Journal of Management

Research on trickle effects has proliferated in the past decade. However, the literature has grown in a largely disorganized and fragmented fashion, with the different types of trickle effects (trickle-down, trickle-out, trickle-up, trickle-in, and trickle-around) often examined as independent phenomena. To better understand and integrate this research, we provide a comprehensive review of the empirical literature of trickle effects. In particular, drawing on an indirect social influence perspective, we clarify the definition of trickle effects as a process whereby perceptions, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors of a source affect perceptions, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors of a transmitter, which in turn affect perceptions, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors of a recipient. We then review the works collectively, cataloging them by trickle type. Next, we examine boundary conditions (moderators) of the effects, methodologies utilized, and the theoretical accounts proposed to explain the effects. Finally, we introduce a conceptual framework that allows us to organize trickle-effects research and identify paths for future trickle-effects research.

The influence of the state on firms in the global economy is alive and well. States have become dominant owners of companies in many countries around the world. Firms have also increasingly established political connections to access resources and improve their competitive positions. Nonetheless, our understanding of how state ownership and political connections affect firm performance remains limited and marked by conflicting findings. Using meta-analytical techniques on a sample of 210 studies spanning 139 countries, we examine two key research questions: (a) How do state ownership and political connections affect firm strategies and financial performance? and (b) How does firm-level strategic decision making mediate the relationships between state ownership, political connections, and firm financial performance? Our findings show that state ownership has a small negative effect on firm financial performance and that political connections have no direct consequences for performance. However, we find evidence that both state ownership and political connections have a profound effect on the strategies firms pursue, such as financial leverage, R&D intensity, and internationalization, and that these strategies play a mediating role in the state ownership–firm performance relationship. We conclude with some suggestions for fruitful future research in further connecting these two important and timely research fields.

Recent advancements in the area of workplace mistreatment have begun to challenge our view of who is affected by this phenomenon. Whereas it was initially assumed that mistreatment affected a small subset of employees who were directly targeted by negative treatment, empirical work has documented that employees who observe or become aware of others being mistreated are also adversely affected. However, the extant literature examining vicarious mistreatment has developed in silos centered around individual mistreatment constructs and individual outcome domains, and there is currently little integration among these bodies of work. As such, this paper draws on a systematic review of empirical studies examining vicarious mistreatment to summarize its antecedents and outcomes. The review further enumerates the mechanisms that transmit the effects of vicarious mistreatment to third-party outcomes and the moderating variables that may mitigate or amplify the impact of vicarious mistreatment. The culmination of this review is the development of a dual process model of vicarious mistreatment that integrates prior theoretical perspectives into an overarching framework to guide subsequent research. The authors then conclude by providing a road map for future theoretical and empirical work on vicarious mistreatment. Included within the future research agenda is a constructive critique of current research designs and methodological approaches that may undermine the field’s understanding of how vicarious mistreatment operates.

Causal ambiguity relates to ambiguity as to how organizational actions and results, inputs and outcomes, or competencies and advantage are linked. Causal ambiguity is important because of its organizational performance implications. Over the last 25 years, research has analyzed the concept from various theoretical angles. As a result, the literature is fragmented and presents different, and sometimes contradictory, views on the concept. In this article, we systematically review the literature on causal ambiguity and develop a framework incorporating the types, antecedents, and consequences of causal ambiguity for both organizational performance and organizational learning. We disentangle the arrays of conceptualizations and operationalizations present in the literature, and we isolate distinct streams in causal ambiguity research. One stream of research concentrates on causal ambiguity as an interfirm barrier to imitation, a second relates to causal ambiguity as an intrafirm barrier to factor mobility, and a third focuses on causal ambiguity as a potential trigger for intrafirm learning. Our review also helps to consolidate research on the substitution dilemma, the causal ambiguity paradox, and the challenge of learning under causal ambiguity. Finally, we develop a coherent set of implications for management practice, and we provide an agenda for further research.

