We examine why organizations may at times decrease their performance after receiving a positive rating. We argue that in contrast to the prevailing assumption that organizations will strive for favorable ratings to achieve reputational benefits, incompatibility between a positive rating and a dominant institutional logic may cause recognized firms to question the perceived value of maintaining superior performance, thus leading them to strategically reduce their efforts on the rated dimension. Using a difference-in-differences design, we examine how companies responded to being rated as charitable organizations, an evaluation that we argue was generally perceived as incompatible with the dominant logic of shareholder maximization during the early 1990s. Our results suggest that firms that were rated as generous were more likely to decrease philanthropic contributions relative to firms that were not rated as generous. We also found this reaction to be amplified or attenuated by organizational and institutional factors that increased or decreased the saliency of the perceived incompatibility between the philanthropy rating and the dominant shareholder logic. These findings provide insights for scholarship on organizational reactivity and impression management and raise important questions for scholars and practitioners interested in improving the effectiveness of evaluation metrics as drivers of organizational performance.

This multi-method study of managers in a grocery chain identifies a novel mechanism by which threats of gender stereotypes undermine women’s ability to be effective managers. I find that women managers face a task bind, a dilemma that managers experience as they try to disprove a negative group stereotype by doubling down on one set of tasks at the expense of other essential tasks. My analysis of interview, observational, and archival data reveals that, compared to men, women do more tasks in front of subordinates—in this setting, supervisory tasks “on the floor” of the store—in order to showcase their qualifications as managers. In doing so, they forgo attention to other tasks that are less public but no less important to being effective managers—in this setting, planning tasks in the office of the store. Neglecting office tasks ultimately undermines the profitability of women managers’ departments. This study’s identification of the task bind has implications for theory and practice related to stereotype threat and women leaders, showing how the threat of negative gender stereotypes, prompted here by concern about subordinates’ perceptions, can affect managers’ behaviors in ways that detract from the performance of managers themselves and that of their organizations.

Kensbock, Alkærsig, and Lomberg (KAL) (2022) address the important topic of employee mental health in organizations. For three reasons, we caution readers against embracing KAL’s proposition that employee mobility spreads mental disorders across organizations through a contagion process. First, we view harmful contagion as the least plausible of three theoretical mechanisms that imply similar empirical results. Second, despite detailed employment and healthcare data from Denmark, the empirical analysis does not distinguish harmful contagion from the alternative mechanisms. Third, KAL’s infectious disease metaphor and language risk further stigmatization of vulnerable populations with mental disorders. We offer suggestions for continuing research on healthy organizations.

Scholars studying stigmatized, or “dirty work,” occupations have tended to characterize people outside of the occupation as the stigmatizers and those within the occupation as social supports who buffer each other from stigma. We argue that this characterization discounts the unique ways stigmatization can take place within heterogeneous occupations and the challenges it raises for finding support from other occupational members. Based on a six-year qualitative study of the sex work occupation in Canada, we explore the internal dynamics of stigmatization in the occupation. Our analysis reveals that sex workers are not just the stigmatized but also the stigmatizers, as they elaborate, borrow, and adapt perceptions of stigma to rank and place each other into a stigma hierarchy. To avoid the risks of being stigmatized based on this hierarchy, sex workers engage in stealth organizing to find safe others within the occupation to provide social support. Thus the occupation is not a stigma-free safe haven for its workers. Instead, the occupation as a whole is characterized by dissension among its members. Their efforts to find social support lead to what we call bounded entitativity: a sense of being grouplike that is confined to small community groups within a broader occupational context of dissension. We found bounded entitativity to be associated with challenges for occupational members in undertaking social change efforts.

Status–authority asymmetry in the workplace emerges when lower-status professionals are ascribed with the functional authority to oversee higher-status professionals and elicit compliance from them on specific processes or tasks. Eliciting such compliance is ridden with challenges. How and when can lower-status professionals with functional authority elicit compliance from higher-status professionals? To examine this question, I conducted a 24-month ethnography of 911 emergency coordination to understand how 911 dispatchers (lower-status professionals with functional authority) can elicit compliance from police officers (higher-status professionals). I identify a set of relational styles—entailing interactional practices and communication media—enacted by the dispatchers. My findings suggest that dispatchers whose relational styles involved customizing the workflow via private communications with police officers or privately escalating cases of officers’ noncompliance to supervisors did not elicit greater compliance. In contrast, dispatchers who did elicit compliance used a peer publicizing relational style: they shared news of the noncompliant behavior—generally in a bantering, humorous manner—with an officer’s immediate peers using a communication medium that all officers in the police unit could hear. Publicizing noncompliant behavior among the immediate peers triggered the officer to self-discipline, as that noncompliant officer’s trustworthiness was on the line in front of the peer group. More generally, through enrolling an alter’s peers in the compliance process, the lower-status professionals with functional authority could generate second-degree influence and elicit compliance from the higher-status professionals.