Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

The servitization of product-centric manufacturing industries is an ongoing trend that few firms can ignore. Yet, turning a servitization strategy into a success continues to be a challenge. In this presentation, we will review and synthesize the empirical evidence from six studies, including a meta-analysis, on the factors that determine the success of servitization. Drawing from these insights, we will then proceed to outline an integrated model for future research that can help researchers in this field identify new research opportunities.

The globalized world and its interdependencies bear the potential for new or refueling geo-political tensions. Those tensions serve as a ground for developing negative country attitudes towards the aggressor, which highlights the probability of long-lasting animosity. In marketing research, the concept of animosity encompasses factors that influence consumers’ hostile attitudes toward a specific country, which decreases consumers' purchase intention of products from that specific country (Klein et al., 1998).

25 years of research brought up important evidence about antecedents, consequences and conditional effects. However, research findings regarding the effect of consumer animosity on product judgment are inconsistent ranging from null to negative effects. Hence, how and when consumer animosity affects consumers’ product judgment is still unclear. To derive sufficient action recommendations for policy-makers and practitioners, profound evidence about how and when consumer animosity affects consumers’ attitudes and subsequent behavior is crucial. To fill the outlined research gap, this meta-analysis aims to 1) confirm the main effect of consumer animosity on product judgment on a large study set and to 2) investigate moderating effects of different country-specific determinants which influence the relationship between consumer animosity and product judgment. Thoroughly considered, we propose a five-dimensional approach capturing five different facets, which are assumed to be impactful with regard to consumer animosity: Economy, policy, geography, demography, and culture. Our results show a significant negative relationship between consumer animosity and product judgment

(r = -0.27, LCI = -0.32, UCI = -0.22). The results further emphasize that economic, demographic, as well as cultural country characteristics moderate this effect.

This study contributes to academia by introducing a five-dimensional approach considering consumer animosity’s country-specific multidimensionality. On more than 160 observations (N = 21,485) this meta-analysis embraces this inconsistency by revealing country and country dyad economic, political, geographic, demographic and cultural moderators, which explain the divergent research findings.

BERD@NFDI is a powerful platform for collecting, sharing, and preserving Business, Economic, and Related Data – all in one place. The BERD platform facilitates the integrated management of algorithms and data throughout the whole research cycle, with a special focus on unstructured (big) data such as video, image, audio, text, or mobile data.

BERD@NFDI provides a platform for the challenges of expanded empirical research. The platform offers publicly available and online accessible data sets, and enhance data documentation and preservation guided by the FAIR principles. The platform also provides an algorithm repository and benchmarks to analyze (big) data.

Ecosystem identity – the mutual understanding of the central, enduring, and distinctive features of an ecosystem value proposition – is key to the growth of incumbent ecosystems. It is established by ecosystem orchestrators through framing tactics. However, little is known about how orchestrators frame to strengthen ecosystem identity when facing new rivals. We address this gap with a longitudinal qualitative study of a European carmaker whose location-based mobility services ecosystem was challenged by Google. The carmaker deployed distinct framing tactics – straightening up, future-proofing, and valorising – each time incumbents questioned the ecosystem’s future. In doing so, the carmaker gradually revitalized the identity and continued the growth of its ecosystem while other carmakers abandoned their own respective ecosystems in favour of Google. Based on these findings, we advance a process model for strengthening the identity of incumbent ecosystems after new rival entry. We contribute to research on ecosystems and the framing literature.

Organizational identity as shared understandings of “who we are as an organization” (Gioia et al., 2013) is crucial to real utopias. As oftentimes fluid collectives, real utopias develop “the vision of future alternatives […]” while also being “rooted in the potentialities of the present” (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022, pp. 237–238). This present-future orientation renders the formation of an organizational identity challenging for them: How do members come to a shared understanding of “who they are” when they cannot rely on a shared past, and when desirable futures are open to negotiation? Whereas organizational identity change “from A to B” is well-studied, organizational identity formation “from nothing to something” is less well understood (Gioia et al., 2013), and typically studied in sequential fashion. This leaves us with an incomplete understanding of organizational identity formation in real utopias. Understanding this process is important for shedding light on the temporal dynamics in organizational identity formation.

In this paper, we explore how members of a real utopia form an organizational identity using the case of “Utopia”, an emerging center for social and sustainable entrepreneurship. Based on extensive data collection, starting in 2021, we develop a model of the process of organizational identity formation at a real utopia. Our study shows how this process is shaped by, first, the context of the founder’s identity and reputation, the shared aspirations for a better world and identity uncertainty. Second, this process is strongly shaped by three practices of mobilizing utopias, namely demarcating, prioritizing and reifying. With our study, we contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how real utopias engage with the future. More generally, we contribute to a more processual understanding of organizational identity formation, including its starting point, demonstrating that the formation process does not start “from nothing”, but from a rich context.

The concept of paradox has emerged as a crucial lens for comprehending seemingly contradictory yet interconnected elements that coexist and persist over time. This lens has been particularly valuable in investigating various organizational domains, including the growing area of corporate sustainability. Scholars have explored the paradoxical tensions between economic and social objectives through multiple research streams, including the detective, sensemaking, and responsive uses of paradox. Despite much progress, we still lack understanding of the collaborative nature of navigating paradoxes within organizations. This study seeks to contribute to a relational approach towards navigating paradox examining how sustainability professionals collaboratively address their paradoxical conditions in work. In our qualitative study, through field observations, interviews, and informal conversations conducted over six months, we illuminate how sustainability professionals engage in different types of relational engagement based on how they construct their role and how they engage in everyday practices legitimized through distinct cognitive frames towards these practices. The different types of engagement then support the development of peer relationships, either as an inter-group relationship or and intra-group relationship. While existing literature has predominantly focused on individual responses to paradox, our research underscores the essential role that interactions and relationships between individuals play in shaping responses to paradoxical tensions. We discuss how our research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of how individuals collaborate to manage competing demands within their roles. Thereby, we uncover the contribution of a relational approach towards navigating paradox to support a systems perspective since it offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness between a detective, sensemaking and responsive use of paradox.

Scaling up is a key strategic challenge for social enterprises, organized as hybrid organizations, that pursue multiple, potentially conflicting goals (e.g., profit and social impact), because tensions arising from these conflicting goals become particularly salient in growth phases. Whereas differentiated hybrids create social value for their beneficiaries, integrated hybrids create social value with those beneficiaries, such that they either separate or integrate their social and commercial missions. Based on a qualitative case study of German social enterprises, we find that differentiated and integrated hybrids distinctively differ in their prioritization of scaling strategies, what kinds of scaling tensions emerge and how they strategically respond to tensions. Differentiated hybrids, for instance, primarily rely on increasing sales to increase social value, whereas integrated hybrids tend to focus on more indirect scaling by inviting others to replicate their innovative social impact ideas. We contribute to the ongoing research on social enterprises and hybrid organizing by proposing a theoretical model. Our model demonstrates the relatively stable nature of differentiation and integration over time and their role in informing scaling strategies, tensions, and response strategies. Additionally, we highlight the dynamic and interdependent nature of these factors.

In many creative industries, content creation and content distribution are organized by publishers (e.g., Random House, Paramount, or Hasbro). International distribution of content (e.g., books, films, board games) is often organized by licensing alliances with other publish-ers. We study these licensing alliances, more precisely the antecedents of alliance stability and alliance formation. According to our hypotheses, licensing alliances are dependent on the up-stream producers who create the content for the publishers (e.g., authors, film directors, game designers). If a publisher has a stable set of upstream producers or if a publisher relies on new producers for its content has implication for the dynamics of licensing alliances. To test our hypotheses, we use a dataset from the board game industry (n=178 publishers, time period from 2005 to 2019). For the analysis, we use SAOMs a tool designed to study longitudinal network data. Results show support for our assumptions.

The management of R&D alliance portfolio dynamics and their link to new ventures’ innovation are still a white spot on the map of alliance research. Extant studies provide important insights into the drivers and outcomes of a venture’s formation and dissolution of direct ties with alliance partners over time. Yet, we still know little about the temporal ordering and progression of these events and how they relate to innovation outcomes. We address this shortcoming and adopt a longitudinal configurational approach to explore how the temporal attributes of new ventures’ alliance formation and their complex interdependencies over time relate to firm innovation. We draw on a proprietary longitudinal dataset of 50 pharmaceutical biotechnology firms to track when, how frequently, for how long, in what rhythm and how concentrated in time these firms form R&D alliances during their early development phases. Our findings reveal that within each development phase different configurations of temporal patterns of alliance formation are associated with high innovation. Furthermore, our findings suggest two distinct equifinal trajectories—consistent time-pacing and switched to time-pacing—that highly innovative firms take to (re-)configure their alliance portfolio across the early phases of their development and one less successful trajectory—frequent punctuation. By showing how the temporal attributes that characterize the patterns of alliance formation relate to ventures innovation this study contributes to applying a dynamic lens to alliance portfolio research.

The ability of groups to collaborate effectively is of growing economic and societal importance. Research has demonstrated that group performance can be explained by a general “collective intelligence” factor. Here, we examine a more differentiated hierarchical factor structure, using a meta-analytic approach in a dataset from 22 studies, comprising 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups. Our findings suggest that collective intelligence emerges from three lower-level sub-factors, representing collective memory, attention, and reasoning. We compare the fit of different models to each other and within different subgroups of our dataset, and find that a three-factor hierarchical model fits the data the best, and explains the structure of collective intelligence in established groups (compared to new groups) particularly well, suggesting that group cognition becomes more developed and differentiated as groups work together over time. Importantly, we find no substantive difference in the structure of collective intelligence for groups that work remotely. Our analysis offers new insights into the development of the sociocognitive systems comprising collective intelligence to guide interventions such as those made possible by AI-enabled tools.

The balance between exploration and exploitation is a central theme in organizational and strategic management research. Despite extensive prior research in this area, the understanding of factors that influence the strategic decision between exploration and exploitation as well as how this decisions affect performance remain fragmentary and contradictory. In our research project, we will add to the above-mentioned research stream by focusing on ambidexterity in strategic decision-making at the team level. Team decision making refers to the process in which members with different roles and skills use information from their environment to collectively reach decisions. However, the empirical research contexts investigated by existing studies on team decision making are far from covering the decision contexts in which teams operate in today's organizations. Empirically, we use a quasi-experimental setting in the context of e-sports game data. E-sports is a well suited research context to test theories of how teams engage with dynamic environments, because these teams compare well with traditional business teams. In the proposed research project, we aim to examine what factors influence team decision making regarding exploration and exploitation in contexts with high time pressure. We are convinced that the proposed project will make relevant theoretical and methodological contributions to the literature on organizational teams in general and team decision making in particular.

While overconfidence and over-optimism of managers and entrepreneurs are intensively discussed in the literature, these biases among auditors have received considerably little attention in research. Since every human may be prone to biased beliefs, an auditor’s overconfidence or over-optimism could affect audit and financial statement quality, intuitively in a negative way. In this paper, we therefore explicitly postulate a biased auditor. First, in a non-strategic setting, we find that the auditor’s overconfidence in his ability to detect errors may affect audit quality both positively and negatively. We show that if the intended audit quality and the degree of overconfidence are relatively low, the resulting audit quality is higher when the auditor is overconfident. In contrast, if the auditor is over-optimistic and underrates the probability of liability, we find that audit quality unambiguously decreases with over-optimism. In a game theoretic setting, where the manager reacts to the auditor’s overconfidence by adjusting his probability to commit fraud, we show that audit quality is affected in the same direction as in the non-strategic setting. Moreover, we analyze a setting with an underconfident auditor, and show how the effects are reversed.

This study examines how intentional financial misrepresentation (i.e., accounting fraud) by a firm affects the financial situation of the individuals who establish the spatial community around which the firm operates. Utilizing granular data from a consumer credit panel covering 10% of the U.S. population with credit histories, we analyze both pre-revelation financial decisions and post-revelation financial distress. Upon revelation, we identify significant increases in indicators of financial distress among individuals who reside in spatial proximity to fraudulent firms' headquarters. On average, we observe incremental increases in debt in collection, affecting approximately one in every one hundred to one in every two hundred individuals. Additionally, we compare individuals' credit demand and supply under fraudulent 'good' information to that under truthful 'bad' information from firms headed for bankruptcy, revealing misinformed financial decisions before the fraud's exposure. Overall, we offer critical insights into the connection between one of the roots of social outcomes, the financial health of a broad set of individuals in a spatial community, and accounting fraud.

We study whether exogenous variation in audit staff’s stress affects audit quality. There is a robust literature on the effect of time pressure on auditing. However, we know little about how non-work stressors affect auditors. An extensive body of research has established that commutes can induce stress. Using a rich dataset of all accidents in the U.S. from 2016 to 2023 to proxy for exogenous variation in stress, we find that increases in accident-induced stress reduce audit quality (higher discretionary accruals, higher restatement and comment letter likelihood). We provide a battery of falsification, robustness, and cross-sectional analyses to corroborate our results and provide evidence that effects are unlikely to be driven by client personnel. Our findings contribute to understanding how exogenous stressors affect auditing.

Decision-making is an area that is undergoing rapid changes due to the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), as AI recommender systems can help mitigate human flaws and increase decision accuracy and efficiency. However, AI can also commit errors or suffer from algorithmic bias. Hence, blind trust in technologies carries risks, as users may fail to recognize mistakes and follow advice that could be harmful to others and to themselves. The current study investigates whether users overrely on AI advice—to their own detriment and that of other parties. In an online behavioral experiment, we identify that people follow advice more frequently when they know it to be AI-generated advice. This is particularly concerning in cases when people follow a recommendation that contradicts available context information as well as their own assessment. Frequently, this overreliance leads not only to inefficient outcomes for the advisee, but also to unjustified discrimination of others. The results call into question how AI is being used in assisted decision making, emphasizing the importance of AI literacy and effective trust calibration for productive employment of such systems.

The purpose of this study is to provide an alternative measure of value-based management (VBM) sophistication that relies on a dictionary-based natural language processing (NLP) method. First, we develop and validate a customised dictionary for VBM sophistication. Second, we apply the novel measure to explore the relation between VBM sophistication and corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling. The findings indicate that our novel measure has acceptable convergent and predictive validity. We also find that VBM sophistication mitigates CSR decoupling. This study first contributes a customised, open-source dictionary for the measurement of VBM sophistication. Second, it assesses the validity of the novel measure through content, convergent, and predictive validity. Third, we integrate the literature on VBM and CSR by showing that VBM curbs CSR decoupling. Overall, our study generates future research opportunities to leverage NLP and advance the integration of textual analysis into management accounting research.

This study empirically investigates the impact of implementing a performance reporting system on a critical facet of medical care quality – specifically, the timeliness of discharge letter completion following patients' hospital stays. Leveraging longitudinal archival data from three distinct departments (clinics) within a leading German tertiary medical center, we examine the dynamic effects of the reporting system on performance in three distinct phases: prior to its implementation (2014), during its active utilization (January 2015 to July 2019), and subsequent to its discontinuation (August 2019 to December 2021). Additionally, we scrutinize the influence of service complexity on the efficacy of performance reporting, employing the number of external inputs per discharge letter (e.g., laboratory tests, diagnostic procedures) as a proxy for service complexity and division of labor. Our primary findings reveal that the introduction of a performance reporting system can enhance performance across the board, irrespective of service complexity, provided it is accompanied by appropriate governance structures. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the timely release of patient discharge letters is a process that does not naturally sustain itself. In fact, for highly efficient departments, we observe a deterioration in performance after the management opted to discontinue the reporting system.

