Sustainable corporate governance has been defined as corporate governance that ensures corporations are run in such a way that they are sustainable over the long term. Note that for corporations to be sustainable in the long run, they need to ensure the preservation, as well as possibly the enhancement, of their ecosystem. This not only includes establishing and maintaining good relations with their shareholders and stakeholders but also preserving their environment. Here, the term environment should be understood as taking on a broader meaning. Indeed, corporations preserving their environment should not be reduced to mere environmentalism but they should also operate in harmony with the broader economic and social system. Put differently, sustainable corporate governance should also ensure that corporations are run in such a way to avoid future crises, such as the Great Recession. This would require a move away from business models that focus on short-term shareholder value while endangering the survival of the corporation over the long term.
Whereas much of the existing literature suggests that corporations should merely maximize shareholder value and that a stakeholder approach will result in vague and often contradictory objectives for the management, long-term shareholder value creation is nevertheless compatible with the corporation looking after the interests of its immediate, as well as possibly more remote, stakeholders. Ultimately, sustainable business practices will not only benefit the corporation’s employees, customers, and the broader society but also its owners.
The key question that arises is whether there is a link between various types of owners and sustainable corporate governance. A number of related questions emerge. What different types of owners are there and how influential are they in putting their stamp on how their investee firms are managed? Attempting to answer these questions requires revisiting the premise of the principal-agent theory that owners are typically disinterested from engaging with their investee firms. The main critique of this premise is that, even within the Anglo-Saxon corporate governance system, firms tend to have block holders, and there exist activist shareholders. Further, since the 1980s there has been an emergence—as well as an increase in the prevalence—of activist shareholders. Are some types of owners or shareholders more likely to enhance and maintain sustainability than others?
A review of extant evidence on the effects of various types of shareholders on long-term financial and non-financial goals suggests the following. While some types of owners are found to promote and support sustainable corporate governance, the effect of other types is less clear or even negative. This difference in effects could be due to three reasons. First, context, including the national setting, is important. Second, some types of investors, such as sovereign wealth funds, show great diversity in their characteristics and objectives. Finally, the goalposts are shifting with an increasing number of investors embracing corporate social responsibility and environmental, social, and governance issues. Importantly, given the increasingly visible consequences of global warming and societal unrest caused by a worsening of wealth inequality, the transition to a more sustainable society should not merely be the responsibility of corporate owners. Others, including corporate executives and business schools, are key to achieving this transition.
Article
Governance Through Ownership and Sustainable Corporate Governance
Marc Goergen
Article
Holistic Leader(ship) Development: An Integrative Process Model of Leader and Leadership Development
H. Michael Schwartz, Pooja Khatija, and Diana Bilimoria
The question of how to efficiently, holistically, and successfully develop leaders has been the focus of scholars and practitioners for several decades. Embedding the process of leader development in organizational contexts allows participants to develop and apply leadership knowledge, skills, and identity awareness. Embeddedness facilitates the holistic integration of the interactive processes of leader development (which focuses on increasing the leadership capacity of an individual) and leadership development (which focuses on increasing the leadership capacity of an organization), which is referred to in this article as leader(ship) development (LD). Two sub-processes involved in LD (i.e., general and situational identity development and knowledge/skill/social capital development) and four mechanisms of embeddedness that facilitate holistic LD (i.e., leader identity integration, opportunities to learn and develop in the organization, organizational support and feedback, and helping relationships) will be described. A discussion on the ways by which management education pedagogy can integrate and facilitate embeddedness and provide guidance for future research will follow.
Article
The Impact of Diversity Training Programs in the Workplace and Alternative Bias Reduction Mechanisms
Alexandra Kalev
Corporations often start their diversity journey by providing their managers or all workers with diversity training. These trainings were first offered as race-relations sessions in the 1960s and are among the most popular tools for diversity managers. Diversity training programs have changed their content during the decades, but they usually include live or online explanations about unlawful discrimination and bias, often supplemented by discussions of cultural differences and business needs for diversity. Despite their popularity and often high costs, a large body of research conducted over decades shows that most diversity training programs do not lead to long-term improvements in participants’ bias, attitudes, behavior, or workforce diversity. Some studies also show that training has negative effects on bias and diversity.
