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.

A rise in racism, racial violence, and hate crimes has catalyzed the implementation of workplace allyship initiatives as a mechanism for creating equity and inclusion in organizations. Yet, these allyship initiatives can evoke leader anxiety because they make power dynamics salient. Extant allyship literature has not considered the implications of leader anxiety for allyship and power dynamics that contribute to inequality in the workplace. Thus, in this paper, I reveal how allyship initiatives may trigger different types of leader anxiety (i.e., preventive, promotive, and mixed preventive–promotive) and motivate different leader allyship actions, which I refer to as "LEAP" behavior. As a conceptual framework, LEAP categorizes four broad allyship actions theorized in prior research: Locating oneself, Engaging in discussions, Asking probing questions, and Providing support. LEAP also acknowledges nuances in leader anxiety that can lead to different types of LEAP behavior (i.e., restricted, responsive, or radical). Lastly, I posit that leaders' LEAP behavior can reinforce power imbalances, challenge power imbalances, or change power structures in the workplace. Ultimately, this paper contributes a more nuanced conceptualization of leader allyship behavior to the allyship literature, and provides a foundation for identifying strategies for increasing equity and inclusion in the workplace.

In management research, theory is commonly viewed as a set of propositional statements backed up by theoretical assumptions. This view is embraced across conceptual and empirical research and effectively binds a particular style of reasoning, as a common grammar, to a specific form that theoretical explanations, as a structured set of propositions, should take. In this paper, I analyze characteristics of the propositional grammar and highlight several significant problems, including its high incidence rate of false positives in empirical research (false hypotheses that are accepted as true) and how it generally limits our explanation of phenomena by casting them as effects to be predicted. Informed by this analysis, I make the case for theoretical triangulation and offer a prescriptive model whereby researchers can strengthen their explanations of phenomena by iterating across multiple theoretical grammars rather than steadfastly using a single grammar. Using examples from prior research, I show how such theoretical triangulation helps mitigate the specific inferential biases and threats to validity of any grammar and leads to better explanations overall. Finally, I spell out the implications of this argument and offer a set of practical recommendations for implementing the practice of theoretical triangulation in the field of management research.

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 the 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.

Trust represents a key social mechanism facilitating collaboration in interorganizational relationships. Yet, the concept of interorganizational trust is surrounded by substantial ambiguity, especially as it pertains to the levels of analysis at which it is located. Some scholars maintain that trust is an inherently individual-level phenomenon, whereas others insist that organizations constitute the central sources and referents of trust in interorganizational relationships. Our article addresses this controversy, aiming to reduce conceptual ambiguity and foster cumulative progress. Using a micro-sociological approach, we advance knowledge of the meaning and context-specific relevance of individual- versus organizational-level trust. Specifically, we apply the notion of organizational actorhood to both the trustor and the trustee in an interorganizational relationship. We then build on micro-institutional and entitativity theory to offer a model of the antecedents of organizational actorhood that identifies a set of contextual conditions explaining the degree to which an organization rather than individuals within it constitutes the focal origin and target of trust. The contingent account we propose here helps bridge disparate traditions of scholarship on interorganizational trust by highlighting that trust can, but need not always, reside to a substantial extent at a supraindividual level of analysis.

In interfirm exchanges such as contracts, transaction cost economics theory (TCE) argues asset specificity, critical for value creation, poses hazards requiring contractual safeguards. TCE assumes actors have foresight to mitigate these hazards even though specificity is typically hard to observe, suggesting managers’ impressions may be biased. Taking a microfoundational approach, we explore how individual negotiators form perceptions of optimal asset specificity and aggregate them to a firm-level assessment that may be influenced through negotiation. We then explore how managers may actively manipulate their counterpart’s perceptions to maximize their firm’s value capture. We theorize about when this may occur and the implications for contractual governance, value creation/capture, and repeated exchanges – each of which may vary from extant predictions. By applying both an expanded bounded rationality assumption (including cognitive distortions) and net value capture motivation symmetrically, we augment contract design research allowing it to predict when and how managers’ strategic behavior may impact exchange outcomes. As a result, this analysis provides a more nuanced understanding of when contract design may intentionally deviate from efficient governance predictions.

Since we wrote “Crowdsourcing as a solution to distant search” a decade ago, enthusiasm for crowdsourcing’s capacity to produce remarkable solutions to some problems has continued to grow, and profiting from crowdsourced solutions has become a strategic goal for more and more firms. Crowdsourcing research has progressed impressively, with more progress made in researching the phenomenon than in theorizing about it. We are deeply honored by the 2022 Decade Award. In this manuscript, we reflect on the factors that led to this progress in crowdsourcing research, and how the theoretical insights from our paper––e.g., markets in the hierarchies-markets dichotomy are made up of markets with ex ante contracts and crowdsourcing (markets with no ex ante contracts)––may have influenced that progress. Also, because profits have become the ultimate goal of a large number of the seekers of solutions through crowdsourcing, we present an outline of a framework for exploring the impact of crowdsourcing on a seeker’s profitability. The framework builds on insights from the paper and new constructs in crowdsourcing such as artificial intelligence (AI), the crowdsourcing process, revenue models, complementary assets, and organizing to minimize crowdsourcing disadvantages that we have added. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

This Dialogue considers the question 'When is a simulation the right tool upon which to theorize?', using Chen et al.'s recent simulation to illustrate the issues. We define what a simulation is and what is application arena is. We then use the example to dive deeper into the challenges of the use of a simulation. Such challenges include the validity and comprehensiveness of coding assumptions, the predictability of results, and the relationships believed proven by the model. For the example, we offer alternative coding assumptions, and question why a simulation was required for their results, results neither specific to the entrepreneur or uncertainties advertised. This provides important lessons on assessing simulations, and significant points for debate about their value in analyzing particular phenomena.

The negative relationship between corporate risk and corporate returns, also known as the “Bowman paradox,” has been an important puzzle in strategy research that has motivated dozens of empirical studies. Theoretically, the paradox was explained with an appeal to contingent managerial preferences for risk or to heterogeneous managerial capabilities. A popular alternative view has been that the paradox is merely an empirical artifact and, thus, does not need to be explained with management theories. Furthermore, the view that the negative risk-return relationship does not need to be explained theoretically translated into a bottom line for nearly five decades of research on diversified firms—that the paradox cannot be explained theoretically based on the context of corporate diversification. This study counters that pessimistic view and develops a formal model to explain theoretically how the negative risk-return relationship exists in diversified firms due to the interplay of two types of economies of scope. Thus, the Bowman paradox is explained in this study parsimoniously, with the fundamental features of the context of corporate diversification that exist regardless of the variation in managerial preferences for risk or in managerial capabilities.