2020 Responsible Research in Management Awards

This book focuses on the role multistakeholder partnerships (MSP) can provide to alleviate complex social problems, especially the “wicked” problems that defy resolution and cannot be solved by one sector alone.  Drawing on three comprehensive cases and countless shorter examples from around the world, the book offers both practical advice for organizations embarking on an MSP, as well as, a theoretical understanding of how partnerships function. Using an institutional theory lens, it explains how partnerships can effect change in institutional fields by reducing turbulence and negotiating a common set of norms and routines to govern partners' future interactions within the field of concern.  This book provides a comprehensive understanding of MSPs, why they are needed, the challenges partners face in working together, and how to design them effectively. Through the process of collaboration partners combine their differing strengths, vantage points and expertise to craft innovative responses to pressing societal concerns. The book highlights the potential for partnerships to bring change to societal norms, practices, and relational networks that govern stakeholders'roles in relation to specific complex problems and offers valuable advice to leaders on how to design and scale up effective partnerships, and how to address potential obstacles that partners may face. 

This study sought to distinguish corporations that are able to investigate and vouch for their supply chains from those who are not. The Section 1502 of Dodd-Frank Act gave firms three years to determine and report on whether their products contained "conflict minerals" from the Democratic Republic of Congo area. An analysis of every conflict minerals report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission by over 1,300 corporations found that almost 80% admitted they were unable to determine the country of origin of such materials, and only 1% could certify themselves conflict-free with certainty beyond reasonable doubt. Moreover, internationally diversified firms and those with large and more dispersed supply chains were less likely to declare their products conflict-free: complexity reduces the visibility of a firm's supply chain. The results suggest that wide spread outsourcing may have reduced the corporate sector's capacity to account for the practices that yield its products. The findings indicated the more complex and diversified the supply chain system, the more likely "conflict minerals" were part of the firms' process. 

Increasingly, entrepreneurs seek to address deep-rooted societal challenges through hybrid organizations that pursue dual social and business missions. Yet successfully sustaining such hybrids is challenging, as leaders face ongoing tensions between social and business demands. This study identifies practices and processes through which leaders manage these competing demands and sustain dual missions over time. To do so, it draws on in-depth data from the first 10 years (2001-2010) of Digital Divide Data (DDD), a digital content and technology services provider that employs underserved youth in Southeast Asia and Africa, creating sustainable economic opportunities through a profit-generating business. Using DDD as an exemplar, the paper highlights two key practices. First, “organizational guardrails”, which include dedicated skills and expertise, roles, structures, metrics, and stakeholder relationships associated with each mission, prevent leaders from focusing on one mission to the extent of the other, functioning like guardrails on a road to keep the organization within boundaries. Second, “paradoxical frames”, which involve shared perceptions of social and business missions as synergistic not just contradictory, help leaders to accept tensions and experiment with alternative approaches for pursuing dual missions. Together, these practices sustain dual missions through a process of “structured flexibility”, in which leaders make ongoing shifts in organizational decisions and practices to navigate competing social and business demands within the boundaries set by organizational guardrails, ultimately serving both missions not just one or the other. Since publication the paper’s findings have been featured in the Harvard Business Review and Stanford Social Innovation Review and are used as a case study in MBA and executive education courses. 

This study sought to understand the impact pay-for-performance (P4P) may have on mental health problems. Matching survey-based data on P4P adoption by 1,309 Danish firms with wage, demographic, and medical prescription data of 318,717 full-time employees, the authors found a 4 to 6% increase in the usage of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication after firms adopt P4P. This change is strongest in low-performing and older workers.  Workers select in and out of P4P firms based on mental health considerations, implying mental health effects influence turnover.  Further, low performers were more likely to leave following P4P adoption. Women with latent or potential mental health concerns were more prone leave firms after P4P adoption. Although the study could not claim a causal relationship, collectively our results suggest a model where performance-based pay forces many employees to choose between leaving or else depression and anxiety. The study expands existing work by showing that the mental health costs of performance-based pay can be severe enough to necessitate pharmaceutical treatment.  Since publication the article has received media attention in FastCompany, HR Executive and ScienceDaily. 

This book identifies and describes an entrepreneurial approach for responding to disaster and suffering through the local organizing of spontaneous, compassionate, and impromptu actions.  The authors term the approach “spontaneous venturing,” asserting it can be more effective than the traditional “command-and-control” methods of large disaster relief organizations.  The focal disaster discussed in the book is the catastrophic 2009 bushfires in Victoria, Australia where residents organized an impromptu relief center that collected and distributed urgently needed goods without red tape. Many victims were able to mobilize resources despite considerable personal losses. The research also found spontaneous compassionate actions played a vital role in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Unlike the limitations of traditional disaster relief efforts, victims that were able to take action to help others, developed behavioral, emotional, and assumptive resilience which led to social interaction, community connections, and other positive outcomes. The book showcases the power “spontaneous venturing” can play when disaster hits, providing a practical guide for individuals, organizations, and communities to take a more humanistic and compassionate approach. 

