2024 Responsible Research in Management Awards

Looking beyond the shiny surface of Potsdamer Platz, a designer microcity within Berlin’s city center, this book goes behind-the-scenes with the cleaners who pick up cigarette butts from sidewalks, scrape chewing gum from marble floors, wipe coffee stains from office desks and scrub public toilets, long before white-collar workers, consumers and tourists enter the complex. It follows Costas’s journey to a large yet hidden, four-level deep corporate underworld below Potsdamer Platz. There, Costas discovers how cleaners’ attitudes to work are much less straightforward than the public perceptions of cleaning as degrading work would suggest. Cleaners turn to their work for dignity yet find it elusive. The book explores how these cleaners’ dramas of dignity unfold in interactions with co-workers, management, clients and the public.

Much has been written about the potential for entrepreneurship to spur economic growth — and yet repeatedly, we’ve seen entrepreneurship-driven revitalization programs fail to make a real, lasting impact on local communities in economically challenged cities and towns. How can we foster ventures that actually revive the economies in which they’re founded? We explored this question through an eight-year investigation into two organizations that took contrasting approaches to supporting entrepreneurship in Detroit. We find that if the goal is to harness the power of entrepreneurship to revitalize economically challenged places, business leaders and policymakers need to reconsider the pervasive pursuit of scaling up, whereby ventures are designed to grow rapidly over wide geographical areas. Instead, they can encourage founders to “scale deep,” whereby they design ventures that would steadily take deep roots into the local economy by repurposing and recombining underutilized local resources. Unlike scaling-up ventures whose local impact is explosive yet short-lived, scaling-deep ventures create jobs, products or services, and spillover effects that stay local and address specific local problems. This means that revitalizing places like Detroit may require not just ventures that offer strong financial returns, but ventures that lift up their local communities to achieve sustained self-reliance.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a critical mental illness that onsets in approximately 15% of mothers, making it one of the most common complications associated with childbirth. Yet, while research in the organizational sciences has begun to pay increased attention to the challenges of motherhood (e.g., pregnancy, breastfeeding), limited attention has been paid to how the symptoms of PPD dynamically shape women’s experiences and identities at work and at home. Within this research, the authors conducted a qualitative investigation of women who had been formally diagnosed with PPD, as well as subject matter experts familiar with the diagnosis of PPD. Findings highlighted how being diagnosed with PPD and coping with this experience resulted in an imposing identity for women—an identity that is unexpected and undesirable, and imposes upon existing (e.g., work) and/or provisional (e.g., motherhood) identities. Findings highlighted that coping with this imposing identity ultimately gave way to important outcomes in the work and home domains. Most notably, women were able to better enact self-compassion towards themselves, and compassion towards others, becoming critical supports for coworkers going through personal hardships. Further, women were able to craft personal work-family narratives, allowing them to reshape the relationship and balance they have with their work.

More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the last year alone. The pressing overdose crisis was fueled by physicians’ overprescribing of highly addictive medications, including benzodiazepines, a common drug prescribed for anxiety and insomnia. Prolonged use of benzodiazepines can increase risks of substance use disorders and suicide. What drives physicians’ excessive prescribing of these medications? Popular belief and enforcement efforts point to deviance – physician overprescribing for personal gains. But we find that deviant prescribing accounts for less than 10% of overprescribed drugs. More than half of excess prescriptions are driven by liminal prescribing – physicians prescribing more than guidelines but within the bounds of medical use. Using a rich dataset of using 213.9 million prescriptions, we show that deviant and liminal prescribing behaviors are learned through different peer networks. Deviant prescribing occurs in large, cohesive networks; liminal prescribing occurs in socially isolated networks with fractured information flows. Despite producing similar outcomes – supplying communities with large quantities of drugs with high abuse potential – these practices have different network footprints, peer influence processes, and are practiced by different physicians. Our paper shows that increasing the connectedness of liminal prescribers can be highly effective for reducing high-risk prescribing.

Analyzing careers of over 1,300 NFL coaches from 1985 to 2015, we found that white coaches were more likely to be promoted than coaches of color, even among coaches with equivalent experience, credentials, and (objective) performance. This disparity persisted after the Rooney Rule was introduced in 2003 to increase diversity among NFL coaches, by requiring teams to interview candidates of color for head coaching and senior management positions.

