Organizations, Strategy and International Management Seminars

My research journey spans a period of exciting new theories informing innovative practices in businesses and other organizations and a period littered with concerns about the research-practice gap, questionable research practices, and a strong emphasis on the number of publications in top journals for hiring and promotions. These recent developments led to the dilution of both scientific freedom and scientific responsibility in our scientific work. I offer my research journey to illustrate the importance of both, with the most recent endeavor in a global responsible research movement to produce useful and credible knowledge that will enable business and management practices to serve all stakeholders and to solve the world’s most challenging problems. Emerging institutional changes in business schools, journals, associations, and accreditation agencies provide hope that scholars will soon find the conditions favorable for both freedom and responsibility to support their aspiration to pursue research that will contribute to better societies and meaningful careers.

Women-led startups are evaluated less favorably than men-led startups, but the reasons for this require further investigation. Drawing on ambivalent sexism theory, we predict that evaluators’ benevolent sexist attitudes (which refer to a sense of affection, idealization, and protectiveness toward women) undermines gender equity in startup evaluation. We initially expected benevolent sexism to be negatively related to evaluations of women-led startups. Surprisingly, we found that benevolent sexism is unrelated to evaluations of women-led startups but is positively related to those of men-led startups. We replicate this pattern of findings where men-led startups are advantaged in two additional studies. Our work shows that benevolent sexism is subtly undermining gender equality in startup evaluation by giving a leg up to men while ostensibly not influencing women.

We examine an important but underexplored question: How does a technology policy in an emergent power affect the cross-border acquisitions of its firms in an era of geopolitical rivalry? Using balance of power theory, we focus on home-host-country policy interactions to understand the impact of techno-nationalism on firms’ international acquisitions.
Geopolitical rivalry suggests that a home country’s proactive technology policies (aimed at technology catchup and development) may lead to a rival country’s reactive/defensive techno-nationalism (aimed at defending technology leadership). We therefore predict that although home-country technology policies may lead to more international acquisition attempts by its firms, defensive policies in the host (rival) country may increase regulatory barriers and hinder the MNE’s acquisition completion in the host country. Using acquisition data on Chinese firms from 2010 to 2019, we examine how the introduction of China’s Made in China 2025 policy and the US’s heightened regulatory response (FIRRMA) affect the acquisition announcements and completions of Chinese firms in the US.
We then extend the analysis to other technology-leading host countries and to the US’s security allies to understand whether the US regulatory response results in policy diffusion. Our study informs international business and innovation research and practice.

Most organizational research on stigma focuses on preexisting stigma, leaving the question “where does stigma come from?” largely unexplored. The few studies that have examined stigma emergence, position transgression as a trigger for the stigmatization process and focus mainly on the actions of external stakeholders at the expense of the agency of the stigmatized. I address these voids by explicating the process of stigma emergence in the context of the 2012 “foreign agents” law in Russia and its application to NGOs. I used an inductive approach–by relying on archival data, online sources, and interviews–to uncover deliberate attempts of the government to stigmatize select NGOs by assigning to them a newly created “foreign agent” label. I present a three-phase process model of stigma emergence and detail the iterative manner, through which the stigmatizer amended enforcement tactics as the stigmatized devised new coping strategies. The ironic outcome was that the quest to stigmatize and exert formal control over “foreign agent” NGOs led to NGOs’ deformalized existence. I discuss the critical roles of power imbalance, limited action by higher authority, and low media attention during the early phase of stigma emergence. These findings may generalize to other countries with authoritarian regimes.

Organizations often face multiple, potentially interdependent goals at both the organizational and operational levels. According to Simon (1947), some goals are of most direct interest of decision makers and serve as generators of actions, referred to as aspirational goals—the core aims or desired outcomes; others serve as checks or constraints to test potential actions, referred to as constraint goals—goals that require no improvement but cannot be hurt during the focal actor’s search. Departing from the existing literature’s focus on organizational-level goal multiplicity, this paper examines operational-level goal multiplicity by looking at how actors in functional departments learn from the interdependency between their aspirational and constraint goals and search accordingly. We build a theoretical account of how these micro-level actors react to performance feedback on constraint goals. Specifically, we theorize that positive performance feedback, by signaling unintended, positive cross-department interdependency and thus previously unknown performance improvement opportunities, induces explorative search, whereas negative performance feedback, by signaling a need for conflict resolution, induces exploitative search. We further suggest two behavioral consequences of the explorative (exploitative) search:

1. exploring new (exploiting existing) search resources and
2. expanding (narrowing) search focus.