This study sought to understand the impact of loosened bankruptcy regulation on the growth of Japanese new start-up technology ventures. Using a quasi-natural experiment with longitudinal data, they found that lenient bankruptcy regulations increased the number of bankruptcy cases, but also surprisingly motivated more capable founders to start new technology ventures. The authors assert that lenient bankruptcy laws are more beneficial to capable founders who often have the most to lose. Thus, the flow of human and social capital that these capable founders bring leads to the foundation of higher-performing firms. The paper engaged academic cooperation and obtained funding from practitioners who were interested in the study. The practitioners in Japan actively participated is providing examples and quotes that broadened the paper's appeal. This paper, by its effect in policy circles, has added to academic theories of institutional change. Their findings have since been incorporated into new public policy in Sweden and the Japanese government continues to use the research to reform business regulations to energize its entrepreneurial environment. The paper is used widely in Ph.D. seminars. 

The study seeks to understand how the provision of long-term executive compensation—which aims to increase managers’ time horizon—impacts firm value and strategy. To study this relationship, we explore the impact of changes in executives’ long-term incentives on a variety of outcomes, including stock prices and operating performance. Specifically, we examine shareholder proposals on long-term executive compensation (advocating the use of restricted stocks, restricted stock options, and long-term incentive plans) that pass or fail by a small margin of votes. The passage of such “close call” proposals is akin to a random assignment of long-term incentives, which allows us to draw causal inferences. We find that corporate short-termism hampers business success, and that long-term incentives improve business performance. Firms that adopted long-term compensation experienced a significant increase in their stock price. This stock price increase foreshadowed an increase in operating profits that materialized after two years. We explore the reasons for these improvements in performance, and find that firms that adopted long-term executive compensation made more investments in R&D and stakeholder engagement, especially pertaining to employees and the natural environment. This suggests that long-term executive compensation benefits companies by fostering innovation and allowing them to acquire intangible assets (such as legitimacy, reputation, and trust) through stakeholder relationships. Our study raises the question of the temporal dimensions of corporate governance and the optimal design thereof. The findings of this study have important managerial and policy implications. Our research has informed recent policy debates in the U.K. on the need to reform executive pay; has been featured in the Wall Street Journal; cited in reports by McKinsey Consulting; and presented to practitioners at various venues including the International Centre for Pension Management, the Investment Innovation Conference for the Canadian Investment Review, and the United Nation’s Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) Conference. 

The study examines how community members (custodians) worked to renew an institution (public water services) during the Detroit water shutoffs that began in 2014. We conducted a longitudinal qualitative study beginning prior to the 33,000 household water shutoffs of 2014 and following this ongoing crisis through 2017. We found that four groups of custodians were mobilized to act at different times, to take on unique roles, and had distinct understandings of their institutional roles: operatives, warriors, converts, and agnostics. These custodians are micro-level actors who worked alongside the macro-level institution to stimulate public awareness that water and water services required active protection and renewal. Our findings demonstrate that different groups of custodians may, in turn, find that leveraging powerful shared institutions could be a valuable tool to address growing social inequalities, bridge polarizing social divisions, and to protect resources in crisis. Subsequent water conflicts in Ireland, the U.S. (Baltimore, Flint, and Standing Rock), and South Africa continue today to draw on the energy and resources renewed in Detroit. Often terming themselves water "protectors" or "defenders," custodians have stimulated broad public awareness that water and water services are neglected and require active protection. 

This book emphasizes Integrated Management as the key driver of innovation and profitability in progressive companies.  It presents an evidence-based approach to integrating sustainability into business practices. Research within the book builds on peer-reviewed published qualitative field studies, survey-based studies, and multivariate analysis studies involving management systems and sustainability to foster reliability and validity for readers from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds. It takes readers through the opportunities we have to enable an enterprise value proposition across all business functions that can include environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. Applying a proven strategic planning approach, it helps managers and decision-makers uncover the tools and actions available for change management, and performance measured with an Integrated Bottom Line (IBL). The book provides credible and useful knowledge for professionals, and serves as a resource for those in executive education, and as a text, for business management students. A resource with concrete evidence-based examples from best-in-practice enterprises, proven management tenets, models and tools alongside emerging technologies, that can develop integrated solutions aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To date, the book has been disseminated in over twenty countries. 

