2019 Responsible Research in Management Awards

Lean manufacturing, or waste minimization, is hypothesized to improve the social performance of manufacturers. This study examines a panel of more than 300 Nike supplier factories in 11 developing countries, finding that the adoption of lean manufacturing reduced noncompliance with labor standards reflected in wage and work hour policies. A reduction in these non-compliances could have future implications for how lean manufacturing and other interventions to enhance management capabilities can provide social benefits in global supply chains. 

Calls for longer maternity leave bring into question the negative effects on female’s career progression. Three studies in the context of Canadian maternity leave policies were conducted to test hypotheses. The first study examined 93 participants in a job advertisement and application study, showing the negative effects of longer legislated maternity leave. The second study proved that applicants who took a longer maternity leave were expected to be less committed to an enterprise, while the third showed that corporate programs helping women stay in touch with work could positively enhance perceptions of women’s agency. This research suggests that longer legislated maternity leaves can negatively affect women’s careers, but when coupled with agency enhancements, women are less likely to incur negative consequences. Practical implications suggest providing women with creative avenues to stay engaged in the workplace and raising awareness among decision-makers to combat the unintentional negative consequences of maternity leaves. 

The authors of Hammer and Silicon use three foundations – institutional theory, imprinting theory, and identity theory – to examine how immigrants contribute to economies. Following stories of Soviet immigrants adapting to the U.S., this book analyzes the role of institutions, imprinting, and identity formation in the immigration process. Evidence of the impact of highly educated, technical professional immigrants on U.S. innovation will drive future conversations about how immigration policies are formed. 

Harsh criticism meets U.S. firms who are accused of shifting profits offshore to avoid taxes. This study examines the extent of operations in tax havens compared with U.S. companies’ disclosures of geographic operations. This study uses hypothesis testing and change analyses to conclude that firms operating more extensively in tax havens tend to disclose information at a higher level of aggregation. In the future, country-specific reporting is needed to highlight the tax-avoidance activities of firms and prevent firms from hiding tax-avoidance behavior. 

Corporations are increasingly facing social pressures to adopt responsibilities such as disaster relief and recovery that traditionally fall upon governments and aid agencies. This study argues that firms with a local presence are more capable than other organizations to act with more efficiency to help areas affected by catastrophes. Using a quasi-experimental analysis, the authors examine every natural disaster and reported aid donation worldwide from 2003-2013 and find that nations that received a substantial proportion of aid from firms with local operations received relief in a shorter time and recovered faster than if they would have received a larger proportion of aid from other sources. This shows how corporations can greatly benefit nations by becoming involved when disaster strikes. 

The conflict between groups is woven into the fabric of organizational life, especially when there are strong commitments to identities developed external to the organization. This researcher conducted a 30-month ethnographic study of two professional groups – U.S. Army Commanders and mental health professionals – with the goal of having mentally healthy, mission-ready soldiers. The data led to the development of a model that explains how professional groups with strong identity commitment can overcome conflict to achieve organizational goals. These findings can help to understand managing goal conflict with a micro-level examination of how goal conflict among sub-units is addressed in everyday work. 

Hoffman examines crucial questions about the research on climate change, including why people reject scientific consensuses and why climate change is a part of culture wars in politics. This book uses research in the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science to reveal that the climate change debate is largely due to deeply entrenched, contradictory worldviews. Through further scientific education of the public and cultural shifts, the global community can work together to find answers to questions surrounding climate change. 

This article discusses how male and female-led ventures are often penalized differently, with female-led ventures being penalized due to gender stereotypes. The first study conducted was a field study of 421 business plans and judge pairs from female-led ventures, which showed that female-led ventures with a social impact frame experienced diminished penalties from evaluators. The second lab-study screened 224 participants in a start-up venture, which found that framing a venture in terms of its social impact diminishes the evaluation penalty to which female entrepreneurs are subjected. The researchers concluded that female entrepreneurs who use the social impact framing would be more likely to mitigate the effects of gender bias. In the workplace, this could aid in reducing gender bias and improving gender equality among entrepreneurs. 

