggered governments and companies to switch from benefiting from international expansion toward being concerned about the drawback and potential cost of international expansion? This symposium fosters the development of an important research agenda that helps us understand the incentives behind the shift from globalization toward deglobalization. It also reminds us of whether we are missing opportunities forgoing globalization. We believe the theoretical insights and empirical findings of this set of coherent research studies by leading scholars will not only have broader implications for firms’ strategic responses, management, and adaptation to both the globalization and deglobalization process in the future but also open up new exciting avenues of research.
The past few years have highlighted the necessity for management researchers to consider how bodily processes, specifically bodily processes unique to women, affect workers and workplaces (e.g., Bergman et al., 2023; Gabriel et al., 2022; Grandey, Gabriel & King, 2020). This presenter symposium on menstruation at work invites the Academy of Management community to think differently about people and their capabilities in organizations by focusing on an underrepresented but prevalent topic for organizational theory and practice. The menstruation (i.e., menstrual bleeding) and the menstrual cycle (i.e., 28-day recurrent cycle of sex hormones) is a topic fraught with shame and stigma, but it is embedded in organizational reality as a part of “experiences where work and nonwork blend (…) and [that] are brought directly into work” (Grandey et al., 2020, p. 22). Although menstruating people often try to mask their symptoms, passing as non-menstruating while they are at work (Sang, Remnant, Calvard & Myhill, 2021), those with menstrual problems cannot prevent negative aspects from entering the work domain (Motro, Ellis & Gabriel, 2019). The Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2024 theme “Innovating for the Future” invites members to examine the interplay of innovation, policy, and purpose as a lens for rethinking conventional ways of leading, managing, and organizing. For organizations to be dynamic and innovative, they are dependent on cognitive resources provided by employees. These individual resources are also naturally consumed by non-work-related tasks such as taking care of menstrual needs. In addition, cognitive resources and abilities fluctuate over the course of a woman's cycle. As such menstruation can consume resources to varying degrees by time and person (Motro et al., 2019). Following recent menstruation research (e.g., Grandey et al., 2020; Sang et al., 2021; Werner, Punzi & Tukenburg, 2023), we recognize menstruation as a distinctive issue inclusive of physical symptoms, stigma, shame, and social interactions, including those in the workplace. With this presenter symposium we aim to create insight about the connection between biological processes and specific problems regarding menstruation (e.g. endometriosis; Presentation 3) and behavior at work (e.g. motivation to lead and risk-taking behavior; Presentation 1 and 2). Building on this, we shed light on the contribution that organizations can make to establish better working conditions that take the female cycle into account (e.g. menstrual leave policies; Presentation 4). This symposium raises some the challenges menstruating people experience at work, what would help them feel more empowered in the workplace and what organizations can do to design and implement appropriate and effective measures that make a supportive workplace. Together with discussant, Dr. Mirjam Werner, this symposium aims to identify and review gaps in theory, policy, guidelines and practice that provide starting points for creating humane, powerful and innovative organizations and further research on the topic of menstruation and work.
Supporting employee growth is increasingly critical for organizations in the new world of work. Employees who experience growth are not only less likely to leave, but are also more likely to perform at their best (DeCarbo, 2023). Yet, a fragmented literature on growth at work limits our understanding of how employee growth is achieved and its impact on employees and organizations. This symposium brings together outstanding junior and senior academics who will present novel research insights on employee growth. Specifically, the set of papers included in the symposium explore how employees achieve growth from a number of perspectives, considering the mindsets, behaviors, and sensemaking that positively contribute to growth. Moreover, these papers, and the planned discussion, explore how each of these perspectives may learn and contribute to each other to form a more coherent perspective on growth and how it is achieved in organizations.
Geopolitical risk has emerged as an important factor in foreign investment decisions in recent years. The rise of geopolitical tensions worldwide and the fragmentation of relationships between countries have introduced new dimensions to foreign investment risks. MNEs and their managers are taking notice. Many have established dedicated roles to address geopolitical risk. For example, in 2023, the Financial Times reported that Goldman Sachs had launched a Global Institute to advise clients on geopolitical matters due to heightened demand. Similarly, Lazard established a geopolitical risk unit to “capitalize on global volatility.” The symposium will open with introductory keynote comments by two prominent scholars in the field, it will continue with four paper presentations, and it will conclude with a brief question-and-answer session with the audience. The ensuing discussion is envisioned to help advance both conceptual and empirical work on the management of geopolitical risk. We hope to also shed light on promising areas for further research that leverage both novel approaches to theory and explore new empirical settings.
As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations rushed to support their employees’ well-being. However, despite good intentions, few have taken a strategic approach, resulting in stress levels rocketing to an all-time high and a gap in perceived well-being efforts between employers and employees. The four papers in this symposium aim to offer employees, managers, and organizations theoretically informed and practically useful tools to address the challenges of the modern workplace with the goal of enhancing employee well-being and, in turn, individual and organizational performance. The first paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on knowledge workers, proposing coworking interventions that improve job satisfaction and reduce stress. The second paper compares the effectiveness of expressive and gratitude writing interventions on psychological well-being, challenging the universal benefits of expressive writing and emphasizing caution in its application. The third paper investigates factors influencing individuals' preference for algorithm-based artificial intelligence, revealing that reflective thinkers are more likely to appreciate algorithmic advisors, providing insights for organizations relying on AI-based technologies. The fourth paper explores the modification of the uncertainty mindset (UM) to enhance well-being and performance at work, revealing that fostering beliefs about uncertainty as an opportunity positively influences directed exploration. Led by Yuri Scharp, the discussion will assess implications for theory and practice, providing valuable feedback for researchers and practical insights for the audience.
Despite widespread recognition of its importance, numerous organizations still grapple with effectively implementing genuine diversity and inclusion (McKinsey, 2020). This discrepancy between aspiration and reality poses a pivotal challenge: How can organizations innovatively address contemporary challenges to enhance representation? Our sessions aim to dissect both the challenges and potential solutions for cultivating more representative environments at various stages of the organizational pipeline. Specifically, we will demonstrate diverse methods by which organizations can boost representation, ranging from harnessing feedback mechanisms to modifying organizational communication, identifying gaps in the pipeline stages, and understanding mentorship dynamics among individuals from working-class backgrounds. Additionally, our symposium features a diverse group of researchers, offering insights into how representation can permeate through the research process itself.
While the literature on gig work is expanding rapidly, many are the issues that need to be answered in order to fully understand the lived experiences of gig workers and illuminate the dynamics of gig work. Despite it is widely recognized that gig workers constitute an heterogenous workforce, for instance, seminal works have focused on finding similarities among gig workers across platforms, while the mechanisms behind different gig workers’ behaviors and perceptions are still widely obscure. Moreover, most of the literature focuses on what gig workers do individually on platforms, but not – or only cursorily – on how these workers manage the interplay between their online and offline activities. Specifically, comprehending how the online dimensions of work blur or integrate with offline aspects of gig workers’ lives – such as family condition or family needs, the presence of alternative, offline jobs, the cultural context of the community and country of origin – is of significant importance. This symposium addresses these issues by examining what happens behind and beyond platforms, and by presenting four papers looking at different gig workers’ experiences and different forms of interplay between online and offline aspects of gig work.
This symposium brings together a collection of four papers that extend the application of the tightness-looseness construct into the domain of management. These papers traverse a variety of topics, from unethical behavior, employee burnout, career motivation, to the creation of new business ventures. Each study contributes to a burgeoning body of literature that identifies tightness-looseness as a significant variable in understanding and navigating the complexities of management practices across diverse cultural landscapes.
Supporting this year’s annual meeting theme of “Innovating for The Future”, this presenter symposium seeks to discuss – and to stimulate discussion about – the interplay between firm innovation and their external environment and the subsequent implications for firms and society. We bring together four papers that make impactful contributions by constructing unique datasets to facilitate answering such important questions as: How do external regulatory and technological environments shape firms' technological trajectories? What role do young firms play in technology adoption in developing economies? How can firms influence their external technological environment to their own benefit?
This symposium aims to explore how different pillars of emotional intelligence – including awareness, motivation, emotion displays and adaptive behaviors based on emotions – can elevate or diminish relevant organizational outcomes. We emphasize the importance of understanding and managing one’s own and others’ emotions in using social prompts to enhance personal and social effectiveness. Four presentations look at how emotional intelligence shapes organizational outcomes, including leaders responding to followers’ negative emotions, employees deciding to stay or leave, and subtle cues affecting people perceptions. Using diverse methods and perspectives, these studies collectively provide a valuable perspective on how organizations can foster an emotionally intelligent culture to adapt and thrive in the face of future challenges.
