Publication database

When it comes to hiring, blind luck can trump biased reasoning and generate a less-is-more effect.

Exceptional innovations are often attributed to brilliant strategies or leaders with superior foresight. But luck is in fact necessary for exceptional innovations in many ways.

This is a practitioner article based on a recently published academic paper on career shocks of executive. The article explains the phenomenon of a career shocks and offers strategies for dealing with them.

Business owner and managers are facing the challenge of how to best drive digital transformation in their organizations. Design thinking might be one method to address these challenges and, at the same time, support a mindset change within the companies.

There is a growing interest in the concept of employer attractiveness. Yet, research appears to be unsystematic in how it conceptualizes and studies the phenomenon. In this paper, we argue that thus far most research on employer attractiveness has combined perspectives about employer attractiveness of both prospective employees and for exiting employees, making therefore little differentiation with a reference to the question: For whom is the employer attractive? In this paper, we argue that this is problematic considering existing evidence signaling that there are differences in the employer attractiveness attributes between the two groups. With this paper, we aim to extend the literature on employer attractiveness by shifting the conversation to the perceptions of employees. We systematically review 48 articles on employer attractiveness from the employee perspective, and offer a model, capturing Inputs, Mediators and Outputs (IMO) of the concept. The paper concludes with a discussion of what our findings mean for future research and practice.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Superior profit usually depends on capturing opportunities that rivals fail to identify or utilize. A key challenge for strategists is how to be both different and viable. Prior research has tended to associate contrarian opportunities with rivals’ behavioral failures. Herein, we argue that contrarian opportunities can emerge endogenously in an ecology whenever there is a dominant logic. We develop our argument in the context of organizational design, in which the majority voting rule is demonstrated to be an efficient and typically mainstream approach for screening alternatives. We formally demonstrate when antimajority—an unconventional screening rule where acceptance depends on the minority’s approval and majority’s disapproval—exploits the opportunities left behind by the majority rule. We illustrate how a contrarian niche emerges, and its scope conditions using the case of an antimajority voting venture capitalist firm together with an evolutionary model of competing rules. More generally, a contrarian niche emerges not necessarily because the dominant firms have been suboptimal or inefficient but because their homogeneity predicts an exploitable blind spot, preserving opportunities for strategists who can afford to be contrary.

With permission of the Academy of Management

The aim of this symposium is to understand, through the lenses of social identity theory and stereotypes theory, how network utilization and alters’ evaluations vary for members of minority and majority groups. Furthermore, the symposium also aims to explore how these theories contribute to explaining differences in the outcomes that members of majority and minority groups achieve even though they occupy similar network positions.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Scientific research has for a long time been the domain of professional scientists, often working within the confines of academic or corporate labs. However, there are increasing calls from funding agencies, policy makers, and civil society to involve “crowds” and “citizens” in the research process. The hope is that such involvement can increase the productivity of research as well as the relevance and societal adoption of the knowledge that is produced. A growing number of crowd science projects now operate in fields as diverse as astronomy, biology, history, medicine, and physics. Results have been published in top tier journals such as Nature, Science, and PNAS. However, most of these projects “use” crowds for empirical tasks such as collecting and coding data (e.g., Zooniverse), or for problem solving (e.g., Foldit). There are only few efforts to involve crowds in earlier, “agenda setting” stages of scientific research such as the identification of research questions, the selection of problems that should be investigated, or the development, evaluation and funding of research proposals. To gain a deeper understanding of this emerging topic, distinguished panel members including scholars of science and science policy, as well as experts on crowdsourcing and open innovation, organizers of real-world efforts to involve citizens in agenda setting and interested AoM members discuss why crowd involvement in setting research agendas is, so far, more limited, whether crowds should get more involved in setting research agendas and if so, how this could be organized, and what the boundary conditions for crowd involvement in setting research agendas are.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Inventors recombine existing knowledge elements to identify new technological solutions and novel inventions. We study how inventors’ reliance on different sources of knowledge, their personality traits, and the diversification of the organizational knowledge of their employers jointly determine recombination outcomes. In our theorizing, we distinguish inventors’ overall recombination success from the share of technologically novel recombinations. Our predictions are tested relying on a large-scale survey of 1,327 industrial inventors, enhanced with patent-based measures of recombination outcomes. The results confirm earlier findings that access to a diverse set of knowledge is positively related to both recombination success and the rate of novel recombinations. Further, we are able to show that this clear relation holds only for inventors employed by firms with low knowledge diversification. Finally, personality dominates the effect of inventors’ reliance on different sources of knowledge and is relatively more important.

With permission of the Academy of Management

The assumption that better performance today predicts better performance tomorrow pervades nearly all behavioral theories of learning from experience in organizations. Because of the widespread reliance on the higher-is-better heuristic, theories predicting performance non-monotonicity---higher past performance generating lower future performance---are of long-standing interest in management theory and economic sociology. The extent of real-world violations of the higher-is-better heuristic is, at its core, an empirical question. However, there is very little research testing the higher-is-better assumption, despite its ubiquity in organizations and markets and the panoply of mechanisms detailing when it might fail. In part, the lack of empirical research on this very important question is driven by the weaknesses of existing methods for detecting non-monotonic relationships in data. The method applied here, which adopts a "shape constrained'' approach to statistical inference, avoids the well-known problems of testing non-monotonic associations in commonly-used methods based on linear regression. Our paper empirically tests the hypothesis of performance monotonicity in 12 datasets across four commonly-studied domains. Performance monotonicity is rejected in eight out of the twelve datasets examined and at least one dataset in all four domains demonstrates a non-monotonic performance pattern.

With permission of the Academy of Management