A high amount of successful Chinese business entrepreneurs hold political appointments with the People’s Congress or the People’s Political Consultative Conference, which prompts the question of why entrepreneurs join political councils. Two studies examine how motives affect successful POE chairs pursue political appointments. The first study surveyed 166 private-firm executives regarding their desires of political involvement, and the second study on Chinese publicly listed firms analyzed their attained political appointment. These studies theorize that pro-self motives drive entrepreneurs to avoid political appointments after their firms gain success, while pro-social motives drive them to seek these appointments as a platform to serve the society. The authors suggest that in the future, the government may open more political channels for Chinese entrepreneurs to fulfill their pro-social motivations to benefit the public and advance social goods. 

Personal financial insecurity is a growing concern, which can pose a burden on individuals and the organizations that employ them. This paper argues that financial well-being can influence organizational performance by affecting employees’ ability to do their jobs. The first field study combined survey responses from a target sample of 1,649 full-time drivers with data on preventable accidents, while the second study manipulated financial worry in a lab environment using a driving simulation task. These studies showed that people who are concerned about money have less cognitive capacity, which affects work performance. Implications of this study include the suggestion that employers should act in their self-interest by undertaking initiatives to reduce employees’ financial precarity. 

“Work-related driving is an issue with occupational health and safety implications. This study presents and tests an intervention by the Israeli National Road Safety Authority to enhance road safety climate within organizations and its influence on employee driving. In addition, by integrating the literature on organizational climate and work–family interface, the study explored climate spillover and crossover from work to home domain. A longitudinal, with an intervention versus control experimental design, revealed that increasing road safety climate within an organization significantly improves employee driving. Although driving is a life-and-death issue with high costs to organizations, it occurs outside the organization’s physical boundaries, where managers cannot directly supervise. By creating a specific climate, managers may influence employee behaviors within the organization, with potential spillover effects to employee behaviors outside of their work life.” 

Corporations are increasingly focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which renders the question of how CSR is perceived by and impacts employees. Four studies were designed to understand the relationship between employee outcomes and perceived CSR, including tests where employees of corporations were given scenarios of how a firm takes action to promote CSR. Results demonstrated that perceived CSR is directly related to employee turnover and can positively affect employee behavior, indicating that firms should clearly communicate CSR goals and practices to employees. Job attitudes such as trust, commitment, and pride can improve and increasing willingness to stay as a result of seeing a firm’s corporate social responsibility and its effectiveness. 

This book examines the negative effects of toxic workplace practices on employees, employers, and society.  Research using interviews, press articles, and extensive epidemiological evidence reveals that economic insecurity, long work hours, work-family conflict, and an absence of job control are as harmful to health as second-hand smoke and in the aggregate may cause 120,000 excess deaths  and $190 billion in extra costs annually in the U.S.  The book provides specific guidance on how to measure dimensions of harmful work environments and their effects and what to do to promote employee health and well-being. 

“This study examines the conditions under which the retention of first-time workers is facilitated by examining data from a garment factory in India that hires and trains impoverished women workers. Personnel records on a sample of 510 women workers in the factory, and survey data of 50 other first-time workers were analyzed to find that assignment of newcomers to experienced trainers increased retention through the mechanism of improving work readiness. This paper demonstrates the important roles of individual trainers, as well as the importance of understanding when and why training programs facilitate the retention of first-time workers.” 

Community founding of cooperatives can experience the long-term effects of a disaster. An analysis of the Spanish Flu, attributed to infected individuals, in Norway and preventative measures to halt its spread was contrasted with spring frost, attributed to nature, to determine if there is an important difference in the effects on communities based on the casual framing of a disaster. This research can be used to expand the reach of civic capacity and understand that sociable communities are more likely to help themselves and more resilient in the face of a disease outbreak or natural disaster. The diversity of organizational forms can provide security to communities and can remediate the effects of disasters that are not only physical events but social constructs. 

