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Extant research has shown that it is harder for women than for men to form high-status connections in the workplace. Extending this line of research, we examine how two structural factors – geographic and network proximity – affect men’s and women’s chances of forming high-status connections. Using data on the formation of collaboration ties with star scientists within the R&D laboratories of the forty-two largest pharmaceutical companies between 1985 and 2010, we show that women who are geographically co-located with a “star” colleague are less likely to form a tie with that colleague than male peers who are similarly co-located, and this difference persists irrespective of the star’s gender. Conversely, women benefit more than men do from network proximity, as indicated by the presence of common third-party ties, and this difference widens if the star colleague is also a woman. By illuminating how geographic and network proximity affect the chances of forming high-status connections differently for women than for men, our study goes beyond the notion that women have reduced access to workplace social capital and expands consideration to the structural factors that underpin – amplify or reduce – that disadvantage.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Extant research shows that individual cognitive style affects whether employees benefit most from a brokering or a dense network. But do people build the network structure in which they perform best? We address this question by advancing a novel 2-stage explanatory model that explicitly disentangles the network formation process from its performance effects. We hypothesize that Adaptors (i.e., individuals inclined to focus on implementable solutions through commonly accepted and well-defined approaches) perform best when their network spans structural holes. Yet, these same individuals systematically forego opportunities to build relations across structural holes. By contrast, Innovators (i.e., individuals inclined to focus on envisioning creative solutions that break away with established approaches) draw no or even negative performance returns from structural holes. Nevertheless, their inclination is to build ever-new bridging relations. We test and find support for this counterintuitive hypothesis through a randomized longitudinal field experiment enabling us to disentangle empirically both stages of our theorized process model. Our findings help illuminate why people may build networks that hurt their performance, shed a new light on the role of individual cognitive style in shaping network advantage, and bear concrete implications for organizations aiming to leverage networks to enhance employees’ performance.

With permission of the Academy of Management

We examine whether the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Codification made it easier for preparers and auditors to locate relevant accounting guidance. We find that areas of U.S. GAAP with more dispersed and voluminous guidance before the Codification experience a larger post-Codification reduction in restatements. We find a similar decline in SEC comment letter questions referencing areas of U.S. GAAP with more dispersed and voluminous pre-Codification guidance. Our results suggest that before the Codification, preparers and auditors had difficulty in locating the appropriate accounting guidance and that the Codification mitigated this difficulty.

Seeking causal evidence on biases in idea evaluation, we conducted a field experiment in a large multinational company with two conditions: (a) blind evaluation, in which managers received no proposer information, and (b) non-blind evaluation, in which they received the proposer’s name, unit, and location. To our surprise—and in contrast to the pre-registered hypotheses—we found no biases against women and proposers from different units and locations, which blinding could ameliorate. Addressing challenges that remained intractable in the field experiment, we conducted an online experiment, which replicated the null findings. A final vignette study showed that people overestimated the magnitude of the biases. The studies suggest that idea evaluation can be less prone to biases than previously assumed and that evaluators separate ideas from proposers.

© 2023 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.