Our five presentations aim to address issues to do with AI research in the field of HR by providing evidence from varied but rigorous approaches into studying the subject matter. In so doing, this symposium will help to set the course for future research on AI in HR by highlighting overlooked phenomena and presenting evidence from novel contexts. Specifically, the symposium reveals the significant potential for future researchers to advance the field by building theories grounded in novel and relevant HR-specific phenomena, coupled with methodological innovations in design and measurement approaches tailored to the study of such phenomena.
Attention to workaholism has grown significantly in both research and the popular press. Workaholism has been linked to negative individual, organizational, and interpersonal outcomes. Recent research has sought to refine the conceptualization and measurement of workaholism. To further our understanding, the current symposium presents workaholism in multiple different organizational contexts: family businesses, leader – subordinate relationships, and within teams. Expert discussants will share practical and research implications as well as future research directions.
Gender differences in career trajectories and representation in top- tier positions persist today, despite broader progress toward achieving equality in society. A robust body of evidence points to a combination of supply-side (i.e., differences in preferences) and demand-side (i.e., biases and unfair barriers) processes perpetuating gender gaps in career advancement. To develop a comprehensive understanding of these processes, it is crucial to take a multi-level perspective and consider the interplay between men and women and their firms, networks, and occupational contexts. This symposium contributes to this growing area of work by bringing together quantitative and qualitative work that builds and tests theory for how gendered organizational, occupational, and network contexts impact various aspects of men’s and women’s performance, experiences, and choices in the workplace.
The maintenance of meaningful work is challenging and riddled with setbacks and struggles. However, as scholars acknowledge the challenges inherent in the pursuit of meaningful work, it is also notable that many forces also have the ability to promote, or enhance, work meaningfulness, potentially resulting in myriad tradeoffs. As forces at various analytical levels both foster and impede meaningful work, it is vital to understand these influential forces as well as how to navigate them. The presentations in this symposium address this important topic by discussing the many enablers and inhibitors for meaningful work and exploring how, despite a number of challenges, we can build more bridges toward meaningful work.
The symposium’s goal is to bring together and showcase new research on how novel ideas, most prominently within entrepreneurship, are evaluated. This research informs which new individuals, ventures, and ideas are allocated resources and how inequality is produced in the opportunity to participate in innovation. We combine theoretical perspectives on how evaluators assess an idea’s quality under uncertainty and the mechanisms that inform evaluative outcomes, including work on structural conditions of an evaluation process.
A central theme of organization studies is to understand how organizations composed of multiple actors each with different perspectives and motivations achieve coordination (March & Simon, 1958; Thompson, 1967; Mintzberg, 1980; Puranam, 2018). Whether it's the structured hierarchies within bureaucratic organizations (Weber, 1978; Monteiro & Adler, 2022) or self-managing entities without direct managerial control (Ashby, 1947; Lee & Edmondson, 2017), coordination is an essential, albeit additional, function beyond the primary operations of any organization. While organizational scholars have accumulated a substantial body of knowledge about coordination functions within human organizations, our symposium seeks to broaden the discussion to encompass a wider array of systems requiring coordination, where organizational scholars can derive novel insights. For instance, bee colonies, a remarkable super-organism that might seem to operate seamlessly, need coordination beyond genetic programming to adapt to the environment. Similarly, in bacteria, regulatory genes function akin to managers, orchestrating the activities within the cell. These examples from nature underscore the universality and importance of studying coordination processes beyond human society. Therefore, we brought presenters from a variety of fields to this symposium, each of whom highlights the systems and definition of coordination functions in organizations across diverse systems including firms, self-organizing system, biological systems, and federal agencies. While each system faces a different set of tasks or problems to be resolved, our symposium centers on developing a uni? ed science of coordination functions and its associated structure to answer the following questions: What are the driving factors behind the cost of the coordination? Can we predict the amount of regulatory costs an organism or organization needs based on its size, function, and complexity? Building on the theme of coordination across diverse systems, our symposium invites cross-disciplinary experts to mark a notable departure from the traditional themes at Academy of Management’s (AOM). This multidisciplinary dialogue integrates biological paradigms with organizational theory. We believe that this fresh perspective enriches AOM’s discourse, challenging its members to expand their analytical scope. This expansion is designed to deepen our collective grasp of organizational practices, which is aligned with the AOM’s dedication to the advancement of management sciences. Finally, our symposium is poised to cultivate an intellectual community that embraces and explores these innovative intersections.
This symposium aims to shed light on how creative industries are conducive to some advanced developments in Organization Theories. On the one hand, it aims to understand how actors achieve several outcomes related to innovation, performances related to success, and strategy development. On the other hand, this symposium explores how wrongdoings reshape the labor market in the context of creative industries. The symposium will present a unique opportunity to better understand different and complex dynamics within creative industries that lead to the development and implementation of strategies, and their effect on different outcomes such as innovation, individual success, and performance. This symposium also explores how mitigation actions to wrongdoings and innocent practices affect their labor market in creative industries. Overall, the symposium aims to explore complex and idiosyncratic mechanisms that profoundly impact performances and careers in such industries, advancing the field of organizational theory. The four papers in our symposium address these issues with a complementary set of methods and across a wealth of insightful contexts.
This presenter symposium explores the role of Makerspaces in fostering entrepreneurial innovation, particularly focusing on how these shared environments, where individuals can experiment and quickly learn to innovate, may act as catalysts for entrepreneurial activities. The presenter symposium addresses a gap in examining the prospective societal impact of these habitats, how they are evolving, and how their inhabitants behave in the early stages of entrepreneurial action. Key contributions of the symposium include the exploration of how Makerspaces function as entrepreneurship support organizations, the analysis of the Makerspaces population in the US, the role of Makerspaces in fostering inclusivity and diversity, the impact of Makerspaces on the identity evolution of venture founders and the details the stage-processes which transform innovators in nascent entrepreneurs. Overall, the symposium sets out to theorize and provide empirical evidence on how increased participation in Makerspaces can lead to more individuals engaging in early stages of entrepreneurship and how this could have positive societal impacts, aligning with the broader theme of 'Innovating for the Future'.
This symposium presents a focused exploration of advancements in leadership measurement, transitioning from traditional questionnaire-based methods to the application of AI and machine learning. Recognizing the foundational value of classical psychometrics, the symposium represents its use in the development of leadership items and scales, as well as works on the use of AI for these important topics. This symposium particularly explores the multifaceted nature of leadership and addresses issues of construct redundancy and bias. The event features a series of presentations that collectively highlight a transformative approach to leadership measurement. These include an in-depth analysis of followership measurement, the application of AI for developing refined leadership scales, an exploration of the interrelations among various leadership constructs, and a discussion on identifying and mitigating biases in these new methodologies. Concluding with insights from two experts in the field of leadership measurement, the symposium aims to integrate traditional insights with modern technological advancements, setting a direction for future research that promises a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of leadership.
This symposium brings together four papers that explore the evolving landscape of moral conflict and harm perceptions in contemporary workplaces and academic settings. This symposium sheds light on the nuanced ways organizations, and their members navigate ethical dilemmas in an era marked by heightened sensitivity to harm and aversive emotional experiences.
Award Winners will be announced at the IM Division Awards and Recognition session.
This presentation will dissect the intricacies of public and private sector convergence, exploring how partnerships drive value creation, the interplay between profit and defense, the politicization of federal contracting, and collaborative efforts to mitigate educational disparities.
This presentation will compare business and nonprofit organizations on the basis of gender diversity and efficiency, their ability to attract talent, and their differences in perceptions of sustainability.
This session focuses on the ethical foundations, cultures, and practices that shape organizational behavior and outcomes. By bringing together these research streams, this session aims to deepen our understanding of the ethical dimensions of organizational life, highlighting the importance of compassion, culture, and socially responsible practices in driving positive organizational outcomes and creating value for stakeholders.