We account for racial differences in representation across playing and coaching positions (e.g., quarterbacks, linebackers) and focus our analysis on differential rewards for equivalent qualifications and performance. Our simulations imply that racial parity in top leadership representation necessitates that diversity initiatives like the Rooney Rule are applied at the lower level positions where most people begin their careers; diversifying pipelines is insufficient to achieve parity.

Our findings helped civil rights attorney Cyrus Mehri and the Fritz Pollard Alliance persuade the NFL owners to apply the Rooney Rule to lower-level positions (e.g., coordinators). The research was also featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ESPN. The research is also the basis for a teaching case on Cyrus Mehri’s continued advocacy for the Rooney Rule, DEI initiatives, and equitable opportunities.

Why do some professionals, such as sustainability officers, patient safety advocates, environmental health and workplace safety experts, algorithmic auditors, and social media fact checkers, have higher formal authority to oversee and direct a specific set of tasks and functions performed by other higher-status professionals in an organization, but they themselves have lower professional status? This research identifies how and why this misalignment or asymmetry between status and authority (“status-authority asymmetry”) emerges between professionals in organizations, how it negatively affects compliance and coordination, and with what individual- and organizational- level consequences. To examine these questions, I conducted a 24-month ethnography of 911 emergency coordination to understand how 911 dispatchers (lower-status professionals with higher formal authority) were able to navigate status-authority asymmetry and elicit compliance from the police officers (higher-status professionals). This study highlights the importance of generating second-degree influence through publicizing the higher-status professionals’ (police officers) non-compliance and lack of cooperation to their professional peers (the immediate police unit) as an important mechanism that helped 911 dispatchers to navigate status-authority asymmetry and elicit compliance from police officers. This study’s findings also highlight the considerable emotional toll experienced by individual 911 dispatchers in their attempts to elicit compliance from police officers, resulting in outcomes such as reduced morale, burnout, and absenteeism that produced negative career consequences for these 911 dispatchers, most of whom are women and racialized minorities. In doing so, this research highlights the gendered and racialized nature of authority in organizations, and its cascading set of negative consequences.

In an era of globalization, it is commonly assumed that multicultural experiences foster leadership effectiveness. However, little research has systematically tested this assumption. We develop a theoretical perspective that articulates how and when multicultural experiences increase leadership effectiveness. We hypothesize that broad multicultural experiences increase individuals’ leadership effectiveness by developing their communication competence. Because communication competence is particularly important for leading teams that are more multinational, we further hypothesize that individuals with broader multicultural experiences are particularly effective when leading more multinational teams. Four studies tested our theory using mixed methods (field survey, archival panel, field experiments) and diverse populations (corporate managers, soccer managers, hackathon leaders) in different countries (Australia, Britain, China, America). In Study 1, corporate managers with broader multicultural experiences were rated as more effective leaders, an effect mediated by communication competence. Analyzing a 25-year archival panel of soccer managers, Study 2 replicated the positive effect of broad multicultural experiences using a team performance measure of leadership effectiveness. Importantly, this effect was moderated by team national diversity: Soccer managers with broader multicultural experiences were particularly effective when leading teams with greater national diversity. Study 3 (digital health hackathon) and Study 4 (COVID-19 policy hackathon) replicated these effects in two field experiments, where individuals with varying levels of multicultural experiences were randomly assigned to lead hackathon teams that naturally varied in national diversity. Overall, our research suggests that broad multicultural experiences help leaders communicate more competently and lead more effectively, especially when leading multinational teams.

Across analyses of data from the EEOC and accompanying experiments, we found that Black women’s gender and racial discrimination claims were believed less compared to those made by White women and Black men, respectively. We revealed that Black women are viewed as less typical victims of these forms of discrimination, which explains their reduced believability. These patterns diverged when it came to financial remedy. When discrimination claims were believed, Black women received less financial remedy versus White women, but more financial remedy versus Black men. These results emerged because Black women are viewed as less warm and are pitied less than White women, but they are viewed as warmer and face less contempt than Black men.