In this paper, we examine the effect of corporate taxes on air pollution. We use satellite data to measure air pollution through nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels at a spatially detailed scale. We identify the relation between taxes and NO2 levels exploiting rich local business tax variation in Germany. We find that a 1% increase in business taxes increases NO2 level by 0.19%. This increase in pollution can be explained by higher taxes preventing firms from innovating and shifting towards cleaner technologies. In cross- sectional tests, we find that the positive tax-NO2 association is stronger when investments are more irreversible, firms are less flexible to adapt, and local industries are rather dirty. Overall, through higher air pollution, corporate taxes appear to have negative welfare consequences beyond the negative effects on investment and resource allocation.

We exploit the staggered adoption of GRI 207 by publicly listed firms in the EU to examine the effect of corporate tax sustainability disclosure on firms’ tax avoidance. Using a panel event study regression design, we document that GRI 207 adopters increase their GAAP effective tax rates in the year following the adoption by 2.8 percentage points. Based on innovative machine learning and text mining approaches, we find that this effect is greater for firms whose GRI 207 disclosure shows a more positive tone, which contrasts with suspicions of greenwashing. Moreover, using textual analyses, we show that the content of qualitative tax sustainability disclosure barely changes over time and that many first-time adopters announce to take significant actions following the adoption of GRI 207 such as implementing new tax strategies, tax compliance management systems, and tax reporting mechanisms. Overall, our findings suggest that the implementation of public tax sustainability reporting standards has the potential to deter corporate tax avoidance, which should be of interest for policymakers and standard setters.

This research note critically extends Audretsch and Moog’s (2022) work on the relationship between democracy and entrepreneurship. While Audretsch and Moog present a positive relationship between democracy and entrepreneurship, we find that key measures of entrepreneurship are frequently negatively, not positively, associated with democracy and its various determinants. However, we do find some evidence to support Audretsch and Moog’s theorizing that democracy is learned in start-ups and small businesses, by showing that entrepreneurs in advanced economies are more democratic in their attitudes or behaviors than their employee counterparts. But the evidence on whether the transition from regular employment to entrepreneurship increases political engagement and democratic orientation remains inconclusive.

Despite the many measures to foster innovative entrepreneurship, the impact and synergistic effects of entrepreneurship policies remain vague. This paper provides new insights through the lens of complementarity theory, linking institutional policy design and underlying policy elements to performance effects. Evaluating two German policy initiatives, our results suggest that intended complementary effects cannot always be realized. Our findings give impetus to more nuanced policy approaches that better consider the specific policy target and context. In particular, context-specific policy instruments must consider the specific policy context including the resources and factors at the regional level.

When, how, and to what extent can people living at $2 per day appropriate economic value to experience wealth and growth? To investigate how value creation and appropriation are determined in Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) markets, we propose to use coalitional game theory. Based on the case of a growing venture in rural Kenya, we analyze three market structures as coalitional games – before, during, and after the venture enters the BoP market. We employ the solution concept of the core, for which we develop a new specification of competitive intensity. We use the core to formally characterize the often as exploitative criticized nature of BoP markets, in which consumers cannot appropriate any value. This allows us to show how market entry of a socially motivated but profit-oriented entrepreneur can transform an exploitative consumer market into a participative one, where all stakeholders receive a positive share of the created value. The core reveals how participation of households depends sensitively on the market-clearing business-to-customer (B2C) strategy of the market entrant, which lowers profits for incumbent firms. By widening the entrepreneurial scope to business-to-business (B2B) value creation, we then show how incumbent firms’ profits can be raised even within a participative market. Thus, by pursuing both a B2C and a B2B strategy, the BoP entrant can increase total created value and the appropriated values of all stakeholders in the market. The extent to which market participants can appropriate value thereby crucially depends on the market strategy of the BoP entrant.

Firms can gain plentiful advantages with internal corporate ventures. To take advantage of them, the internal corporate venture and their parent firm need a fruitful relationship. This relationship is highly based on organizational cultures, i.e., values, beliefs, and rules, within the parent firm and within the internal corporate venture. The goal of this paper is to build and maintain a beneficial and resource-sharing relationship between internal corporate ventures and their parent firms taking culture into account.

While research deepened our understanding of internal corporate venture and parent firm relationship, e.g., via dominant coalition configurations and degrees of structural separation, it did not take the culture into account and put a focus on the relationship between the top-level management and the internal corporate venture. Taking culture into account is essential because internal corporate ventures and their parent firm often have different cultures shaping the relationship and the resource exchange; not only between top-level management and the internal corporate venture but between the whole parent firm and internal corporate venture.

This exploration design science study has the goal to find novel means-ends-relationships on how the relationship between an internal corporate venture and its parent firm ‘should be’. Therefore, we use strategic action fields as a lens to acknowledge the configurational perspective, culture, and environment of the parent firm and its internal corporate venture. Induced by an empirical study with 52 interviews (44 hours), we present five design requirements and 14 design principles to form and maintain a beneficial relationship between internal corporate ventures and their parent firm. Via the design knowledge, the study contributes to (1) contextualizing the internal corporate venture and parent firm relationship regarding the social and cultural forces shaping it and (2) formulating theoretical design object knowledge to form and maintain a beneficial relationship across different organizational cultures.

Incubators and similar organizational forms, which have proliferated in recent years, pursue the goal of helping companies to build ambidexterity. Also referred to as hybrid ambidexterity, these organizational forms combine multiple forms of contextual and structural ambidexterity. At the same time, this creates complex management challenges between autonomy and control and between integration and differentiation. To date, knowledge about the handling of these tensions remains scarce. We build on a six-month ethnographic study of EnergyCo to investigate the process of building an incubator. We show changes between a phase of more control that promotes integration and inhibits progress and a phase of more autonomy that promotes differentiation and inhibits trust. Highlighting these tensions, we contribute to research on the microfoundations of hybrid ambidexterity.

Many phenomena in consumer psychology have recently been explained by processing fluency theory. The key tenet of the theory is that (marketing) stimuli that are perceptually or conceptually easy to process are liked better with important downstream consequences on relevant marketing outcomes. Recent research successfully identified stimulus characteristics that systematically increase/decrease the fluency of stimuli. Moreover, different marketing-relevant outcomes of experienced fluency have been reported in the literature such as liking, purchase behavior, perceived truth, and perceived trustworthiness. A key epistemic benefit of processing fluency theory is that it explains a wide variety of phenomena based on a parsimonious set of theoretical assumptions. This talk aims to (1) introduce recent advancements in processing fluency theory; (2) summarize exemplary applications of processing fluency theory to important marketing phenomena; (3) present the results of a comprehensive meta-analysis of processing fluency studies in major marketing journals; and (4) provide guidance and best practices how to conduct processing fluency studies in marketing research.

Visual product design plays a crucial role in driving consumer demand. Consequently, companies allocate a great deal of resources to generating and testing potential new designs. But while visual similarity to the current market has proven useful to understand market potential, might similarity to prior offerings also play a role? To begin to address this question, we develop a novel way to measure design similarity, employing a deep learning computer vision architecture trained on publicly available images. Using the car industry as a test case, we gather thousands of automotive design images spanning 120 years. We train a model to generate image embeddings representing prior design periods and use that to compute visual similarity scores. Above and beyond similarity to the current market, results suggest that similarity to past periods may also shape car sales. Rather than always being beneficial, however, results reveal that the relationship between similarity to past periods and sales may depend on the specific period examined. Overall, this work provides a novel approach to measure similarity, deepens the understanding around drivers of design’s impact, and provides managers with a useful tool to generate, select, and implement more successful designs.

Almost ironically, consumer behavior research often does not measure real behavior. In fact, many scholars rely on scale-based measures and run laboratory studies in artificial settings. These settings may cause biased results and limit the research questions that can be studied. Against this backdrop, scholars have developed online shop simulations where they observe hypothetical consumer behavior in a realistically designed online shopping environment. However, these simulations lack systematic validation. To address this lack of empirical evidence, using a self-programmed online shop simulation, the authors systematically validate the use of such simulations as an approach to collect in-depth consumer behavior data. They do so in three experimental studies (nStudy 1 = 336; nStudy 2 = 109; nStudy 3 = 444), one involving real purchases of customers of a fashion retailer. Additionally, they compare their online shop simulation to traditional settings with scale-based measures to show that this hypothetical simulation mimicking real online shops predicts incentive-compatible behavior better than other methods of eliciting consumer reactions. By validating their online shop simulation as an experimental research tool, results have implications for research on online shop simulations as well as experimental realism, and for consumer behavior research in general.

Interorganizational relationships can generate multiple interrelated paradoxes, with tensions commonly arising between financial and social objectives or the goals of value capture versus value creation. Our empirical investigation of an interorganizational buyer-supplier relationship along a global value chain explores how power dynamics affect different organizational actors’ experiences of such tensions and how these hinder or enable joint efforts to respond to paradoxes effectively. Our analysis contributes to theory by elucidating the central role of power dynamics in determining both the relative salience of paradoxical tensions and the collective capacity of organizations to leverage paradoxes as a source of innovation. We demonstrate how acknowledging interdependence and striving for participatory interaction are essential for developing an integrated interorganizational paradox-measurement apparatus that facilitates collective recognition of paradoxical tensions and thereby enables coordinated action to harness the potential of such tensions for fuelling joint innovation.

Municipal utilities (MUs) are characterized by a multiplicity of values stemming from the private and public spheres. MUs must comply with the business logic but their orientation towards the common good implies that they are also stewards of the public interest and therefore also have to comply with regulations safeguarding it. Today’s MUs’ public value (PV)-creation is more and more linked to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To move beyond mere symbolism and genuinely incorporate the SDGs, effective management controls are fundamental to steer MUs’ PV-creation. We investigate how public values drive MUs’ SDG efforts and shape their management control practices (MCPs). Embedded in the literature on the values of MUs and institutional logics, our qualitative study explores the drivers for SDG implementation and the MCPs of 16 Austrian and German MUs. We systematize the drivers for MUs’ efforts towards sustainable development according to community, business and compliance logic, and illustrate MUs’ efforts in realizing the SDGs through projects that fill them with life. Our findings also underscore the relevance of PV expressed and mediated by their local owners’ sustainability city strategies to all types of MCPs (of which cultural, cybernetic, and administrative controls are most prominent). In sum, many MUs show a long-term commitment towards PV-creation as stewards of the public interest by providing vital services and promoting the SDGs, although they have to balance their pioneer engagement with the business logic and the revenue expectations of their owners.

The transition towards a sustainable society requires not only the consideration of stakeholders beyond organisational boundaries, but active collaboration between businesses and non-commercial stakeholders. All too often, such multi-stakeholder collaborations for sustainable development get mired in conflict around goal incongruences, incompatible value creation logics, or governance mechanisms. The root-cause for such conflicts lies so deep, that it is often overlooked: collectively held and large unquestioned cultural frames which shape those deepest moral convictions and political principles which structure a worldview (Lakoff 2006a, 2006b). Yet, differences at the level of worldviews are responsible for much conflict and debate in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. To advance our understanding how deep-seated cultural frames influence organisational responses in multi-stakeholder initiatives for sustainability we adopt the conceptual lens of intercultural organising (Cornwall, 2008; Eversole, 2012) and apply deep frame analysis (Hajer, 2006; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005) to learnings from an extraordinary case study of a collaborative engagement between Indigenous stakeholders and a large multi-national mining company in the Pilbara region in Western Australia. Tasked with examining how the already business-community collaborations can deliver better social outcomes for local communities, we uncovered that unaddressed intercultural conflicts were the root-cause of detrimental consequences that affected all parties involved. While this case study from remote Western Australia appears to have very little connection with challenges of sustainability transitions in Central Europe, it carries relevant implications. The learnings from the Pilbara case study build an important knowledge base as Indigenous wisdom invites reflexivity (Husted, 2021; Yunkaporta, 2019) and points to the importance of fostering relationship, responsibility, reciprocity in management thinking (Pio & Waddock, 2020), all of which are needed for transitioning towards a sustainable society.

Environmental issues are the focus of growing political, societal, and economic debates and have become a major concern for the future of young adolescents. Therefore, we analyze how this growth in environmental awareness affects adolescents’ occupational choices. Drawing on job ad texts as data, we calculate a “greenness score” for apprenticeship training occupations, i.e., the respective occupation’s potential for serving environmental protection. We then match this greenness score to occupational choices of adolescents observed in process-generated from Yousty.ch, Switzerland’s largest job board for apprenticeship positions. Using the location and timing of Fridays for Future strikes as a measure for local shocks in environmental awareness, we analyze whether adolescents living in the catchment area of a strike apply to occupations with higher greenness scores after the strike took place. Very preliminary results indicate that adolescents indeed react to the strikes by applying to occupations with higher greenness scores. The results of our paper will be important for policymakers and firms who aim at reducing skill shortages across industries.

Corporate sustainability includes the 'lower' concepts of corporate social responsibility and the triple bottom line. Responsibility to whom is broadly stated as responsibility for shareholders or society, becoming more all-encompassing towards the high level of ambition and implementation efforts of ‘corporate sustainability’. How the all-encompassing ambition inherent in ‘responsibility’ for society, shareholders, or stakeholders in CSR or ‘corporate sustainability’ might manifest itself in research agendas or at the sustainability ambition and implementation efforts of sectors remains unclear. This empirical qualitative study addresses tensions and gaps on ‘responsibility’ in the strategic sustainability management literature through the case of a multi-disciplinary research group on electronics.

As organizations increasingly adopt “Open Strategy” by involving a more diverse group of actors in their strategy-making processes, the implications for strategic sensemaking are likely to be profound. In this paper, we examine how increased participation affects strategic sensemaking. We draw on a longitudinal single case study of an international finance firm where the CEO invited 20 frontline employees to participate in strategy making together with traditional strategy actors. We find that strategic sensemaking is a dual sensemaking process –sensemaking about the strategy itself and sensemaking about the participation process – and show how these two processes are entangled. Sensemaking of the strategy can trigger breakdowns in sensemaking of the participation process, which can stall sensemaking of the strategy, in turn. We also explain how these disruptions between the sensemaking processes can be resolved. Based on these findings, we develop a conceptual framework of dual sensemaking processes that contributes both to the literatures on strategic sensemaking and Open Strategy.

Abstract

The perception of increasing environmental complexity, uncertainty, and dynamism calls for a more comprehensive understanding of the possibilities of organizational adaptation. The core problem with organizational adaptation lies in a tendency toward a too one-sided focus on increasing the speed of adaptation to environmental changes without simultaneously discovering and activating new forms of organizational preparedness. To achieve this, it is necessary to include both classic planned, predictive forms of innovation management, as well as evolutionary approaches. This allows organizations to remain fundamentally open to the contingencies of an inherently unknowable future, which they can proactively enact. We present the parallel handling and balancing of both types of processes in a conceptual model regarding their interaction and the possible occurrence of imbalances. In doing so, we expand the overall concept of organizational adaptation in terms of providing organizational adaptability. Our paper thus contributes to an understanding of forms of adaptation that are not only event-based but also process-based, emphasizing the particular importance of morphogenetic processes in the latter.