Factors that impede the success of diversity training or make them backfire include the hardwiring of cognitive biases and people’s complex reactions to direct attempts to change their biases, as well as the broader systemic biases rooted in everyday organizational routines. These suggest that common diversity training simply may not be the right tool for reducing bias and generating the changes needed for increasing workplace diversity. Some studies suggest that trainings’ effects could be improved by carefully designing them. This includes: avoiding training features that increase participants’ alienation, such as mandatory attendance, quizzes, and legalistic content; designing long-term training such that meaningful learning can be achieved; calibrating training to specific organizational challenges rather than using off-the-shelf content; and including ongoing collaborative contact with members of underrepresented groups and integrating training as part of broader diversity and accountability efforts. More research is needed to determine whether these types of training indeed produce sustained improvements in bias and diversity.
Alternative bias reduction mechanisms can be found in popular management models that increase collaboration between workers, such as cross-functional teams and cross-training. Such collaborative teams and training improve corporate performance and, as a byproduct, also reduce bias. Cognitive biases are affected by the work contexts in which individuals operate. Highly segregated workplaces, where White people and men meet women and people of color (or other underrepresented groups) primarily in marginalized jobs, deepen group boundaries and strengthen stereotypes. When organizations create cross-functional collaborations using self-directed teams and cross-training, workers from different groups have more opportunities to collaborate and, as studies show, biases and group boundaries are reduced, and leadership diversity increases.
Article
Individualism-Collectivism: A Review of Conceptualization and Measurement
Chao C. Chen and Ali F. Unal
The concept of individualism-collectivism (I-C) has been a prominent construct in philosophy, political science, sociology, psychology, and organization and management. Its meaning may vary greatly in scope, content, and levels of analysis, depending on the fields of inquiry and the phenomenon of interest. We focus on I-C as it relates to values, identities, motives, and behaviors in the context of organization and management. At its core, I-C is about self-collective relationships and the impact they have on the relational dynamics and outcomes at various levels of analysis. Theory and research have identified patterns of contrasts between individualism and collectivism. While the individualist orientation emphasizes individual self-identity, personal agency, and values that tend to prioritize individuals over collectives, the collectivist orientation emphasizes individuals’ collective identity, collective agency, and values that tend to prioritize collectives over individuals.
Various I-C conceptions have been critically evaluated with the focus on basic assumptions regarding the nature of individualism and collectivism as unidimensional, bidimensional, or multidimensional constructs, and whether or not individualism and collectivism are conceived as inherently oppositional or complementary to form a high-order construct. Specifically, previous reviews of culture and value studies in general, and of I-C studies in particular, acknowledge the possibility that individualist and collectivist orientations may coexist within a diverse society, organization, or group, and that those orientations may change over time or evolve to tackle emergent survival challenges. However, most previous reviews continue to focus on the unitary construct of I-C composed of two entities as polar opposites of each other, the high of one meaning the low of the other. Over time, instead of or in addition to the initial unidimensional conception of I-C, research has adopted the bidimensional or multidimensional conceptions. Furthermore, more of bi- or multidimensional conceptions have adopted the unipolar approach. That is, maintaining I-C as a high-order construct, individualism and collectivism are conceived as independent dimensions of I-C, each varies on a separate continuum, making it possible that individuals, groups and societies may be categorized on the various combinations of individualism and collectivism.
The advantages of the multidimensional approach have been emphasized, but issues of conceptual muddiness have also been raised, together with the challenges of theory-based research. It is recommended that I-C researchers be mindful of conceptual equivalence in developing I-C constructs and measurements and consider the optimal distinctiveness theory and the dialectic perspective as two potential overarching perspectives for comparative research on I-C. Finally, areas of future research have been identified as fertile fields for generating knowledge and understanding of I-C.
Article
Innovation for Society
Sanjay Sharma
At a macro level, innovation for society refers to innovation of societal institutions. At a micro level, it refers to innovations undertaken by social entrepreneurs as start-ups with a social and/or environmental mission and innovations undertaken by firms in products/services, processes, operations, technologies, and business models to address social and environmental challenges while achieving core economic objectives. The focus here is on firm-level innovations and the drivers for such innovations.
Exogenous drivers include institutional-level influences such as regulations, societal norms, and industry best practices (mimetic forces) and stakeholder-level influences including shareholders, investors, customers, regulators, nongovernmental organizations, media, and others that have power, legitimacy, and urgency of their claims directly or indirectly via other stakeholders. The endogenous drivers include institutional ownership, activist shareholders, boards of directors, ownership, and competitive strategy focused on developing profitable businesses that address societal challenges.
