Not on the right rung for me? How status inconsistency leads to avoidance of status-threatening ties in NCAA

This study examines the impact of status inconsistency on status-threatening activities within NCAA Division I men's basketball teams. Specifically, we focus on a nested form of status that includes both individual and group-level elements. We argue that organizations dealing with status inconsistency stemming from such nested form face challenges in reducing status inconsistency. To maintain their deserved status, these status-inconsistent organizations tend to avoid activities that could further threaten their status, despite potential economic gains. An analysis of NCAA Division I men's basketball scheduling data from 2000 to 2019 provides robust support to our theoretical arguments. Our findings suggest that the status inconsistency between a team's status and its conference status diminished the likelihood of scheduling games with non-Division I teams, a behavior considered counter-normative in this context. This effect is most prominent among teams in "Mid Major" conferences, while teams with recent participation in the NCAA Tournament show a mitigated effect.

Looking for Greener Grass? Prior Status and Exploration-Exploitation Decisions in Job Search

Research on the returns to specialist versus generalist careers has largely neglected what drives individuals’ motivations to build different career profiles in the first place. Although specialization is widely associated with benefits, generalist careers are seen as more at risk except in certain mitigated conditions. At the same time, given the uncertainty in labor markets, future returns to specialization cannot simply be assumed. We introduce in this paper a novel mechanism behind the formation of generalist careers, opportunity-enhancing generalism, whereby workers willingly give up the benefits to specialization to dissociate from a past expertise considered to yield relatively poor future prospects. On the premise that one’s prior experience provides the basis for exploration-versus-exploitation decisions, we argue that aspects of one’s previous jobs, including status, will importantly affect decisions about whether to continue specializing. Specifically, negative feedback about prospects for advancement in their prior jobs will increase workers’ motivation to search for jobs in new areas of expertise. Focusing on managerial workers’ job search decisions, we predict that individuals who come from low-status firms, low-status work domains, or both will be more likely to search for jobs in a new area than job seekers coming from high-status firms and work domains. Using data on job searches in a Master in Business Administration labor market, we find support for our prediction and suggestive evidence for the opportunity-enhancing mechanism we propose.

Funding: This work was supported by the French National Research Agency [Grant “Investissements d’Avenir” Labex Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX-0047] and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [Grant MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1663 .

How does employees' behavior change how we feel about their organization? Transfer of affective impressions between employees and organizations

Stable impressions of how good, powerful, and active an organization is may be jointly shared with their employees, yet the impression produced by employees' behavior may be transferred back to the organization. Our first studies shows that stable impressions, or sentiments, of organizations (e.g., a library) are fairly similar to those of their employees (e.g., an employee of a library), with organizations viewed as more powerful and morally extreme than their employees. Our principal studies along with affect control theory simulations show how the impressions created by an employee's behavior toward a customer (e.g., an employee of a library shouts at a customer) transfer to the employee's organization. Affect control theory simulations predict the impressions of an organization as well as they predict impressions of the individual employee. Regression and classification analyses give support to impression transfer, with the most transfer occurring for evaluation impressions, and more so for transferring bad impressions rather than good ones. Therefore, this research shows how a single behavior by a rank-and-file employee can shape outsider's impressions of organizations and the potential for applying affect control theory predictions to impressions of organizations.

The Evaluation of Founder Failure and Success by Hiring Firms: A Field Experiment

Organizations tout the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet, when hiring it remains unclear how they evaluate entrepreneurial human capital—namely, job candidates with founder experience. How hiring firms evaluate this experience—and especially how this evaluation varies by entrepreneurial success and failure—reveals insights into the structures and processes within organizations. Organizations research points to two perspectives related to the evaluation of founder experience: Former founders may be advantaged, due to founder experience signaling high-quality capabilities and human capital, or disadvantaged, due to concerns related to fit and commitment. To identify the dominant class of mechanisms driving the evaluation of founder experience, it is important to consider how these evaluations differ, depending on whether the founder’s venture failed or succeeded. To isolate demand-side mechanisms and hold supply-side factors constant, we conducted a field experiment. We sent applications varying the candidate’s founder experience to 2,400 software engineering positions in the United States at random. We find that former founders received 43% fewer callbacks than nonfounders and that this difference is driven by older hiring firms. Further, this founder penalty is greatest for former successful founders, who received 33% fewer callbacks than former failed founders. Our results highlight that mechanisms related to concerns about fit and commitment, rather than information asymmetry about quality, are most influential when hiring firms evaluate former founders in our context.

Do Startup Employees Earn More in the Long Run?

Evaluating the attractiveness of startup employment requires an understanding of both what startups pay and the implications of these jobs for earnings trajectories. Analyzing Danish registry data, we find that employees hired by startups earn roughly 17% less over the next 10 years than those hired by large, established firms. About half of this earnings differential stems from sorting—from the fact that startup employees have less human capital. Long-term earnings also vary depending on when individuals are hired. Although the earliest employees of startups suffer an earnings penalty, those hired by already-successful startups earn a small premium. Two factors appear to account for the earnings penalties for the early employees: Startups fail at high rates, creating costly spells of unemployment for their (former) employees. Job-mobility patterns also diverge: After being employed by a small startup, individuals rarely return to the large employers that pay more.

COVID-19 and business failures: The paradoxes of experience, scale, and scope for theory and practice

In light of growing scholarly works on business failure, across the social science domains, it is surprising that past studies have largely overlooked how extreme environmental shocks and 'black swan' events such as those caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and other global crises, can precipitate business failures. Drawing insights from the current literature on business failure and the unfolding event of COVID-19, we highlight the paradoxes posed by novel exogenous shocks (that is, shocks that transcend past experiences) and the implications for SMEs. The pandemic has accelerated the reconfiguration of the relationship between states and markets, increasing the divide between those with political connections and those without, and it may pose new legitimacy challenges for some players even as others seem less concerned by such matters, whilst experiential knowledge resources may be both an advantage and a burden.

An ambidexterity perspective toward configurations of knowledge flows: an empirical testing of its two-phase performance implications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine how knowledge inflows and outflows interact to affect performance outcomes. Though previous studies have dealt with knowledge inflows and outflows, the quality and quantity characteristics of knowledge are often not taken into account, thus leaving a research gap with regards to the effect of their interactions on performance outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on Poisson regression analysis, this quantitative study fills the aforementioned research gaps by analyzing the ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective and examines their effects on two-phase performance (i.e. regular season and playoffs), using a longitudinal data set of National Basketball Association transactions from the 2003-2004 to 2014-2015 season.

Findings

The results suggest that the complementarity between knowledge inflows and outflows along the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a positive impact on two-phase performance, while the imbalance between knowledge inflows and outflows under the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a negative impact on playoffs performance (Phase 2). These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows under a single quality or quantity dimension of knowledge. Furthermore, the interaction between the quantity of the inflows of knowledge and the quality of the outflows of knowledge and the interaction between the quality of the inflows of knowledge and the quantity of the outflows of knowledge are both positively related to two-phase performance. These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge. Finally, the effects of the interaction between knowledge inflows and outflows on playoffs performance are greater than regular-season.

Practical implications

Organizations should leverage ambidexterity to manage/balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions, further enhancing performance outcomes.

Originality/value

This study, first, provides new insights into knowledge flows by distinguishing between the quality and quantity of knowledge, the inflows and outflows of knowledge, constructing ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective. Second, it contributes to the relationship between knowledge flows and organizational performance by revealing how ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows exert different effects on performance outcomes. Third, it adds to the literature of ambidexterity-performance relationships and expands it to the context of sports.