Davis explains how technology is shifting the landscape of the American corporation in ways that result in a large-scale decline. The research draws on large-scale data and historical analyses to make sense of recent history and speculate on what comes next. This book describes how the fundamental question of what constitutes a firm will continue to change as technology alters the business environment. 

“This study uses standpoint theory and intersectionality to display that whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity are embedded in organizational knowledge. The author conducted a case study of a U.S. university known for having some of the best systems for building organizational knowledge about sexual violence on campus. The study shows that these practices mask heterogeneity in knowledge across the university. Further, these practices give the university’s knowledge of the appearance of neutrality and, subsequently, can defer important organizational actions. In the future, organizations should analyze not only what they know, but how their knowledge-building practices may re-center and reinforce dominant ways of knowing, thereby obscuring the knowledge of minoritized populations. Organizations should account for the partiality of their knowledge, rather than maintaining the appearance that knowledge is neutral and uniform.” 

This study proposes that attractive candidates are discriminated against in the selection of jobs that are relatively less desirable. Four experiments were conducted using an experimental paradigm, a hiring simulation, real selection decisions, and questioning of HR managers. These experiments showed that attractive people are discriminated against in the selection for less desirable jobs, which can motivate future fairness and efficiency of decision making in relation to less desirable jobs, impacting people who lack better options and opportunities. This research offers insight into the various discriminatory processes that seem to operate in selection for relatively less desirable jobs. 

This multi-level research speaks to a critical international strategic HR management topic especially in emerging economies – designing and implementing human ressource systems that can cultivate employee creativity, which determines a firm’s sustainable development. Specifically, the researchers investigate how different types of employee-experienced HR systems can synergize to facilitate employee domain relevant skills and ultimately, employee creativity. The findings indicate that the synergy of different types of HR systems is more likely to be activated in privately owned firms than in state-owned firms. Also, employee creativity is more likely to be translated into firm innovation in privately owned firms. Following the suggestions from this research, managers can develop effective HR systems to improve employee creativity and firm innovation in different organizational contexts. 

Problems of moral hazard and adverse selection are endemic to insurance markets, and this study examines how these problems apply to the use of philanthropy as a form of reputation insurance, whereby firms that donate to social causes are given the benefit of the doubt in light of negative information being revealed about the company. Building off a formal model of corporate philanthropy, researchers show that philanthropy weakened the negative correlation between oil spills and stock market reactions in the U.S. petroleum industry, but that increases in philanthropy were also associated with greater subsequent spills. This study calls for a more nuanced understanding of the use of philanthropy as insurance and the associated cost-benefit trade-offs, with supplementary analyses highlighting the critical role that social activism plays in ensuring social welfare by subjecting CSR activities to stronger scrutiny. 

This study examines institutional change processes in authoritarian states, specifically the efficacy of civic activism regarding Chinese firms’ environmental performance. Research on environmental penalties issued to firms from 2007 to 2011 highlights the paradox of “responsive authoritarianism” on display in China: the government seeks citizens’ feedback but resists associated legitimacy threats regarding its capacity to rule. Results suggest that while the government and media are responsive to pressures from publicly-visible civic activism such as mass protests, when civic activism is through private channels, such as citizen complaint letters, the government uses that information to dissolve the pressure behind the scenes to avoid damage to its public image. This research contributes to understanding social movements and institutional change in authoritarian states. 

Knowing how to respond to disasters effectively requires an understanding of the role of organizations as responders to rebuilding and suffering following disaster events. Six ventures by locals in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake were explored to find that two key groups emerged in terms of taking advantage of opportunities, using resources, taking action, and acting effectively. This study offers insight into a model that provides information regarding resilience adversity and overcoming the challenge of disaster relief. 

“Written by an ex-Chief Strategy Officer at Alibaba, this book examines the tremendous growth of Alibaba through reflection, theoretical analyses, and storytelling. Zeng proposes the idea of Smart Business, a combination of Data Intelligence and Network Coordination, and how this can impact the future of businesses. Through empirical data and applied logic, Zeng proposes how  scholars can develop theoretical frameworks to promote organizational design and strategic management of future businesses to drive them to success.”