The study examines how the prevailing bias in leadership roles arising from prototypes induces more scrutiny on minority CEOs, leading to more shareholder activism towards the firm led by them. Integrating the framework of corporate opportunity structure in shareholder activism with the research on stereotype, we hypothesize that firms led by female and foreign CEOs are more likely to suffer from shareholder activism as minority status is a crucial factor for assessing the possibility of campaign success. More importantly, we develop argument that female and foreign CEOs can mitigate such bias by employing different linguistic techniques that can show their leadership capability and effectiveness. The results largely support our predictions. The display of specific values can mitigate the negative impact of leadership stereotype. Our study contributes to research on strategic leadership and shareholder activism.

Stringent bankruptcy laws are generally understood to increase the costs of failure and thus not conducive for entrepreneurship. In this paper, theory is developed and tested exploring the moderating influences of the dimensions of culture—individualism—collectivism, masculinity–femininity, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance. Results of this study, from conditional fixed effects Poisson regressions, support that stringent bankruptcy laws are positively associated with the levels of entrepreneurial activity in certain cultural contexts.

New venture performance measurement is essential for research and practice. However, there is no existing consensus and clarity about the choice of performance measures is lacking. This may adversely affect comparability and normative implications of research findings. To assess new venture performance measurement, we conduct a systematic literature review of articles measuring firm-level new venture performance. We provide an overview of measures, a new categorization and alignment with the life cycle. Our review offers a nuanced perspective on performance measurement over the new venture’s life cycle. Scholars will gain insights and will be able to make more informed decisions on new venture performance measurement.

Although scholars have long examined the antecedents of knowledge search, research on how appropriability risk shapes innovators’ search direction remains scarce. We address this question by focusing on duplicative imitation, which presents significant appropriability risk to innovators of original content in the digital economy. Exploiting the jailbreak of Apple’s iOS as a quasi-experiment that triggers duplicative imitation, we find that after the jailbreak, iOS app developers increase search depth and reduce search scope, compared to control app developers. We further show that searching in these directions is more likely to land satisfactory solutions. Innovators looking to address appropriability risk through search are advised to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of a search strategy against the characteristics of such risk.

Many diversity initiatives focus on majority members or fail to appreciate the tension Black (and other minority) employees face in whether to express their social identities in majority-dominated workplaces. Applying theoretical concepts from the emotion management and social decision-making literatures, we develop a new theoretical model that highlights important contextual (authenticity climate) and psychological (perspective-taking) precursors to social identity affirmation by Black employees. We propose that authenticity climates facilitate social identity affirmation and bolster organizational involvement because these climates help Black employees feel more certain about how their colleagues will treat their social identity expressions. Additionally, building on theorizing that perspective-taking facilitates people’s ability to understand others and navigate interpersonal relationships, we propose that perspective-taking by Black employees is a critical facilitator of these effects. We first present interview data that captures Black professionals’ workplace experiences regarding their social identity and illuminates our theoretical constructs and hypotheses. Three survey and experimental studies involving samples of Black working adults then test our predictions. We consistently find that the level of authenticity climate positively predicts social identity affirmation by Black employees, and that this relationship is further strengthened when these employees engage in perspective-taking. We also find that social certainty is a mechanism driving these effects and that social identity affirmation increases organizational involvement. The current research links the organizational-level variable of authenticity climate with the psychological process of perspective-taking to better understand the social identity expressions and organizational involvement of Black employees.

Research on the application of mindfulness to organizational settings has exploded in recent years. Most of this research takes an intrapersonal perspective, examining how mindfulness can improve individual outcomes. However, other disciplines document the potential interpersonal benefits of mindfulness. A recent conceptual model of the relational aspects of mindfulness will be presented, along with a program of research aimed at examining the relational benefits of mindfulness. Intervention research on mindfulness training as a strategy for reducing workaholism will also be discussed.

