How do firms balance market competitiveness with internal cohesion when setting employee pay? We examine this question using confidential compensation data on 19 million U.S. employees across 479 firms varying in knowledge intensity. We construct precise pay reference groups: internal benchmarks based on skill-equivalent peers across functions and market benchmarks based on same occupation, skill level, and region at other firms. We find that in low knowledge-intensity firms, pay is equally sensitive to both internal and market benchmarks, whereas in high knowledge-intensity firms, pay becomes decoupled from market forces and aligns with internal benchmarks. Internal pay alignment also increases following chief executive officer transitions that prioritize innovation. These patterns are driven by high-skilled employees in roles requiring complex problem-solving and collaboration. Moreover, firms with greater internal pay alignment generate more patents, including breakthrough innovations. Altogether, our findings reveal that although some firms maintain close market alignment, knowledge-intensive firms appear to decouple pay from market forces. This is particularly the case for their skilled workers, consistent with firms prioritizing internal social dynamics in contexts where complex problem-solving and collaboration are important for value creation. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19959 .

Professionals increasingly work within commercial and governmental organizations whose mandates often create tensions with their professional values. Prior research, however, shows mixed findings regarding how professionals respond to these value tensions, with some values being protected and others being compromised. We explore this inconsistency by investigating how Chinese patent examiners navigate tensions between their professional values and governmental pressures to promote domestic strategic innovation under the Made in China 2025 policy. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative interviews with 27 Chinese patent examiners and quantitative analyses of nearly 1 million patents reviewed by 10,304 examiners, we develop a hierarchical framework of professional values. We find that examiners perceive their values hierarchically, distinguishing between core identity-defining values and subordinate operational values. Under external pressures, they attempt to protect their core value of judgmental fairness while absorbing the pressures by compromising their subordinate value of diagnosing diligence. Professional interactions with foreign examiners and experienced patent agents mitigate this compromise by anchoring examiners’ attention to the operational details where diagnosing diligence is embedded. Moreover, our quantitative analyses reveal that compromised diagnosing diligence ultimately undermines judgmental fairness due to interdependence within the value hierarchy. Our study advances the understanding of professional value dynamics under external pressures and provides insights into how experts balance their professional ideals with institutional mandates. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18504 .

Throughout history, both human-made crises and natural disasters have displaced populations, forcing people to leave their homes. This not only results in lasting scars on those who flee but can also profoundly impact entire societies. Drawing from the fields of organizational studies, migration studies, and psychology, we argue that understanding the long-term effects of refugee migration requires a comprehensive examination of the entire refugee journey. During pre-, mid-, and postmigration phases, organizational actors play a pivotal role in shaping refugees’ individual and collective experiences. At the individual level, refugees may experience posttraumatic stress disorder and posttraumatic growth. At the collective level, transgenerational trauma evolves into a shared memory, profoundly influencing the long-term outcomes of refugee migration, which is intersected by coping skills and spillover-crossover effects from work to family. By highlighting the intricate interplay between these psychological processes and organizations, we shed light on how much contemporary society has been—and will continue to be—shaped by the opportunities extended to, or withheld from, refugees. We underscore the imperative for organizational scholarship to more clearly theorize refugee migration as distinct from broader migration phenomena and outline a path forward for research, policy, and practice.

This study moves beyond the traditional atomistic view of firms engaged in alliance agreements. By integrating current research on internal organizational design with research on interfirm collaboration, we investigate the implications of the organizational design of parent firms for the design and governance of technology partnerships. More specifically, we propose that in a research and development (R&D) alliance between a client firm and an R&D firm, the client firm’s internal organizational structure in R&D plays an important role in alliance design and governance. Centralized firms are better able to integrate knowledge in the organization compared with decentralized firms, and hence, we theorize that they will design their technology partnerships for greater knowledge access. Empirical findings from alliances in the biopharmaceutical industry offer support for our predictions: firms with centralized R&D decision making are more likely to capture intellectual property rights. Further, these firms tend to engage in alliances with broader vertical and horizontal scope and greater technological interdependence in order to access, recombine, and distribute knowledge. This study extends research on alliance design and governance by underscoring the important influence of a partner firm’s organizational structure.

In recent years, many firms have prioritized both pay equity (i.e., closing pay gaps associated with target groups such as women and racial minorities) and equitable representation (i.e., ensuring these target groups are fairly represented across a firm’s hierarchy). We use formal modeling and simulations to show how efforts to close pay gaps across multiple groups can undermine equitable representation. Specifically, our analysis suggests that pressure for pay equity creates a cost-based financial incentive to enact a subtle form of tokenism: A firm may minimize the cost of closing pay gaps if it maintains a workforce with a small number of minority women whom it pays well in order to compensate for underpaying larger numbers of majority women and minority men who resemble each other in terms of job attributes and personal qualifications. A firm can avoid these outcomes if it focuses on ensuring that employees from target groups are equitably rewarded for job attributes and personal qualifications rather than minimizing cost. But an equitable-rewards approach can be substantially more expensive than a cost-minimization approach, especially if pay gaps are larger in high-wage jobs or if there are many target groups. We conclude by offering testable empirical predictions and recommending a practical solution, namely to include terms for intersectional categories (e.g., minority women) in the regressions used to estimate pay gaps. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18306 .

