2022 “Responsible Research in Management” Award Winner Announcement

Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem “truth decay” and Andrew J. Hoffman lays the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy. But, as he points out, academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis—a crisis of relevance. Scholarship rarely moves very far beyond the walls of the academy and is certainly not accessing the primarily civic spaces it needs to reach in order to mitigate truth corruption. In this brief but compelling book, Hoffman draws upon existing literature and personal experience to bring attention to the problem of academic insularity—where it comes from and where, if left to grow unchecked, it will go—and argues for the emergence of a more publicly and politically engaged scholar. This book is a call to make that path toward public engagement more acceptable and legitimate for those who do it; to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways that one enacts the role of academic scholar in today’s world.

Collaboration between business, government, and citizens is necessary to generate and implement innovative solutions that reduce harm to our environment and revitalize our natural world. Yet a pitfall of many such collaborative efforts is that they progress slowly and fail to keep pace with urgent threats to the earth’s sustainability. To address this puzzle of scholarly and societal significance, we show how organizations tackling grand challenges can effectively accelerate and scale impact through crowdsourcing. In an in-depth longitudinal study, we analyzed an award-winning collaborative crowdsourcing initiative that developed innovations for the sustainable use of oceans within the maritime industry. Our findings show that, by generating engagement of new actors across all phases of the crowdsourcing process, the initiative connected stakeholders who have a deep understanding of the problem with organizations that have resources to develop solutions. Moreover, our study reveals the importance of retaining novel knowledge generated by one set of stakeholders for use by other stakeholder groups that continuously change over time. Based on these observations, our study offers actionable insights into how conventional management approaches and the implementation of digital technologies need to be adapted to organize collaboration for sustainable development.

Have you ever thought about which companies provide the components of your smartphone’s battery or your car’s engine? Most likely, your answer is no. We tend to focus on big-name companies like multinationals and perhaps on their first-tier suppliers (e.g., the battery or engine suppliers), ignoring suppliers that are located further upstream in a firm’s supply chain. Our goal is to bring attention to these players, which we call “lower-tier suppliers.” Our research shows that lower-tier suppliers have a higher incidence of violations, often with acute environmental and social impacts, that can jeopardize the firm’s operations and reputation. Unfortunately, these suppliers tend to be passive about addressing such violations—i.e., they tend not to respond to inquiries or initiate actions to address sustainability problems, unless the large multinational company intervenes. Our study: 1) reveals that many lower-tier suppliers constitute the riskiest suppliers in a supply network; 2) provides a grounded theoretical framework for managing a sustainable supply network that accounts for multiple network members as well as three key sustainability dimensions (profit, people, and planet); and 3) shows how processes firms use to manage their suppliers differ from processes these suppliers use with their first-tier suppliers.

Despite decades of research and intervention efforts, women remain underrepresented in male-dominated fields. An emerging body of research has suggested that one way women attempt to overcome gender discrimination when applying for male-dominated jobs is by deliberately managing impressions of their gender (femininity and masculinity) in their job applications. We investigate the strategies that female job seekers use and the effectiveness of these strategies and find—across three studies in the lab and in the field—that women manage impressions of their gender for male-dominated jobs by using less feminine language in their cover letters, in part because they anticipate gender discrimination from those employers. In turn, these attempts to overcome bias ironically lead to less favorable hiring outcomes: women who use less feminine language in their cover letters were less likely to receive a callback because they violate expectations about how women are expected to self-present. Our results suggest that placing the onus on women to navigate gender biases in the labor market is ineffective and call for future research on how organizations can more directly tackle the root of the problem of existing gender bias in the labor market.

Sustainable development research has assumed that organizations must make intertemporal trade-offs between benefits now versus benefits later. However, under extreme resource constraints, organizations are unable to sacrifice resources now for benefits later without risking their survival. In these conditions, prior theory has suggested that organizations would be present focused, making sustainable development elusive. Through an ethnographic study, we investigated how tea producer organizations in eight communities in East Africa confronting severe resource constraints acted for sustainable development. We discovered that a “present” time perspective is richer than has been described previously. Prior time research has described the present as a “moment” in time, which allows managers to juxtapose the present against the future to make the intertemporal trade-offs for sustainable development. However, our tea producers did not see the future as a trade-off with the present. We discovered that they see duration in the present—what we call a “long present.” Because the present is long, they see connections among processes such as resource flows, which inspired incremental actions that continuously ease extreme resource shortages. We therefore offer an alternative to the trade-off thinking that currently dominates sustainable development discourse.

Most new businesses struggle to make a profit and attract necessary startup and growth capital. These struggles are intensified for social enterprises. Practitioners and policymakers are interested in the catalytic potential of philanthropic grants to help social enterprises become more financially sustainable and attractive to investors. Although grants are the second largest source of social entrepreneurship finance, they have received comparatively limited attention to date. Using a dataset of over 3,400 social enterprises tracked over a 1-year period by the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative, we find grants help social enterprises hire more employees and attract debt financing but have no effect on revenues and equity finance. It is possible that receiving grants provides social enterprises the ability to either borrow against the value of the grant or give lenders a signal of legitimacy. Additionally, it may be the case that equity financers perceive social ventures that receive grant financing as too focused on societal impacts, and thus less likely to deliver the outsized financial returns expected in traditional venture capital. Grants do not represent a one-size-fits-all solution for social enterprise growth but can play an important role in helping social enterprises achieve social and environmental impact at greater scale.