The idea that structure —explicit and predetermined rules that are imposed to guide behavior in situations and tasks— can elevate and improve performance is well established in the field of management. However, what is largely absent from the literature is an investigation of individuals’ perceptions and attitudes towards the structures that are often embedded in tasks and situations necessary for our work. As perceptions are consequential antecedents of behavior, how individuals perceive these structured devices may have important implications for the tasks and experiences they choose to engage in and support. The papers in this symposium build on prior work on the topic of structure by making three important contributions: 1) they begin to investigate how people perceive the impact of adding structure on enjoyment and effectiveness; 2) they demonstrate how structure can provide interpersonal benefits— topic preparation improves conversations and precommitment strategies facilitate the development of interpersonal trust; and 3) they show how structural attributions shape perceptions of others, the self, and support for policy. Ultimately, the work presented in this symposium highlights the power of perceptions and how they might hinder our ability to capitalize on the benefits that structure can confer in organizations and society.
Employee mobility scholars have demonstrated a longstanding interest in the performance implications of internal and external hiring. Scholars examining direct comparisons have found that internal hires perform better initially, with external hires eventually closing the performance gap over time. Meanwhile, scholars focusing on the integration of external hires have documented factors (e.g., co-mobility, external social capital, hiring firm capabilities) that ease the performance challenges external hires face as they enter new firm. This symposium presents four papers that extend this work in several ways. First, the papers highlight that the outcomes associated with moves across jobs and firms are heavily shaped by a variety of contextual factors, including organizational strategy and structure, the status dynamics within and between work groups, and the availability of mobility options outside a firm. Additionally, the papers examine the implications of internal and external mobility for a range of outcomes, extending the focus from new hires’ individual job performance (e.g., performance ratings) to include differences in exploratory innovation and new hires’ socialization experiences at the individual level, quality rankings at the law practice level, and workplace accidents at the firm level. The authors of these papers examine their research questions across a variety of empirical contexts (e.g., health care, legal services, multi-business firms) and draw on a variety of data sources, including administrative data, market intelligence data, and company survey data, which collectively provides future scholars with a roadmap of potential options for studying mobility-related questions.
Among the myriad grand challenges in today’s world as highlighted by the AOM 2024 conference theme, economic inequality is one of prime concern (Bapuji et al., 2020). While some people enjoy professional and economic success in society and the workplace, many are classified as the “working poor” and face enduring financial strains (Leana et al., 2012). Traditionally, organizational researchers have used personality and other individual differences to predict job outcomes and career success (Ng et al., 2005; Seibert et al., 2024) but have rarely examined the long-term, fundamental impact of work on the person. With widening economic inequality, a pressing research question is how people change as a result of their career success, or the lack thereof. Using innovative research methods and data sources with high ecological validity, the current symposium addresses this question with four presentations that investigated the longitudinal, reciprocal relationships between career success/stress (extrinsic and intrinsic career success, chronic underemployment, and job/financial stress) and changes in individual characteristics previously considered stable, including personality traits, goals, and values. Collectively, this set of studies contributes to the organizational literature by answering the recent call for management scholars to study income and income inequality as drivers of organizational behavior (Leana & Meuris, 2015) and further expands the outcomes of interest from short-term cognition, affect, and behavior to long-term changes and development of the person. Examining changes in personality and other individual characteristics as a result of work experiences and illuminating the dynamics of individual differences, rather than treating them as stable dispositions, represent a major paradigm shift for understanding worker behavior and experience in organizational research (Judge, 2023). This set of studies also advances careers research by incorporating a temporal perspective on career success and investigating the underemployed and financially strained—a previously understudied population (Seibert et al., 2024). Practically, findings from this symposium have important implications for the management and development of employees as well as effective utilization of human capital in society.
In response to career scholars’ increasing attentiveness to the complex outcomes of boundaryless careers (Guan, Arthur, Khapova, Hall & Lord, 2019) and the urgency in policymakers’ search for innovative solutions to the fast changes in labor markets (Gmyrek, Berg & Bescond, 2023), our paper symposium provides the space to discuss opportunities and challenges associated with boundaryless careers. We bring together scholars conducting conceptual and empirical research in less-studied career contexts, offering fresh insights and new avenues for future research into boundaryless careers. The presentations in our symposium directly examine mechanisms that can lead to greater inequalities or enhanced opportunities in boundaryless careers. While we identify challenges, our symposium also offers a note of hope identifying mechanisms that can lead to greater opportunities for employees, particularly those likely to be disadvantaged.
Networks and Culture represent two foundational theoretical lenses through which scholarship in organizational theory has historically understood and analyzed organizational phenomena. The former focuses on the patterns and formal properties of social relationships in which organizations – or actors within them – are embedded; the latter on the sets of meanings, local practices, repertoires, narratives, beliefs and norms that organizational actors create, adopt and use. While most contributions within organizational theory that consider networks and culture as their explanatory lenses tend to privilege one or the other in isolation, several recent studies situate themselves at their nexus, considering how they mutually constitute each other in organizational contexts, or how their interaction can illuminate our understanding of a host of organizational phenomena. This symposium proposes the presentation of four scholarly papers, each of which examines a facet of the interplay between networks and culture, and brings together scholars of organizational theory, sociology, and strategy whose work reflects a theoretical interest within this space. It aims at advancing scholarly conversation and promote theoretical synthesis in organizational research in this area, exploring, in particular, the agentic mechanisms that individuals and organizations devise in navigating the opportunities or the constraints configured by the cultural and social structural relational spaces in which they are embedded.
Third parties, or people who learn about or observe others’ mistreatment at work without being directly involved (Skarlicki & Kulik, 2005; Treviño, 1992), play a crucial role in victims’ future workplace outcomes following the initial mistreatment (Dodson et al., 2023). However, the intricacies of the relationship between victims and third parties are under-addressed in the current literature, and we believe scholars have merely scratched the surface of understanding how third-party responses affect victims of workplace misconduct or mistreatment. In this symposium, we present four papers that share novel findings related to how third parties respond in the aftermath of workplace mistreatment and highlight opportunities to continue to expand our understanding of complex interpersonal processes that occur in organizations between third parties, victims, perpetrators, and other organizational stakeholders following mistreatment.
Much has been unveiled about the impact of faultlines on team functioning over the past two decades of research. However, most studies only focused on faultlines within small groups, while dismissing the possibility of faultlines at higher levels. This symposium aims to advance our comprehension of how faultlines operate at the macro-level. Firstly, Danneels and Vestal delve into the influence of demographic and information-based faultlines within top management teams on a firm's exploration of new products, with a focus on examining constructive conflict as a potential boundary condition. Secondly, Shin, You, and Chung investigate the role of individual board member power as a moderating factor in the impact of faultlines within top management teams on board member departures. Following this, Su and Hou concentrate on faultlines within film production teams and their influence on the success of films, with particular attention to the individual power of film directors. The fourth presentation by Lawrence and Wittman explores organizational faultlines in the context of intra-organizational communities, examining how being a member of these communities can shape employees' career expectations and networks. Lastly, Yang, Bezrukova, and Spell examine the impact of state-level faultlines in the United States during the COVID pandemic on people's health practices, subsequently influencing pandemic and economic outcomes.
Entrepreneurs from under-represented groups, inherently face inequalities in starting and succeeding in their entrepreneurial endeavors. In recent years, significant progress has been made in understanding the entrepreneurial challenges faced by diverse under-represented groups, including racial minorities, women, immigrants, and justice-impacted individuals. While such previous work has been influential in identifying barriers such as restricted access to human, social, or financial resources (Kim, Aldrich, and Keister 2006) and biased evaluators (Fairlie and Robb 2008) faced by under-represented entrepreneurs, we have limited knowledge on how institutional barriers – ranging from formal regulations to informal societal and cultural norms – shape and aggravate entrepreneurial inequalities. Thus, our symposium aims to address the underexplored role and impact of diverse and novel institutional contexts in shaping entrepreneurial inequality for under-represented groups. This symposium addresses this question by focusing on different under-represented populations including individuals with criminal records, women, and racial minorities, leveraging a diverse set of experimental and archival methods. Each paper in our symposium explores distinct and novel institutional contexts encountered by under-represented groups such as formal regulations on financial access for individuals with criminal records, informal legacies from historical slavery, social and cultural norms around women entrepreneurs in Mexico, and gender bias in the start-up employee market. Our presenters further showcase novel consequences of such institutional contexts, by documenting that institutional barriers to entrepreneurship not only leads to stunted entry and success by under-represented entrepreneurs, but also perpetuate inequalities in unforeseen areas by exacerbating gender-bias in innovation and increasing crime among the most vulnerable populations. These presentations collectively broaden our understanding of the impact of institutional barriers on under-represented entrepreneurs, examining novel mechanisms across a variety of institutional contexts as well as unique consequences. Through our symposium, we hope to underscore the importance of creating inclusive formal and informal institutional ecosystems, which are crucial for leveling the playing field in entrepreneurship.
