Interpersonal relationships among organization members based on trust, disclosure, and mutual respect are an important capability that organizations need to be resilient in times of crisis. Using the attention-based view, we theorize how the attention paid to interpersonal relationships among top managers continually shapes and is shaped by the quality of relationships that emerge at the unit level. We leverage the attention-based view to theorize how different patterns of attention are associated with configurations of structures for building interpersonal relationships, with the resulting patterns of behavior producing distinct relational systems. We contrast three relational system archetypes: relational advocacy, relational antipathy, and what we argue is the most common but least understood and most likely to weaken organizational resilience—relational indifference. These systems are theorized as central to the attentional infrastructure of the organization, impacting its capacity for attentional stability and coherence on emergent issues. The proposed framework offers a novel view of organizational resilience and interpersonal relationships with notable contributions to multiple research domains and to practice.

The grand challenges society faces compel strategy and organization scholars to engage meaningfully with practice and contribute toward solution development. As global complexities escalate, the importance of addressing these challenges intensifies. While the notion of “impact” in organization theory remains elusive, a recent surge in scholarly work highlights the tensions and challenges associated with conducting impact-driven research. In this essay, we reflect on our 15-year program of research into financial responses to disasters, illustrating the process of doing impact through activities of “translating, ‘co-creating,” and “performing.” We show how these activities fostered the emergence of new research questions, new collaborations, and novel impacts. Based on our journey, we generate four reflexive insights. First, translating, co-creating, and performing are an iterative, rather than sequential, process in which these activities partly overlap and build cumulatively on each other. Second, a flexible yet robust impact object is crucial. Third, while co-creation is indispensable, it is also, often, contentious. Finally, impactful research necessitates humility, courage, and persistence.

Aligned with changing societal norms toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals, many firms strive to become more inclusive toward their LGBT stakeholders. Despite this positive trend, not all firms embrace LGBT inclusion; some choose to be less inclusive. We assert that considering organizational factors can explain why such disparities exist. We used the organizational performance feedback theory to understand the antecedents of LGBT inclusion in firms. Performance feedback theory proposes that firm performance relative to an aspiration level drives organizational actions. Using the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index of 269 US firms between 2012 and 2020, we demonstrated that as firms’ financial performance decreases below aspirations, or as it increases above aspirations, LGBT inclusion decreases. We also showed that the firm’s prior LGBT inclusion performance feedback moderates these relationships. Our study has important implications for performance feedback theory and LGBT inclusion in firms.

Status dynamics play a critical role in venture capital (VC) syndication. Prior research on multiparty syndicates has shown how status differences among current syndicate members affect how the syndicate searches for new investors in later investment rounds. However, it is unclear how potential newcomers evaluate whether or not to join a syndicate based on the degree of status disparity among current syndicate members. We adopt an alter-centric approach by examining how an existing syndicate’s status disparity affects a potential newcomer’s willingness to join. For potential newcomers, we contend that syndicate status disparity is a double-edged sword, both deterring newcomers due to low perceptions of syndicate trust while simultaneously attracting newcomers at the prospect of accessing diverse future investment opportunities. Whether the perceived costs of syndicate status disparity outweigh the perceived benefits for newcomers depends upon the degree of risk associated with the venture deal. Across two studies—a field experiment of 193 institutional investors and an archival study of 3644 multiparty syndicates—we found that newcomers are attracted to syndicate status disparity when deal risk is low but deterred from syndicate status disparity when deal risk is high. Our article highlights how newcomer additions to multiparty syndicates entail a complex interplay between features of co-investors and features of the venture deal.

The motivational effects of success and failure on firm risk-taking have been widely documented in research rooted in a behavioral theory of the firm, with the resultant body of work yielding divergent theoretical predictions and empirical findings. Despite scholarly progress, recent studies ruminate that envisioning success and failure through the lens of realized performance and aspiration foregoes its temporal considerations and takes a narrow view of its information content. Emphasizing the temporality of performance feedback, this study proposes success and failure persistence as reliable indicators of firm performance. In particular, we propose a curvilinear relationship between success (failure) persistence and firm risk-taking, such that risk-taking by firms initially decreases (increases) and then increases (decreases) with an increase in success (failure) persistence. Using a data set of publicly listed Indian manufacturing firms from 1995 to 2018, we find robust support for the above-proposed curvilinear relationships. Our findings highlight the nonlinear, asymmetric influences of success and failure persistence on firm risk-taking and disclose the presence of strategic momentum effects. This study contributes to the research on a behavioral theory of the firm and performance feedback theory and offers managerial guideposts for handling success and failure.

This So!apbox Forum’s essays relating to the state of entrepreneurship theory are collectively and briefly assessed and summarized by considering their substantive areas of agreement and disagreement, as well as their projections for how such theory can progress and add even more value to society in the future.

We argue that firm-specific theories are critical for understanding the emergence and evolution of ecosystems. We first highlight how existing research on ecosystems lacks microfoundations and tends to be overly structural. We focus on the theory-led firm—the role that a firm-specific theory plays in capability development and the associated growth of ecosystems. Ecosystems are contingent on firm-specific theories of value. We also discuss the implications of our arguments for search- and demand-based approaches to ecosystems and point toward a theory-based and supply-side alternative.

Research has addressed how the practices and organization of strategy meetings shape strategy processes and outcomes. However, how interactive processes run between and feed into meetings—an integral aspect of how managers shape ongoing strategy emergence—remains relatively poorly understood. Through a strong processual-interactionist approach, we thus examine how in- and between-meeting practices interact and create combined effects in orchestrating ongoing flows of strategy formation. By considering strategy meetings as part of and punctuating chain-like, interactive processes of strategy formation, we develop an understanding of how in- and between-meeting practices dynamically interact—they enable, balance the effects of, and shape one another through the interaction flows in which they are engaged. The longitudinal case study reveals and explains the role of cross-over effects and coalescing between multiple simultaneous interaction flows, thereby advancing extant research on how series of interaction sequences shape strategy emergence and evolution.

In our study, we examine how category density affects entrepreneurs’ propensity to engage in category spanning, and investigate the moderating effects of category fuzziness, regional density, and the number of entrants in a system of categories. We test our hypotheses by focusing on 3707 bands in the British metal music industry. Our findings indicate that increased category density reduces the degree of category spanning, but this effect is attenuated by increased category fuzziness and an increase in the number of new ventures founded in the same market. Regional density has no moderating effect, but its positive main effect points to the independence of the effects of categorical and regional density on category spanning. Our findings facilitate theory building regarding the antecedents of category spanning and the evolution of the categorical system of markets.

Entrepreneurs increasingly tap into both spatial and digital resource environments to mobilize critical resources in support of new ventures. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how entrepreneurs make joint use of these environments. Linking the recent debate on spatial and digital affordances to the resource mobilization literature, this study examines how entrepreneurs mobilize critical resources from local ecosystems and the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in complementary ways. We discuss two strategies of resource mobilization. (1) The circular strategy, which is mainly applied by social ventures, leverages community narratives and support for crowdfunding campaigns to strengthen and expand the very community support the campaigns are based on. (2) The cumulative strategy, which is mainly applied by commercial high-tech ventures, mobilizes the symbolic value of local institutional ties to attract crowdfunding backers and uses crowdfunding success to attract new resource-holders in local ecosystems. Our findings contribute to research on entrepreneurial resource mobilization and our understanding of the interplay of spatial and digital affordances.