This book offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Based on extensive field research, this book reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, it shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what this book calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. This book takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. It explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As this book argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

Myriad cross-sector initiatives seek to remake capitalism into a more just, sustainable, and inclusive system. But how do these distributed efforts—which often vary in strength—interact? To answer this question, we attend to the interaction between weak and strong governance reforms. Drawing on longstanding research on organizational values and the sociology of law, we theorize how the enactment of weak and broad sustainability legislation is likely to increase pressure on values-driven businesses to pursue both values authentication and material authentication by way of strong third-party certification. We test our conceptual model by examining the effects of the frequently criticized benefit corporation legislation passed in 36 U.S. jurisdictions on the related B Corporation certification. We find that new certifications and recertifications both increase in jurisdictions with such legislation and these effects are amplified or attenuated depending on corporate sustainability norms in the region. Taken together, our findings contribute to the intensifying societal conversation regarding the prospects for remaking capitalism, illustrating how even weak legislation can contribute to systems change not only by encouraging incremental sustainability reforms within a field but also by triggering an authentication imperative that mobilizes values-driven businesses to pursue rigorous certifications.

This study explores how heterogeneous actors produce solidarities to address institutionalized infrastructural inequalities. We trace fifteen years over which diverse actors constructed community palliative care infrastructure in Kerala, India. We analyse how actors engaged in solidarity processes of recognizing interdependences, reconfiguring spaces and re-imagining accountability to challenge exclusionary institutions and construct inclusive infrastructure at different scales. We foreground solidarity-making as an indispensable yet under-theorized aspect of institutional research on inequalities. We inform solidarity studies by illustrating how solidarity-making pulsates infrastructures with diverse webs of relations and spatial configurations. Overall, we advance a generative engagement with heterogeneity in institutional analyses and discuss the implications of solidarity-making to address infrastructural inequalities.

We examine how actors who have no legislative authority over others are able to transform water management from a frag- mented approach to a coordinated regional approach, by drawing on a longitudinal study of a regional water board in British Columbia, Canada. We found that the water board enacted an ethic of care to initiate and implement change to achieve water sustainability. Three caring processes operated in the initiating change period: leveraging a caring water ethic to amplify urgency, constructing care narratives to reduce resistance, and embedding care in organizational structures to demonstrate authenticity. Two caring processes operated in the implementing change period: enacting an ethic of care to transform rela- tionships and valorizing a caring water ethic. We found that care within the social world (e.g., caring for others both in a community and in neighboring communities) led to better care for the biosphere world (e.g., water). This study contributes to the emerging organization scholarship on the ethics of care by examining the process through which care is enacted inside and outside (e.g., between interdependent actors) the organization and the consequences of the enactment of care (e.g., beyond the organization, field-level effects). We reorient care in organization scholarship not only as a response to suffering as commonly portrayed in extant literature, but also as a source of agency. From this, we discuss the potential of care ethics for finding innovative solutions to environmental sustainability, and grand challenges in general.

To explain how multistakeholder groups organize democratic deliberations about complex sustainability issues, organizational scholars have focused on the key role of deliberative capacity, which encompasses the dimensions of inclusiveness, authenticity and consequentiality. However, the tensions inherent to the search of these three dimensions have been overlooked. In this paper, we argue that focusing on how spaces for deliberation are designed can help one understand how to manage such tensions. We identified the boundary work practices that shape the design of deliberative spaces and generate deliberative capacity properties in a high-level expert group (HLEG) launched by the European Commission about sustainable finance regulation. Our results show how these boundary work practices help balance deliberative tensions. We advance deliberation studies by conceptualizing deliberative boundary work, explaining how deliberative capacity is spatially generated and showing how deliberative tensions are balanced. We also contribute to boundary work theory by making explicit the deliberative nature of configuring boundary work and showing its relevancy to regulatory settings.

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an unprecedented era of public admiration for healthcare workers. Indeed, the title “healthcare heroes” became a ubiquitous moniker for healthcare providers of all stripes during the pandemic, a sentiment reflected in countless advertisements and banners. Paradoxically, these same “healthcare heroes” who were being publicly celebrated for their work in the fight against a novel coronavirus also faced stigma for their work amidst the virus and infected patients. Using grounded theory, we document how stigmatized members of an occupation experience and respond to mixed—even conflicting—social evaluations. We contribute to the literature on stigma and social evaluations more broadly by showing how targets of stigma evaluate their evaluators through nuanced logical and emotional processing and, moreover, that such processing can lead recipients of mixed evaluations toward a number of outcomes not previously theorized. We explore the concept of “dirty heroes,” where workers are celebrated and stigmatized along distinct dimensions of work traditionally studied in dirty work (i.e., physical, social, moral). Our findings further illustrate how high-legitimacy occupations can be subject to “hero-washing,” whereby workers are publicly celebrated yet privately neglected.