This study set out to understand how a firm with proclaimed Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) standards came to practice Corporate Social irresponsibility (CSiR - "the failure to act responsibly") in the forests of Guyana.  Using a grounded theory approach, the authors conducted field research, examined documents and their interview data, coded the actions and events described in the data, identified conceptual categories that captured the firm’s strategies, and summarized their findings in a narrative account.  The research provides an understanding of how a firm that appeared to be socially responsible was in fact operating irresponsibly, despite having been certified as practicing sustainable forestry by a recognized certification body. The findings are used in business ethic courses worldwide and have provided policy makers with evidence that they must take effective, practical steps to ensure that CSR does not turn into CSiR. 

This study sought to understand how cultural preservationists leverage the political fraction between the local government and the central government to resist the commercialization (as measured by admission price) of 141 Buddhist temples in China between 2006 to 2016. A Fixed-Effect regression analysis with a panel data set controlled for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneities showed that admission prices were lower in Buddhist temples that gathered support from local, cultural preservationists. The study provided evidence that local, cultural resistance in a moral market can successfully influence the central government of an authoritarian country concerned with the public appearance of social justice, to push back the local government's efforts of developing temples into tourism businesses. This study showed that political power is not a monolithic body and can be fractured at different levels. Local residents in an authoritarian regime can voice their grievances and coordinate collective action to mobilize the central government to override the local government. These findings contribute to developing a contentious account of the moral market and have implications for the study of the political economy of authoritarian regimes. 

In response to media exposés and activist group pressure to eliminate exploitive working conditions, multinational companies have pushed their suppliers to adopt labor codes of conduct and improve their labor practices to meet the standards set forth in these codes. We examine a proprietary dataset from a large social auditing firm that audited 3,276 supplier factories in 55 countries on behalf of 102 buyers from 11 countries from 2012 through 2015. Audit teams assess the extent to which factories’ workplace conditions meet a single code of conduct that specifies maximum working hours and minimum wages, occupational health and safety practices, and environmental management practices. We investigate the improvement of a supplier factory’s labor practice and find that three important internal structures are associated with greater improvement in labor practices: payment incentives (e.g., piece-rate payment), certifications to management standards (e.g., SA8000 and WRAP), and unions. Specifically, factories that avoided the high-powered productivity incentive of piece-rate pay improved their audit score in successive audits 55% more than factories that used piece-rate payment. Supplier factories certified to management system standards improved by an average of 17% more than noncertified factories.  Unionized supplier factories improved 20% more than nonunionized ones. We also find important interactions among these three internal structures — piece-rate payment tempers labor practice improvement associated with certifications and unions, and certifications and unions complement each other. Our findings suggest important strategic considerations for managers selecting supplier factories and provide key insights for the design of transnational sustainability governance regimes. 

This study sought to understand the role of emotions and values in solving grand challenges of water sustainability, drawing on ethnographic and longitudinal data of the Okanagan Water Stewardship Council (the Council). The paper investigates how and why Council members embedded in disparate logics are able to overcome diverse and sometimes conflicting interests in water, and construct a new shared-governance logic together. An inductive theory-building approach was used, with data including naturalist observations, semi-structured interviews, and archives. The findings showed that social emotions, moral emotions, and emotional energy facilitated logic-construction cycles by working through the agentic mechanisms of openness and reflexivity, commitment and engagement respectively. The study demonstrated that positive emotions resulted in the continued elaboration and enactment of a new shared governance logic, whilst negative emotions seemed to weaken the new logic. The findings offer new insights into the role of emotions in agency and institutional dynamics, and illustrate how micro level interactions affect meso- and macro level social structures. The work has been presented to policy makers at federal, provincial, and regional government level, in addition to academics and local communities. The executive committee of the Council took the findings of this study seriously, and the Council has since re-formed sub-committees and produced a new Water Sustainability Document that positively impacted the practice of water sustainability. This study on grand challenges makes a tangible contribution to a better and more sustainable world.