Granted patents do not necessarily warrant that the property rights granted are correct, and some patents did get invalidated later. However, the impact of such rare yet negative events is overlooked in the existing innovation literature. We propose that patent invalidation may serve as a negative signal of the quality of the patent owner’s other still-valid patents and reduce the patent owner’s opportunities to monetize these patents. In support to this argument, we find that patent invalidation reduces the likelihood of selling valid patents in the patent owner’s portfolio. Moreover, we find that the harm caused by patent invalidation is stronger if the patent is in the same tech class as the invalid patent and the negative impact of patent invalidation on patent sales will be weaker if the firm has more experience in patent sales and the firm is a foreign firm as opposed to a domestic one.

The benefits of foreign institutional ownership have been amply researched, but there are also potential downsides to such ownership. High foreign institutional ownership can subject a firm to heightened regulatory scrutiny and compliance, increasing its political dependence. Drawing on resource dependence theory, we argue that firms can manage the political dependence that arises from foreign ownership by engaging in corporate political spending (CPS). We derive two moderating conditions from our theoretical argument, positing that the influence of foreign institutional ownership on CPS hinges on the intensity of a firm’s government contracting and on the political sensitivity of the industry. Using a sample of publicly-traded U.S. firms, we find empirical support for our arguments. Our study advances strategic ownership research by showing that U.S. firms can address potential liabilities associated with foreign institutional ownership through nonmarket strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to disentangle individual-level gender differences and norm-based gender roles and stereotypes to provide a finer-grained understanding of why female and male entrepreneurs experience different growth returns from their social networks across different national cultures. Design/methodology/approach – This research uses a survey of 637 (278 female and 359 male) entrepreneurs across four nations varying on relational culture (importance of social relationships) and gender egalitarianism (importance of gender equality or neutrality in social and economic roles). Findings – The authors find evidence that male entrepreneurs in high relational cultures benefit the most in terms of growth in revenues from larger network size while women in low relational cultures benefit the least. In cultures with low gender egalitarianism, male entrepreneurs benefit more from their larger social networks than did the female entrepreneurs. Practical implications – The study presents implications for female entrepreneurs’ behaviors to gain more benefits from their social networks, especially in cultural contexts where relationships are important or where there is equality in gender roles. In these contexts, they may need to develop other strategies and rely less on social networks to grow their ventures. Social implications – This research suggests that female entrepreneurs still are disadvantaged in some societies. National policy may focus on developing more opportunities and providing more support to women entrepreneurs as a valuable contributor to economic growth of the nations.

In this talk, I will discuss a pattern-oriented approach for studying work-related adjustment. The approach contains both inductive and deductive features, thus can be used for both theory building and theory testing. I will start the talk by providing a conceptual overview on different types of work-related adjustment. I will then discuss various theories that can inform work-related adjustment and highlight the challenges faced by taking a piece-meal approach. In addressing these challenges, I will detail the pattern-oriented approach for identifying unobserved heterogeneity in adjustment processes and illustrate how this approach can yield novel theoretical insights and reconcile contradictory existing findings by discussing two research examples (Takeuchi, Li, & Wang, 2019; Wang, 2007). I will also discuss the research design and statistical features required by this approach.

This paper sheds new light on the role of social capital in entrepreneurship. Addressing contradictory positions and inconclusive empirical evidence on whether new ventures benefit from bonding vs. bridging positions, we offer a novel, temporal perspective on founding teams’ social capital. Specifically, we introduce the notion of “nested temporality,” highlighting that new ventures are under immense pressure to proceed to the next life cycle stage such that time spent within a given stage plays a critical role. We test our arguments using data on the relationships between 20,845 new venture team members of 5,568 new US ventures. Results suggest that bonding positions are associated with funding success across stages, whereas bridging positions become critical only once seed funding has been obtained and the venture enters the commercialization stage. Further, both social capital dimensions are particularly valuable during convergent periods when the pressure to advance to the next stage is particularly high. These findings imply that extant entrepreneurship literature has underappreciated bonding positions while the benefits of bridging appear more narrow than previously thought. We discuss important implications for the entrepreneurship literature on social capital, for the role of temporality in management theory, and for research on dynamic managerial capabilities.