The current proliferation of misleading and deceptive communication in public discourse, often referred to as post-truth communication (PTC), presents a pressing challenge to democratic societies today. While PTC thrives on disrupting established organizations such as political parties, academic institutions, legacy media, and firms, in doing so it also brings forth its own forms of counter-organization. To date, however, the organizational dynamics at the heart of PTC have received only scant attention in organization theory. We shed new light on these dynamics by drawing on a perspective that considers communication as constitutive of organization (CCO), advancing this perspective with Michel Serres’ notion of the “parasite”. We develop a model of parasitic dis/organization highlighting how PTC maintains its own organizational properties by disorganizing established organization. More specifically, we show how PTC accomplishes communicative interconnectivity, identity and actorhood by parasitizing these same properties in established organization through escalating disruption of decision-making, identity simulation, and coordinated authority exploitation. Our study adds to organization theory in two main ways. First, we offer an integrative explanation of how PTC perpetuates its organizational existence by parasitizing established organization. Second, we extend communication-centered understandings of organization by unpacking the dependency relations between established and partial organization. Our study also yields practical implications for how established organizations can respond to and avoid the polarizing effects of PTC by embracing rather than seeking to suppress their inherent parasitic properties.

Although cross-boundary collaboration happens increasingly in online environments, existing research falls short in examining the role of modern communication technologies in enabling and constraining these collaborations. To address this gap, we draw on a 14-month online ethnography of a project team using video-conferencing software to collaborate across functional and hierarchical boundaries. Surprisingly we find that the observed team ended up in a situation in which the ability to speak was bound to the hierarchical position and the different units would not talk with each other at all during the meetings. Our findings indicate that the way the team used the video-conferencing software gave rise to two communicative practices we call structuring and silencing. Whereas actors in a hierarchically higher position engaged in structuring behavior to give voice to speakers, topics, or sequences in the conversation, actors lower in the company’s hierarchy were hindered from speaking up by their silencing behavior. The two practices follow an escalating dynamic over time, eventually reinforcing the hierarchical boundaries within the team. Moreover, the practices reinforced the existing functional boundaries, by imposing a structure upon the communication that mimicked the company’s functional structure. By shedding light on the unexpected and detrimental effects of communication technology, our study contributes to research on cross-boundary collaboration, especially in technology-mediated settings.

This paper builds on the premises of the Attention-Based-View of the firm to conceptualize social media use as a situational characteristic of attention allocation. We conducted a preregistered experiment in which managers at different hierarchical levels (N = 200) acted as the CEO of a fictitious firm. Participants were exposed to manipulated LinkedIn posts to test if and how social media content influences the salience of strategic answers and, thereby, strategic decision-making. Our experiment, replicated in a non-managerial sample, shows that social media exposure biases managers’ situated attention and strategic choices. We further demonstrate that these effects were particularly pronounced for top managers, preparing the ground for a critical impact of these biases on the firm-level.

Strategy-as-practice (SAP) has become an important area of research, highlighting that strategy is something that is ‘done’ by individual practitioners within organizations. Hence, the impact of ‘ordinary’ members of organizations is an important area of interest within the field. In particular, the link between micro-level actions and macro-level outcomes requires further investigation. As such, impactors influencing these practitioners’ micro-level actions consequently need to be investigated. It has been shown that one of these impactors is emotion.

Thus, this study aims to answer the explorative guiding research question how individual, micro-level emotions impact macro-level strategizing and vice versa.

We investigate this question by conducting video-based micro ethnography to observe displayed emotions in a hitherto unseen research setting: professional esports. We analyse strategic conversations arising during a professional League of Legends (LoL) game. This context helps us circumvent common fallacies of emotion research while providing us with abundant data.

In doing so, we identify that ‘strategizing events’, i. e. micro-events within an episode of strategizing, induce individual-level displayed emotions. These, in return, induce team-level reactions and affect team-level strategizing. Hence, we conclude that emotions are a potential link between the micro and macro of strategizing.

Our paper contributes as follows: First, we identify that ‘strategizing events’ trigger displays of emotion. Second, we assert that the relationship between strategizing and emotions is reciprocal and integrate our findings into a process model. Third, we add to the SAP literature’s discourse on the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of strategy by deriving that professional esports athletes and esports in general can be seen as strategists and strategizing practice respectively.

Loneliness is on the rise, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend. Still, little is known about the longer-term and dynamic effects of the increase in remote work and its impact on workplace loneliness. Such insights are important because the working environment has likely changed permanently with increased home-working arrangements posing significant opportunities and challenges for organizations. To investigate the dynamic of workplace loneliness over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a large sample of over 500 German employees from different sectors followed over 4 measurements times in 2020 and 2021. We use latent growth modeling (LGM) to investigate: (a) Trajectories of loneliness over time, (b) how virtuality (working from home) relates to loneliness over time, and (c) how two leadership behaviors (initiating structure and consideration) affect loneliness both initially and over time. Overall, we find a decline in workplace loneliness. Virtuality positively influenced lonelines in two out of four time points. Negative significant results were obtained for the longitudinal effects of leadership consideration, but not for leadership structure. Our study shows the importance of some level of face-to-face interaction, even in the modern remote work environment. It also shows the importance of leadership behavior as a possible intervention to mitigate workplace loneliness over time in a remote setting. Employees whose leaders showed high consideration experienced a significant decline in workplace loneliness levels. Our study emphasizes the importance of continuously paying special attention to the ongoing challenges of workplace loneliness while designing changes in the new hybrid and remote work environment.

Previous research remains ambiguous about when and how individuals benefit from deep-level diversity in the workplace, particularly dissimilarity in conscientiousness. This shortcoming may result from an incomplete theory that overlooks the importance of both the direction of dissimilarity and task-complexity-induced dependence on coworkers. To address this shortcoming, we develop and test theory on when and how relative conscientiousness between coworkers influences individual stress as a function of task complexity. We test our theory using a unique dataset of matched physiological, survey, and archival data from surgeon dyads. Analyses of 157 surgical segments provide partial support for our theory. Post hoc analyses reveal unexpected patterns that extend our theory. Our study contributes to the literatures on deep-level diversity and stress in teamwork.

Committee decisions on more than two alternatives can vary widely in the adopted voting procedure. This affects how closely collective choices reflect the preferences of a given committee member. We study how well the decisions produced by pairwise majority votes, plurality voting with or without a runoff, and the Borda scoring method track preference rankings of individual decision makers when the distribution of their voting weights is skewed. Corresponding indices of voting success allow to assess the individual a priori benefit of adopting one voting rule rather than another. We validate our theoretical results for weight distributions that reflect voting shares in S&P 100 corporations. Plurality rule or the Borda method maximize a priori voting success for most shareholders. Our findings may be of interest to shareholders or committee members and potentially regulators aiming for most beneficial collective decisions.

Empirical studies on the effects of corporate political connections (CPCs) on financial reporting quality often find that political connections are associated with low reporting quality. A frequent interpretation of this association is that CPCs are a means to influence enforcement institutions. However, the effect of CPCs on auditor choice is ambiguous and does not necessarily suggest that politically connected firms are interested in low reporting quality. In line with CPCs research from the fields of economics and finance, we argue that firms possibly obtain a variety of benefits from their political connections. Some of them align the interests of corporate insiders and external addressees of financial reports while others aggravate their conflicts of interest. We propose an analytical model that incorporates two forms of benefits from CPCs, that is, direct economic benefits (e.g., procurement contracts or bailouts) and leniency benefits which diminish enforcement strictness. We show that while leniency affects the extent of the financial reporting bias, economic benefits affect both the extent and the direction of the bias. Endogenizing a reporting firm’s audit quality choice, we show that audit quality is a complement to enforcement strictness if enforcement is lax but is crowded out if enforcement becomes very strict. We identify circumstances in which more lenient enforcement leads in equilibrium to more biased audited financial reports due to the interplay of political reporting incentives and the audit quality choice.

We study the press coverage of corporate tax and accounting violations. First, we define the press as a biased watchdog that informs the public about corporate misconducts but also exhibits slanted reporting behavior that can affect the extent and sentiment of published press articles. Subsequently, we employ a difference-in-differences event study design using firm-level data on corporate violations and daily press coverage to determine whether and how the press reports on punished cases of tax and accounting violations. We find that tax and accounting violations are reported more frequently than all other types of corporate violations. In additional analyses, we detect that left-leaning press outlets tend to report more frequently on tax and accounting violations while right-leaning and financial press outlets exhibit a stronger negative sentiment. Our results suggest that tax and accounting violations are considered newsworthy events that receive substantial attention by the press. Assuming that the press aims to cater towards its readership, these results imply that there is a large public interest in corporate tax and accounting violations and their prosecution.

Prior literature indicates that using management control (MC) practices in a consistent manner driven by the firm’s headquarters (HQ) could be beneficial for strategy implementation. We further argue that a HQ-consistent use of MC practices could facilitate organizational identification processes at the individual level and, thereby, could increase individual satisfaction. However, if the preferences for MC design rooted in national cultural backgrounds largely diverge from the HQ, we argue that this positive relationship could be mitigated. Finally, we predict that a stronger perception of the firm’s beliefs system can counteract the mitigating influence of national cultural distance on the relationship between a HQ-consistent use of MC practices and individual satisfaction. Based on a large survey in a multinational firm, we find that a HQ-consistent use of MC practices is positively associated with individual satisfaction. However, we also find that national cultural distance negatively moderates this relationship. To counteract this negative moderating influence of national cultural distance, we find that a stronger perception of the firm’s beliefs system can function as an important complement. Altogether, our study has implications for the design of MC in multinational settings.

This paper provides initial survey evidence on performance measures which German private companies use for executive compensation (N = 142). 68% of the companies employ one performance measure only, 17% use two measures. However, the median company uses four measures for steering the company. 77% and 76% of respondents consider EBIT/EBITDA and net income, respectively, to be the most important performance measures for executive compensation, while Economic Value Added© (6%) and ROCE (3%) play a minor role. 13% of the companies pay bonuses based on non-financial measures, mostly customer and/or employee satisfaction, rarely environmental or diversity measures.

Multivariate regression analyses yield three main results. First, EBITDA is more likely to be employed for bonus compensation with larger companies and when executives hold a company share of more than 25%. With unconsolidated financial accounts, the use of EBITDA allows to reward executives for good company performance without weakening tax-saving incentives. Second, companies with a larger number of owners are more likely to employ non-financial performance measures for bonus compensation. Less informed shareholders may want executives to respond timely to warning signals such as deteriorating employee or customer satisfaction. Third, companies with at least one female on the executive board employ more financial performance measures for steering the company than companies with male executives only. This result matches related findings from publicly listed companies suggesting that female executives are associated with improved internal control quality and increased financial reporting quality.

The integration of the tax function in a firm’s decision-making process is typically considered a “black box”. Using novel survey data from 197 large public and private firms in the German-speaking D-A-CH region, I examine the timing of a tax function entering the investment planning process (temporal tax function embeddedness) and the organizational framework facilitating tax integration (organizational tax function embeddedness). I find that earlier temporal tax function embeddedness, supported by stronger organizational tax function embeddedness, positively influences the respondents’ attitude towards the decision-making process. Tax planning firms are associated with earlier temporal tax function embeddedness compared to purely tax compliant firms, indicating that tax planning requires early involvement of the tax function. Furthermore, I find that most respondents prefer an even earlier tax integration compared to the current timing of tax integration in their firm, with the difference between the status quo and desired scenario being smaller for tax planning firms and firms with stronger organizational tax function embeddedness. Overall, this study contributes to unveiling the ‘black box’ of tax integration in investment planning.

On March 03, 2021, the UK’s finance minister Rishi Sunak announced a tax reform that marks a U-turn in the British corporate tax policy, as it includes a significant corporate tax hike to recover the fiscal costs of Covid-19 support measures, which were, as part of the an-nouncement, concurrently extended. This study analyzes the investor reaction to the tax re-form plan and a series of political events that brought its repeal and reinstallation. We find that the capital market reacts positively to the tax reform with regard to companies that are severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Brexit. However, the extension of Covid-19 support measures and refinancing them through a corporate tax hike comes at the price of penalizing more dynamic and innovative companies, which is reflected in the capital market response. Thus, by looking at the stock market we are able to trace how fiscal adjust-ment in the form of tax rate hikes jeopardizes future growth, as dynamic and innovative com-panies suffer the most. Without any kind of fiscal adjustment and in the light of ensuing fiscal uncertainty, however, government’s financial support stops being positively valued by the stock market and regaining fiscal stability becomes most important for investors.

The digital transformation has not only lead the way to new business opportunities, but has also substantially expanded the start-up financing landscape. Crowd-based means of funding are emerging as a sustainable novel way for entrepreneurs to secure scarce early-stage financing. With venture capital still being the most important source of funding for young innovative ventures in later stages, this raises the question of potential interactions between crowdfunding and traditional forms of start-up financing. The study investigates whether professional venture investors perceive a seed-financing hierarchy by entrepreneurs, and whether this equity pecking order is affected by venture quality and could therefore serve as an uncertainty-reducing signal to prospective investors. Drawing on a choice experimental research design the study finds causal evidence that VCs believe that “lemons” (low-quality start-ups) have a higher relative likelihood than “peaches” (high-quality start-ups) of turning to crowd-based financing as a first means of external equity funding rather than turning to traditional sources, suggesting a perceived negative selection bias toward crowd-based financing. In addition to extending the pecking order framework and advancing signaling theory in the entrepreneurial setting, the study yields implications for entrepreneurs, venture investors and policy makers.

Cross-sectional evidence from former studies shows that at the end of a lockup period after an Initial Public Offering (IPO), newly listed corporations typically experience a negative share price reaction. While stock trading subsequently becomes more liquid due to the larger number of tradable shares and the illiquidity premium demanded by investors decreases, sales by existing shareholders, such as founders and senior executives, can cause these negative price reactions. Sales and the corresponding negative wealth effects seem particularly obvious, especially for unicorn IPOs valued at over $1 billion when they go public. The incentives to liquidate shares and relocate personal wealth are very high, which could lead to high sales pressure, as observed e.g. at the Facebook IPO. But, does this actually happen? We analyzed the wealth effect of lockup expirations for a sample of 128 unicorns in the pre-COVID period from late 2013 to late 2019. Our results reveal that in line with our assumption, the price corrections for unicorns are stronger than those observed for other IPOs. We conclude that after giving up their promising unicorn tag by going public, the magic of unicorns fades.

Acqui-hiring – a new human capital strategy chosen by Big Tech Silicon Valley-based companies nowadays, as acquiring and retaining high-skilled employees is getting more difficult. In these acquisitions, the focus lies not on technologies, but on people and teams. Founders play an important role, as their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit are crucial for transferring knowledge and creating value. This study empirically investigates factors that influence their retention in such acqui-hires. The dataset used in this paper is a unique and novel hand-collected full sample dataset of acquisitions conducted by Facebook and Google. Based on 454 founders from 241 companies, we analyze which factors influence the likelihood that founders stay after an acqui-hire and how their retention period can be enlarged. Our findings indicate that it is not only predetermined factors that are of relevance but also the integration choices of the acquirer – however on varying degrees, depending on the entrepreneurial personality of the founders

We explore the role of gender in new venture legitimacy, particularly pinpointing the moderating factors of gender (non-)conformity and evaluative legitimacy on venture capitalists’ perception of new venture legitimacy. Integrating gender role congruity with institutional legitimacy theory, we predict that startups led by female founder-CEOs gain more from evaluative legitimacy than their male counterparts, and that gender (non-)conformity moderates the gender-legitimacy relationship. These postulations yield our ‘Gender Congruent Legitimacy Judgment’ framework, an initial step towards an overarching theory of gender dynamics in new venture legitimacy. Moderation analyses based on propensity score-weighted data on startups’ pre-money valuation validate our theoretical conjectures.

Research has long recognized that entrepreneurial ventures act under resource scarcity, and that the availability of resources is a crucial determinant of venture development and growth. Consequently, we would expect that resource abundance would further facilitate this positive relationship. However, our explorative, multiple case study identified three resource traps through which abundant resources can decelerate venture development: resource illusion, resource drift, and resource depletion.