Even when the firm is motivated due to exogenous and endogenous drivers to undertake investments in innovating for society, it needs the capacity to generate and implement such innovations. Innovations for society require motivated managers, managerial capacity, and organizational capabilities that go beyond routine innovations that firms undertake to improve products and processes and enter new markets. This capacity enables firms to reconcile their performance on economic, social, and environmental metrics to address societal challenges while achieving core economic objectives.
Managerial capacity requires firms to overcome cognitive biases and create opportunity frames that convert negative loss bias, where managers perceive lack of control over outcomes, to a positive opportunity bias, where managers perceive the ability to control their decisions and actions. Opportunity framing involves legitimization of innovation for society in the corporate identity, integration of sustainability metrics into performance evaluation, creation of discretionary slack, and empowerment of managers with a relevant and ongoing information flow.
Innovating for society also requires major changes in a firm’s decision-making processes and investments in new organizational capabilities of engaging stakeholders and integration of external learning, processes of continuous improvement of operations, higher order or double-loop organizational learning by integrating external learning with internal knowledge, cross-functional integration, technology portfolios, and strategic proactivity, all leading to processes of continuous innovation.
Knowledge about the role of firms in addressing societal challenges has grown over the past three decades as scholars in multiple disciplines have explained the motivations of firms to undertake innovations for society, processes to build organizational capabilities to adopt and implement sustainability strategies, and linkages of such strategies to financial performance. Nevertheless, such innovations and strategies are far from a universal norm.
Article
An Institutional Perspective on Corporate Governance
Ilir Haxhi
Concerned with the structure of rights and responsibilities among corporate actors, corporate governance focuses primarily on the monitoring of executive boards, the protection of minority shareholders, corporate reporting and disclosure, and the improvement of employee participation in the corporate decision-making process. An institutional theory–driven approach helps position corporate governance as a social construct that reflects formal institutional rules as well as the informal practices that prevail when formal rules are absent, weak, or ambiguously defined. The institutional context thus constitutes a framework for corporate governance that captures not only the internal structures of corporations but also the institutional arrangements and national business systems in which these corporations are embedded. The actor-centered institutional perspective provides a comprehensive, in-depth, and nuanced picture not only of current governance structures but also of the characteristics and practices that prevail within and across different corporate governance models. Overall, adopting an institutional perspective underscores the importance of recognizing that corporate governance at the national level remains a key unit of analysis for explaining its diversity because it highlights the role of national institutions and their powerful institutional actors.
Article
Intersectionality Theory and Practice
Doyin Atewologun
Intersectionality is a critical framework that provides us with the mindset and language for examining interconnections and interdependencies between social categories and systems. Intersectionality is relevant for researchers and for practitioners because it enhances analytical sophistication and offers theoretical explanations of the ways in which heterogeneous members of specific groups (such as women) might experience the workplace differently depending on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, and/or class and other social locations. Sensitivity to such differences enhances insight into issues of social justice and inequality in organizations and other institutions, thus maximizing the chance of social change.
The concept of intersectional locations emerged from the racialized experiences of minority ethnic women in the United States. Intersectional thinking has gained increased prominence in business and management studies, particularly in critical organization studies. A predominant focus in this field is on individual subjectivities at intersectional locations (such as examining the occupational identities of minority ethnic women). This emphasis on individuals’ experiences and within-group differences has been described variously as “content specialization” or an “intracategorical approach.” An alternate focus in business and management studies is on highlighting systematic dynamics of power. This encompasses a focus on “systemic intersectionality” and an “intercategorical approach.” Here, scholars examine multiple between-group differences, charting shifting configurations of inequality along various dimensions.
As a critical theory, intersectionality conceptualizes knowledge as situated, contextual, relational, and reflective of political and economic power. Intersectionality tends to be associated with qualitative research methods due to the central role of giving voice, elicited through focus groups, narrative interviews, action research, and observations. Intersectionality is also utilized as a methodological tool for conducting qualitative research, such as by researchers adopting an intersectional reflexivity mindset. Intersectionality is also increasingly associated with quantitative and statistical methods, which contribute to intersectionality by helping us understand and interpret the individual, combined (additive or multiplicative) effects of various categories (privileged and disadvantaged) in a given context. Future considerations for intersectionality theory and practice include managing its broad applicability while attending to its sociopolitical and emancipatory aims, and theoretically advancing understanding of the simultaneous forces of privilege and penalty in the workplace.