Collaborations between organizations from different sectors, like firms and nonprofits or governments, offer potential solutions to complex societal problems like climate change. Yet the optimism around cross-sector collaborations overlooks the challenge to collaborating when distinct audiences on whom two organizations rely have contradictory interests or expectations. In “Frenemies” I show that ideological opposition can stifle collaborations between firms and social movements organizations (SMOS) despite their potential societal benefits. Firms wanting to signal support of a movement’s cause may be eager to collaborate with SMOs. But when SMOs’ supporters and/or peers define their identity in opposition to firms—when they are oppositional audiences—collaborations do not form. I find that SMOs who cooperate, and don’t compete, with oppositional peers can better navigate the constraint of oppositional audiences. Firms, in contrast, aggravate the constraint of oppositional audiences. Firms’ inclination to collaborate to repair their reputations after being contentiously targeted by a movement compounds the challenge to SMOs of partnering with the enemies of their friends. I corroborate my arguments using over 160,000 hand-coded archival documents on 14 environmental movements and all contentious and collaborative interactions between 136 environmental movement organizations and 500 of the largest U.S. firms between 1988 and 2012.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty which, among other things, created a system called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to encourage sustainable development in developing economies. Under the CDM, businesses in less-developed economies created carbon offsets (documented GHG reductions) that could be sold to firms in advanced economies for regulatory compliance. New business projects must be approved by both the local-country and international CDM offices. The presumption was that this standardized international carbon-trading scheme would not only reduce global carbon emissions, but also provide consistent environmental, social, and economic benefits across participating countries.

In testing this assumption, we found that although each country was subject to the same CDM scheme, the CDM produced uneven sustainability outcomes. Projects addressing social and economic sustainability issues were more likely to be approved, but those claiming environmental benefits were often discounted and more frequently rejected. Diving into the data, we found that countries’ idiosyncratic priorities for social, environmental or economic dimensions of development influenced implementation of the CDM and caused significant variation. The paper concludes with several suggestions to improve the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, including standardizing measurements and mandating metric transparency and reporting.

Employees around the world have experienced sudden, significant changes in their work and family roles due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the collapse of the work-nonwork boundary during COVID-mandated remote work has led to heightened work-family stress. In this study, we examine how the pandemic has affected the intersection of work and family for employees, how that affects their attitudes at work, and what organizations can do to ensure better employee well-being and functioning during such societal crises. Using a sample of employees surveyed before and during the pandemic, we found that a meaningful portion of respondents experienced positive and negative changes in the pattern of their work-family experiences. People were more likely to go through negative changes if they had high segmentation preferences, engaged in emotion-focused coping, experienced higher technostress, and had less compassionate supervisors. In turn, negative transitions were associated with negative employee consequences during the pandemic (e.g., lower job satisfaction and job performance, and higher turnover intent). Finally, we identify best practices that can be implemented by organizations both prior to and during a crisis, including training, recognizing and rewarding compassionate supervisor behavior, and adopting and training employees on new technologies that support remote work.

Ethnic employment discrimination remains a challenge on labor markets around the world. With increasing migration, the challenge of securing equal labor market access for increasingly diverse groups of job applicants is only going to increase. Traditionally, the public sector has been thought to be a more inclusive employer than private firms, but relatively little research has scrutinized this claim. We present an audit experiment to compare ethnic employment discrimination in public and private workplaces in Denmark. We sent similar job applications with Danish and Middle Eastern soundings names to real job openings within occupations found in both sectors (e.g., teachers and secretaries). To mitigate valid ethical concerns, we made sure to quickly decline interview invitations and did not sample beyond what was required.

We found substantial ethnic employment discrimination. Applicants with Danish sounding names were around 50 percent more likely to be invited for an interview compared to otherwise similar applicants with a Middle Eastern sounding name. To our surprise, we did not find evidence that discrimination is less pronounced in public workplaces. Our study underlines the complexity of employment discrimination and suggest that we should be careful to make assumptions about which workplaces might be more inclusive.

Our study demonstrates the societal value of gender diversity on boards of directors. Using data on 4,271 FDA-regulated medical product recalls over a 14-year period, we find that firms with more female directors behave very differently when it comes to recall decisions. Compared to firms with all-male boards, those with female directors announce high severity recalls 28-days faster (a 35% reduction in time to recall). These recalls are for drug and medical device defects with life threatening risks to consumers, so each day counts. Having more women on boards also influences recalls of products with lower risks for consumers. Low risk product defects are easy for firms to hide and not recall. However, firms with female directors announce 120% more low severity recalls, in comparison to firms that have no female directors. Hence, not only do firms respond faster to life-threatening defects when women are on the board, but they are also less likely to hide quality problems from the public and FDA. In sum, our study shows that increasing female board representation is not merely a diversity and inclusion issue, but that having women on a board has tangible benefits for consumer well-being.