Human capital is a key source of competitive advantage for organizations, and new ventures are not an exception. However, hiring tends to be more challenging for new ventures than for older and larger firms. The emergence and rapid development of online platforms suitable for recruitment alleviated some of those challenges, but many remain to be tackled. The complex dynamics of entrepreneurial labor markets have attracted increasing attention and curiosity among scholars, and recent years witnessed growing research at the crossroads of strategy, human capital, and entrepreneurship. This symposium invites scholars interested in topics related to entrepreneurship and strategic human capital to present and discuss their views on the demand- and supply-sides of the entrepreneurial labor market. By adopting a two-sided approach to the examination of factors related to startups’ attraction of joiners, we hope to open conversations and avenues for future research with the objective of shedding light on the multiple mechanisms that contribute to improving the match between founders and high-quality joiners.
Digital transformation is expected to reshape local service delivery, organizations, and governance fundamentally across the globe. In many countries, local government is the most significant tier of public service delivery, ensuring proximity to citizens and a key player of digital transformation. While there is ample research on the theme of digital transformation of and in local governments, it is a matter of concern and criticism that in current comparative research concerning the digital transformation of the public sector, local levels of government have been insufficiently investigated. Addressing this shortcoming, the aim of this paper symposium is three-fold. First, it aims to make a first step towards taking stock of recent developments in the area of digital transformation in local governments. This is achieved by presenting the current literature on the topic based on a structured review. Second, it aims to showcase the breadth of the research topic, with respect to different branches of local government, geographical breadth (Europe, Asia and Africa) and the different organizational and governance settings in which digital transformation takes place. Third, it aims to discuss further avenues for research against the backdrop of particular characteristics of the branches of local governments, as well as developments in the wider institutional and social context in which they operate.
Despite the growing literature on AI, there are still important questions to answer about its impact on companies. For AI to change our work lives, it can depend on complementary organizational change to translate technological change into a change of daily work routines. Failure to scrutinize the organizational adjustments companies make in response to these technological advances will lead to an incomplete comprehension of the evolution of work dynamics. We lack an understanding of the barriers that prevent companies from integrating AI into their current work processes, the areas where reorganization contributes to overcoming these barriers, and identify the mechanisms whereby organizational change complements AI adoption. We need to better understand how AI is redefining the boundaries of a company, specifically how they are changing the organization of work both inside and outside the firm. This symposium contains new research aimed at filling this research gap on the new frontiers of organizing work within firms. Each project offers fresh perspectives for the successful integration of AI within the existing information processing routines of the firm.
This session explores the nuanced role of cognitive diversity in team and organizational performance, focusing on contrasting perspectives and emerging research. Cognitive diversity, defined as variations in thought processes, perceptions, and information processing, is generally perceived as beneficial for team decision-making and organizational value, as supported by studies from McKinsey and Deloitte, amongst others. However, recent literature suggests that its effectiveness is context-dependent. For example, firms with an innovator strategy or those in less competitive environments may benefit less from cognitive diversity. This complexity is further highlighted in startup contexts, where the role of early joiners and non-founding employees becomes significant. Empirical studies, such as those by Sako, Qian, & Verhagen (2021), and theoretical models from the organizational learning literature, propose a reevaluation of decision-making processes and the importance of leveraging knowledge diversity. The session underscores the importance of recognizing cognitive diversity's nuanced impacts, particularly in startups and innovative environments.
This symposium is aimed at building and expanding this stream of research by bringing together four papers that coalesce around the main theme of unintended antecedents and consequences of psychological safety. Specifically, the papers in this symposium examine the utilization of psychological safety in high-performing teams, the curvilinear effects of team psychological safety on creative performance, leader’s gaslighting as an antecedent of psychological safety, and associations between psychological safety and receipt of incivility from coworkers. Following the presentations, Dr. Zhike Lei, a renowned scholar in the field of psychological safety, will provide a synthesis and discussion of the papers themselves and broader research trends in the literature.
The intersection of identity and creativity offers a set of nested puzzles: identity seemingly provides stability for creators but also seems to require creators to destabilize their identities to sustain creativity. The papers in this symposium explore managing identity boundaries in creative work, the influence of creator occupational identity on autonomy, how the degree of creative and personal identity integration affects creative recognition, the influence of leader creative catalyst identity on the ability to act as a creative catalyst, and identity conflicts in entrenched organizational creative identity.
This presenter symposium brings together five pioneering papers that dissect intersectional dynamics of self-presentation within organizational contexts, particularly as they relate to Black identity in the U.S. and Central America. Each paper presents a novel perspective on the ways in which hair and other aspects of appearance shape and are shaped by racialized, gendered, and classed experiences in the workplace. These works highlight systemic gendered racism (Wingfield, 2008) and establish the need for additional research examining the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational implications of cultural expectations, norms, and values on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belongingness.
Humanity is facing major global challenges and finds itself at divergent cross-roads of precarious consequences. The disruptive change triggered by the global pandemic has called into question much of our settled views about how workplaces and other social institutions are supposed to operate. We are facing crisis in which we no longer feel that we can control the situation. Now even a bigger threat looms large on humanity’s horizon sparked by growing geopolitical polarities and incessant wars of narratives, necessitating to choose between self-annihilation and peaceful co-existence. Organizations and leaders can play a key role in helping us choose wisely between peaceful co-existence and no existence. It means, above all, peace for us all and our loved ones, a chance for our children to grow up as happy and useful citizens rather than to end their days in wooden boxes on distant battlefields. During these high-intensity moments, we must build on the lessons we have learned so far and help leaders and organizations to embrace innovative principles and values to not only survive but also to thrive during turbulent times. The symposium draws upon various wisdom and contemplative traditions of the world in leading organizations to harness peaceful co-existence.
Recognizing how employees embark on a multifaceted "idea journey," encompassing intricate social processes following the inception of their creative ideas (Amabile & Pratt, 2016; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017; Rouse, 2020), has become increasingly pivotal. Now in its fourth year since the 81st Academy of Management Annual Meeting in 2021, this symposium aims to continue the productive conversation among scholars and practitioners in examining creativity in its entirety. We seek to discuss recent advancements in creativity literature connected to other important research areas such as team dynamics, diversity, and human-AI interactions using a variety of methods and thus, delve deeper into the creative journey from ideation to evaluation.
Entrepreneurship is a central economic driver that leads to technological advancements and new business opportunities. However, entrepreneurship is an arena fraught with uncertainty, and entrepreneurs have to make various decisions under these uncertain conditions. In building a new venture, important characteristics that require investigation include the factors affecting entry, the team, the capital, and the idea itself, among other factors. Taken under uncertain conditions, these factors fundamentally impact the outcomes of the new venture and could dictate the potential direction the new ventures may take. Perhaps the highest uncertainty could be attributed to the very early stages of the new venture creation process, where even the idea and the team are still prone to changes. Despite some studies documenting the various stages of the new venture creation process, a dearth of studies zoom into the very early stages of the new venture creation process to shed light on how the decisions made during the pre-entry and early stages affect the new venture outcomes. Studying the very early stages of the venture creation process could provide critical insights that can potentially inform the strategic decisions that shape entrepreneurial journeys. Through the presentations and discussion of the proposed symposium, which involves both qualitative and quantitative studies, we aim to shed light on the factors affecting critical decisions made at the pre-entry and early- stage process of new venture creation as well as the potential outcomes of these decisions for new venture outcomes and success.
Recent work suggests that the political partisanship of workers influences how firms engage with pressing social issues, and even how they fare financially. Little is known, however, regarding the extent to which workers are sorted by partisanship across workplaces or the underlying processes driving this sorting. The purpose of this symposium is to draw attention to ongoing scholarly efforts to address these questions. Scholars will present cutting edge research on this topic, often demonstrating how they leverage ideas from political science to address questions core to management and strategy research. An expert-led discussion and audience Q+A will follow. This symposium will be of particular interest to those interested in human capital strategy, corporate sociopolitical activism, and labor market segregation.