Article
Is There a Female Leadership Advantage?
Lynn R. Offermann and Kira Foley
Women have historically been underrepresented in leadership positions across private and public organizations around the globe. Gender inequality and gender discrimination remain very real challenges for women workers in general, and especially so for women striving for leadership positions. Yet organizational research suggests that female leaders may bring a unique constellation of leadership-related traits, attributes, and behaviors to the workplace that may provide advantages to their organizations. Specific cultural and organizational work contexts may facilitate or inhibit a female leadership advantage. Reaping the benefits of female leadership relies on an organization’s ability to combat the numerous barriers female leaders face that male leaders often do not, including gender-based discrimination, implicit bias, and unfair performance evaluations. Despite these challenges, the literature suggests that a reasoned consideration of the positive aspects of women’s leadership is not only warranted but is instructive for organizations hoping to reap the benefits of a diverse workforce.
Article
Leader Humility and Its Effectiveness in Organizations
Thomas K. Kelemen, Michael J. Matthews, and Samuel H. Matthews
As businesses continue to strive for higher standards of morality and researchers’ interest in positive organizational scholarship grows, interest in the construct of humble leadership has accumulated. As a function of this rapid progression, several key findings have emerged. In terms of empirical measures of humble leadership, there exist several psychometrically sound measures and approaches. While there remains some debate on the dimensions of humble leadership, the three dimensions of (a) admitting mistakes and limitations, (b) spotlighting follower strengths and contributions, and (c) modeling teachability consistently appear in most conceptualizations of humble leadership. As such, these three dimensions of humble leadership constitute core elements of humble leadership. Regarding outcomes associated with humble leadership, across levels of analysis, humble leadership generally leads to positive effects for individual followers, teams, and organizations. Likewise, research has generally found that when leaders engage in humble leadership this typically results in improved follower perceptions of the leader and positive career outcomes for the leader, although it can result in some negative effects for the leader. The antecedents of humble leadership are relatively less studied, although research notes that both individual factors such as personality and situational factors contribute to humble leadership. Despite these important findings, additional research that explores the antecedents of humble leadership, better recognizes the nuances and multidimensionality of humble leadership, and applies stronger methodological approaches is warranted.
Article
Luxury Business
Pierre-Yves Donzé and Rika Fujioka
The luxury business has been one of the fastest growing industries since the late 1990s. Despite numerous publications in management and business history, it is still difficult to have a clear idea of what “luxury” is, what the characteristics of this business are, and what the dynamics of the industry are. With no consensus on the definition of luxury among scholars and authors, the concept thus requires discussion. Luxury is commonly described as the high-end market segment, but the delimitation of the lower limit of this segment and its differentiation from common consumer goods are rather ambiguous. Authors use different terminology to describe products in this grey zone (such as “accessible luxury,” “new luxury,” and “prestige brands”).
Despite the ambiguous definition of “luxury,” various companies have described their own businesses in this way, and consumers perceive them as producers of luxury goods and services. Research on luxury business has focused mostly on four topics: (1) the evolution of its industrial organization since the 1980s (the emergence of large conglomerates such as Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE or LVMH, and the reorganization of small and medium-sized enterprises); (2) production systems (the introduction of European companies into global value chains, and the role of country of origin labels and counterfeiting); (3) brand management (using heritage and tradition to build luxury brands); and (4) access to consumers (customization versus standardization). Lastly, new marketing communication strategies have recently been adopted by companies, namely customer relations via social media and the creation of online communities.
Article
Managing Surface-Level Diversity as a Business Imperative
Jacqueline A. Gilbert
Organizational diversity is regarded positively, but haphazardly embraced. The absence of a cultural mandate at work (one which includes an emphasis on managing differences) can result in minority assimilation, and in either unintended bullying or in intentional abuse. Declining stock price, loss of goodwill, inability to recruit qualified candidates, and internal havoc marked by perpetuation of firm dysfunction may occur. These outcomes are especially alarming in the face of transformative population growth, in which minorities are predicted to become the demographic majority within the United States.