Although much research has examined human resource management (HRM), managers’ roles in HRM seem to have been ancillary to this area of research. That is, HRM theory and research largely has advanced with a focus on policies, practices, systems, and their implementation and effectiveness, with less attention focused on the managers responsible for the design, adoption, enactment, and implementation of HRM strategy and practice. The purpose of this review is to examine extant research to determine the state of knowledge of the role of managers across organizational hierarchy in HRM. Thus, we review empirical literature for studies that include aspects of the impact lower-to-middle managers, human resource managers, top management teams, CEOs, and boards of directors have on HRM content, process, and outcomes. On the basis of the findings of this systematic, multilevel review, we discuss avenues for future research at each specific manager’s level, as well as general opportunities and challenges for research on managers’ roles in HRM across all hierarchical levels.

We draw on relative deprivation theory to examine how the context influences the relationship between employees’ perceptions of gender discrimination and outcomes at work using a meta-analysis and two complementary empirical studies. Our meta-analysis includes 85 correlations from published and unpublished studies from around the world to assess correlates of perceived workplace gender discrimination that have significant implications for employees. We extend relative deprivation theory to identify national differences in labor laws and cultural norms as contextual factors that affect the threshold for feeling deprived and moderate the relationship between perceived workplace gender discrimination and employee outcomes. Findings show that perceived gender discrimination is negatively related to job attitudes, physical health outcomes and behaviors, psychological health, and work-related outcomes (job-based and relationship-based). Correlations between perceived workplace gender discrimination and physical health outcomes and behaviors were stronger in countries with more broadly integrated labor policies and stringently enforced labor practices focused on promoting gender equality. Correlations were also stronger in countries with more gender-egalitarian cultural practices across multiple employee outcomes of perceived workplace gender discrimination. Further, results from two complementary studies (one employee survey and one experiment) supported the meta-analytic findings and provided evidence of the relative deprivation rationale central to our theory. Implications for research and practice include the need to consider the influence of the country context in organizational decisions to prevent and address gender discrimination and its consequences for employees and ultimately, for employers.

Shame is a powerful and relevant discrete emotion in the workplace, as organizations are rife with potential to induce shame, and reactions to shame relate to important organizationally relevant outcomes. In this article, we review shame-related research from a variety of disciplines, integrating and identifying common patterns to better understand the shame process as it relates to organizational life. In doing so, we develop a framework that outlines the more internal psychological processes at the heart of the emotion of shame and situates these processes within the context of organizations. This framework highlights the organizational factors that help instigate shame in employees (i.e., unintentional shame triggers and purposeful shaming behaviors) as well as the behavioral outcomes important to organizations (i.e., prosocial, withdrawal, and aggressive behaviors) and provides insights regarding moderators that likely impact this process. In addition, we discuss future research implications as they pertain to each of the components in our framework, hoping that our article not only improves our understanding of organizational shame but encourages much-needed future research on it.

Studies on abusive supervision have adopted justice and resource perspectives to explain its effects on employee organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). However, these studies have not provided a comprehensive account of why abusive supervision affects OCB and CWB and which of these two mediating mechanisms matters more. To address these questions, we conducted two studies using meta-analytic structural equation modeling. In the main study, we analyzed 427 primary studies that incorporated 973 independent correlations (N = 336,236). The results showed that both organizational justice (the justice lens) and work stress (the resource lens) mediated the influence of abusive supervision on OCB and CWB. Furthermore, organizational justice accounted for a greater proportion of abusive supervision’s effect on OCB than did work stress, whereas work stress accounted for a greater proportion of abusive supervision’s effect on CWB than did organizational justice. Finally, between-study moderation analyses showed that the effect of abusive supervision on CWB was stronger in masculine cultures than in feminine cultures. The supplementary study incorporated effect sizes from six existing meta-analyses (N = 151,381) and largely replicated the main study’s findings.

