Journal of Management Studies最新文献

Organizations often leverage corporate social responsibility (CSR) in their efforts to gain external legitimacy, and yet CSR managers – the very people responsible for implementing CSR initiatives – often struggle to achieve internal legitimacy and, thus, their objectives. This qualitative research seeks insights into CSR managers’ need for legitimation (why) and the strategies they use to overcome challenges and establish legitimacy within their organizations (how). A set of six distinct challenges CSR managers face reveals the complex reality of their roles and the factors that drive their quests for legitimacy. In turn, CSR managers draw on a repertoire of eight legitimation strategies to navigate the challenges, each reflecting a different legitimacy dimension. Notably, CSR managers’ occupational self-perception influences their perceptions of challenges and choice of legitimation strategies, indicating the importance of individual characteristics (when) in shaping CSR practices. These nuanced insights into the micro-level dynamics of legitimacy advance literature on both legitimacy and micro-CSR by offering a personalized approach that accounts for the unique perspectives and strategies of CSR managers.

Although leader humility is considered a desirable leader characteristic, an emerging research stream focuses on when leader humility may come at a cost. By integrating implicit leadership theories with the attentional focus model, we examine when followers perceive leader humility favourably and unfavourably due to valuing leader characteristics differently in different situations. We suggest that followers are more likely to value (disvalue) leader humility when there is less (more) time pressure. Specifically, followers are inclined to attribute leader humility as comprehensive (indecisive) when time pressure is low (high), resulting in high (low) evaluations on leader effectiveness and satisfaction with leader. The results of an experiment and a three-wave survey support our predictions, which advances knowledge about the benefits and perils of leader humility and their underlying mechanisms.

Investors increasingly pressure firms for action on climate change and carbon emissions, in particular, by setting carbon targets. Whereas investors largely rely on quantitative information in evaluating this important aspect of non-financial performance, scarce research has explored how firms may exploit the numerical magnitudes of carbon targets. We examine this possibility by analysing deceptive parameter changes in carbon targets after initial adoption, wherein firms create the perception of strengthening carbon targets while in reality loosening them, a novel form of decoupling. We theorize a U-shaped relationship between the most conspicuous target parameter, target size (percentage emissions reduction), and the propensity for deceptive target change based on countervailing pressures – stakeholder expectation management and target attainment – that create tension. We further propose greater investor pressure over policy, through long-term ownership and shareholder voice, exacerbates these pressures whereas media controversy that may prompt investor scrutiny over practice deters deceptive target changes. We find empirical support for our hypotheses and provide additional analyses that support our theorized latent, countervailing pressures and our characterization of deceptive change as decoupling.

There is growing recognition that business activity can promote peacebuilding, yet contradictory claims have emerged about company roles in peace and conflict. The research field of business and peace has focused on this issue, as have scholars in related fields like political science, economics, law, and ethics. This has led to definitional variations, alongside unit and level of analysis differences, which generate contradictory claims that hamper future research on this critical topic. To reconcile extant research around companies and their place in peacebuilding scholarship, we undertake an organizational-level examination of the field, cataloguing the research by scholars across disciplines through a systematic review of 215 publications. Our review maps the known ways by which businesses can engage in peacebuilding, while demonstrating how organizations exercise their agency to create heterogenous effects on peace and conflict. Our analysis highlights the need for businesses to advance peace-positive ends across a range of activities to reduce the conflict-causing effects of business. By showing that businesses, intentionally or not, create peace or conflict through their activities, this article issues a call to action for scholars and decision-makers to advance knowledge concerning peacebuilding organizations.

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as a global phenomenon aimed at tackling societal grand challenges through market-based activities. A holistic understanding of social enterprise outcomes is crucial for reflecting their effectiveness in meeting social objectives and informing internal organizational processes. This study explores the outcomes of social enterprises through a comparative qualitative analysis of 49 social ventures in Austria, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States, spanning diverse sectors. Three key outcome dimensions are identified: individual transformation, capital provision, and societal influence. Our analysis results in a typology of seven distinct types of social enterprises, each integrating these dimensions to varying degrees. Utilizing this typology, we reveal how social enterprises navigate barriers to solving complex social and environmental problems, illustrating the dynamic interplay between outcome dimensions and the importance of multi-objective organizing – beyond hybrid organizing – in addressing complex societal issues.