Inattention to employee misconduct prevents firms from experiencing enhanced productivity. Encouraging civil behavior is thus essential to engendering camaraderie in a diverse workforce, in which incivilities, or micro-inequities, are disproportionately targeted at minority groups. Management modeling of appropriate behavior (and swift action toward perpetrators for non-compliance) are necessary to achieve human capital integration.
Article
Men, Masculinities, and Gender Relations
Jeff Hearn and David Collinson
Even though gender and gender analysis are still often equated with women, men and masculinities are equally gendered. This applies throughout society, including within organizations. Following pioneering feminist scholarship on work and organizations, explicitly gendered studies on men and masculinities have increased since the 1980s. The need to include the gendered analysis of men and masculinities as part of gender studies of organizations, leadership, and management, is now widely recognized at least within gender research. Yet, this insight continues to be ignored or downplayed in mainstream work and even in some studies seen as “critical.” Indeed the vast majority of mainstream work on organizations still has either no gender analysis whatsoever or relies on a very simplistic and rather crude understanding of gender dynamics.
Research on men and masculinities has been wide ranging and has raised important new issues about gendered dynamics in organizations, including cultures and countercultures on factory shopfloors; historical transformations of men and management in reproducing patriarchies; the relations of bureaucracy, men, and masculinities; management-labor relations as interrelations of masculinities; managerial and professional identity formation; managerial homosociality; and the interplay of diverse occupational masculinities. Research has revealed how structures, cultures, and practices of men and masculinities continue to persist and to dominate in many contemporary organizations. Having said this, the concepts of gender, of men and masculinities, and of organization have all been subject to complex and contradictory processes that entail both their explicit naming and their simultaneous deconstruction and critique. This is illustrated, respectively, in the intersectional construction of gender; the pressing need to name men as men in analysis of organizational dominance, but also deconstruct the category of men as provisional; and in the multiplication of organizational forms as, for example, interorganizational relations, net-organizations, and cyberorganizations.
These contradictory historical and conceptual namings and deconstructions are especially important in the analysis of transnational organizations operating within the context of globalization, transnationalizations, production, reproduction, and trans(national) patriarchies. Within transnational organizations such as large gendered multinational enterprises, the taken-for-granted nature of transnational gendered hierarchies and cultures persists in management, maintained partly through commonalities across difference, gendered horizontal specializations, and controls. Transnational organizations are key sites for the production of a variety of developing forms of (transnational) business masculinities, some more individualistic, some marriage based, some nation based, some transcending nation. These masculinities have clear implications for gendered practices in private spheres, including the provision of domestic servicing often by Black and minority ethnic women. The growth of the knowledge economy brings further complications to these transnational patterns, through elaboration of techno-masculinities, and interactions of men, masculinities, and information and communication technologies. This is particularly relevant in the international financial sector, where constructions of men and masculinities are impacted by the gendering of capital and financial crisis, and gender regimes of financial institutions, as in men financiers’ risky behavior. Further studies are needed addressing the “gender-neutral” hegemony of organizations, leaderships, and managements, especially in transnational arenas, and organizations subject to changing technologies. Other key research issues concern analysis of neglected intersectionalities, including intersectional privileges, male/masculine/men’s bodies, and the taken-for-granted category of “men” in and around organizations.
Article
Micro-Foundations of Institutional Logic Shifts: Entrepreneurial Action in Response to Crises
Trenton Alma Williams
Institutional logics shape how actors interpret and organize their environment. Institutional logics include society’s structural, normative, and symbolic influences that provide organizations and individuals with norms, values, assumptions, and rules that guide decision-making and action. While institutional logics influence individuals and organizations, they do not exist/form in a vacuum, but rather are instantiated in the practices and patterned behaviors of actors who act as carriers of logics in specific contexts. Given the dynamic interaction between institutional logics and individual/organizational actors, research has begun to explore the micro-level processes that influence institutional logic changes to help explain how and why those who are shaped by an institution enact changes in the very context in which they are embedded. Thus, the formation and changing of institutional logics involve precipitating action—which can include entrepreneurial action. Entrepreneurial action—especially in moments of crisis (e.g., when there is a disruptive event, natural disaster, or external feature that disturbs the status quo), can function as a micro-foundation for institutional logic shifts. An entrepreneurship model of dominant logic shifts therefore reveals how crises induce sensemaking activities that can influence shifts in how actor’s see the world, which in turn motivates the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Significant disruptions, such as environmental jolts, have a triggering effect in enabling individuals to problematize previously held beliefs and logics, allowing them to temporarily “step out of” status quo institutional logics. With prior beliefs and logics problematized, individual decision-makers become open to seeing new interpretations of their surroundings as it is and as it could be. Therefore, actors shift their dominant way of seeing the world (e.g., dominant logic) and then enact this new logic through ventures that, ultimately, can shift and alter institutional-level logics. Therefore, an entrepreneurship model of dominant logic shifts serves as an explanation for how broader institutional logics may shift as a result of the interaction between entrepreneurial action and the environment following a major disruption.