In the strategic human resource (HR) management literature, over the past three decades, a shared consensus has developed that the focus should be on HR systems rather than individual HR practices because the effects of HR practices are likely to depend on the other practices within the system. Despite this agreement, the extent to which the fundamental assumption in the field of interactions and synergy in the system holds true is unclear. We present a systematic review of 495 empirical studies on 516 HR systems in which we analyze the development of HR systems research over time and identify important trends, explicitly linking conceptualization and measurement of the HR system. Our findings suggest that the increasingly broad conceptualization and measurement of HR systems and the lack of clarity on the HR systems construct at different levels have hampered research progress. Much of the research to date does not align with the fundamental assumption of synergies between HR practices in a system, the measures have problems and increasingly confound HR systems with related concepts and outcomes, and insufficient attention is paid to the HR system construct at different levels. Overall, we thus still know little about the “systems” element and how synergies and interactions in an HR system operate. We offer actionable suggestions on how to advance HR systems research towards conceptual clarity and construct refinement, focusing both on how to conceptualize, measure, and combine practices in systems and on studying such systems at different levels of analysis.

Although increased board independence is a commonly offered solution to curbing corporate misconduct, scholars have expressed skepticism about its effectiveness, and empirical evidence is mixed. We argue that the relationship between board independence and corporate misconduct is likely nuanced—and may vary by the type of independence (e.g., independence on the whole board or on the audit committee) and by national context. We conducted a meta-analysis of 135 studies spanning more than 20 countries. We find that the board independence–corporate misconduct relationship (a) is generally negative, (b) varies based on the implementation form that independence takes on (i.e., independence of the whole board, on the audit committee, or between the roles of CEO and board chair), and (c) is more strongly negative in countries with less corruption. We advance corporate governance theory and research by demonstrating that the popular governance practice of increasing board independence must both account for the manner in which independence is implemented and consider the powerful influence of firms’ broader societal context to clearly understand its effect. Further, based on our review of the literature, we uncover opportunities for the advancement of corporate governance and corporate misconduct research.

Understanding the receiving side of creativity has both scientific and practical value. Creativity can add value to organizations after it is perceived, evaluated, and eventually adopted. In this paper, we review four decades of empirical research on the receiving side of creativity scattered across several business and social science fields. A comprehensive framework surfaces out of our review, indicating four groups of factors affecting the evaluation and adoption of creativity, namely, characteristics of target, creator, perceiver, and context. Although the receiving side of creativity has received far less attention than the generative side in management literature, vibrant research efforts in other scientific fields have built a solid foundation to understand creativity receiving in the workplace. We call for more studies on this important topic and discuss how future research could contribute to its development by advancing conceptual clarity, methodological precision, and integration between theories, disciplines, and different sides of the creative process.

In describing measures used in their research, authors frequently report having adapted a scale, indicating that they changed something about it. Although such changes can raise concerns about validity, there has been little discussion of this practice in our literature. To estimate the prevalence and identify key forms of scale adaptation, we conducted two studies of the literature. In Study 1, we reviewed the descriptions of all scales (N = 2,088) in four top journals over a 2-year period. We found that 46% of all scales were reported by authors as adapted and that evidence to support the validity of the adapted scales was presented in 23% of those cases. In Study 2, we chose six scales and examined their use across the literature, which allowed us to identify unreported adaptations. We found that 85% of the administrations of these scales had at least one form of adaptation and many had multiple adaptations. In Study 3, we surveyed editorial board members and a select group of psychometricians to evaluate the extent to which particular adaptations raised concerns about validity and the kinds of evidence needed to support the validity of the adapted scales. To provide guidance for authors who adapt scales and for reviewers and editors who evaluate papers with adapted scales, we present discussions of several forms of adaptations regarding potential threats to validity and recommendations for the kinds of evidence that might best support the validity of the adapted scale (including a reviewer checklist).