Category Archives: Journal of Management Studies

The Fire to Inspire: A Multilevel and Multimethod Investigation of How and When CEO Passion for Organizational Development Impacts Employee Creativity

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Abstract

In this paper, we conceptualize CEO passion for organizational development (CEO POD) as CEOs’ strong inclination to continuously grow and improve their companies, which they find important and fulfilling. We draw from social information processing theory to articulate how and when CEO POD may trickle down to facilitate frontline employees’ creativity. Our research encompasses three studies employing different methodologies, including a multilevel, multisource, and multiphase survey and two vignette-based experiments. The results consistently support our model, revealing that CEO POD inspires middle managers to exhibit transformational leadership, which subsequently fosters frontline employees’ creativity. Moreover, CEO self-promotion skills augment the indirect effect of CEO POD on employee creativity via middle managers’ transformational leadership. Our findings generate valuable theoretical and practical implications to leverage CEO POD to foster employees’ creativity in the fast-changing business environment.

Dynamic Capabilities and MNE Global Strategy: A Systematic Literature Review‐Based Novel Conceptual Framework

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Abstract

Global strategy cannot be fully understood without consideration of dynamic capabilities (DCs). This is because the three key constituents of DCs – the sensing and seizing of opportunities and the reconfiguration of the resource base – are essential preconditions for strategy development, within nations and cross-border. We investigate the aspects of DCs that are most suitable for global strategy and those that need to be revisited and developed. We discuss theory and evidence on DCs and global strategy, present a systematic literature review, compare theory and evidence, and identify gaps between the two as well as opportunities to align them more closely and to develop both. To help guide future research, we develop a novel conceptual framework and provide suggestions for more theory-congruent empirical research.

A Psychological Ownership Perspective on the HR System–LGBT Voice Relationship: The Role of Espousal and Enactment of Inclusion Matters

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Abstract

Voice behaviours of invisible sexual minorities, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and others whose sexual orientations and/or gender expressions fall outside of heterosexual/cisgender norms (LGBT), have received scant attention in prior research. Based on the psychological ownership (PO) perspective, this study investigates the relationship between the presence of an LGBT-supportive human resource (HR) system and LGBT employees’ voice. Moreover, grounded in the situational strength and leadership literature, this study examines the boundary conditions of the strength of an LGBT-supportive HR system and leader inclusiveness within this PO mechanism. Data collected from LGBT employees in three waves reveal that PO can mediate the influence of the presence of an LGBT-supportive HR system on LGBT voice. Additionally, the strength of an LGBT-supportive HR system moderates the relationship between its presence and LGBT employees’ PO in the first stage, while leader inclusiveness moderates the PO–voice relationship in the second stage. Overall, the mediating effect of PO is most significant when a strong HR system is aligned with high leader inclusiveness. Theoretical and managerial implications are also discussed.

Multi‐Temporality and the Ghostly: How Communing with Times Past Informs Organizational Futures

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Abstract

Despite growing interest in time, history, and memory, we lack an understanding of the multi-temporal reality of organizations – how past, present, and future intersect to inform organizational life. In assuming that legacies are bequeathed from past to present, there has been little theorization on how this works practically. We propose that the lexicon of the ghostly can help. We contribute a theory of ghostly influence from past to future by offering a framework focusing on core moments of organizational existence: foundation, strategic change, and longevity commemoration, and illustrate this using a case study of consumer goods multinational Procter & Gamble (1930–2010). In showing that organizational ghosts, absent members whose presence is consequential to the actions of living members, are active and dialogical, we illuminate a dialectical interaction missing from other non-linear conceptions of temporality. This emphasizes the performative force of a dynamic past that provides an inference to action in the present and future.

Upbeat or Off‐the‐Mark? How Work Rhythms Affect Strategic Change

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Abstract

This study examines how organizational members cope with new work rhythms that are brought about by a strategic organizational change. Based on a two-year qualitative case study of a major strategic change in a research unit at a university that encouraged academics to embody an upbeat, energetic work rhythm, we identify four different modes of engaging with rhythms (syncing, tuning, figuring, and settling). We found that individual academics engaged rhythmically in different ways to meet this expected way of working and with discernible consequences for how they participated in the strategic change and ultimately were able to support the change, or not. Based on our study findings, we conceptualize a process model of rhythmic coping that highlights a central but often overlooked part of strategic change with significant implications for the success of a change as well as for the continued health and well-being of employees.

The Role of Multistakeholder Initiatives in the Radicalization of Resistance: The Forest Stewardship Council and the Mapuche Conflict in Chile

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Abstract

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) that address sustainability concerns have grown in importance in recent years. These private governance measures involving market, state and civil society actors aim to resolve disagreements between stakeholders through stakeholder engagement practices. However, our empirical study of the Mapuche conflict in Chile shows how a multi-stakeholder initiative contributed to the radicalization of a protest movement leading to an escalation of violence that left all actors worse off. The implementation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification scheme, perhaps the best known MSI, exacerbated existing political discontent among the Indigenous Mapuche peoples who were resisting the expansion of industrial forest on their lands in southern Chile. Our findings indicate that MSIs cannot address the needs of marginalized stakeholders and may further undermine their interests. Our analysis enhances our understanding of the outcomes of MSIs by describing processes of radicalization as well as the role of the state in conflicts. The FSC certification scheme was incapable of addressing the key Mapuche demand for land rights. Instead, it raised false expectations, which coupled with corporate irresponsibility and state repression led to an escalation of violence. The increasing reliance on private governance measures in natural resource management, especially in countries of the so-called Global South, can further exacerbate existing conflicts and hence it is important to understand how and why MSIs lead to negative outcomes.

Giving it all You’ve Got: How Daily Self‐Sacrifice and Self‐Esteem Regulate the Double‐Edged Effects of Callings

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Abstract

Occupational callings are a combination of passion and enjoyment with a sense of duty and destiny. Pursuing a calling is a double-edged sword, sometimes beneficial and sometimes detrimental, but it is unclear why it has contradictory effects. We show how daily self-sacrifice behaviour explains these effects and reveals how workers regulate their callings on a daily basis. We argue that people with intense callings use self-sacrifice to attain daily calling goals. However, this has a cost to their wellbeing in terms of daily emotional exhaustion. Diary data from church ministers and chaplains reveals that daily self-sacrifice behaviour mediates the positive effects of calling intensity, via felt obligations, on both daily calling goal attainment and emotional exhaustion. Within-person, we show how state self-esteem further regulates this double-edged process both within a day and from one day to the next. Low morning state self-esteem promotes daily self-sacrifice and is indirectly related to higher calling goal attainment and emotional exhaustion via daily self-sacrifice. But morning self-esteem is itself predicted positively by the previous days’ goal attainment and negatively by emotional exhaustion. Therefore, state self-esteem in conjunction with daily self-sacrifice behaviour and its double-edged effects represents a daily regulation mechanism for self-sacrifice in callings.

Social Comparison Inside Business Groups and Strategic Change: Evidence from Group‐affiliated Chinese Firms

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Abstract

This study examines the effect of performance feedback on strategic change with a focus on internal social comparison in a business group context. We argue that group affiliates are more responsive to internal social comparison with group peers than to external social comparison with industry peers. However, the salience of internal social comparison is subject to institutional contingencies. We test these arguments using panel data from 1449 group affiliates in China during the period 2005–12. We find that internal social comparison has a greater effect on a group affiliate's strategic change than does external social comparison. Moreover, this effect differential is smaller in groups located in regions with more developed market institutions but larger in state-owned groups and groups managed by internally promoted CEOs.