Recent public discourse and media coverage have highlighted misconduct in and by startups, revealing a complex landscape where innovation and rapid scaling sometimes transgress ethical and legal standards. High- profile cases have brought to light issues such as misrepresentation of product capabilities, financial fraud, and employee mistreatment. These instances are not isolated cases but rather indicators of a systemic problem within the startup ecosystem. Startups, often under pressure to achieve rapid growth and satisfy investors, may neglect essential ethical guidelines and regulatory frameworks. This behavior not only threatens their long-term viability but also poses significant risks to stakeholders and the broader industry. This symposium includes diverse research focused on misconduct in the context of starups. It illuminates widespread issues propelled by investor expectations, operational pressures, and the unique dynamics in startups. The collective research offers insights into the external perceptions and structural pressures faced by startups, leading to ethical dilemmas. These studies provide a thorough understanding of the risks and consequences of misconduct in startups, considering both internal and broader industry contexts. The findings underscore the need for a holistic approach in evaluating and mitigating risks in the startup sector, taking into account not just the actions of individual startups but also the wider effects of industry practices and perceptions.
This symposium aims to explore the dynamics of organizational errors and failures in an integrated manner, departing from the traditional approach of studying these concepts separately. It will feature four papers employing diverse theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and levels of analysis across various empirical contexts. Together, these papers will address a compelling set of questions, significantly advancing our understanding of organizational errors and failures, as well as how organizations respond to and learn from these challenges. Based on the dynamic model of organizational error and failure, each author will delve into each component of this dynamic with an individual focus on error sharing, learning from failure, resilience, and organizational confidence.
While decades of research have demonstrated that networks, through their structural configurations, powerfully influence people’s behaviors, attitudes, and outcomes, recent work has sought to better understand the role of individuals in shaping network processes. There are increasing appeals to devote greater attention to the differences individuals exhibit in establishing, managing, and navigating social relations. Accumulated evidence underlines that 1) individuals may be able to actively position themselves in the network and that 2) agency and purposive action may look different for certain individuals despite occupying similar network positions. In response to these emerging discussions, our symposium aims to contribute to a better understanding of individual agency in network theory. Questions include: What role do individuals play in shaping the process of network evolution? And, how do these dynamics impact the distribution of social capital (positive or negative) among actors within networks? This line of work provides a promising starting point for network agency research. Our presenters’ research highlights that a productive conceptualization of individual agency within organizational networks should be multifaceted. People might strategically leverage social relations and network relations for their own sake without meaningfully changing the structure of their networks. They can also take actions that meaningfully shape the architecture of their networks, intentionally or otherwise. During the processes of individuals exerting agency in shaping their social relations and exploiting network-related advantages, numerous potential mechanisms exist and should be systematically elaborated.
Workplace mistreatment research has seen a surge of interest in recent years, and much progress has been made in construct definition, conceptualization, and theoretical development. However, arguably, relevant research methods to study these constructs have not developed at the same rate. Workplace mistreatment constructs are multifaceted, including such issues as bullying, harassment, discrimination, incivility, mobbing, and many others. They come with different requirements for studying them effectively. In the current presenter symposium, a group of four presentations advances methodological issues in workplace mistreatment research.
The five presentations tackle different questions about the vulnerability associated with organizational life. The session begins with defining the construct space and exploring what we currently know about vulnerability—what it is and what it is not. The symposium then focuses on trust—an area of management research that includes vulnerability in its major theories (e.g., Mayer et al., 1995). Vulnerability and trust are discussed through the perspective of stress, in which the vulnerability experienced by trustors is explained using principles of cognitive appraisal. Additionally, vulnerability is conceptualized temporally, in which the duration of vulnerability after information sharing helps to explain the relationship between transparency and trust. Finally, the symposium presentations end with empirical studies of underprivileged workers and their experiences with AI-mediated HRM, as well as low-wage workers and how volatile pay influences their well-being. Following the formal presentations, the discussant will then lead a conversation with the audience and presenters that integrates each respective set of insights.
A variety of occupational aspects and factors have been much changed since the unexpected global crisis (e.g., Covid-19 pandemic) and the advancement of artificial intelligence. Despite research efforts and interests in those new areas, these happenings paradoxically revealed that emotion regulation which features human beings is still important across diverse workplaces and technological breakthrough cannot substitute for the roles of employees’ emotion regulation in workplaces. Given the importance of emotion regulation at work and the Annual Meeting theme of "Innovating for the Future: Policy, Purpose, and Organizations," we are interested in how emotion regulation functions at work. This symposium focuses on emotion regulation, defined as the process by which an individual forms, interprets, and modifies a specific feeling in one’s social/work context (Grandey, 2000). Emotion, as one of the key components in occupational and social contexts, orients an individual’s attitudes and behaviors in specific directions (Spector & Fox, 2002). It affects the way organizational members manage their feelings according to social norms and expectations. Hence, emotion regulation becomes important to employees, managers, and their organizations because effectively regulating emotions interconnects with and influences individual and collective performance at work. The main purpose of our symposium is to attract scholars to pay more attention on emotion regulation, encompassing its potential effects across work and non-work areas, and delve into the challenges and consequences of this pervasive but understudied phenomenon. This collection of studies investigates various occupational contexts in which emotion regulation plays its unique, significant roles in relation to several work outcomes. By attempting to look into those aspects from multiple theoretical backgrounds, this symposium contributes to enhancing our understanding of emotion regulations for employees, managers, and organizations.
The workplace of the future is evolving to become not only increasingly digitized but also more diverse in its makeup. A report from McKinsey estimated that in 2020 organizations collectively spent $7.5 billion investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (DEI), predicting that number to more than double to $15.4 billion by 2026 (McKinsey & Company, 2023). At the same time, Deloitte’s 2023 Global Technology Leadership Study estimated that the average organization dedicates 5.49% of revenue to investing in technology (Deloitte Insights, 2023). These numbers point to the dual importance of diversity and technology in the modern organization. However, little work by organizational scholars considering the dual impact of increasing diversity and technological advancement in organizations, and how organizations can best prepare for this future. In order to innovate for a better future, we must consider technological innovation in tandem with goals such as increasing diversity, making organizations more equitable, and implementing fairness as a default. The four presentations in this symposium offer multiple perspectives on the key issues facing organizations of the future when it comes to diversity, equity, and technology, as well as offering potential tools and solutions that organizations can leverage as they try to adapt to the future of work. The first presentation explores how the introduction of AI-based large language models such as ChatGPT may change the landscape of organizations in a way that meaningfully impacts intergroup interactions. The second presentation also explores how AI may change organizations, examining the differential consequences of AI for members of different racial groups. The third presentation zooms out a bit, offering a novel theoretical model of how bias emerges in Machine Learning Models, and what organizations can do to prevent it. Finally, the fourth presentation looks towards the future with empirically-tested solutions for how we might better understand one another’s experiences as our organizations continue to diversify.
This symposium showcases four papers that draw on a diverse array of theoretical perspectives to examine the rise of disruptive technologies such as cell-cultivated meat, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), artificial intelligence, and digital platforms. Collectively, the presentations in this symposium shed light on a variety of phenomena—including questions of how technologies that disrupt existing markets become legitimated over time; how technological advancements redefine the relationships between individuals, organizations, and the idea of what constitutes expertise; and how striving for ‘better futures’ drives the emergence of novel technological ideas and practices. The symposium integrates both macro- and micro-level perspectives to better understand the implications of novel technologies for organizations, markets, and fields. Taken together, the symposium aims to bring together scholars from various backgrounds to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on the pervasive implications of technological disruption for organizing.
This presentation will share research on the complexities of state-owned enterprises, examining their political evolution, sale strategies, gender pay disparities, and their financial sustainability.
Listening to music while working is ubiquitous in contemporary organizations. While employees report enjoying listening to music and working better with it, the extant literature offers contradictory evidence that music can have positive, negative, or no effects on performance. In other words, the relationship between music and performance is complex and complicated. This symposium seeks to bring clarity to this relationship by introducing four recent scholarly works on the relationship between music and performance. Specifically, this symposium asks one big question: When, why, and how does music affect employee performance? Four presenters seek to bring clarity to this question using various methods (e.g., experimental, ESM, meta-analytical), and considering aspects of the person (e.g., personality, depletion levels), the music (e.g., volume, complexity, familiarity), the task (e.g., simplicity/complexity), and the broader work environment (e.g., person-environment fit). The symposium will conclude with a discussion that highlights opportunities for integration and new directions for future research and seeks to stimulate conversations among the audience.