When thinking about one’s future work life and career with its seemingly endless possibilities, individuals rarely have a singular “put together” vision of their future self, in which all components neatly fit together. We investigate how the complementarity of a future self impacts an individual’s efforts to work toward their desired future career. We conceptualize and operationalize a future self as a network of future-oriented cognitive representations and complementarity as the extent of mutually beneficial connections in this network. We propose that future self complementarity amplifies the energizing effect of activated future self representations as it spreads across the network, enhancing vitality, and thus promoting proactive career behavior. In Study 1, we developed and validated a network-based measure to capture future self complementarity. In Study 2, we found, in a temporally lagged sample of 517 employees at 11 organizations, an indirect effect of future self complementarity on proactive career behavior through vitality. Study 3, a preregistered causal chain experiment, provided further support for this link. In Study 4, a preregistered field experiment, we again found an indirect effect of future self complementarity on proactive career behavior, assessed using a scale as well as a behavioral measure, via vitality. Funding: Financial support from a grant overseen by the French National Research Agency as part of the “Investissements d’Avenir” program [ANR-16-IDEX-008]; a grant from the Community for Learning & Innovation at Erasmus University Rotterdam; and by the ESSEC Research Center is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18204 .

Scholarly attention in the venture funding literature is primarily devoted to tie selection, with a great deal of that attention focused on the perspective of the investor evaluating the entrepreneur as a candidate for funding. But venture funding can be conceptualized as a long-term, dual-sided matching process. Two mixed methods studies offer support for a specific basis of background similarity that can influence entrepreneur evaluations of investor tie potential: shared entrepreneurial experience. An archival study of 677 entrepreneurs evaluating 408 investors demonstrates that investors with entrepreneurial experience are more likely to be perceived as empathetic than investors without this experience. In turn, entrepreneurs rate investors whom they perceive to be empathetic more favorably than those they do not perceive to be empathetic. Perceived empathy thus emerges as a mechanism that serves to mediate the positive relationship between shared entrepreneurial experience and entrepreneur ratings of investors. A preregistered between-subjects experiment conducted on 481 entrepreneurs exposed to otherwise comparable investor profiles randomized for experience complements the correlational evidence from the archival study with causal support for each of these paths. Shedding light on the key components of perceived empathy, linguistic analyses indicate the extent to which cognitive perspective taking (understanding how the entrepreneur thinks) and affective perspective taking (understanding how the entrepreneur feels) mediate the effect. Gender implications are discussed as this work also documents that women are less likely to traverse the path from entrepreneurship into investing, restricting their ability to reap these relational upsides. Funding: This research was supported by faculty budgets at London Business School and Georgetown University. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18429 .

The field of organization science has many important insights to offer to practice, but often those insights go unnoticed. This article uses examples from a related discipline, economics, to suggest actions that the organization science field could consider in order to increase its impact. History: This manuscript is part of the five-piece crossroads collection “Organization Research as an Applied Science,” edited by Gokhan Ertug and Stephen Zhang. The companion pieces are Zhang and Ertug (2025) , Eesley and Gerber (2025) , Berry (2025) , and Yoeli and Rand (2025) .

This paper reports a two-part field experiment study that demonstrates that negative externality primes commonly used in anticorruption campaigns and academic research on collusive corruption are more effective in reducing participation in corruption among the minority of people who already reject the private-public trade-off inherent in collusive corruption than they are in changing the behavior of those who are tolerant of it. Using a random sample of 1,403 residents of Nairobi County, Kenya, we first administered an in-person vignette experiment that measures respondents’ attitudes regarding collusive bribes compared with more coercive types. Collusive bribes are judged more acceptable across multiple outcome measures because they provide the greatest private benefits, but collusive bribes are also rated as the most unethical and at least as harmful to public goods as coercive payments. Several days later, we administered a behavioral experiment to the same respondents, which provided an opportunity to collude with a corrupt representative of the research team to receive illicit additional compensation for participating in the study. A negative externality prime was effective in reducing acceptance of the corrupt opportunity among respondents who rejected the trade-off between self-interested benefits and harming public goods in the vignette experiment. A concluding discussion addresses the high overall acceptance rate of the collusive offer and suggests directions for future interventions. Lastly, we generalize our results to a middle-range theory of organizational misconduct involving transactions between corrupt agents and the public. Funding: This work was supported by the University of South Carolina Sonoco International Business Department’s Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) [Grant P220A220013-23], received from the U.S. Department of Education. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18659 .