In extreme contexts, actors must often engage in collective sensemaking to enable coordinated action. While prior research has established that cognitive disparities and emotive distractions disrupt collective sensemaking, we lack theory on how actors overcome these common challenges in extreme contexts. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a process study, collecting unique multi-perspective video and archival data during a maritime search and rescue mission in the Aegean Sea where actors (i.e., rescue crew members and refugees) faced cognitive disparities (e.g., different levels of maritime expertise) and distracting emotions (e.g., fear, anxiety, and tension) yet needed to coordinate their actions to ensure a safe evacuation. We draw on this data to develop a collective sensemaking model that details the auxiliary process steps and multimodal communication – verbal, para-verbal, and non-verbal cues – actors use to alternately frame emotional states and convey task-related information. Our model demonstrates how actors, through multimodal collective sensemaking, overcome the challenges posed by cognitive disparities and distracting emotions in extreme contexts. It thus adds a dynamic emotive and bodily perspective to the predominantly cognitive and verbal understanding in sensemaking theory, and also has implications for practitioners working in extreme contexts.

Charity organizations are important to solving complex social and environmental issues that are beyond the reach of government and commercial organizations. However, these organizations are under increasing pressure for survival due to a sharp decrease in their traditional sources of funding. This study examines how leaders of charity organizations can improve the financial security and impact of their organization by adopting commercial structures into their organization, and therefore undergoing a process of hybridization. We conducted a multiple comparative case study of 18 UK charities comparing how they engaged with emerging social finance funding opportunities that required them to adopt commercial structures which lay outside their dominant logic of action. We identified several aspects that influenced the likelihood of a charity organization to engage with this opportunity and, therefore, strategically hybridize. These included whether a charity executive had sufficient socialization in both the social and commercial logics to view social finance as a strategic opportunity and whether the organization could alter the role expectations of trustees with a commercial background to enable them to actively use both logics rather than compartmentalizing them in their decision-making. Our findings have important implications for research streams on hybridization and hybrid governance.

This study explores the often-overlooked political dimension of social enterprises, particularly their advocacy activities aimed at influencing public policy, legislation, norms, attitudes, and behaviour. While traditional management research has focused on commercial activity and the beneficiary-oriented aspects of social enterprises, this paper considers their upstream political activity. Using a phenomenon-based approach, we analyse original survey data from 718 social enterprises across seven countries and six problem domains to identify factors associated with their engagement in advocacy. Our findings reveal that public spending and competition in social enterprises’ problem domains, as well as their governance choices – legal form, sources of income, and collaborations – are significantly associated with advocacy activities. We propose a new theoretical framework to understand these dynamics, positioning social enterprises as key players in markets for public purpose. This research underscores the importance of recognizing the political activities of social enterprises and offers new insights for studying hybrid organizing and organizations that address complex societal challenges. By highlighting the integral role of advocacy, our study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of how social enterprises drive social change, not only through direct service provision but also by shaping the broader sociopolitical environment.

The new venture creation process is a central phenomenon in entrepreneurship research. Typically, scholarship has sought to identify common, linear stages of development in this process in pursuit of a sustained, growing venture. In contrast to this theory, this study reveals dynamic, non-linear venturing processes that allowed for venture persistence despite failing to ‘progress’ toward traditional outcomes. We generate these insights from qualitative data on Syrian refugee entrepreneurs seeking to create and sustain ventures in Lebanon while living in a state of limbo – a precarious situation where the future is unknown and unknowable. We organize our findings in a model of venturing in limbo, which explains why and how entrepreneurs persist in venture creation practices despite experiencing repeated and significant setbacks that return them ‘to square one’. We reveal dynamic venture creation processes that allow for adaptive responses to erratic environmental shifts by producing entrepreneurial readiness, which consists of behavioural, cognitive, and psychological/emotional capabilities. Entrepreneurial readiness enables persistence of venturing efforts in the face of chronic precarity. Our study contributes to theory on new venture creation in entrepreneurship and organizational liminality.