Through resource illusion, abundant resources create an illusion that the idea is effortlessly realizable, which leads to passivity. Through resource drift, abundant resources direct the venture’s focus to peripheral tasks, and due to the progress made with peripheral tasks, ventures overlook the resulting neglect in core-task development. Through resource depletion, abundant resources take more value from the venture than they add, leading to a net-loss in venture resources.

These resource traps shed new light on entrepreneurial resourcing research: They indicate that not only resource scarcity, but also resource abundance can impose challenges on entrepreneurial ventures and decelerate venture development and point to the necessity to depart from a foremost positive linking between resource availability and venture development to a more differentiated perspective, capturing the positive and negative impact of mobilized resources on entrepreneurial ventures.

Passion is an important resource for entrepreneurs. Importantly, resources build themselves. Accordingly, we investigate passion development over time contingent on the current passion shaping this development. Our theoretical model shows that it is the interplay between an individual’s present harmonious and obsessive passion level, coupled with competence experiences, that determines whether passion intensifies or wanes over time. Specifically, obsessive passion shows a self-enhancing effect: the higher its current level, the stronger it is built due to competence satisfaction and frustration experiences. Conversely, we demonstrate a self-regulating effect for harmonious passion: its accumulation slows down when existing levels are already high. We test our model with a multi-study approach including an experience-sampling field study (Study 1) involving 209 entrepreneurs (with 1,172 lagged observations over seven weeks) and a between-subject experiment (Study 2) with 191 entrepreneurs, which yield broad support for our hypotheses. By introducing the self-enhancing and self-regulating effect of passion, we advance our theoretical understanding of how present passion levels influence their future developmental course.

An entrepreneurial ecosystem enables productive entrepreneurship by integrating diverse actors as well governing and facilitating their interactions. One of the key features of Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) is downward causation, which refers to the influence of entrepreneurial output on the overall system. However, little is known about how entrepreneurs decide to contribute to the development and evolution of the EE. This paper addresses this gap by applying social exchange theory (SET) to examine the factors that influence entrepreneurs’ decision-making to engage in specific contribution behavior such as mentoring, coaching, or peering. Based on SET, we propose a conceptual model that examines the likelihood of EE contribution behavior as a potential function of six constructs: reciprocity, personal relationships, affiliation, altruism, rationality, and group gain. We test our hypotheses using a metric conjoint experiment with a sample of German entrepreneurs who have emerged from an EE. We are currently gathering data and plan to use regression analysis to analyze the data and examine the relative importance of the attributes. Our paper will contribute to the theory of entrepreneurial ecosystems and specifically downward causation in ecosystems. It will also introduce a social exchange perspective as a new research path in entrepreneurial ecosystem research.

Why do entrepreneurs go against the norm and break the rules of the game? Are they conscious economic calculators or do they just see the world with different eyes? In this paper, we examine the underlying cognitive processes that lead to entrepreneurs' decisions to deviate from the norm. More specifically, we investigate how entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs differ in their perception and evaluation of the social consequences of norm-breaking behavior.

To achieve this, we have built a parsimonious two-step decision-making process model, which we test empirically with entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs. This model builds primarily on the theoretical contributions of James G. March and Gary Becker, focusing on the perception of appropriate behavior in the first step and the economic calculation of the cost of deviance in the second step. Essentially, we are investigating and answering whether entrepreneurs expect less severe consequences for a specific behavior because they differ from non-entrepreneurs in their understanding of what is appropriate or because they simply apply different values in the risk assessment.

Building on promising results from an experimental vignette pre-study, we are in the process of carrying out a large-scale online/lab experiment with an estimated completion date of December 2023. The experiment consists of an online norm elicitation task (Krupka & Weber, 2013) and a business simulation game that will take place 3-4 weeks after the first task with the same participants (entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs).

The findings from our study will increase our understanding of the entrepreneur as an individual, provide answers to the quesiton of who sees and exploits opportunities and help us explain negative and even counterproductive entrepreneurial behavior, an area that has so far received little attention from entrepreneurship research

Aufgrund zunehmender Bedenken bezüglich der Replizierbarkeit selbst grundlegender Effekte hat sich in verschiedenen Bereichen der betriebswirtschaftlichen Forschung ein Wandel hin zu Open Science-Praktiken vollzogen. Diverse renommierte Fachzeitschriften fordern Autoren inzwischen routinemäßig auf, ihre Daten offen zugänglich zu machen und haben begonnen, neue Publikationsformate wie Registered Reports anzubieten. Parallel zu dieser Entwicklung haben Big Team Science-Projekte ihren Einzug in die betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung gehalten. In der Psychologie war vor gut zehn Jahren ein ähnlicher Wandel zu beobachten, mit weitreichenden Konsequenzen für die Forschungs- und Publikationskultur. Im Vergleich zur Psychologie steckt die betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung allerdings noch in den Kinderschuhen, wenn es um die konsequente Umsetzung von Open-Science-Praktiken geht. In dieser Podiumsdiskussion werden wir die Vor- und Nachteile von Open Science in der betriebswirtschaftlichen Forschung diskutieren und Herausforderung bei deren Umsetzung aufzeigen.

Susanne Adler ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Marketing der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Ihre Arbeit befasst sie sich mit Entscheidungsverhalten in Konsumsituationen sowie Metaforschung und Open Science. Sie beschäftigt sich unter anderem mit der Entwicklung von Richtlinien für transparentes Reporting über alle Phasen eines Forschungsprojektes hinweg und arbeitet an der praktischen Implementierung von Open Science-Praktiken. Entsprechende Beiträge sind unter anderem im Journal of Business Research erschienen. Aufgrund ihrer Arbeit an der Schnittstelle zwischen Konsumentenforschung und Metaforschung ist Susanne Adler Fellow for Interdisciplinary Economics and Interdisciplinary Business Administration der Joachim Herz Stiftung.

Oliver Genschow ist Professor für Kognitions-, Sozial- und Wirtschaftspsychologie an der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. In seiner aktuellen Forschung befasst er sich mit Imitationsverhalten und den Auswirkungen des Glaubens an den freien Willen. Dabei interessiert ihn auch Konsumentenverhalten. Oliver Genschow hat sich Open Science-Praktiken verpflichtet indem er seine Studien präregistriert, sowie seine Daten und Materialien öffentlich zugänglich macht. Regelmäßig veröffentlicht Oliver Genschow Registered Reports und engagiert sich in einem häufig vergessenen Bereich der Open Science Bewegung: Nämlich der transparenten Kommunikation von Forschungsbefunden in laientauglicher Sprache.

Marko Sarstedt ist Professor für Marketing an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In seinen aktuellen Arbeiten setzt er sich mit Möglichkeiten zur Bestimmung von Messunsicherheit in der Konsumentenverhaltensforschung und der Adaption von Open Science-Praktiken in der Marketingforschung auseinander. Seine Forschungsergebnisse wurden in international führenden Fachzeitschriften, wie zum Beispiel Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Marketing Research und MIS Quarterly veröffentlicht und zählen mit über 200.000 Zitationen zu den am häufigsten zitierten Beiträgen in den Sozialwissenschaften. Marko Sarstedt ist Mitglied des Open Science Centers der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Doreen Siegfried leitet die Abteilung Marketing und Public Relations an der ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Sie ist Chefredakteurin des Open Science Magazins, das sich inhaltlich mit Transparenz, Offenheit und Reproduzierbarkeit wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Forschung befasst. Dabei werden Entwicklungen aus der Wissenschaftspolitik sowie Erfahrungen von Wirtschaftsforschenden aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz betrachtet als auch ganz konkrete praktische Arbeitsanleitungen angeboten. Doreen Siegfried beschäftigt sich seit vielen Jahren mit der Erforschung von Open-Science-Praktiken in der Wirtschaftsforschung und ist Projektleiterin der regelmäßig erscheinenden Studie „Die Bedeutung von Open Science in der Wirtschaftsforschung“. In ihrer Rolle als Kommunikationsmanagerin setzt sich Doreen Siegfried intensiv mit der Frage auseinander, wie das komplexe Thema „Open Science“ für unterschiedliche akademische Zielgruppen verständlich aufbereitet werden kann.

We investigate the impact of textual disclosures’ quality and quantity, measured as the share of boilerplate language, the linguistic complexity, and the disclosure length, on investors’ security pricing at issuance. Exploiting an extensive data set of over 1,000 issuance prospectuses covering all ABS transactions under the European Central Bank’s loan-level reporting initiative, we show that the prospectuses’ quality and quantity substantially affect investors’ pricing beyond all observable risk factors. Investors demand an economically significant lower yield spread if the share of boilerplate language increases, while longer prospectuses lead to higher spreads. We provide three mechanisms for our results: presumed default risk, level of information asymmetry, and visualizations supplementing the prospectus. Investors’ risk assessment is weakened because the resulting prices are less predictive of future security performance. We show empirically that these results are not driven by information on performance or deal complexity being potentially included in the textual disclosure measures. Recent EU regulations aiming at addressing these problems have homogenized the quality and quantity of textual disclosure in ABS prospectuses. Our results have important implications for market participants and regulators alike, placing the quality and quantity of textual disclosure in prospectuses high on their agenda.

We examine how division managers’ human capital affects internal capital allocation using a hand-collected and comprehensive data set of divisional managers at S&P 1,500 firms. Based on a novel measure of division-manager ability, we show that more able division managers receive substantially larger capital allocations than do their less able peers. This effect is robust to controlling for the possibility of assortative matching and more pronounced for firms with better governance. Firms not only allocate more capital to higher-ability managers, but also appoint them to relatively larger divisions, suggesting that firms entrust them with larger allocations, both in relative and absolute terms. Finally, we find that the allocation of extra capital to higher-ability managers creates value at the firm level. Taken together, these results correspond to efficient fund transfers to high-productivity managers and provide support for a largely unexplored bright side of internal capital markets.

We study the contagion effects of high-yield bond defaults via common auditors, rating agencies, underwriters, and exchange listings. A bond event study of 53 defaults between 2012 and 2019 among all German small and medium enterprise bonds shows significant negative price reactions for non-defaulted bonds with a common rating agency or underwriter as the defaulted bond. Regressing abnormal returns on possible determinants corroborates the effect of common rating agencies but not for common underwriters. It additionally reveals an effect of common exchanges. Effects of common rating agencies and exchanges are concentrated in respective market leaders among those intermediaries. Finally, we find some evidence consistent with stronger effects when bonds use more intermediary reputation.

The world of marketing undergoes a substantial transformation with the emergence of spatial computer-simulated environments, which enable new forms of shopping, entertainment, but also work and scientific research. While these spatial environments can be accessed with widely available 2D interfaces such as smartphones and PCs, specific devices such as virtual-reality (VR) headsets have been argued to offer superior user experiences because they are able to provide users with a higher level of psychological presence, as the state of being in a virtual world. But do consumers truly prefer high levels of such presence, which might be associated with lower levels of presence in the user’s physical environment? While this question is of essence for the future of spatial marketing and particularly for producers of virtual-reality headsets such as Meta, Lenovo, and soon Apple, little is known about the issue yet. We report theoretical arguments and empirical insights from experimental studies we conducted at Münster’s eXperimental Reality Lab in which we compare responses to high-presence VR headsets and lower-presence devices and derive managerial implications from them.

Extant research underscores the pivotal role of online ratings in shaping consumer decisions, assuming that these online ratings provide a discernible guide for informed choices. However, a pervasive pattern on various e-commerce websites challenges this assumption, with an increasing prevalence of overly positive online ratings.

Our study, situated in the search stage, when consumers form their consideration sets, aims to investigate whether and how these overly positive online ratings affect consumers’ decision-making. We first document the extent of online rating skewness across three prominent e-commerce websites. Second, relying on the principles of prospect theory, we examine its impact on consumer decision-making. Finally, we explore whether potential adjustments could mitigate the challenge of online rating skewness for the most often-used five-star rating.

Our study documents the prevalence of left-skewed online rating distributions in samples extracted from Amazon, Walmart, and Booking. We further find a growing skewness trend in online ratings on the Amazon Marketplace over time. Our key finding reveals that consumers employ a binary approach to online ratings. Once a product’s rating surpasses a particular reference point (4.2-stars), it is considered for inclusion in consumers’ consideration set, with no differentiation for higher online ratings up to 4.8-stars. Remarkably, alternative online rating designs fail to mitigate consumers’ decision-making process.

The circular economy (CE) concept represents a major paradigm shift for sustainable development in business and policy, while creating the opportunity for economic growth. Circular startups play an increasingly important role in implementing CE in the market. In this study, we take a mixed methods approach to better understand circular business model design in a preliminary quantitative study, i.e., a survey sent out to circular startup entrepreneurs. We find that from the 27 valid responses, intrinsic motivation is superficially important, whereas a positive impact, social responsibility and a positive influence on the environment are considered most relevant. In the subsequent qualitative study, we interviewed eight circular startup founders to identify their understanding of circularity in their personal life and from a founder’s perspective as well as their motivations and values. We find that the following key values and motivational factors were particularly relevant: (1) environmental impact, (2) social responsibility, and (3) need of achievement. With our study, we contribute to circular entrepreneurship theory and practice by developing five propositions that inform researchers as well as practitioners and policymakers to encourage circular startup foundations and offer avenues for future research to further test these propositions.

This study investigates the attitude-behavior gap in the context of ethical fashion consumption. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior we conduct a comparative analysis of N=1000 German consumers differentiated into two groups: 1) consumers who despite having ethical attitudes do not consume ethically and 2) ethical shoppers. A survey is employed including a best-worst scaling experimental methodology and a logistic regression analysis is conducted to reassess the relevance of previously identified ethical consumption barriers. Our findings reveal that the majority of the hitherto attested barriers do not increase the likelihood of the attitude-behavior gap and, thus, cannot be classified as purchasing barriers. Specifically, we highlight the relevance of overt behavioral controls for the explanatory power of the Theory of Planned Behavior in the context of ethical fashion consumption. Our findings contribute to the ethical consumption discourse and general consumer research by differentiating the attitude-behavior gap both theoretically and empirically.

The article highlights the critical role of sustainable consumption in addressing environmental challenges. While interest in sustainable goods is growing, there remains a gap between consumer attitudes and actual purchasing behavior, which raises questions about the factors that influence sustainable consumption. This article focuses on income inequality as a key determinant. It posits that the distribution of income in a society influences how people spend money on sustainable products. It suggests that individuals in more unequal societies may feel less responsible for environmental outcomes and therefore have lower sustainable norms and consumption levels. Using a multi-study design, the preliminary results support the general idea of a negative effect of income inequality on sustainable consumption.

Increasing implementation of transparency policies and freedom of information (FOI) laws should enable citizens to gain access to government information. Recent literature on open government and FOI emphasizes the many benefits associated with high transparency, such as increasing citizens’ trust in government, stimulating public participation, and improving public performance. While some public organizations already proactively publish information on open data portals or on their webpages, citizens are also granted with the right to directly send individual information requests to public bodies, meaning that organizations bound by FOI are obliged to respond. While citizens can request the desired information via direct communication channels (post, email, or social media), they can also indirectly file requests via digital intermediaries such as online FOI platforms. These are oftentimes hosted by non-governmental organizations and forward information requests to the responsible authority, thereby providing a low-threshold way for citizens to get engaged with public organizations. This study aims to explore the specific role such FOI platforms play in strengthening transparency and the exchange of government information demand and supply. By drawing on intermediation theory and a principal-agency problem, the study shows the potential of FOI platforms for processing information requests and reducing information asymmetries. In the frame of an exploratory single case study, data from a German FOI platform is analyzed. Looking at German data is especially valuable as FOI is not regulated on a federal basis, but differs in each federal state (Länder). Under this premise, investigating information demand and supply via online platforms can not only shed light on overall compliance to government transparency and FOI, but also show how platforms can be used for more efficient citizen-state interaction and information exchange.

