HEC Paris

Abstract Humans are not omniscient. For individuals, appropriately reckoning with intellectual limitations requires intellectual humility or acknowledging the boundaries of their knowledge. Adolescence is a time of immense developmental potential, but is intellectual humility valuable for adolescents to develop, can they develop it, and how might it be developed? Rooted in recent research, in this article, we describe why intellectual humility benefits adolescents in intellectual, social, and civic domains. We also explain why adolescents have the capacity to develop intellectual humility due to developmental changes in both cognitive sophistication and self-understanding. Finally, drawing on an emerging evidence base, we describe how experiences in school shape the development of intellectual humility and we identify priorities for future work in this area.

We study the decision problem of a Proposer who has a set of applications to submit for approval to an Authority and can choose an order of submission. The Proposer’s utility depends on the Authority’s rulings. The Authority has to be consistent with its past decisions, which we model using the nearest-neighbor criterion. If the Proposer’s utility increases with the set of approved applications, then any greedy strategy is optimal for her: She should submit any application that, given the current history, would be approved. However, if her utility increases with some approvals but decreases with others, the Proposer’s problem becomes significantly more complex. In the single-dimensional case, an optimal strategy can be computed in polynomial time. In the general case, however, finding an optimal strategy is NP-hard. Thus, even in the absence of uncertainty or strategic behavior on the part of the Authority, evaluating the impact of current submissions on future outcomes can be computationally intractable.

Female leadership remains a significant challenge for firms. Although research has documented the benefits of gender diversity in leadership positions, we lack understanding of how female leadership affects team cohesion—a critical determinant of team effectiveness. Drawing on role congruity theory and gender stereotypes literature, we examine the relationship between female leadership and social cohesion– a key subcomponent of team cohesion, exploring how this relationship is shaped by leadership style and purpose communication. Using a unique dataset of 26,500 teams from 728 firms between 2016 and 2021, we find that teams led by women demonstrate higher social cohesion compared to similar teams led by men. However, this advantage diminishes when female leaders adopt more authoritative leadership styles that deviate from gender-role expectations. Importantly, we discover that team-level purpose communication weakens the negative impact of such role incongruity. Our findings advance research on female leadership advantages by illuminating the conditions under which women leaders enhance team cohesion, contribute to gender diversity literature by revealing team-level mechanisms of stereotype effects, and extend organizational purpose research by demonstrating its role in mitigating gender biases. These results provide important insights for organizations seeking to support female leaders and foster inclusive team environments.

Many organizations depend on collective resources, including shared resources, Common-Pool Resources (CPRs), and public resources, to gain competitive advantage. These resources, requiring collaboration at distinct levels, vary significantly: shared resources involve collaboration within collective organizations (e.g., cooperatives, alliances), while CPRs and public resources necessitate inter-organizational collaboration. However, little is known about the effect of CPR use on shared resources. Strategy literature, particularly the Resource-Based View, assumes collective resources are accretive, suggesting organizations use all available resources simultaneously. Yet, collaboration at different levels may be difficult to sustain, leading to a potential negative effect of CPR use on shared resources. Such an effect could threaten the survival of collective organizations relying on shared resources, such as cooperatives. This study examines whether the use of CPRs, which require collaboration among competing organizations, reduces the use of shared resources within these organizations. We focus on the French wine industry, where cooperatives are a prevalent organizational form and CPRs play a critical role. Using original data from the French Customs Agency and unique geographic data, our identification strategy leverages an exogenous plant disease and legislative change. These methods allow us to rigorously investigate how increased availability of one resource type affects the use of another, shedding light on the interplay between CPRs and shared resources and their implications for organizational strategy and survival.

This two-study paper examines the link between gender and perceived leadership effectiveness in self-organized Global Virtual Teams (GVTs). Perceived leadership effectiveness is assessed through both self and peer evaluations across a combined sample of 2,430 participants (predominantly students with work experience) from 96 countries, organized into 533 GVTs. The findings from both studies indicate that, in global virtual teams (GVTs), women are perceived by their peers as more effective leaders compared to men. Moreover, women show a smaller gap between self and peer evaluations, suggesting greater alignment between their self-assessments and teammate evaluations. Additionally, Big Five personality traits, specifically Conscientiousness and Extraversion, positively influence peer evaluations of perceived leadership effectiveness. Finally, no single espoused national cultural value of the individuals being rated consistently predicted perceived leadership effectiveness across both studies. Although Masculinity and Collectivism were significant in one study and Uncertainty Avoidance in the other, none showed a consistent effect across both studies. These findings provide valuable insights for recruitment and performance management practices and suggest important directions for future research on gender dynamics and leadership in global virtual teams.

This study investigates how market actors legitimize new categories that challenge the foundational understandings of established ones while simultaneously seeking to compete in the same market space. We analyze the development of the U.S. plant-based meat category from 2012 to 2019, focusing on how plant-based meat producers positioned their products as legitimate competitors within the meat category despite their nonanimal origins. We identify three key legitimation strategies used by entrepreneurs: reconfiguring the category basis by reframing the core attributes of meat from animal origin to shared biochemical components; creating experiential congruence by replicating the sensory qualities and social practices associated with traditional meat; and instilling value superiority by emphasizing health, environmental, and ethical benefits along with forward-thinking innovation. Our observations also lead us to theorize what we term category transmutation—a construct for understanding how the successful legitimation of a new category might reshape the meaning and boundaries of an existing one. We envision category transmutation as a process through which an existing category evolves to incorporate both traditional and new subcategories, thereby vertically modifying the category structure. This study advances our understanding of category dynamics and extends the role of cultural entrepreneurship beyond gaining legitimacy to reshaping category systems and market structures, with the potential to drive positive societal changes.