Firms use patents as isolating mechanisms to protect the proprietary knowledge that underlies their competitive advantage. Patents confer ownership rights on knowledge newly created by a firm, allowing it to undertake litigation to protect these rights. Prior research has not, however, considered in any detail the effects of patent litigation on the firm’s ability to actually protect its valuable knowledge. This research considers how courtroom dynamics during patent litigation can create unintentional knowledge spillover from patent-holding firms to those accused of patent infringement, facilitating vicarious learning. A unique database of over 3000 patent litigations from 1992 through 2012 in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is used to test this argument. Findings suggest that various types of knowledge spillovers during litigation are associated with higher subsequent innovation output on the part of the accused firm, supporting the argument that litigation creates conditions that facilitate vicarious learning.

Loss-averse (as opposed to fully rational) managers may frame institutional changes in ways that prompt escape-based internationalization. Related studies are often conceptual or do not explicitly disentangle escape-based from traditional FDI motives. Combining a natural experiment-based research design with behavioral predictions derived from prospect theory, we used the differential impact of framed losses to test for indications of escape. Examining 548 Latin American FDI deals, we found support for escape. Using detailed data on 174 of the deals, we found further evidence that characteristics associated with speed, a priority in avoiding loss, were significantly related to escape-based FDI.

Despite its commonality in the business world, leaders’ immorality encouragement (LIE) – or leaders’ direct encouragement of followers to perform unethical pro-organizational behaviors (UPB) – has not received enough attention by organizational researchers. Drawing on social cognitive theory and French and Raven’s (1959) conceptualization of bases of power, we posit that LIE increases UPB. Further, we suggest that employees are more likely to comply with LIE when leaders have high quality exchange relationships with the employees (leader-member exchange, or “LMX”) and their own leaders (leader-leader exchange, or “LLX”). We develop and validate a scale for LIE and test our hypotheses. Data collected through field and laboratory studies support our hypotheses. As predicted, LIE increased the likelihood of UPB, an effect that was enhanced by high LMX; and this LIE x LMX interaction-effect strengthened when LLX was high, not low. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Employees often remain silent rather than speak up to managers with work-related ideas, concerns, and opinions. As a result, managers can remain in the dark about issues that are otherwise well known to, or universally understood by, frontline employees. We propose a previously unexplored explanation for this phenomenon: Voice is prone to bystander effects, such that the more certain information is shared among employees, the less any particular employee feels individually responsible for bringing up that information with managers. We theorize that such bystander effects are especially likely to occur when peers of focal employees, on average, enjoy high quality relationships with managers and thereby have adequate relational access to voice up the hierarchy. Using a correlational study involving managers and employees working in teams in a Fortune 500 company, and two experimental studies (a laboratory study involving undergraduate students working in a hierarchical setting, and a scenario study with a sample of U.S.-based workers), we provide evidence for our conceptual model. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.

While research on Chinese economic growth has focused primarily on governmental policies and institutional factors, we propose that the rise and success of the private economy was primarily due to the “visible hands” of the founder-entrepreneurs. We conducted a critical analysis of interviews with thirteen founders and CEOs of Chinese private enterprises, including Jack Ma of Alibaba, Liu Chuanzhi of Lenovo, Wang Shi of Vanke, Weihua Ma of China Merchant Bank, identified the managerial practices for entrepreneurial success in competitive and inhospitable environment, and proposed a concentric model of leadership attributes and principles to guide strategies and relationships.

This study proposes a theoretical explanation for the accuracy of top management teams’ diagnoses of complex strategic issues. Key contingencies are the span of managerial attention and its allocation to the environment and to other managers, the number of members on the management team, and the decision-making process—whether decentralized, collective, or centralized. Depending on the nature of the organization’s environment, managers who reason analogically from past experience to draw inferences about current strategic issues may arrive at accurate or inaccurate diagnoses. We specify and analyze a multiple-agent model that encompasses individual, top management team, and environmental attributes relevant to the challenging problem of classifying strategic issues as opportunities or threats based on learning from experience. Collective decision making generally outperforms the other approaches. Attending to the environment improves the accuracy of strategic issue diagnoses, whereas attending to other managers’ inferences proves detrimental. Adding members to the top management team has different performance implications for decentralized, collective, and centralized decision making.