Algorithms appear to influence human behavior in situations where humans directly interact with an algorithmic system. However, empirical evidence that disentangles what influence the application of algorithmic decision-making in public e-services has for citizens and for the implementing organizations is scarce. We will conduct a discrete choice experiment on citizens' service-configuration preferences, their corresponding legitimacy judgments, and how the introduction of an algorithmic decision system changes these evaluations. Data will be collected online with a representative sample of German citizens in late 2023.

We expect that citizens will place increased importance on trustworthiness, organizational capabilities, and technological performance in the case of an algorithmic decision system because they expect the machine to provide tangible benefits compared to a human bureaucrat. Accordingly, if those service dimensions are high, the perceived legitimacy of the organization should increase. On the contrary, if those quality dimensions are low, algorithmic decision-making should lead to a decrease in perceived organizational legitimacy.

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought about technological changes in organizations and workplaces which have manifold ramifications. AI bears both a chance to mitigate bias and discrimination in organizations as well as fostering them. This contribution discusses how recent AI developments, specifically ChatGPT, could influence speciesism and vegaphobia in the workplace. In this study, we employ illustrative data from our conversations with ChatGPT-3.5. We contribute to discussions on AI fairness and equality, diversity, and inclusion in organizations, and animal organization studies.

While extant research has investigated the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on work, it has not explored the impact of AI on worker representation. At the same time, worker representatives expect AI to have implications for workers of large scale and scope. Understanding how worker representatives navigate the challenges of AI is critical, as it is through collective action that workers advocate their interests regarding AI implementation. To address this research-practice gap, we draw on interviews with worker representatives, documentary evidence, and field observations. Due to their intermediary role between workers and employers, worker representatives are uniquely positioned to shed light on competing perspectives on AI and how its implementation is negotiated in organizations. We apply a paradox lens that suggests that competing perspectives on AI in the workplace are not mutually exclusive but interwoven and persistent. The contribution of our study is twofold. First, we conceptualize four paradoxical tensions in AI engagement. These tensions relate to the evitability, tangibility, boundaries, and evaluation of AI. Second, our findings indicate that worker representatives have three response mechanisms to these tensions: accommodative visioning, experimenting within guardrails, and building coalitions. We conclude that it is this ambiguity and complexity that characterizes AI and places high demands on the representation of worker interests. Negotiating AI is not simply a matter of quickly building up new technical skills among worker representatives. Rather, they need to collectively organize in ways that enable multiple meanings and perspectives to be accommodated, simultaneously provide flexibility and structure, and enable dialogue and participation. With this, we extend scholarship on AI and work as well as on navigating paradox.

How gender inequalities are disrupted or (re)produced in Scrum teams is the main question we tackle with in this paper. Drawing upon the concept of gendered organization by Acker (1990) and using qualitative data from 14 interviews we aim to better understand the limitations and potentials of agile work structures, i.e. the Scrum method, with respect to gender equality. The findings reveal an ambivalent picture, where Scrum values and practices turn out to possess emancipatory potential. However, numerous gendered organizational practices could be identified too. Consistent with Acker's (1990) concept of gendered organization, our interviews show how a gendered culture (i.e., gendered images of Scrum Master and Product Owner), gendered interaction (i.e. the self-organized nature of Scrum teams), gendered organizational practices and structures (i.e., the limited compatibility of Scrum with part-time work), and a gendered organizational logic (i.e., the negation of gender inequality) are (re)produced in Scrum teams.

While research on open strategy emphasizes the potentials of increasing transparency and involving employees in strategy-making, its relation to codetermination and other traditional forms of workplace democracy is neither investigated nor theorized. In this essay, we discuss various potential reasons for this omission, followed by an identification of issues for open strategy research and practice that are affected by this. We then derive and assess concerns for management as well as elected worker representatives, before ending with suggestions for future research on open strategy and workplace democracy.

Management research often takes a ‘business case’ approach to sustainability issues. Paradox theory has criticized this approach for framing the problem as an either/or and ultimately giving priority to economic ends over environmental or social concerns. Instead, paradox scholars argue for the generative potential of making the tensions underlying sustainability salient and embracing them with a both/and approach. In this paper, we problematize the assumption that either/or approaches cannot lead to generative outcomes for sustainability. With an in-depth ethnographic study, making use of a practice-theoretical lens, we shed light on the key role of normativity in mundane organizational practices to cope with (paradoxical) tensions in general and those linked to sustainability in particular. Specifically, we discover how a normative orientation that strongly leans towards social and environmental ends generates the development of a recursive loop that facilitates to meet economic demands, at least in the long run. This provides a processual understanding of the prematurely dismissed either/or approach and shows the generative potential of this response to urgent sustainability problems. The study thus contributes not only to paradox research but also to research on corporate sustainability by uncovering the importance of the normativity implicit in daily practices for sustainability and developing an empirically grounded model that shows traces of a sustainability case for business.

This study explores how firms and civil society organizations (CSOs) engage in inter-organizational learning to achieve the transition towards the Circular Economy (CE). While the need for collaboration is widely acknowledged, prior research lacks an understanding of successful practices, especially in horizontal relationships and between heterogeneous actor groups. Based on qualitative data from the fashion industry, the findings of this study are used to develop an empirically grounded model of inter-organizational learning for the CE transition. The model unfolds the different challenges inherent in inter-organizational learning for the CE. In addition, it captures three practices of inter-organizational learning that firms and CSOs develop to realize the CE transition: 1) creating a safe learning space, 2) visualizing CE processes and outcomes and, 3) involving additional expertise. Finally, it shows how inter-organizational learning enables actors to realize collaborative pathways that enable the transition to the CE, such as creating experimental forms of collaboration and professionalizing CE knowledge. Thus, the study contributes to the literatures on inter-organizational learning and CE and, overall, towards a socio-technical theory of the CE transition.

Firms operate in a business environment influenced by a series of unique external events. A polycrisis commencing first with the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by conflict and an adjoin energy crisis in fast succession changed the framework conditions for firms. This happens while strategic aspects of trade and industrial policy has become debated internationally.

These changes have taken place over a relatively short period, which represents a unique situation for adjustment in firms and their organization. While some these events are predominantly external to firms, a reaction in terms of considering potentials through e.g. digitalization may have been propelled. It accordingly becomes essential to provide research infrastructures to offer precise insight into firm’s adjustments to such sudden needs for change and how this affects employer-employee relations.

This is one purpose of SOEP-LEE2, which comprises employer-employee data based extending SOEP into an employer-employee framing. Other themes covered are cybersecurity, HRM, flexibility, remote work, job security and recruitment bottlenecks in operations of firms. SOEP-LEE2 at the same time allows for research on survey methods comparing employee-first approaches with representative samples of employers. Also, a module attends self-employed to allow for both analysis of self-employed and persons in dependent work.

It thereby consists of the SOEP-LEE2-Core comprising linked employee-employer data, SOEP-LEE2-Self-employed focusing on self-employed and the SOEP-LEE2-Compare constituting a representative sample of employers. The survey is conducted in cooperation between DIW/SOEP Berlin, HSU/IPA Hamburg and infas Institute for Applied Social Science in Bonn.

An extensive body of research has studied the origins of the gender pay gap (GPG), either from a macro-level perspective (e.g., how equality laws reduce the GPG) or a micro-level perspective (e.g., how career choices affect the GPG). However, little is known about the role of firms – the place where pay decisions are made and the foundations for the GPG are laid. Specifically, we examine how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) shape the gender pay gap in their firms. We integrate upper echelons theory with the literature on the GPG and argue that CEOs have a substantial impact on the pay philosophy and pay decisions of their firms, and thus on the firm-internal GPG. Our examination centers on five CEO characteristics, CEO gender, educational background, intelligence, psychopathy and achievement striving, which impact the gender pay gap in different ways, such as through reward systems or gender equity awareness. We test our hypotheses with a comprehensive and novel panel dataset that encompasses matched employee, firm, and CEO data, covering all but the smallest Finnish firms from 2009 to 2020. In line with expectations, we find a reduced GPG in firms that are led by CEOs with higher level of education, higher intelligence, and a stronger achievement striving motive. We find a higher GPG in firms that are led by CEOs with a higher level of psychopathy. These results are robust to a number of robustness checks. In addition, similar patterns emerge when we examine the role of CEO characteristics for employee promotions.

This paper examines the effects of a different dyadic formation of concurring and lead auditor (‘dyad formation’) to a corporate social responsibility (CSR) assurance engagement – compared to the financial audit dyad – on CSR assurance fees and the probability of disclosing CSR restate-ments due to error, i.e., error restatements in a CSR report. We find that audit firms charge, on average, less CSR assurance fees for CSR assurance engagements with differences in the auditor dyad formation compared to the financial audit. Further, we find that different auditor dyads are likely to increase a client’s disclosure of error restatements. In contrast, higher CSR assurance fees – as being charged by audit firms scheduling the same financial auditors to the CSR assurance engagement – are likely to decrease the probability of error restatements. Our findings reveal a potential gap between financial auditors and auditors primarily conducting CSR assurance engage-ments related to CSR reporting knowledge.

A vast body of literature has focused on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting as a legitimation tool for years. However, considering the introduction of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), it remains an open question whether mandatory reporting requirements will prevent the use of legitimation strategies in the future. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on gaining, maintaining, and repairing organizational legitimacy through ESG reporting according to Suchman (1995) to get an understanding of the status quo of legitimation strategies used and to provide an outlook on the potential use of legitimation strategies under CSRD. Using a systematic literature review, 228 papers from 1996 to 2022 are analyzed. The findings show that ESG reporting is widely used to manage organizational legitimacy, using a combination of strategies depending on the legitimation challenge companies face. Based on early studies looking at the use of legitimation strategies after the implementation of mandatory ESG reporting requirements, e.g., in South Africa or Australia, this study provides evidence that many strategies in the voluntary reporting context can be transferred to the mandatory reporting context. The findings of this study offer future research opportunities and provide valuable insights for both scholars and stakeholders on how legitimation strategies are used in ESG reporting.

This study examines how private firms’ disclosure creates information externalities for public firms’ information environment. Exploiting a setting with varying importance of private firms and availability of their information, we document lower analyst forecast accuracy when private peer importance in the respective industry is higher. Further, holding the importance constant and varying the availability of private peers’ information reveals that these effects are driven by opaque private peers. A cross-sectional test indicates that these externalities primarily manifest when the availability of information about public firms is relatively poor. Finally, a difference-in-differences analysis shows increased forecast activity around private peers’ disclosure dates, indicating causality. Overall, our findings support a cost-argument explaining the negative relation between analysts’ information acquisition and processing costs and the availability of private firms’ disclosure, contributing to the regulatory debate about disclosure requirements for private firms.

We explore the importance of financial information of counterparty firms in supply chain

relations. Exploiting the implementation of electronic business registers in European countries that

significantly increased the accessibility of private fims’ financial information, we find that more

accessible financial information is relevant to supply chain relationships in an asymmetric way: it

tends to have a larger impact when the financial information is customer-related than when it is

supplier-related. We also find that the timing in which the financial information becomes available is

important to its effect on the stability of supply chain relations. Information that is available before

the supply chain relations have started contributes to the stability of the relations in line with a better selection of supply chain partners, while information that becomes available after relations have started tends to destabilize the existing relations. Overall, our results highlight the differential

importance of financial information to suppliers and customers and the importance of timing of

information accessibility in the supply chain.

Using a mixed-methods approach, we examine the effects of corporate tax complexity and tax misperceptions on the choice of organizational form. In a first study, we use German administrative tax return data and demonstrate that most entrepreneurs who can choose between taxing retained earnings under the partnership rules (pass-through principle) and the corporate income tax rules (double taxation principle) avoid opting for corporate taxation even though doing so would lead to significant tax savings. In a second study, we use an experiment to show that the corporate double-tax regime is perceived as significantly more complex. This complexity has a direct negative effect on opting for corporate taxation as complexity-averse individuals refrain from choosing the more complex option. In addition, corporate tax complexity has an indirect negative effect on opting for corporate taxation, mediated by an overestimation of the corporate tax burden.

This paper provides evidence on short-run tax incidence on company profits using data from a survey experiment with German firms. Managers, facing tax burden changes, have various adjustment margins impacting different groups. Our experimental design allows us to measure the resources allocated to a large set of possible adjustment margins, whereas the literature typically studies one margin at a time. We document that from a EUR 100 increase in the tax burden, workers pay EUR 17 through changes in wages and employment, firm owners EUR 23 through forgone distributed profits, and consumers EUR 18 via price increases. The remaining 43 EUR are financed through changes in investment, reserves, and debt, among other margins. By exploiting experimental variation in the assignment of hypothetical permanent tax increases and decreases, we find that profit tax incidence is highly asymmetric, especially with regard to prices, and sensitive to the size of the tax change.

Significant technological change in an incumbent’s environment questions established capabilities and resources (Eggers and Park, 2018). The corresponding uncertainty of this change is likely to create political contestation by which strategic leaders aim to determine the incumbents’ adaption to technological change (Kaplan, 2008; Eggers and Park, 2018). This political contestation is characterized by strategic leaders’ attempts to (re-)shape change-guiding coalitions in order to influence the adaption according to specific interests.

However, the literature offers heterogeneous insights into the effects of political contestation on adaption to technological changes. While political contestation can create a variety of strategic alternatives to overcome resisting coalitions, it can also paralyze incumbents by creating an inward focus on power struggles and open conflicts.

This heterogeneity points towards so far omitted constructs explaining conditions under which the political contestation of strategic leaders drives the adaption of incumbents successfully. Yet, research on political contestation has tended to neglect research on cognitive mechanisms and vice versa (Kim, 2021). This focus resulted in a limited understanding of how specific framing behaviors shape the influence of political contestation on incumbent’s adaption to technological change. However, the investigation of cognitive framing processes is crucial, as political contestation concerns the pursuit of specific interests, and these interests, as well as motives of strategic actors, are grounded in and reinforced by their cognition (Kaplan, 2008).

In response, we explore the relationship between political contestation of strategic leaders and the adaption of incumbents to technological change under conditions of different framing behaviors. To do so, we investigate the technological change in the automotive industry from fossil-powered combustions engines to more sustainable alternative power units. We use unique, longitudinal data from 2010-2021 to test a set of hypotheses. This context allows us to investigate the effects of political contestation on adaption of the innovation portfolio’s breadth.

Firms rely on the creativity of their employees to drive innovation and secure competitive advantages. At the same time, in the modern workplace, teams collaborate increasingly often virtually, often also in a non-native language for many team members. Yet, the effects of working virtually on creative tasks and in a language that is foreign to many members have largely remained underexplored. This study addresses how the use of either their native or a foreign language (English) as team language affects creative performance in both face-to-face and virtual teams, which use a partially anonymous, synchronous technology. Results are based on an experiment with 95 dyadic virtual and face-to-face teams, with random assignment to either a foreign or native language work setting. Key insights are that the use of a non-native team language is detrimental to verbal creative performance, but that this is (partially) remedied by using the focal virtual technology (a chat-augmented audio-virtual collaboration setting); as well as by improved language proficiency in the team and/or reduced foreign language anxiety. Digital technology may thus help to alleviate some globalization-induced challenges to nurturing employee creative performance.