Whether employees express (i.e., voice) or withhold (i.e., silence) their ideas, questions, opinions, and concerns at work affects individual and collective development and well-being. Employee voice is a precondition for employees to realize their potential, for organizations to deal with current management challenges (e.g., inclusion of forced and voluntary migration, diversification of life-style choices, dynamization of innovation), and it is essential for the functioning of current management strategies (e.g., total quality management, agile teams) that draw upon proactive and empowered workers. If, in turn, employees do not want to or feel that they cannot address critical issues or make suggestions for change, unhealthy, inefficient, unsafe, and toxic work environments endure and management gives away potential in the form of valuable contributions from diverse perspectives. Moreover, as media reports show time and again, such silence enables unethical practices including fraud, abuse, and discrimination to persist over time, harming cohorts of people repeatedly and at times over many years. Notably, cases of silence and their detrimental effects are not only observed in the corporate world or in singular countries, they also happen in sports teams, educational establishments, entertainment, academia, religious institutions, law enforcement agencies, and the military all over the world. Given that silence has been identified as hampering the sustainable development of organizations and societies in a broad variety of countries and contexts, surprisingly little systematic knowledge is available on the role of context as an antecedent of silence, and as a factor that influences the effects of more proximal antecedents of silence. In this symposium, five talks provide integrative and exploratory approaches to advance understanding of the role of context for the emergence and endurance of silence in organizations. In an extended discussion, Elizabeth Morrison – a central researcher on silence in organizations – will reflect on the journey the concepts of voice and silence have taken during the last 25 years and provide an idea of where the field might head to. The discussion will then open and we invite the presenters and audience to elaborate on challenges and opportunities that context provides to advance silence and voice research and intervention.
Academic publications on careers date back to the early 20th century. One of the earliest publications, for example, is Parson's trait and factor theory, which was developed in the early 1900s but not published until after his death in 1909. The continued interest in career studies since then is not surprising, as the "evolving sequence of a person's work experiences over time" (Arthur et al., 1989, p. 4) has also developed along with spatial, ontic and temporal changes in the context of organizations (Gunz & Mayrhofer, 2017). However, taking a critical look at the publications in career research, a majority of the studies refer to the careers of middle-class, middle-aged, Caucasian, Catholic, male career actors, preferably MBA graduates. Indeed, this focus is WEIRD (Heinrich et al., 2010) – it reflects the generalization of the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic population to the rest of the world. This is even though Parsons already in 1909 differentiated between traits and factors in his career theory. The 'factors' refer to possible jobs and occupations, while the 'traits' refer to the qualities of people who aspire to a career. Especially when it comes to ‘traits”, much research is still needed. A growing discourse in the field of diversity assumes that the samples do not fully represent the occupations and traits of today's highly heterogeneous workforce. For example, employability – a term that continues to characterize career research (Fugate et al., 2021) – arguably looks different depending on one's position in social space. In the careers literature measures and analyses of career outcomes typically focus on objective dimensions including income, job level, promotion history, and occupational status; and subjective aspects such as career satisfaction, perceived career success, or commitment (Spurk et al., 2019). However, too little is known about the extent to which the diversity characteristics of career actors influence their career outcomes. Are the seeds for career success already sown in one’s childhood (and is career success therefore a function of psychological or social inheritance)? Do career outcomes depend on one’s decisions (as in the case in path dependency) and are they the result of individual action? What role do structural factors play (e.g., support from superiors, mentoring) and to what extent do they have a positive or negative effect on career outcomes? After all, career outcomes will look different in certain parts of the world (see e.g., Briscoe et al., 2021). Which contextual factors at country level (e.g., educational expenditure) moderate the observed correlations between diversity and career outcomes and have the potential to bring about change? Against this backdrop, the symposium presents papers which address five diversity-related issues connected to social origin, age, gender, parental status, and culture. All papers combine a strong theoretical background and empirical focus and use a range of methodologies, ranging from large-scale surveys to experiments to establish causation. Four papers employ multi-national datasets, with the ‘social origin’ paper (Paper 1) using survey data from an impressive 19,452 individuals in 30 countries, the ‘age’ paper (Paper 2) using survey data from 6,968 individuals in 29 countries, the ‘gender and parental status’ paper (Paper 4) using survey data from 6,727 professionals and managers in 27 countries, and the ‘culture’ paper (Paper 5) using survey data from 6,134 individuals nested in 12 countries. Each of these studies is based on a multi-level analysis and examination of macro-level variables – relational social capital (Paper 1), education expenditure and unemployment rate (Paper 2), gender inequality index (Paper 4), individualism/collectivism (Paper 5) – as cross-level moderators. The further study (Paper 3) uses 396 undergraduate business students from a Canadian University and 329 American employees to experimentally test the effect of allyship (vs no allyship) on career consequences for women and men. These diverse studies are aligned in their effort to provide in-depth insights and a better understanding of careers and career-related outcomes through a diversity perspective – that is, do career outcomes differ for women and minority group members – with the career outcomes under examination in these papers including subjective financial career success (Paper 1), career resilience and career optimism (Paper 2), career consequences in form of perceived promotability, leadership effectiveness, and recommendations for work-related rewards and penalties (Paper 3), proactive career behaviors (Paper 4), and work engagement as a result of perceived career self-congruence (Paper 5).
The goal of this presenter symposium is to provide a deeper understanding of the ongoing bias and environmental barriers female entrepreneurs continue to face. We see a clear need for change that recognizes the contributions and abilities of female entrepreneurs; and encourages a new and unbiased perspective that supports female entrepreneurship. We seek to understand the current entrepreneurial environment and hope to reveal a path forward by examining the bridges female entrepreneurs have and are building in different areas of entrepreneurship. Only by understanding the importance and impact of the evolving entrepreneurial environmental can we hope to discover how positively changing the entrepreneurial environment can unlock the full potential of female entrepreneurs.
Welcome/Introduction Paper presentations • Impact of Natural Language Processing on Personnel Selection. Presented by Emily Campion and Michael Campion • Artificial Intelligence and Performance Management. Presented by Arup Varma • Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, and Compensation Practices and Decisions: Challenges and Opportunities. Presented by Janet Marler • Will AI Make Radically Changes to Human Resource Management Processes? Presented by Kimberly Lukaszewski Discussant, Gary Latham
Understanding leader and follower identity processes has received considerable attention within the leadership field with a substantial body of work having been accumulated. This presenter symposium intends to showcase different perspectives, research methods and foci to further uncover how followers and leaders interact, influence, impact and develop on an intrapersonal, interpersonal and group level. Specifically, the first presentation aims to investigate how leaders assess the social capital of their groups by examining instrumental versus expressive connections with leaders of other groups. The second presentation aims to understand how employees' unethical pro-supervisor behaviors are influenced by factors like supervisor support and supervisor status loss. Investigating the import role of new leaders’ shared goals with their followers in leader development during the transition into new leadership roles is the focus of the third presentation. The aim of the fourth presentation it to understand the role of growth mindsets in processing negative feedback as part of the leader identity development process. Finally, an identity play and identity work measure is introduced in the fifth presentation. The purpose of this symposium is to bring together both leader- and follower-centric perspectives on different aspects of leader and follower identity processes. The presentations in this symposium provide valuable insights on how to and what to consider when developing leaders and the implications of follower-leader interactions and relationships in an organizational context. We hope this symposium sparks future research and highlights the different approaches and components of leader and follower identity processes.
In contemporary professional landscapes, people frequently undergo diverse work-role transitions, encompassing shifts between jobs, careers, or professions (macro-role transitions), traversing the boundaries of concurrently held roles (micro-role transitions), or redefining their perception of a current role (intra-role transitions). These transitions occur within specific social and historical contexts that prescribe normative scripts dictating the initiation, progression, and expected outcomes of role changes. However, people increasingly engage in noninstitutionalized role transitions, deviating from established norms and diverging from mainstream career trajectories. While holding, to date, only limited scholarly attention, preliminary empirical findings suggest noninstitutionalized transitions to offer enriching experiences and pose challenges for individuals. This symposium explores noninstitutionalized work-role transitions across various magnitudes (i.e., macro, micro, and intra-role transitions). We inquire into the nature of noninstitutionalized work-role transitions (i.e., their types and defining characteristics), their antecedents (i.e., the motivations behind people opting for them), their unfolding processes (i.e., the mechanisms in their progression), and their psychological and career-related outcomes (i.e., their impact on people’s identities, social connections, careers, and well-being). By delving into these aspects, our symposium contributes to the advancement of research in this field, shedding light on how people, workplaces, and society can effectively navigate and manage noninstitutionalized work-role transitions.