Article
Minority Employees’ Ethnic Identity in the Workplace
Nasima M. H. Carrim
With an increase in the number of diverse groups of individuals (including ethnic minorities) entering organizations, managing diversity in the 21st-century workplace has become imperative. The workplace provides employees with opportunities to work interactively with others in diverse situations and to express their identities, including ethnic identity. Despite Western-based organizations’ adoption of strategies such as affirmative action in an effort to integrate diverse employees into their workplaces, members of ethnic minority groups may still experience great difficulties in obtaining instrumental and social support in these organizations. While some minorities may not outwardly manifest their ethnicity, in the majority of cases, ethnic identity forms a core identity of many individuals and employees do not leave this identity at the doorstep of the organization. In some countries, ethnic minorities have refused to assimilate into the majority workplace culture, and have maintained strong ethnic identities. By outwardly expressing their identities, ethnic minority employees face discrimination, stereotyping and micro-aggressive behaviors within the workplace, and in the majority of cases are relegated to dead-end lower level posts and face barriers to their career advancement. Also, having strong ethnic identities results in a conflict between minorities ethnic identities and the workplace culture. This is especially apparent in terms of religious beliefs and values. Embracing ethnic identity of migrants into organizational cultures is especially challenging for organizations these days, as many immigrants are highly skilled professionals that enter western corporations. They experience discrimination and not receiving support in order to advance their careers.
Article
Organizational Happiness
Howard Harris
Organizational happiness is an intuitively attractive idea, notwithstanding the difficulty of defining happiness. A preference for unhappiness rather than happiness in an organization would be out of tune with community expectations in most societies, as would an organization that promoted unhappiness. Some argue that organizational happiness is a misconception, that happiness is a personality trait and organizations cannot have personality. Others suggest that organizational happiness is derived from, or at least dependent on, the happiness of the individuals in the organization. A third approach involves virtue ethics, linking organizational happiness to virtuous organizations. Some discussion of the nature of happiness is needed before consideration of these three approaches to the concept of organizational happiness. If one leaves aside the notion of happiness as a psychological state, there remain three main views as to the nature of happiness: one based on a hedonistic view, which grounds happiness in pleasure, one based on the extent to which desire is satisfied, and one where happiness is linked to a life of virtuous activity and the fulfillment of human potential. Some would see no distinction between all three senses of happiness and what is called well-being.
Whether or not organizations can experience happiness is to some extent determined by whether happiness is considered subjective well-being, fulfilled desire, or virtue and to some extent by one’s view of the moral nature of corporations. There are dangers in the unfettered pursuit of happiness. Empirical research is impacted by questions of definition, by changes over time for both individuals and society, and by the difficulty that arises from reliance on self-reported data. Recent decades have seen the publication of quantitative assessments of organizational happiness, despite the difficulty of constructing scales and manipulating data, and the problems of effectively taking into account cultural, organizational, and individual differences in concepts of happiness. Potential research questions fall into two groups, those that seek a better understanding of what happiness is and those that seek to collect data about happiness in pursuit of answers to questions about the benefits of happiness.