We started with the observation that progress toward greater equality is a fragmented process, whereby substantive advances in some domains (e.g., top leadership representation) coexist with persisting inequality in others (e.g., pay). The study thus sought to understand how messages celebrating progress in women’s representation in top corporate leadership may affect people’s concern with persisting gender inequality in other domains (e.g., pay gap, housework). Across two correlational and three experimental studies, we find that when people perceive a high (vs. low) level of female representation in top leadership, they express less concern with persisting forms of gender inequality (e.g., pay gap, housework). Why does reading a positive message produce this negative reaction? We find that people who perceive a high (vs. low) level of women’s representation in top leadership come to overgeneralize the extent to which women have access to equal opportunities. In identifying the potential detrimental consequences of messages celebrating substantial changes in the gender composition of traditionally male-dominated leadership spaces, this work helps address a blind spot in academics' and practitioners' understandings of the psychological processes set in motion by social progress in organizations. The paper's conceptualization of gender progress as uneven and fragmented (rather than as linear and continuous) across domains of inequality will better equip business leaders to anticipate previously overlooked barriers to gender progress that may paradoxically emerge as their organizations and societies advance towards greater gender equality. Since publication, the research has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, and has been presented at the 2019 ASCEND Summit, targeted at business leaders seeking to transform their organizations. 

This study sought to understand how an entrepreneur's gender impacts the decision to obtain sustainability certification. Theories of social identity and institutions were combined to develop a novel theoretical framework explaining why and under what conditions women would be more likely to attain such certifications. Data were then collected on prospective B Corporations and their institutional environments to test the research question using Heckman full information maximum likelihood probit models in which stage 1 and stage 2 models are estimated simultaneously. Women-owned businesses were found to be three times as likely to pursue B Corporation certification as otherwise identical non-women-owned businesses, and this tendency was amplified for women-owned businesses located in contexts where sustainability norms are relatively weak, mimetic pressure to obtain sustainability certification is low, and woman-owned businesses are less prevalent. These findings challenge prior work that suggests that certifications are used exclusively to increase legitimacy, instead offering evidence of their role in authenticating business owners’ values-based social identities. Moreover, the findings offer evidence of how women play an important role in "jumpstarting” movements such as those associated with the Certified B Corporation, which are focused on advancing businesses that enhance the well-being of both people and the planet. This research has since been featured in social media and was presented at B Lab's Annual Champions Retreat.

This study sought to build an inductive, qualitative study of independent workers, people not affiliated with an organization or established profession, to develop a theory about the management of precarious and personalized work identities.  The analysis involved repeated iterations between two stages. The first involved synthesizing in a descriptive yet comprehensive fashion the experiences that participants described. The second involved abstracting a theoretical articulation of the identity processes the authors set out to investigate. The evidence found the absence of organizational or professional membership caused workers to experience stark emotional tensions. Lacking the holding environment provided by an organization, the workers studied endeavored to create one for themselves through cultivating connections to routines, places, people, and a broader purpose. These personal holding environments helped them manage the broad range of emotions stirred up by their precarious working lives and focus on producing work that let them define, express, and develop their selves. By clarifying the process through which people manage emotions associated with precarious and personalized work identities, and thereby render their work identities viable and their selves vital, this paper advances theorizing on the emotional underpinnings of identity work and the systems psychodynamics of independent work. Further information can be read on this website:  https://hbr.org/2018/03/thriving-in-the-gig-economy.

The book contends people’s economic potential is directly connected to the vital networks that power the modern economy, as such, business, government, and civil society must devise and implement effective initiatives to ensure inclusive growth is achieved through the global ‘democratization of productivity’ (access and participation to vital networks of services and know-how). An array of case studies are presented, demonstrating people’s economic potential is possible, only, when they have access to the vital networks powering the modern economy.  The book demonstrates the logic of inclusive growth, warning if left unaddressed, the gap between the wealthy and the poor, in both developed and developing economies will continue to widen. Since publication, the book has been presented at the annual international conference of the EFMD (European Foundation of Management Development) and made available by the Asian Case Studies Centre at Singapore Management University. Copies of the book have also been distributed at the annual conferences of AABS (African Association of Business Studies) and the AAPBS (Association of Asia-Pacific Business Schools). 

The study examines how global MFO’s (microfinance organizations) may be impacted by organizational social outreach and financial stability.  A framework is developed to predict the compatibility of social outreach and financial sustainability for different types of enterprises.  Data on 2,037 microfinance organizations in 115 nations between 1995 and 2013 was collected from the Microfinance Information Exchange (IX), a nonprofit initiative founded by the World Bank. A generalized least squares (GLS) regression was used to analyze operational self-sufficiency per MFO year.  The findings supported that social–financial trade-offs were amplified when a social issue was intertwined with deep-seated cultural problems, such as discrimination, and when an enterprise operates in a weak institutional environment. The study provided evidence it is not always realistic to ask local, entrepreneurs to launch sustainable social ventures if they come from disadvantaged places that do not support innovative, sustainable solutions.  Instead, non-profits and charities may be more effective, as these organizations can focus on social mission pursuits without worrying about revenue generation.  The results have since been shared at the European Microfinance Conference and with the European Centre for Microfinance Research, World Bank, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, and the International Monetary Fund.