Organizations increasingly integrate agile processes into their conventional managed NPD portfolios to address growing complexity, dynamics, and turbulences in new product development (NPD). Besides organizational-wide agile transformations and hybrid approaches, most organizations use agile and conventional processes in coexistence depending on the specific characteristics of an NPD project within an NPD portfolio. As identified in previous literature, this leads to an emerging interface of conventional and agile NPD. However, there is a need for further investigation since the contradicting elements of conventional and agile approaches and associated tensions challenge existing knowledge and processes in NPD.

In response, we explore the following research questions: How can the interface of conventional and agile NPD be characterized? How can organizations manage the interface between the requirements of conventional and agile NPD?

We conducted multiple case study research. Preliminary results draw on a rich sample of archival data (more than 1,200 pages) and 63 interviews from two cases. By applying a paradox perspective on agility, our preliminary insights show how the coexistence of agile and conventional NPD processes reinforce paradoxical tensions that, in turn, challenge NPD. These insights extend our understanding of the conventional-agile interface and enable us to derive mechanisms to benefit from the contradicting elements by leveraging synergies from both approaches. Furthermore, we refine paradox theory by contrasting previous findings on paradoxical tensions in the context of conventional-agile NPD. Finally, we develop rich practical implications through an in-depth investigation of the emerging interface.

Wir diskutieren ein praxisrelevantes Thema aus Transferperspektive an der Schnittstelle von Strategie, Innovation und Entrepreneurship. Dazu laden wir Experten aus der Praxis ein.

Wie erreiche ich als Wissenschaftler:in gesellschaftlichen Impact? Als BWLer:innen haben wir etwas zu sagen, auch über unsere Fachcommunity hinaus. Das „Grundsatzpapier Wissenschaftskommunikation“ (BMBF) fordert mehr Dialog zwischen Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft und auch die DFG rückt ein „dissemination requirement“ immer mehr in den Vordergrund. Gleichzeitig könnte die BWL ihre Ergebnisse selbstbewusster und „lauter“ an die Öffentlichkeit kommunizieren. In diesem Panel diskutieren Expert:innen, wie ein Einstieg in eine erfolgreiche Kommunikation gelingen kann, welche Zielgruppen wie erreicht werden und welche Kommunikationskanäle für eine proaktive Kommunikation genutzt werden können.

Ziel des Panels sind Einblicke in Fragestellungen wie: Welche Medienkanäle bespiele ich auf welche Weise erfolgreich? Wie kann ich sichtbar sein, aber die Qualität sichern? Wie erreiche ich die Politik? Welche Themen interessieren die Medien; gibt es ein Risiko? Welche Best Practice der Wissenschaftskommunikation hat sich für wen etabliert? Worin besteht der Nutzen für Wissenschaftler:innen, (über) ihre Forschung zu kommunizieren?

Der erste Teil der Veranstaltung findet als Panel Symposium mit vier Expert:innen statt (75 Min). Der zweite Teil umfasst ein Medien-Kurztraining im Workshopformat mit der Journalistin und Medientraininerin Dr. Katja Flieger. Hier erlangen die Teilnehmenden einen kurzen, intensiven Einblick in ausgewählte Kommunikationskanäle und Themen. Bitte melden Sie sich für diesen Teil an. Die Teilnahme ist auf 32 Plätze begrenzt, eine Warteliste wird eingerichtet.

Using a novel set of international high-frequency data, we examine whether half-hour returns continue to predict half-hour returns on subsequent days in global stock markets at the firm-level, and how this “interday momentum" pattern is affected by market characteristics. Our results show that the pattern is still present across all markets, albeit weaker than in previous studies, and most pronounced during the last half-hour interval. Characteristics such as liquidity, price efficiency, size, and volatility moderate interday momentum, however, depending on the time of day. Lastly, we show that a more pronounced absolute overnight return leads to a decline in interday momentum.

In our interdisciplinary study, we define with meteorological data the strongest heat waves since 1979 for Europe and the United States. We reveal that European heat waves have a higher magnitude and duration. Moreover, we conduct an event study to capture stock price reactions to the identified heat waves for firms with different environmental performance levels. The heat waves significantly impact the stock market, with cumulative average abnormal returns amounting to -3.065%. We reveal geographical differences. In the United States, recent heat waves have a greater impact on the stock market compared to previous years. In Europe, stock price reactions depend on the heat waves' intensity and duration. Only for the United States, we identify a disciplinary effect for portfolios with poor environmental performance.

Despite their global presence, leading e-commerce firms establish foreign direct investment only in select countries to fully apply local operations and management. However, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of this important decision in certain countries, while other countries are served differently. This study proposes a framework to analyze the host country- and firm-specific antecedents of e-commerce firms’ wholly owned foreign direct investment decisions. This study refers to data on 1,828 decisions of 241 leading e-commerce firms in Europe in 2010-2020 and applies multilevel modeling. The results show that firms choose foreign direct investment primarily based on their host country online experience. Country-level antecedents such as host country logistics performance, rule of law or market attractiveness are also relevant but explain the decision differently. The findings have direct implications for managers interested in the roles of the major drivers of foreign direct investment decisions in growing e-commerce markets.

Digital platforms, now ubiquitous intermediaries in the modern economy, claim to uphold governance rules aimed at ensuring a level playing field for their participants. However, there is limited research exploring the extent to which these platforms fulfill this objective. Furthermore, the antecedents and consequences of any non-compliance remain largely unexamined. This paper addresses this research gap by examining the mobile app market. The study analyzes 852 apps available on both Apple and Google platforms across nineteen countries. It assesses these apps' disclosed versus actual behavior concerning device ID transfer for advertising purposes, aiming to pinpoint instances of non-compliance. The findings reveal that about 21% of the apps do not comply. Compliance rates are higher among apps catering to Apple users compared to those for Google users, with negligible variations across countries. Notably, older apps, presumably with more experience, demonstrate greater compliance. However, factors like popularity and reputation do not significantly affect compliance levels. Intriguingly, non-compliant apps earn at least 10% more in advertising revenue than they would if compliant, thus gaining a significant economic edge.

A key driver of academic impact is reach: highly visible research and researchers have a higher potential to impact society, managers, and fellow academics. Social media (SM), especially Twitter (or, now, X), is becoming an increasingly important tool within the scientific community for promoting oneself and one’s publications. With its help, academics can boost their visibility and their publications’ reach. Still, a detailed understanding of academics’ SM activities, its efficacy to drive reach, and its success factors are lacking. Therefore, this paper identifies drivers of engagement with academics’ SM activities using a difference-in-difference approach to uncover how SM engagement affects reach in terms of citations. Specifically, the authors observe more than 386,818 tweets by 585 academics over six years and analyse the who, what, how, and when of their posts. The insights inform academics on how to more effectively engage their SM audience, promote their research, and boost their reach.

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) is a critical driver of consumer purchases, yet relatively little work has sought to understand how characteristics of a company might impact aggregate WOM valence (e.g., average star rating of online reviews). In the current work, the authors examine the effects of one such attribute, company size. The relationship between company size and aggregate WOM valence reflects not only the quality of consumers’ experiences with a company but also individuals’ decisions of whether to engage in WOM. The authors analyze more than four million instances of WOM about hundreds of companies and find a negative relationship between company size and WOM that persists when controlling for the quality of consumers’ experience with the company. The effect occurs across a range of product categories for both online reviews and social media posts. Subsequent experiments show that the effect occurs because consumers are more likely to engage in WOM about a larger (smaller) company following a low-quality (high-quality) experience. Theoretically based on the Stereotype Content model, A mediation analysis shows that for high-quality experiences, consumers perceive smaller companies as higher in warmth. For low-quality experiences, consumers perceive larger companies as more competent than smaller companies. Both warmth and competence then explain a higher likelihood to share the experience. Finally, the authors show that being responsive online (e.g., answering on WOM posts from consumers) can help larger companies mitigate the negative impact of size on WOM valence. Based on the proposed theory, an experiment shows that being responsive online increases warmth of larger and competence of smaller companies. The findings imply that large companies aiming to improve WOM valence might need to allocate more resources to WOM marketing and benefit from strategies that increase their perceived warmth.

The rise of the digital sustainability and the regenerative sustainability imperative is altering established markets. In these reignited markets – which are characterized by relatively clear structures but a high degree of uncertainty –, incumbents need to pursue new strategies that put both imperatives center stage. We posit incumbents can leverage digital technologies to enhance environmental sustainability and drive firm performance through twin strategies. Specifically, we propose that incumbents can adopt revamp, reduce, report, and revive as four alternative strategies. The choice of a strategy is influenced by the incumbents’ impact on natural resources and resource orchestration approach. We integrate these insights into a conceptual framework of twin strategies. We discuss how this framework supports executives in responding to the new sustainability imperatives and how it adds to scholarship at the intersection of corporate strategy and corporate sustainability.

In the face of the major global challenges (Rockström et al., 2009), sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have gained importance and have become central and defining contemporary topics for management, scholars, and the wider public (Wang et al., 2016). This paper delves into the nuanced relationship between CEO characteristics, specifically gender and age, and CSR outcomes in family and non-family firms. It integrates insights from Upper Echelons Theory (UET), emphasizing the impact of CEO personal attributes on strategic decision-making, with CEO discretion, which underscores the importance of CEO autonomy and authority in shaping CSR initiatives. To research this, we rely on a big data strategy which combines data from audited annual accounts, an artificial intelligence approach to identify organizational sustainability intensity, and an algorithm and supercomputer-based identification of family firms. We contribute to research by revealing novel insights and explanations for how companies in our economies are (not) responding to the contemporary climate challenges by examining important boundary conditions for sustainable behaviour in family and non-family firms.

This study investigates the determinants of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance variations among companies, focusing on the influential role of top management teams (TMTs) and industry environment. Based on upper echelons theory and resource perspectives, we hypothesize that the diversity within TMTs—specifically, gender, culture, and functional background—affects companies’ ESG performance. Notably, we introduce functional background as a diversity dimension, illuminating the positive link between low value-oriented (LVO) functional backgrounds and ESG performance, next to the positive effects of gender diversity and cultural diversity. Employing a contingency lens, the study explores the moderating influence of industry environmental factors on the diversity-ESG performance nexus. Our findings reveal that environments characterized by munificence strengthen the effects of gender and cultural diversity on ESG performance, while environmental dynamism negatively affects the association between functional background diversity and ESG performance. Acknowledging the escalating importance of ESG in corporate strategy, our research addresses existing deficiencies in the literature, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive understanding of the diverse effects of TMT diversity in conjunction with industry environment, and providing a much more nuanced understanding of the latter based on its empirical findings.

Biodiversity loss is one of the planetary boundaries most in need for urgent action. Still, only very little is known on consumers willingness to pay for more biodiversity friendly products. Therefore, this article investigates how consumers’ willingness to pay depends on a products impact on biodiversity. To address this research question, we collected representative data of 524 German consumers using a survey based experiment. Building on prospect theory, we identify the shape of the reaction function of WTP for a given product with respect to its biodiversity performance. We show that consumers are willing to pay more for products with above average biodiversity performance. However, how much a product outperforms industry average does not influence consumers willingness to pay. From a sustainable development perspective, the observed patterns highlight a problematic contrast between the need for substantial improvements and limited market incentives for companies. Consequently, interventions by governments or corporate managers are necessary to set incentives, e.g. via introducing labeling schemes or raising consumer awareness.

Predicting peer donor transformation using machine learning

Peer-to-peer fundraising has emerged as a popular funding approach for nonprofit organizations, generating fast revenue and a promising opportunity for donor base expansion by transforming peer donors into organizational donors following their peer donation (Hesse & Boenigk, 2023). The paper discusses the “transformation likelihood,” which is the probability of peer donors directly contributing to the nonprofit organization beyond their initial peer donation. Thereby, the aim of the paper is twofold. First, it aims to identify determining factors of the transformation likelihood. Second, it evaluates if using artificial intelligence (machine learning) can assist in identifying peer donors most likely to undergo transformation.

The data was collected in July 2023 through an online survey targeting U.S. donors that have contributed to a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign before, resulting in a final sample of N =706. The study’s data analysis is twofold. To test the factors affecting the transformation likelihood, and considering the binary nature of the outcome variable, logistic regression is performed. Second, to evaluate the effectiveness of employing machine learning to identify which of the previously mentioned factors accurately predicts transformation likelihood at a donor-level, supervised learning is applied, which is commonly used for predictive tasks by leveraging existing labeled data to predict future events (Casado et al., 2023).

Among peer donors unaffiliated with the nonprofit before, the transformation likelihood is 14.1%. Utilizing a random forest classifier, the study achieves a 77% accuracy in predicting transformation, identifying key factors for accurate prediction. Interestingly, the study challenges some preconceived notions about transformation behavior in traditional fundraising contexts

Non-profits have professionalized over the last decades, which makes them increasingly resemble for-profits (Hwang & Powell, 2009; Maier et al., 2016). For-profits, on the other hand, have adopted the language of non-profits, as the heightened importance of corporate social responsibility exemplifies (Plummer et al., 2020). Thus, as has been thoroughly documented, the boundaries between two sectors that were once conceptualized as following distinct institutional logics have become blurry (Bromley & Meyer, 2017; De Bakker et al., 2013). To investigate the ways in which the two sectors became similar over time, we make use of a longitudinal dataset covering all registered Swiss for-profits (~1.000.000) and most Swiss non-profits (~60.000) between 2003 and 2022. Information on the organizations was obtained through the publicly available Swiss Registry of Commerce. Most importantly, the registry contains the mission statements of all organizations, which allows us to compute the similarity of stated missions between for-profits and non-profits. Our results show an increase in the similarity of mission statements between the two sectors, which seems to be driven by for-profit organizations’ mission statements becoming more similar to non-profit organizations’ mission statements. We further explore whether the increase in similarity can be explained by the market orientation displayed in the mission statements, the moral values present in the mission statements, and the SDGs that the mission statements relate to.

Although online hate speech is widely recognized as a major societal issue, its governance is largely left to the self-regulation of platform-providers. Without established standards of “good governance” in place, however, platform-providers commonly struggle with how they should govern online hate speech, since the “right thing to do” remains unclear vis-à-vis the paradoxical tension between freedom of speech and human dignity. Surprisingly, the paradox literature has mostly neglected normative problems to date. In addressing this gap, we make three key contributions to scholarship on paradox and normativity in organization studies, presenting a longitudinal single-case study of a Swiss media organization and a normative analysis of how its governance of online hate speech developed over time. First, we outline what constitutes good governance of paradox and why it must be based on a strong notion of normativity. Second, our findings reveal that the deliberative approach which emerged at the end of the 13-year period constitutes the best observed form of governance of paradox. We identify three mechanisms that help explain the evolution of this approach: decision-making structures, emotional attachments, and legitimacy. Third, we show good governance is key for addressing paradoxes when tackling grand societal challenges and pursuing desirable futures. (199 words)

The paper examines the theoretical underpinnings and limitations of Rogers’ concept of preventive innovation communication, using computational sentiment analysis to promote a more situational and meaning-based understanding of the concept. The literature suggests that the economic benefits of preventive innovation to organisations, for example to prevent pollution, protect human health or ensure information security, are mainly intangible, often time-delayed and adopted for incidents that may never occur.