Article
Paradox Theory and Corporate Governance: A Systems Perspective
Timothy J. Hargrave
Stakeholder-shareholder contradictions experienced by managers are embedded in complex corporate governance systems that are composed of firm-level corporate governance bundles as well as higher-level institutional arrangements. This is known as the paradox perspective. This relationship is also knotted with other contradictions. To effectively manage stakeholder-shareholder contradictions, boards should seek to create and maintain a balance of power between stakeholders’ and shareholders’ interests within the totality of the corporate governance system, and not just within the governance bundle. To do so, they must design firm-level governance bundles to complement existing institutional arrangements. Because stakeholder-shareholder contradictions are highly complex, boards should govern them by establishing “learning spiral” processes in which they experiment and use trial-and-error learning to progressively adjust the governance bundle. While learning spiral processes will tend to involve learning by testing and produce incremental changes in governance bundles, exogenous shocks and changes to the distribution of power within the board can result in learning by discovery and more significant changes in governance arrangements. Firm-level mechanisms that provide managers discretion while also holding them accountable for achieving particular outcomes are more likely to stimulate learning spirals than are policies that prescribe particular structures, processes, or practices. So, too, government policies that combine discretion with accountability will be more effective than more prescriptive policies. Finally, paradox research suggests that boards under pressure to prioritize one pole of the contradiction (either stakeholders’ or shareholders’ interests) over the other rather than maintaining a continuous balance between the two poles can do so—as long as they employ deliberative spaces to engage in learning spiral processes that restore dynamic equilibrium in the long term.
Article
Pathways in Stakeholder Research
Ronald K. Mitchell, Bradley R. Agle, and J. Robert Mitchell
Stakeholder-focused research seeks to explain relationships among firms and stakeholders, using approaches that predominantly follow normative, instrumental, or descriptive pathways. Following circulation of the 1963 Stanford Memo and the 1984 publication of Freeman, the stakeholder perspective has become a sizable area of research in diverse fields, with growing influence in the business community as indicated in 2019 by the commitment of the US Business Roundtable to stakeholder principles. Still, the tendency to offer stakeholder theory as a replacement for neoclassical theories of the firm somewhat limits its adoption. An approach more likely to advance the trend toward an increasing stakeholder orientation is one of theory collaboration, in which researchers explore how self-interested action in the market system can be tempered by others-interested action. To this aim, the three stakeholder research pathways might be extended, as follows: (a) adding a moral and ethical leadership component to normative stakeholder theory research to move from a philosophy-centric literature toward one that better explains the how and why of normatively based actions toward stakeholders; (b) adopting a stakeholder-work-focused approach to instrumental stakeholder theory research to afford it the benefits of moral neutrality; and (c) returning the focus of descriptive stakeholder theory research to stakeholders as “natural persons,” as compared to corporations as “juristic persons.” With these extensions, scholars can encourage the ongoing reorientation in society toward the stakeholders of firms.
Article
Professions from a Gendered Perspective
Isabel Boni-Le Goff and Nicky Le Feuvre
Professions or professional occupations have been studied through a large number of empirical and theoretical lenses over the last decades: as potential substitutes for organizations and markets, as protected labor markets, and as the site of the subjective experiences and socialization processes of their members. Combining a sociological and a gender perspective, a growing number of studies have shed new light on the growth and dynamics of professional occupations since the mid-20th century. They show how the massive entry of women into the upper reaches of Western labor markets has played a major role in the expansion and reconfiguration of the professions. However, by studying the barriers to women’s access to once exclusively masculine environments, scholars tend to show that the feminization processes coexist with persistent inequalities in income, promotion opportunities, career patterns, and access to leadership positions, popularized by the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” effect.
These contradicting trends—numerical feminization and the persistence of gender inequalities—have inspired a large range of empirical research projects and conceptual innovations. This article distinguishes three ways of framing the gendered dynamics of professional and managerial occupations.
A first way of framing the issue adopts a resolutely structural perspective, presenting feminization as a process that ultimately leads to the crystallization of traditional gender inequalities, thus confronting women with the risk of deprofessionalization or dequalification. Some of these studies observe variations in the rhythms and patterns of feminization across occupations. They reveal complex processes whereby the overall increase in women’s education levels comes with the persistence of gender-differentiated choices of study and occupation. Rhythms and patterns of feminization may also differ within a given occupation, from one specialty to another and from one type of organization to another, depending on the internal hierarchy of the occupation. Very significant gaps may also be observed according to employment status: wage labor or self-employment, for example.
A second way of framing the question adopts an organizational-level perspective; showing, for example, that a “glass ceiling” systematically hampers women’s career progression in all sectors of the labor market. These studies explore the combination of direct and indirect discriminatory processes—from the persistence of “old boys’ networks” to the legitimation of certain gendered body images of professionalism—within different organizational and professional contexts. In the face of such resistance, women’s career progression is particularly slow and arduous, both due to the prevailing symbolic norms of leadership models and due to the collective strategies of closure by male professionals at the organizational level.
