Academy of Management Review

We advance a theoretical framework of how entrepreneurial ideas of employees are commercialized as a function of their uncertainty, firm-specificity, and appropriability. We argue that as uncertainty increases, the choice of commercialization mode will increasingly be driven by differences in subjective judgments of the idea’s value, with firms having an advantage in assessing the true value of their employee’s ideas relative to market because of their firm-specific nature. Building on this insight, we develop a formal model of commercialization choice that maps idea characteristics to commercialization outcomes—spinouts, internal commercialization, market mobility, or abandonment—while also predicting how these relationships will be moderated by the cost of startups, the value of the idea, and the institutional context, as well as how value will be created and appropriated within each mode. In particular, the model distinguishes between four different types of employee spinouts, including the previously neglected case where the employer sees value in an idea and wants to commercialize it, but the employee still prefers to start their own firm. We thus offer a more nuanced view of employee entrepreneurship, based on differences in subjective judgment under uncertainty, the firm-specific nature of employee knowledge, and appropriability regimes.

The phenomenon of organizations breaking laws and norms in the pursuit of strategic advantage has received substantial attention in recent years. Such transgressions generally elicit the intervention of social control agents seeking to curb deviant behavior and defend the status quo. In some cases, their efforts result in the deviant behavior being suppressed; in other occasions, however, organizational deviance can persist and even be accepted into the very system of rules that was initially challenged. In this paper, we advance a structured view of this process by formulating a theory of the social control of organizational deviance. Building upon the sociological literature, we classify forms of social control based on their cooperativeness and formality; additionally, we shed light on the outcomes of social control by illustrating the conditions under which they are likely to be more, or less, accommodative of deviant behavior, as well as more, or less, permanent. In so doing, we contribute to scholarly understanding of the role of social control in organizational fields, as well as of the advantageousness of deviant behavior as a strategic option for organizations.

Expressions about opportunities are used unproblematically in everyday contexts. Yet, the question “What is an opportunity?” has posed a difficult riddle in the academic study of entrepreneurship. Drawing on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, we explain that such perplexities are common when words are removed from ordinary language and intellectuals try to grasp what they name. Approaching the opportunity riddle differently, we ask, “How do entrepreneurs use the word ‘opportunity?’” and elucidate an actualization theory of entrepreneurship attuned to the everyday understandings that underlie the meaningful use of the word. Bringing implicit understandings to the foreground contributes to (a) dissolving the mystification over the nature of “opportunity”; (b) clarifying the conceptual foundations of entrepreneurship theory; and (c) reorienting the field toward more conceptually precise ways of thinking about Knightian uncertainty, entrepreneurial success, and the entrepreneurial process. This paper also contributes to the methodology of management studies by demonstrating how attention to the logic of ordinary language can alert us to theoretical dead-ends and enable the development of theory that bridges academic and everyday understandings.

Crises are harmful events that can influence organizational outcomes, leading to significant scholarly and practitioner interest in crisis management. A limitation of this line of inquiry, however, is that it typically glosses over stakeholders’ multiple concerns and the multiple factors that comprise organizations’ response strategies. To address this limitation, we delineate stakeholders’ crisis concerns into rational, emotional, and moral aspects. We then develop a typology along two dimensions of crisis response strategies—accountability and attention—to predict the likelihood that a specific strategy mitigates each of these concerns. We theorize that certain strategies mitigate just one type of concern, while others mitigate multiple concerns—albeit with a lower likelihood of success. Finally, we apply our typology to an organization’s social evaluations—that is, important, proximal outcomes affected by a crisis—in order to better understand the trade-offs associated with managing stakeholders’ multiple concerns.

We introduce a novel stakeholder-oriented framework that highlights variance in the application and expression of gender bias in the upper echelons. Directed by their relationship with the firm’s leadership, we theorize that stakeholders’ appraisals of top female leaders map onto a categorical and complex continuum. At the “categorical” end of this continuum, stakeholders neither have access nor are attentive to capability cues from the leader, increasing their reliance on stereotypes and gender biases in their leader evaluations. At the “complex” end of the continuum, stakeholders have access and are attentive to capability cues from the leader, decreasing their reliance on stereotypes and increasing their ability to accurately evaluate the leader. Between these ends, stakeholders evaluate female leaders by applying stereotypes and striving for accuracy to varying degrees. Each region on this continuum is linked to an array of behavioral responses, directed by stakeholders toward a target leader, that differ in valence and intensity. Our framework has significant implications for understanding a variety of social biases beyond gender, and enables the development of tailored strategies that can be used to facilitate accurate leader evaluations by all stakeholders.

Diversity training is situated in a cultural context characterized by sociopolitical polarization, complex and fluid social identities, social movements, and debates over its appropriateness. Yet, we lack theories on the drivers of diversity learning and transfer that consider both unique workforce composition characteristics and contextual changes. Diversity training researchers have focused primarily on static aspects of training design and content while largely ignoring the role of the learner. Because these oversights have fueled persistent questions about the effectiveness of diversity training, we offer a learner-centric, process-based model of diversity training that acknowledges the broader context in which it is situated and its influence on trainee motivation, learning, and transfer. We consider the interplay among the design factors, learning context, and learner characteristics in the pre-training, training, and post-training environments, and explore the self-regulatory mechanisms through which trainees can guide their learning. We close by discussing how our process model of diversity training changes our understanding of past research and redirects future research, and we apply the model to several prototypical diversity learner personas to demonstrate how it can be used in practice to personalize diversity training and address barriers to its effectiveness.

Where we work—our workplaces—have enormous effects on our work attitudes and behaviors. As workplaces become increasingly mobile, remote, multiple, and uncoupled from the organization for which the work is done, individuals—and their employers—struggle with the question, “How does this place affect me and what I do?” We need new theoretical insights into how workplaces shape our experience of work and important outcomes such as well-being, boundary management, and territoriality. To do so, we describe the phenomenology of how our workplaces become deeply intertwined with our sense of self at work, particularly in the modern context. Our model explains how the functional, social, aesthetic, and temporal dimensions of the workplace, and the holistic and immersive experiences that result, affect workplace identification via sensemaking processes, and the outcomes that result.

As research on employee voice proliferates, there is an emerging interest in understanding the kinds of voice that have greater potential to enhance performance—that is, the productivity and quality of unit and organizational outputs. Yet, existing work in this area has focused primarily on characteristics of voice that appear valued by recipients, falling short in specifying the dimensions that contribute to voice’s performance-enhancing potential or the conditions that facilitate its development in organizations. Envisioning “voice quality” as a cross-level and context-specific phenomenon, we advance a contextualized theory that first draws on an organizational ambidexterity perspective to detail how voice quality is multiplicatively composed of three dimensions—desirability, feasibility, and, in exploration-focused contexts, degree of change. Further recognizing that the development of voice quality depends on context-specific knowledge, experiences, and cognitions, we accentuate how time—in conjunction with other individual and contextual factors—produces ebbs and flows in voice quality in the specific case of newcomer socialization. Altogether, our framework aims to build consensus around a contextualized understanding of the dimensions of voice quality, highlight its dynamic nature, and advance a temporally precise theory around its unique nomological network in organizations.