Drawing on the discourse perspective of organisational communication and using the information security standard ISO/IEC 27001 as an example of preventive innovation, the authors extend Rogers’ view by noting that preventive innovations are not isolated, static objects or practices, but influence and are influenced by the adopting organisation. Therefore, there is not just one intended way of adopting a preventive innovation, but different approaches, namely agency, stewardship, and brokerage. Second, and also extending Rogers’ view, the findings provide evidence that organisations not only receive indirect recognition but can also gain direct economic benefits from preventive innovation. Third, the authors show that organisational communication of preventive innovations varies along the three adoption approaches and depends on whether organisations receive direct or indirect economic benefits from engaging in preventive innovation.

These findings are important not only for advancing the concept of preventive innovation. For policymakers, it allows them to understand how preventive innovation spreads into organisational practice and sustains social welfare. For adopters of preventive innovations, it is important to disseminate their efforts by creating the right communication, but also to understand that communication is important in organisational reality. In addition, adopters should be aware of the economic benefits that may be at stake. Finally, for innovators, in order to assess the success of their innovations, the findings show the variety of ways in which preventive innovations are adopted and how this shapes organisational communication.

The concept of Purpose has rapidly gained prominence in organizational and management literature. Purpose is currently considered one of the most influential concepts in the business world, promising to enable the transformative power of organizations. This systematic literature review evaluates 152 studies from 2005 to 2023 on the Purpose approach in for-profit businesses. Despite its presumed transformative potential, there is a research gap concerning its inherent challenges and possible negative consequences. This study examines the positive and, particularly, negative implications of the Purpose approach and investigates how organizational challenges influence the outcome. We introduce a framework delineating the complex relationship between applying a Purpose concept and the effects at individual, organizational, and societal levels. Our framework highlights three key challenges influencing the outcome: Purpose Clarity, Purpose Operationalization, and Purpose Credibility. Hence, the study augments the current understanding of Purpose-driven organizing by relating organizational challenges to the ambivalent implications of the Purpose approach. Further, we enrich the academic discourse by postulating the inherent ambiguity in managing the key organizational challenges. Thus, we assist practitioners in navigating potential pitfalls and preventing an unreflected Purpose hype.

In this article, we are proposing a new concept called ‘shared impact’, which reflects the joint achievements of actors working towards the goal of creating social and/or ecological value in highly complex, interdependent contexts. We contribute to institutional theory, particularly to the decoupling discourse, by differentiating the construct ‘ends’ and distinguishing between individual and shared impacts. Moreover, we build the bridge between the decoupling theory and the empirical analysis of ends. We critically discuss impact measurement in highly complex contexts and suggest holistic, triangulated methods for shared impact assessment. Our shared impact concept is also relevant for managers and policymakers aiming to address complex socio-economic issues in fields such as Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability.

Meaningful work and meaningfulness at work have been a subject of attention in a wide range of disciplines. Research has explored that designing workplaces or implementing programs which contribute to society can fuel a sense of meaning at work. A specific arrangement that aims to provide employees with meaning is corporate volunteering. Scholars on meaningfulness at work has approached the topic mostly from the employee’s perspective. In this article, we are exploring the organizational perspective of the challenges of providing ‘meaningful’ corporate volunteering. To understand how organizations manage tensions inherent to meaningful volunteering we adopt a paradox lens and build on the inductive exploration of qualitative data by interviewing 20 managers overseeing corporate volunteering programs in large German corporations. We develop an integrative framework for the identification and characteristics of tensions in corporate volunteering. With our article we demonstrate that organizations experience higher ranked tensions, which affect all corporations, and individual tensions emerging from corporate efforts to manage meaning in corporate volunteering. And we identified three stages of corporate volunteering: early-, mid- and late-stage corporate volunteering. By uncovering tensions of corporate volunteering and examples of how other companies solve the challenges of managing ‘meaningful’ corporate volunteering, we seek to explain how firms attempt to align organizational purpose and individual, employee-driven constructions of what constitutes as meaningful corporate volunteering.

Tackling grand societal challenges requires joint transboundary responses by actors from subsystems with conflicting logics. While transcending these conflicting logics entails diffusing hybrid logics in fields, hybridization encounters resistance and communication problems arising from, e.g., social or ecological versus economic logics. Research on field hybridization from an institutional logics perspective has yielded insights into how these problems can be overcome in centralized fields by breaking powerful dominant logics or establishing governance mechanisms that promote collaborations between non-profit and for-profit organizations. However, we lack insights into hybridization in fragmented fields characterized by the coexistence of uncoordinated but interdependent actors with no dominant logic or governance mechanisms. Drawing on an embedded case study of a circular economy startup in Germany, we reveal how social enterprises can act as “hybrid referents” to overcome coordination gaps between different functional subsystems and encourage the adoption of ecological goals, thereby contributing to the overall hybridization of the field over time. Our study bridges field research on institutional logics with systems theory to advance the literature on hybrid organizing and social enterprises by emphasizing the systemic interdependencies involved in multilevel hybridization processes and introducing the concept of “impasse” and the mechanism of “structural coupling” to explain field hybridization.

This study focuses on organizational temporality through a performative understanding of rhythms as patterns of time. It develops a rhythmanalytical approach that illuminates rhythms as material, embodied, and discursive practices constituting business-as-usual in the Anthropocene. The main research interest is understanding how some rhythms develop an authority over others and how organizations remain locked-in repetition or establish moments of change.

Empirically, the paper builds on an ethnographic study of the winter tourism industry. The findings show how both linear and cyclical rhythms strongly affect work pace and tempo in the winter tourism industry. Through multimodal vignettes, the findings highlight how organizations aim to dominate cyclical rhythms in order to stay within a monorhythmic business-as-usual linearity while everyday practices and processes remain entangled in those rhythms. The findings detail two rhythmic configurations with differing authorities: As long as the linear rhythm of the tourism season remains undisturbed by the natural cyclical rhythms, organizational practices, instruments, and discourses align in a state of eurhythmia. When linear work activities and routines are strongly affected by (changing) cyclical rhythms of the natural environment (e.g. changes in weather patterns, global warming, pandemics) a state of arrhythmia emerges. In this arrhythmic configuration, the cyclical rhythms become authoritative over the linear rhythms of the organizational practices and processes, allowing for a shift away from business as usual.

This study contributes to our understanding of how authoritative rhythms shape and are performed by everyday work practices and materialities and points to the consequences of uncoupling and locking in business-as-usual rhythms for organizing change in the Anthropocene. The study discusses the potential of arrhythmia for interrogating authoritative politics of time and attuning to alternative, more-than-human temporalities. The paper concludes by highlighting the possibilities of socio-material approaches to authority and temporality.

Scholars in the field of institutional theory have enabled us to understand the complex phenomenon of institutional work to a considerable extent. However, what has not been explored in detail is embodied institutional work and the mechanisms that elicit change in it. In this qualitative inductive study based on participant observation, interview, and social media data, we shed light on embodied institutional work and the role of nonhuman animals in it. Our empirical setting is the field of vegan animal sanctuaries in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We find that three core mechanisms provoke institutional change in embodied institutional work: embodied prefiguration, embodied empathizing, and embodied de-anonymizing category exemplars. We contribute to the literatures on institutional work, and animal organization studies.

AI-supported hiring is regularly lauded as a way to eliminate human bias in the hiring process. Such a stance is aligned with techno-optimism where technology is seen as a force for good. While some see AI-supported hiring as a way to reduce human bias, AI-supported hiring is commonly singled out as an example of algorithmic bias, which creates and amplifies inequalities. This article traces the question of how techno-optimism in relation to AI-enabled hiring can be maintained in spite of the fact that algorithmic bias exists. The study draws on interviews with those who design and use such technologies to shed light on how algorithmic bias is discussed in relation to AI-supported hiring. The article shows that techno-optimism is maintained by stressing that humans make hiring processes biased and by constructing algorithmic bias as fixable through a range of techniques such as fixing the data, fixing the human, ‘blinding’ the algorithm and various processes of quality control and auditing algorithms. By constructing algorithmic bias as something that is solvable it is possible to maintain a techno-optimistic stance. Furthermore the article shows that rather than adopting techno-pessimism, the alternative stance to techno-optimism is techno-hesitation. Techno-hesitation stresses that the collaboration between humans and AI leads to improved human decision making but that short-term reputational concerns impede the use of AI-supported hiring. Techno-hesitation is a temporal stance in that it is expected that once AI in hiring becomes commonplace and algorithmic bias is fixed, reputational concerns will dissipate. The paper shows that such an understanding conceives algorithmic bias as a technical problem for which a technical solution is sought rather than seeing technology as shaped by and shaping society, which would allow for a more nuanced and complex conceptualisation of algorithmic bias to emerge.

New technological developments are leading to the increased use of robots in the service sector. Yet, literature about service employees’ reactions to robot introductions is still scant. This study builds on and expands this literature based on a field experiment with the humanoid robot Pepper deployed in a service setting for six weeks. It presents an exploratory case study of a service company with multiple sites, where a humanoid service robot was implemented in only one of the sites. Data from semi-structured interviews is analyzed using a grounded theory approach. It is complemented by comparing employees’ affective and cognitive reactions to the implementation between those who experienced the implementation on their own and those who did not. In general, employees who interacted with Pepper tended to have a more positive affective and cognitive reaction than those who had no interaction. Additionally, they advocated for the permanent deployment of the robot to a larger extent. This work contributes to a better understanding of the possible consequences of service robot implementation for employees and how management may navigate through times of change and transformation caused by increasingly intelligent technologies. Further, it expands current literature by looking at the organization and its workforce in their entirety rather than just those directly affected by the implementation. Therefore, this study reveals different, employee reactions to the implementation of the very same technology, depending on whether employees have directly experienced the focal technology, or have only indirect information through other channels (e.g., hearsay).

The measurement and reporting of intangible assets are key emerging issues for the FASB and the IASB. We contribute to the discussion by examining (a) how reporting incentives and business indicators impact impairment differently for definite and indefinite intangible assets, (b) the moderating role of internal and external monitoring on impairment recognition, and (c) the variation in media and analyst coverage based on the type of intangible asset. Our findings reveal disparities in impairment indicators and a significant impact of reporting incentives, particularly for acquired intangibles. This highlights the necessity of separately analyzing the impairment of definite and indefinite intangibles and goodwill. Second, internal and external monitoring strongly moderates the likelihood of asset impairments for indefinite intangibles and goodwill under high impairment pressure. This highlights the risk of undermining the quality of financial reporting through discretion in accounting for intangibles, but also the role of strong corporate governance in enhancing the reporting quality of intangibles. Third, we find that even sophisticated users, i.e., the media and analysts during conference calls, do not pay sufficient attention to the impairment decisions of definite and indefinite intangibles, allowing firms to exploit the discretion in intangible impairment that remains under the radar. Overall, our study contributes to the scarce literature on indicators of impairment of non-goodwill intangibles by providing empirical evidence that impairment indicators differ between definite and indefinite intangibles and how media coverage and analyst’s questions on conference calls differ for impairments of definite and indefinite intangibles and goodwill. Given the growing importance of intangibles, our findings are relevant to accounting regulators, analysts, auditors, investors and others in assessing the risk of impairment of intangibles.

To investigate the rationalization of financial misreporting, we examine the effects

of an externally caused bad environment on misreporting and entitlement.

We conduct a 2x2 between-subjects experiment, manipulating the environmental

state and the awareness of those environmental states. We predict and find that a

bad environmental state causes a higher rate and a higher degree of misreporting.

This effect occurs due to a greater sense of entitlement among participants in response

to a bad environmental state. We also show that this effect vanishes if managers

are unaware of other environmental states. As managers cannot blame the

bad environmental state when they are not aware of better environmental states,

the sense of entitlement is lower. As a result, a bad environmental state does not

cause a higher rate and a higher degree of misreporting if managers are unaware

of other states.

The International Financial Reporting Interpretation Committee (IFRIC) 23 stipulates firms to recognize and measure uncertain tax treatments to increase transparency and comparability in reporting firms’ tax position. Under this interpretation, firms must assume that tax authorities have full knowledge of the tax information reported in the financial statements. Audit probability assumption and explicit guidelines are expected to limit firm’s discretion in avoiding their taxes. Using difference in difference design, I examine the effect of IFRIC 23 on corporate tax avoidance and whether the effect varies to avoider and non-avoider firms across 51 countries. Overall, I find that, compared to non-IFRS firms, IFRS firms experienced a reduction in cash-based tax avoidance after the IFRIC 23 implementation. I also document that the effect differs among avoiders and non-avoiders. Compared to non-avoiders, avoider firms become less aggressive in the post IFRIC 23 adoption.

Recent global audit failures combined with audit firms’ renewed focus on growing their consulting practices has increased regulatory attention on the impact of non-audit services on audit quality. In this study, we examine the behavior of audit firms during the period prior to and immediately after their client purchases non-audit services. Specifically, we examine the auditor’s influence on tax reserve accounting for a given client as they shift from not purchasing tax services to procuring tax services for the first time from their auditor. We find that companies report increases in tax reserves in the year before they begin purchasing auditor provided tax services (APTS). We also find that the tax reserve effects reverse after the client begins purchasing APTS, which is consistent with the notion that the initial effects were due to auditor influence. Consistent with incentives to sell APTS and inconsistent with a knowledge spillover effect, this decrease in tax reserves after purchasing APTS is due to discretionary tax reserves and related to tax reserves of prior year tax positions when the client did not use their auditor for tax services. Furthermore, we find that this behavior reduces the accuracy of tax reserves implying a reduction in the quality of income tax information. Overall, the results are consistent with auditors influencing firms’ accounting for uncertain tax positions to sell their own tax advisory services, which impairs auditor independence and accounting quality.

Ausgangssituation:

„Chatten, Videos schauen, Informationen suchen: So gut wie alle Kinder und Jugendlichen zwischen 6 und 18 Jahren (98 Prozent) nutzen ein Smartphone oder Tablet. Selbst die Jüngsten zwischen 6 und 9 Jahren (95 Prozent) nutzen zumindest eines dieser beiden Geräte. Mit diesen oder anderen Geräten verbringen Deutschlands Kinder und Jugendliche im Alter ab 6 Jahren jeden Tag im Schnitt fast zwei Stunden (111 Minuten) im Netz.“ (Digitalverband Bitkom, Berlin, Juni 2022)

Für Jugendliche, junge Menschen und Studierende gehört das Smartphone mittlerweile zum Alltag. Darüber nehmen sie ihre Informationen, aber auch ihr Wissen auf, das sie verarbeiten, interpretieren und diskutieren.

Digitale Tools wie Lehrvideos, Podcasts und Lernapps dienen dazu, Wissen zu vermitteln und anzuwenden. Zudem setzen sie dort an, wo junge Menschen ohnehin sind. Ein Smartphone besitzt fast jede/r und kann dort unabhängig von Zeit und Ort sowie ohne hohe zusätzliche Kosten und großen Implementierungsaufwand mobil lernen.

Hinzu kommt, dass die Art und die Rahmenbedingungen des Studierens sich in den letzten Jahren erheblich verändert haben, was insbesondere jüngeren und berufstätigen Studierenden zu Gute kommt: Digitale Formate ergänzen bzw. ersetzen sogar in Teilen die klassischen Präsenzveranstaltungen. Online-Lehre und -Prüfungen haben Einzug in den Hochschulbereich gefunden, was nicht nur die Flexibilität der Studierenden in Zeit und Ort erhöht, sondern zudem auch die Nachhaltigkeit in ökologischer sowie ökonomischer Hinsicht fördert.

Durch die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten der digitalen Vernetzung über unterschiedliche Plattformen wie beispielsweise Studydrive oder Discord lernen Studierende nicht nur mit Kommiliton:innen an ihrer eigenen Hochschule, sondern bilden daneben hochschulübergreifende Arbeitsgruppen, um sich gemeinsam über unterschiedliche Lehrinhalte auszutauschen und sich auf die Prüfungen vorzubereiten.