Employees across the globe speak up with insights on how to improve their organizations. Managers who receive voice are critical in the voice process—both on the front end in soliciting ideas and the back end in evaluating employee ideas. This symposium features five empirical papers that address (a) how managers communicate in the solicitation process and whether employees or managers engage in faking, and (b) the implications to employees as managers evaluate voice.
Self-disclosure and personal communication are abundant in everyday life, including in the workplace. Given that personal communication often blurs the boundary between work and nonwork domains (Clark, 2002) and employees are being increasingly encouraged to ‘bring their true selves to work’ (Cha et al., 2019), it’s important to understand the complexities of human conversations in the workplace. This symposium explores personal communication in the workplace with a unique lens on others' responses. Specifically, this symposium includes four empirical and one conceptual paper, all aimed at elucidating how employees respond to personal communication at work. Specifically, the papers in our symposium investigate (mis)matches between discloser expectations and responder reactions to sharing personal information at work, how coworkers evaluate the reputation of employees who disclose personal information, how leaders and followers react to a leader’s disclosure of positive information, how romantic relationships at work affect others, and how employees anticipate compliance to favor-asking. In addition, the papers explore a breadth of relational contexts (e.g., leader-employee relationships, coworker relationships, romantic partnerships) and a variety of methodologies and analytical approaches (e.g., qualitative, experiments, field studies, dyadic analyses). As a set, the papers spark new conversations about workplace communication.
Over the past decades, the concept of meaningfulness has attracted the interest of a large scientific community and has grown in complexity. Given the beneficial effects of meaningful work on individuals, work, and organizational-related outcomes, it is crucial to understand how a deeper perception of meaningful work can be experienced by different segments of the workforce and how it can be influenced by intra- and inter-individual factors. We bring together five innovative projects that explore ways in which individuals in organizations perceive deeper meaningfulness, and the organizational implications arising from these perspectives. Altogether, the research presented here provides state-of-the-art theoretical and methodological advances to enhance and refine our understanding of work meaningfulness, which is a defining feature of organizations ‘success and a key research topic for our field. As well as filling conceptual gaps in the literatures on work meaningfulness process and how it can be experienced more profoundly, this symposium hopes to inspire future scholarship into work meaningfulness with fresh horizons. Overall, the five presentations included in this symposium shed light on previously underdeveloped aspects of the process of work meaningfulness, the temporal nature of this process, and a deeper sense of work meaningfulness. Drawing from this set of studies that open new perspectives, this presenter symposium will provoke interest and debate amongst attendees of the 2024 Academy of Management conference in Chicago, and generate further research opportunities into work meaningfulness, an enduring reality of organizations and a key research topic for our field.
In recent decades, organizations big and small, public and private, and across numerous industries have made efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion. At the same time, researchers have documented the many ways in which organizations continue to be fundamentally unequal in their treatment of members from historically underrepresented groups, including women and racial and ethnic minorities. There is a growing consensus among researchers that simply increasing the numbers of members from historically underrepresented groups in organizations (achieving “representational diversity”) will ultimately be insufficient to fundamentally improve equity and inclusion within organizations. This symposium brings together leading scholars of organizational inequality who span micro and macro perspectives to interrogate why simply “adding diversity and stirring” will not be enough to address lasting concerns of organizational equity and inclusion. Specifically, the four papers in this symposium utilize multiple complementary methodologies—ranging from natural language processing of historical texts to attitudinal surveys to video experiments—to shed new light on the mechanisms that continue to uphold inequalities even in the face of changing numeric representation of minoritized groups.
Over the past decade, we have witnessed an increasing trend in deglobalization (Witt, 2019), a reversal of open market policies (Cuervo-Cazurra, Gaur, & Singh, 2019), the emergence of techno-nationalism (Luo & Van Assche, 2023), and the breakdown of bilateral relations between countries (Bureau of Industry and Security, 2023; The White House, 2021). Deteriorations in bilateral relationships often trigger operational challenges for multinational enterprises (MNEs) originating from the associated home country and operating in the respective host country (Li, Arikan, Shenkar, & Arikan, 2020). Specifically, these geopolitical tensions can cause negative externalities increasing the difficulties and costs for foreign firms to operate in the host country, thereby affecting their strategic decision-making processes (Bertrand, Betschinger, & Settles, 2016; Li, Van Assche, Li, & Qian, 2022). Given the escalating significance of geopolitical factors, it becomes critical to study the strategies employed by MNEs in addressing such tensions. The extant literature offers several useful perspectives that shed light on this phenomenon. For example, it has been well established that institutional (including historical, political, and cultural) factors might affect a wide range of MNE strategies such as ownership structure (Makino & Tsang, 2011; Wang & Li, 2019; Lu, Ma, & Xie, 2022), entry mode strategies (Henisz, 2000; Holburn & Zelner, 2010; Wang, Wei, & Zhao, 2022), and divestment decisions (Blake & Moschieri, 2017). However, these “macro” factors are deeply rooted in formal or informal institutions, rendering them relatively stable. As a result, the insights generated by focusing on these factors may not allow us to fully uncover the dynamics under the recent geopolitical tensions, which are more volatile. Recent studies have begun to investigate how the more volatile intercountry relations affect MNE performance and strategies such as acquisition successes (Bilgili et al., 2023). This symposium advances the burgeoning research interest on this topic by presenting a cohesive collection of papers that examine comprehensively the role of geopolitical tensions in a variety of strategies, adopting a multi-level perspective. Specifically, it investigates some of the most important market strategies (i.e., intellectual property protection, portfolio strategy) that are key to firm performance (Papers 1 & 2). Moreover, it explores the understudied nonmarket strategies employed by MNEs to target the home or host country, addressing their exposure to geopolitical tensions (Papers 3 & 4). These firm-level analyses are also complemented by a micro-level study (Paper 5) that adopts a microfoundational approach and explores the cognitive processes in intercountry relations.
Organizational members increasingly find themselves immersed in debates, frictions, disagreements, and uncertainties. Effective communication skills are thus crucial for individual and organizational success. Despite the importance of difficult conversations, however, effectively managing them remains an enduring challenge, and extant research suggests that people often choose the wrong conversation strategies and harm their own and others’ outcomes. This symposium presents novel research highlighting how people can manage difficult conversations. In particular, the papers presented (1) identify negotiation issues that employers should bring up to better motivate employees; explore conversation strategies that (2) facilitate creativity and (3) increase receptivity and open-mindedness; (4) document potential caveats of demonstrating good listening in difficult conversations; and (5) discuss why people use ineffective conversation strategies despite knowing their harmful effects. Taken together, this symposium highlights the fraught nature of interpersonal communication, and demonstrates strategies to improve the effective flow of information and improve both interpersonal and organizational outcomes. These papers underscore the importance of managing difficult conversations and inform practical implications for individuals and teams.
The papers in this symposium examine how gendered expectations impact how organizational actors build professional relationships and the consequences of such relationships. The papers introduce new theory at levels “below” (Brands et al., 2022: 602) the network (e.g., dyadic level; Woehler et al.). They focus on, and in several cases, observe, the mediating mechanisms that drive relationship and network formation (e.g., Zhang et al.; Strassman & Harrison) and the impact of those relationships (e.g., Stuart et al.). They also study contexts underexplored in the gender and networks literature (e.g., Kang). Together, the papers in this symposium expand work on gender and professional relationships by focusing on the mechanisms driving workplace relationships and breaking conventions regarding the units of analysis and contexts typically investigated.