Finally, a third way of framing the issue adopts a more holistic perspective, with a stronger focus on the agency of women within the occupational context and on the societal implications of changes to the gender composition of the professions. These studies insist on the potential or real changes that women may bring to the professional ethos and to the occupation-specific “rules of the game” in previously male-dominated bastions. Interested in the undoing of conventional norms of masculinity and fathering as well as of femininity and mothering, this third perspective explores a potential shift to more egalitarian gender arrangements at the organizational, interpersonal, and societal levels.
Article
Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
Rose L. Siuta and Mindy E. Bergman
Business and management conceptualizations of sexual harassment have been informed by both legal and psychological definitions. From the psychological perspective, sexual harassment behaviors include harassment based on one’s gender, enacting unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. The most recent psychological theories of sexual harassment acknowledge that it is a gendered experience motivated by the societal stratification of gender and not by sexual gratification.
Harassing behaviors negatively impact individual well-being. Well-documented workplace effects of sexual harassment include reduced job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and productivity, and increased job stress, turnover, withdrawal, and conflict. Sexual harassment negatively affects target’s psychological and physical well-being, including increases in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety symptoms, emotional exhaustion, headaches, sleep problems, gastric distress, and upper respiratory problems. All of these individual-level effects can result in financial decrements for the target and the organization.
Both individual and organizational factors predict sexual harassment. Women are more likely to experience sexual harassment, as well as minoritized persons, with women who embody more than one minority identity being the most likely to experience sexual harassment. This finding supports the interpretation of sexual harassment as motivated by reinforcing societal power hierarchies. Other individual factors such as sexual orientation, age, education level, and marital status are also related to experiencing sexual harassment. At the organizational level, organizational climate, job-gender context, and relative power between the harasser and the target predict sexual harassment. Organizational climates that are more tolerant of sexual harassment produce more sexual harassment. In addition, as masculinity of a work context increases, so does sexual harassment for women. Lastly, those with lower organizational power are more likely to experience sexual harassment, particularly by people with higher levels of power; however, contrapower harassment (harassment of individuals with higher organizational power by those with lower organizational power) can also occur.
Reporting harassment to organizational authorities has been theorized to lead to positive outcomes, but reporting rates are low. This may reflect findings that procedures for reporting are often unclear and that reporting often leads to worse outcomes for targets of harassment than their non-reporting peers.
The two most common approaches to measuring sexual harassment are direct query (explicitly ask about sexual harassment) or behavior experiences (ask respondents about how many sexually harassing behaviors they have experienced). A few considerations for the methodology used in these studies include inconsistency in conceptual or operational definitions of sexual harassment, the framing of a study, the retrospective nature of research asking about past experiences, and the sampling methodology used. A number of gaps remain in the documentation and understanding of sexual harassment phenomena, which intersect with some research practices and challenges. These include (a) the need to take into account factors other than incidence rates, such as perceived severity of experiences; (b) further examination of how multiple minority statuses and intersectional oppression affect harassment; (c) the importance of conducting research on harassment perpetrators; and (d) the examination of culturally informed topics related to sexual harassment, particularly outside Western countries.
Article
Social Entrepreneurship
Sophie Bacq and Jill R. Kickul
Social entrepreneurship is an ever-growing and ever-changing field. Known as the process of identifying, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities aiming at social value creation by means of commercial, market-based activities and of the use of a wide range of resources, social entrepreneurship combines market elements with a societal purpose. An overview of the evolution of social entrepreneurship as a field of research from its origins in the 1980s to date, and analysis of the themes presented at The Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference over more than a decade, show how the core components of social entrepreneurship remained as the field evolved—social value creation, business model, and social entrepreneurial intentions, with the addition of nuances and complexities over time. These trends demonstrate the importance—and unique opportunities—for social entrepreneurship researchers to pursue further research on scaling, impact measurement, and systems change. Social entrepreneurship bears the promise and potential to revisit, and potentially challenge, the theoretical assumptions made in traditional entrepreneurship and management scholarship, embracing a multiplicity of salient stakeholders, other levels of analysis, or the relevance of community.
