Journal of Management Studies

Publisher:: Wiley
Publication date:: 2021-02-01

ISBN:: 0022-2380

Issue Number

Latest documents

When Do Expert Teams Fail to Create Impactful Inventions?
We investigate the salience of expertise in creating high impact inventions and question experts’ ability to deploy novel ideas. Specifically, we examine the relationships between expertise, component originality, and a team's structural holes’ position in the collaborative network and propose that, in relative terms, expert teams create lower impact inventions if they deploy more original components and if they occupy structural holes. We test and confirm our hypotheses in a sample of semiconductor firms. In post‐hoc analyses, we find a three‐way interaction where the negative effect of structural holes almost disappears when an expert team experiments with original components whereas an increase in non‐redundancy is detrimental when teams with high expertise use familiar components. Our findings inform a foundational view of the invention process and provide novel insights into the contingent benefits of domain expertise.
Mutual Gains? Health‐Related HRM, Collective Well‐Being and Organizational Performance
Research on the effects of HR management on employees’ psychological well‐being has yielded inconclusive results. Moreover, prior works remain unclear on whether human resource practices specifically aimed at enhancing employee well‐being also benefit organizational performance. Building on signaling theory and conservation of resources theory, our study investigates the relationship between health‐related human resource management (HHRM), employees’ collective well‐being (in terms of collective emotional exhaustion and collective engagement) and organizational performance. Results from a multi‐source field study of top management team members, HR representatives, and 15,952 employees in 88 organizations reveal a positive indirect relationship between HHRM and employees’ collective well‐being, which is mediated by employees’ positive stress mindset. In addition, we find this positive indirect association to depend on the level of transformational leadership climate in organizations. Finally, our findings also show a positive indirect relationship between HHRM and company performance, mediated by employees’ positive stress mindset and collective engagement.
Board Committees in Corporate Governance: A Cross‐Disciplinary Review and Agenda for the Future
The importance of board committees – specialized subgroups that exist to perform many of the board's most critical functions, such as setting executive compensation, identifying potential board members, and overseeing financial reporting – has grown over time due to increased legal requirements and greater complexity of the environment in which firms operate. This has resulted in a large body of work examining board committees across the accounting, finance, and management disciplines. However, this research has developed rather independently within each discipline, preventing scholars and practitioners from developing a comprehensive understanding of board committees. To address this issue, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature that: 1) summarizes and synthesizes antecedents and outcomes associated with board committees in publicly‐traded firms in English common law countries; and 2) offers a critical analysis of existing research, providing recommendations for advancements and new directions in board committee research.
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The Context of Entrepreneurial Judgment: Organizations, Markets, and Institutions
The economics and management literatures pay increasing attention to the technological, competitive, and institutional environment for entrepreneurship. However, less is known about how context influences the judgment of entrepreneurs. Focusing on the emerging judgment‐based approach to entrepreneurship, we argue that economics can say much about how the organizational, market, and institutional context shapes entrepreneurial judgment. We describe entrepreneurs as individuals who deploy scarce, heterogeneous resources to service customer preferences at a profit. Because of uncertainty, this process is essentially experimental, and context influences the experimental process. Thus, entrepreneurs will seek to design the internal organization of the firm so that it facilitates internal experimentation. Moreover, the market or task environment determines the need for experimentation (e.g., how fast do consumer preferences change, how does technology evolve, which assets are available at which terms, etc.). Finally, the institutional environment influences, for example, the transaction costs of acquiring and divesting assets as firms adjust their boundaries through ongoing commercial experimentation.
The Context of Entrepreneurship
Well It’s Only Fair: How Perceptions of Manager Discretion in Bonus Allocation Affect Intrinsic Motivation
Perceptions of manager discretion in incentive allocation are theoretically and practically important to help explain the much‐debated relationship between performance‐related bonuses and intrinsic motivation. We argue, and demonstrate, that perceived managerial discretion is a key moderator to this relationship because of its relevance to procedural fairness. In a first study, we developed a measure for perceived manager discretion and distinguished it from related concepts. In a second experiment, we found that higher bonuses associated with higher levels of perceived manager discretion enhanced procedural fairness but those based on lower discretion did not. In a third field study, we found that actual bonuses implemented by a service organization enhanced intrinsic motivation indirectly through procedural fairness, but only when employees perceived their bonus to be based on higher levels of perceived manager discretion. Conversely, when bonus level was associated with lower perceived manager discretion, it negatively predicted of intrinsic motivation.
Beyond Homo Entrepreneurus: Judgment and the Theory of Cultural Entrepreneurship
In this paper, we embrace the critique of the contemporary entrepreneurship literature offered by Foss, Klein, and Bjørnskov, and applaud their advance of the Judgment‐Based Approach (JBA) as a way to broaden our understanding of entrepreneurial processes by contextualizing entrepreneurial action. However, we believe that to attain the promise of the JBA, a broader inter‐disciplinary engagement beyond economics is required. Drawing on theory and arguments in the cultural entrepreneurship literature, we emphasize the fruitfulness of foregrounding the role of culture – a theoretical focus that is marginalized both in the mainstream entrepreneurship literature and in the JBA. We compare the JBA and the Theory of Cultural Entrepreneurship and outline how a wider inter‐disciplinary research agenda could be advanced in entrepreneurial studies.
How do Scientists Contribute to the Performance of Innovative Start‐ups? An Imprinting Perspective on Open Innovation
Our study illustrates how scientists contribute to the performance of innovative start‐ups through an analysis of 211 Italian start‐ups with and without scientist founders. Building upon imprinting theory, we hypothesize and find that scientists provide an advantage to innovative start‐ups to the extent that they stimulate open innovation (i.e., search breadth and depth). However, for this to effectively occur, the involvement of multiple scientist founders is needed, so that their career imprints internalized in the lab are successfully transferred to the start‐up. Moreover, if the start‐up embraces business practices (i.e., strategic planning) or departs from scientific logics (i.e., pursuing non‐commercial goals), scientists’ contribution is further increased. Therefore, our study illustrates how the scientist career imprint can provide an advantage to innovative start‐ups with multiple scientists, but also how it can act as a rigidity if the start‐up does not pursue strategic planning or emphasizes non‐commercial goals.