In the first paper, Brown investigates the consequences of informal and formal disclosure, including filing workplace complaints in response to workplace mistreatment, emphasizing discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Her research explores the complex nature of the grievance process outcomes and consequences and their effectiveness in safeguarding employees who choose to report or formally file complaints. Her paper addresses a significant gap in the literature by examining the impact on employees who consider and decide to engage in the grievance process, filling a theoretical and empirical void that spans decades (Klaas, 1989). Her study advances theory by employing grounded theory to study these social and psychological processes. She develops an organizational punishment- industrial discipline nomological network of what employees can expect when engaging in the formal, informal, or even consideration of workplace grievance processes and how this network is moderated by ethnicity and age. Her study extends organizational punishment- industrial discipline theory to include retaliation and revenge, as well as intentional actions such as ostracism in person and virtually, and individual and institutional gaslighting. Findings from 50 qualitative interviews and archival records concerning 160 employees indicate many participants experienced negative professional consequences such as adverse performance reviews, blacklisting, constructive discharge, reduced work contracts, and diminished career opportunities. Additionally, participants reported negative physical, psychological, and emotional impacts, from weight gain to feelings of revictimization, hypervigilance, and imposter syndrome. Despite the potential empowerment felt by a minority, her study underscores the pervasive challenges, including lack of confidentiality, investigation, and due process within grievance procedures. The resulting nomological network provides a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted consequences faced by employees who engage in or consider engaging in formal disclosure processes. The second project by Opoku, Waldman, and Wright posits that companies are increasingly devoting attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their workforce. However, numerous anecdotes have appeared in the press and social media of how corporations supposedly frame and implement their DEI strategies, with some people interpreting them as excessive, performative, and ineffective. They seek to understand if such characterizations are accurate as viewed by the individuals who oversee DEI strategies. Therefore, their study aims to provide a qualitative examination of how organizations are implementing their DEI strategies and the pushback they may receive from various stakeholders. Through their in-depth interviews with 16 Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) from Fortune 500 companies, they uncovered seven pivotal themes: (1) Prioritizing D, E, and I; (2) Balancing Equity and Merit; (3) Emphasizing Business vs Social Concerns; (4) Implementing DEI Strategies; (5) Dealing with Resistance; (6) Modeling through Leadership; and (7) Managing DEI across Geographies. Their findings contribute comprehensive insights that suggest a balance approach rather than an “all or nothing” approach. The third study, conducted by Sisco and Carter, posits while individual actions and attitudes contribute to racism, it is crucial to recognize that racism can manifest in broader societal structures and institutions, such as the workplace and our workforce. In this study they explore how Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) draw upon their Indigenous and cultural knowledge to navigate racially insensitive barriers in the workplace. They also use the theory of racialized organizations to understand how racism in the workplace continues to operate at the organizational level. Their research is guided by two research questions (RQ): 1) What Indigenous and cultural knowledge approaches are practiced by racial minorities in the workplace? and 2) How is racism and/or racialization described in studies that examine Indigenous and cultural knowledge approaches at work? Results from RQ1 provide critical insights about the coping strategies and resilient ideologies adopted by racial minorities at work, which has direct implications on employee well-being and employee empowerment. For RQ2, the application of the racialized organizations theory serves as a valuable perspective for comprehending how workplace racism constrains the agency of BIPOC individuals and hinders their ability to access essential organizational resources and cultural assets necessary for navigating racialized hierarchies. Finally, the empirical study conducted by Sisco, Fashant, Carter, and Evan posits that over the past decade, organizations have become more transparent about their diversity and inclusion challenges, and they have become more openly involved in sociopolitical affairs. This has led to a greater need for diversity management (DM). Given the relatively new focus of DM within profit-seeking organizations, efforts concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become integral to organizational culture and sustainability. Their study seeks to understand how DEI professionals practice diversity management during this emerging era of racial reform and restorative justice. Another aim of their research is to examine how the racial identity of DEI practitioners influences their work. Their focus was further refined to concentrate on White DEI practitioners who are paid to perform DEI work (e.g., training, data analytics, legal, recruiting, etc.) for their employer. To explore this phenomenon, 10 participants were interviewed about their DEI work experiences, perceptions, and ambitions for DEI. Within the discussion of the findings, they articulate the paradoxes encountered by the participants, particularly concerning limitations to antiracism initiatives in the workplace and their personal affirmations regarding race consciousness.
What’s next for charismatic leadership research and leadership science more broadly? To address this question, we present five papers at the cutting edge of research on charismatic signaling. Specifically, Wilms et al. and Hausfeld et al. explore the extent to which characteristics of followers (e.g. personal values), the situation (e.g. gendered context), and the leader (e.g. leader gender) determine the efficacy of a charismatic message. Engelbert et al. and Bernays & Aydogan work to uncover the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying charisma, identifying the extent to which charismatic signaling suppresses task-unrelated thoughts or distorts followers’ memory. Finally, Kreutschy and Rohner investigate charisma in the political sphere, identifying whether charismatic signaling can predict state-level outcomes by examining the exact topics political leaders address in their speeches. Making use of sophisticated design and analytic techniques such as regression discontinuity design, meta-analysis, biological measures, and behavioral outcomes, the papers included in this symposium represent a selection of research consistent with calls to limit our reliance on survey research (Fischer et al., 2023), to integrate more actual behavior (Banks et al., 2023), and to offer causal explanations (Wulff et al., 2023; Antonakis et al., 2010).
Organized crime groups (OCGs) are important business and institutional actors in several locations around the world. In this symposium, we explore how the presence and activities of OCGs influence emerging societal challenges, threats, and crises. Our investigations use OCGs as a metaphor for pursuit of extreme profit motive and instrumental practices that contribute towards perpetuating social inequalities and exploitation. By digging deeper into the workings of organized crime groups, we develop theoretical and practical implications for what constitutes firms’ ethical and socially responsible behavior.
Traditions, and the custodians who maintain and preserve them, are highly valued and recognized as central for many organizational processes such as institutional persistence, organizational identity and legitimacy and strategy. In contemporary organizational settings however, traditions have come under increasing pressures that threaten their continuity. In this symposium, we explore how custodians respond to these various threats and analyze the outcomes of their strategies by focusing on traditions in unstable and turbulent contexts. The studies collectively highlight two themes under-theorized in the literature on traditions and custodial work. The first theme is change—how and to what extent do traditions change to survive a turbulent time? The second theme is custodial work as strategy—how do custodians respond to threats, creatively, collaboratively or defensively, and how do these strategies contribute to the persistence or erosion of the tradition? In connection to the AOM 2024 theme, the goal of this symposium is to generate conversations and insights into the role of custodians in innovating for the future, while preserving the traditions and values that make up the foundation of community and collective identity.
Strategic management research around organizational wrongdoing has made considerable progress in elucidating how these practices spread both within and across organizations. Central to much of this literature is the logic, famously articulated by Becker (1968), that wrongdoing follows from rational calculation weighing the perceived upsides of these actions against perceived downsides. Integrating perspectives from strategic management, management scholars have enriched this perspective, illustrating how wrongdoing fits into firms’ broader efforts to enhance performance. Naturally, this work has inspired corresponding research on deterrence, wherein greater attention to the strategic motivations for organizational wrongdoing informs novel theories regarding how it may be preempted or cauterized. This symposium brings together scholars whose work is at the cutting edge of these questions. It showcases work illustrating novel motivations for wrongdoing, as well as novel explanations for how and why certain deterrence strategies may prove especially effective. By doing this, we believe this symposium will enhance our understanding on corporate wrongdoing and how it can be more effectively deterred.
Gratitude at work is associated with a number of benefits and recent research has begun to explore the other side of gratitude–feeling appreciated at work (Sheridan & Ambrose, 2022). What is becoming clear is that gratitude and appreciation are key ingredients for developing high quality connections in the workplace. To ensure that management research on gratitude and appreciation is poised to keep up with the complexity and turbulence organizations and leaders face today, researchers must ask new questions and adopt new perspectives. While there are many benefits of gratitude and appreciation for both individuals and employers, there are still unexplored nuances to understanding these emotions at work. This symposium explores the complex nature of gratitude and appreciation at work and how we, as a field, can take research on these social emotions into the future. The studies in this symposium are diverse in methods (e.g., field study, team, time-lagged survey design, experimental design), theory (e.g., optimal distinctiveness theory, social learning theory, person perception, expectancy violations theory, social comparison theory), and focus (e.g., outcomes, antecedents, appreciation meta-accuracy, relational implications), and as such, offer an innovative and complimentary view on gratitude and appreciation at work. Our symposium (1) rethinks the conventional ways of looking at gratitude and appreciation at work, (2) offers novel insights into how to effectively manage and lead organizations, and (3) propels the gratitude and appreciation literature forward into new directions, all with a focus on two simple words: thank you.
This presentation will share research on the interplay between crisis management and common resource governance, examining how nonprofits navigate collaborative challenges, the impact of diverse stakeholder needs on collective action, the fiscal trends in public water systems, and the facets of resilience in public sector organizations.