Nicht zuletzt kann die digitale Vermittlung von Lerninhalten auch auf spielerischem Wege erfolgen, was den Spaßfaktor und die Motivation des Erlernens des mitunter etwas trockenen betriebswirtschaftlichen Lehrstoffs deutlich steigern kann. So ist Gamification in der digitalen Bildung längst kein Fremdwort mehr.

Problemstellung:

Öffentliche Bildungseinrichtungen wie Schulen und Hochschulen tun sich jedoch aus einer Vielzahl von Gründen mit der Entwicklung und dem Betreiben von digitalen Tools schwer, von denen einige hier kurz aufgezählt seien:

• Zielausrichtung: Digitale Tools stehen nicht in dem Ruf, akademische Lerninhalte vermitteln zu können. Sie werden oftmals mit naiven Spielereien oder der Vermittlung von einfachem Alltagswissen in Verbindung gebracht. Die Entwickler:innen von digitalen Tools stammen zumeist aus dem nicht wissenschaftlichen Kontext, denen wenig Akzeptanz aus dem Hochschulbereich entgegenschlägt.

• Datenschutz: Digitale Tools werden ihren Nutzer:innen von den Entwickler:innen im Regelfall über Microsoft, Google oder Apple angeboten. Und damit erfolgt der Datenaustausch über große US-amerikanischen Tech-Giganten, was insbesondere in der Europäischen Union, speziell in Deutschland auf ein gehöriges Misstrauen stößt.

• Ressourcen: Die Entwicklung und das laufende Betreiben von digitalen Tools kostet viel Geld. Neben der Einstellung und des ständigen Überprüfens und Aktualisierens der Wissensinhalte ist insbesondere der technische Programmieraufwand eine bedeutende Kostengröße. Hinzu kommt, dass geeignete Programmierer:innen kaum bereit sind, zu den im Vergleich zur Praxis sehr niedrigen Gehältern im öffentlichen Dienst zu arbeiten.

• Drittmittel: Um den soeben genannten Punkt zumindest zu einem gewissen Teil zu lindern, gibt es eine von staatlicher Seite direkt oder indirekt aufgerufene Vielzahl von Förderprogrammen zum Ausbau der digitalen Bildung bzw. deren Tools in Deutschland. Da die Finanzierung dieser Programme jedoch zumeist nur temporär erfolgt und an bestimmte Personen aus einigen wenigen Institutionen gebunden ist, ist der Effekt dieser Förderprogramme in der Regel wenig nachhaltig. Laufen die Programme aus oder verlassen die Personen, die die Förderprogramme umsetzen, die jeweiligen Bildungseinrichtungen, verbleibt an diesen ein (weiterer) Datenfriedhof.

• Persönliche Widerstände: Nach Ende der Corona-Pandemie, die der digitalen Bildung nicht zuletzt durch die Einführung der Online-Lehre und -Prüfung einen gewaltigen Schub verliehen hat (zumindest ein positiver Aspekt der Pandemie), sind viele Hochschulen bzw. deren Hochschullehrer:innen in weiten Teilen wieder zur klassischen „analogen“ Lehre und Prüfung in Präsenz zurückgekehrt. Begründet wird dies zumeist mit dem (noch) fehlerbehafteten Einsatz von digitalen Tools in der Hochschullehre und -prüfung. Mangelnde soziale Nähe zu den Studierenden oder stark gestiegene Raten von Täuschungsversuchen sind vielfach geäußerte Argumente. Dahinter stehen jedoch zu einem großen Teil versteckte Ängste oder Sorgen, dass der Einsatz digitaler Bildungsinstrumente über kurz oder lang viele Hochschullehrer:innen überflüssig machen würde. Das Aufkommen der künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) in Form von Chat Bots u. ä. trägt zur Verstärkung dieser Ängste bei.

Aufgrund der aufgeführten Schwierigkeiten füllen vermehrt private Anbieter diese Digitalisierungslücke. Während es im schulischen Bereich bereits einige gute flächendeckende digitale Tools wie zum Beispiel die Lernapp Simpleclub gibt, existieren im Hochschulbereich bislang nur einige wenige Insellösungen von einzelnen Hochschullehrer:innen für ausgewählte Themengebiete der Betriebswirtschaftslehre, zumeist gemeinsam mit Partnerfirmen entwickelt.

Auf der anderen Seite steigen Privatfirmen in den Hochschulbereich mit Angeboten modulbezogener Lerninhalte für Studierende ein, die erkennbar nicht von den Lehrenden aus diesen Hochschulen konzipiert wurden.

Zielsetzung:

Auf der VHB-Tagung sollen die Einsatzmöglichkeiten und -grenzen von digitalen Tools wie bspw. Lernapps, Videos und Podcasts diskutiert werden, um Impulse für die praktikable Anwendung im Hochschulbereich zu gewinnen und auf diesem Wege die eingangs skizzierten Probleme zu überwinden.

Darüber hinaus sollen die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Schaffung und des Betreibens digitaler Plattformen erörtert werden, über die interessierte Hochschullehrer:innnen ihren Studierenden ihre Lerninhalte bedienerfreundlich und kostengünstig anbieten können.

VHB scholars are increasingly embracing the design science (DS) approach. DS is rooted in Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (1996) and allows scholars to tackle real-world problems by drawing on the best scientific knowledge available. While scholars across various WKs increasingly develop ideas on planning, conducting, and communicating DS, this knowledge is still much dispersed among these different groups. This I-WK session aims to share ideas on DS, develop novel DS research ideas, and build connections within the growing DS community. This workshop will be a world café format to facilitate discussions on key DS questions, and to share this knowledge within the community. This innovative I-WK aims to inspire participants, learn from each other, and build community.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are crucial for societal grand challenges and the public purpose should be at the core of SOEs, but research indicates de-coupling, a severe need for orientating and repurposing the firm strategic orientation and management towards the public purpose and substantial research gaps. Corporate governance codes and non-financial reporting (NFR) are strongly discussed levers for responsible and sustainable corporate governance. This study theorizes corporate governance codes with the essential comply-or-explain principle as promising institutions for sustainable corporate governance and focusing management on the public purpose and balancing institutional logics. Based on an innovative variable for NFR on the public purpose and unique four-year panel data with 1,406 annual financial statements of 359 German SOEs from cities, states, and the federation, it shows crucial deficits and insights in NFR on the public purpose. The mere existence of a public corporate governance code (PCGC) does not strengthen NFR. However, SOEs are significantly more likely to have better NFR if they are subject to a PCGC with higher quality on the comply-or-explain principle than SOEs subject to a PCGC with lower quality. The profit-orientation legal status of SOEs significantly dampens the effect of PCGC quality on NFR. The study enhances the theoretical understanding on corporate governance codes and balancing institutional logics in the context of NFR and derives perspectives for future research.

Als demokratische Organisationsform zählen Genossenschaften in Deutschland insgesamt über 22 Millionen Mitglieder. Obwohl die deutsche Betriebswirtschaftslehre als anwendungsorientiert gilt, fristet das Genossenschaftswesen sowohl in der Forschung als auch in der Lehre ein Nischendasein. Auch internationale Studien zu den Inhalten von wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Lehrbüchern unterstützen diese Einschätzung. Die weite Verbreitung in der deutschen Unternehmenslandschaft, der pädagogischen Wert als alternative Organisationsform und das Transformationspotenzial hinzu einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung sprechen für eine stärkere Berücksichtigung. Daher führen wir eine umfassende Analyse von an deutschen Universitäten gelehrten Lehrbüchern der Allgemeinen Betriebswirtschafts- und Managementlehre hinsichtlich der Erwähnung von Genossenschaften durch. Obwohl unsere Ergebnisse die geringe Rezeption von Genossenschaften bestätigen, gehen wir insbesondere auch auf Differenzen zwischen den einzelnen Lehrbüchern ein. Wir zeigen, dass sich diese in vier Typologien einteilen lassen: Lehrbücher, in denen Genossenschaften nicht erwähnt werden; Lehrbücher, die Genossenschaften ausschließlich hinsichtlich des Wirkungsbereichs von gesetzlichen Bestimmungen aufführen; Lehrbücher, die nur auf einzelne Aspekte dieser Rechtsform eingehen; und Lehrbücher, die mindestens eine Beschreibung von Genossenschaften beinhalten. Da Lehrinhalte Studierende in ihrer Denkweise prägen, stellen wir überdies Möglichkeiten zur stärkeren Berücksichtigung des Genossenschaftswesens in den bestehenden Lehrbüchern vor, um sie zu befähigen sowohl in der Forschung als auch Unternehmenspraxis zukünftig Szenarien für eine nachhaltige Transformation zu entwickeln und umzusetzen.

In this paper, we contribute a differentiation of micro-institutional reasoning types to further develop discursive institutionalism within the larger field of institutional theory. Discursive institutionalism outlines the relevance of discourse in building institutions, their maintenance and change. However, the theory provides incomplete knowledge on micro-institutional foundations, especially with regard to individual discursive reasoning in economic contexts. Building on Habermasian discourse ethics, we identify pragmatic, ethical and strategic types of reasoning in an institutional discourse. Our contribution is based on an empirical, qualitative, and longitudinal case study of a bank’s discursive development of a bundle of new institutions in the field of sustainable impact assessment. Our results inform theoretical debates about institution building, such as discursive institutionalism or institutional entrepreneurship, as well as related literature concerned with organizational legitimacy. Moreover, our case study provides relevant insights for practitioners as it illustrates core challenges and opportunities for practical impact measurement and impact investment.

This paper presents the ESG Radar, a scientifically sound and user-friendly tool designed to assist companies in integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into their decision-making processes. The ESG Radar addresses the limitations of existing ESG rating-focused approaches by adopting a managerial perspective and balancing the E, S, and G components. By selecting their key areas of action and deriving key performance indicators, companies can effectively enhance their Corporate Social Performance.

This research investigates how overconfidence, that is, the tendency to overestimate one’s knowledge of climate change, affects the effectiveness of climate change communication. An eye tracking experiment with 66 students examines the effects of strong versus weak climate change stimuli on the visual attention and evaluation of a company website. Results show that strong climate change stimuli significantly increase the attitude toward the website, perceived effectiveness of the message and positive word-of-mouth. However, strong climate change communication can backfire for overconfident individuals who display significantly higher levels of reactance. The results underscore the relevance of adapting climate change communication to groups who might overestimate their knowledge.

TBD

Despite growing attention to framing contests as important discursive struggles in articulating societal challenges and their solutions, most research focuses on competition between different frames. The process of how macro-level frames themselves are subject to processes of meaning elaboration is less well understood, yet central for understanding field dynamics. In this paper, we focus on how a master frame—seen as relatively stable macro-level frame—can itself get co-opted, such that it is reinterpreted to support a logic of action that is contrary to the original usage. Using a mixed-methods approach, combining topic modeling with qualitative analysis to examine the German nuclear energy media debate between 1995 and 2016, we explore the hostile co-optation of the dominant security master frame by a coalition of nuclear energy proponents, reversing the frame’s meaning from a rationale against nuclear energy to one in favor of nuclear. We present a process model on frame co-optation, involving mechanisms of broadening, reassembling and overlaying of master frame meaning. We contribute to framing and social movement theory by unpacking the mechanisms and consequences of co-optation and by highlighting co-optation as a powerful discursive strategy to explain fundamental field-level change.

In dem Beitrag wird vorgeschlagen, dem Verhältnis von Organisation und Recht, bestimmt als Verhältnis rekursiver Konstittion, weit mehr als bisher organisationstheoretische Aufmerksamkeit zu wirdmen, besonders dem Einfluss von Organisationen auf die Setzung, Anwendung und Durchsetzung von Recht. Als exemplarische Felder dafür werden erörtert: corporate personhood, business judgment rule und forbearance à la Williamson und limited liability.

For more than three decades the notion of temporary organization in general, and the 4T framework in particular, has informed research on managing projects. In a similarly important way, it has helped to connect this field of scholarly inquiry more closely with management and organization studies. While the 4T framework with its four dimensions (time, task, team, and transition) has often been referred to, few have criticized or developed it further. In this paper we review the respective literature and propose to add the concept of project plasticity, which captures the ability of projects to change substantially and yet stay the same. But instead of adding it as a fifth dimension, we highlight the tension between stability and change, which – like the tension between organizational autonomy and contextual embeddedness – is not only extremely relevant as a means of coordinating temporary organizations, but also cuts across the four classic dimensions. We will illustrate our argument with the example of an interorganizational project from the construction industry.

In the 21st century, addressing complex socioenvironmental challenges has become imperative. This research delves into the deliberate efforts of ventures to tackle sustainability problems.

This study focuses on the dimension of impact scaling and proposes a novel approach by juxtaposing sustainable entrepreneurship, organizational scaling, and meta-organizations research. Meta-organizations, horizontal structures comprising member organizations, offer a unique perspective on collective action and resource utilization. Little is known about how ventures engaged in solving grand challenges form and operate within meta-organizations.

The central question guiding this research is: How does a venture engage in impact scaling through forming a meta-organization? To answer this question, we conducted an 18-month ethnographic process study using an engaged scholarship approach. Our deep immersion into the case of 'Full Circle' revealed a dynamic evolution. Initially perceived as an entrepreneurial support organization responding to stakeholder expectations, Full Circle shifted its focus over time. From offering educational courses and networking, it transitioned to building partnerships between circular startups and eventually formed a meta-organization with a non-governmental organization and a business association.

The study uncovers rich qualitative insights through participatory observations, interviews, and collaborative activities, shedding light on how ventures navigate the intricate process of forming and evolving within meta-organizations. The findings challenge conventional notions about organizational functioning and practices in the context of external impact alliances.

In essence, this research provides valuable insights into the orchestration of collective action through meta-organizations, offering a nuanced understanding of how ventures strategically evolve to address societal challenges through impact scaling.

For established organizations, internal corporate ventures are a feasible way to act entrepreneurial. To ensure an innovative behavior, the top-level management of the parent firm relies on entrepreneurial templates from the entrepreneurship industry when founding internal corporate ventures. We aim to understand how the adoption of these entrepreneurial templates shapes resource exchange dynamics between the parent firm, its ICV, and the parent firm’s industry.

The entrepreneurship industry promotes its entrepreneurial templates with good intention to foster innovation and entrepreneurial activities. However, the promoted templates come with downsides and the entrepreneurship industry’s ambivalent effects are increasingly recognized. The entrepreneurship industry promotes an overly romanticized lifestyle of entrepreneurship and supports the replication of entrepreneurship culture leading to empty innovation. Previous studies have not explored the consequences of adopting these templates within the context of corporate venturing, nor have they delved into its impact on resource exchange dynamics which play an important role for the success of corporate venturing activities.

This qualitative embedded single case study with 48 interviews (37,5 hours) is context specific and plays within the construction industry. It includes a comprehensive analysis of how these entrepreneurial templates influence resource exchange. Our analysis leverages strategic action fields and considers how the established norms, values, beliefs, and rules of the parent firm, its internal corporate venture, and the parent firm’s industry impact resource exchange.

The study reveals that entrepreneurial templates of the entrepreneurship industry travel to the German Mittelstand, which starts replicating these templates within their internal corporate ventures without questioning their effects. We highlight potential negative effects on the exchange of resources offering a nuanced perspective across the diverse organizational contexts.

Development projects have opened up their activities for decades to legitimate how they address social challenges in the global south. However, openness comes along with struggles and requires legitimacy in the first place. By applying an institutional perspective to open innovation (OI), I explore legitimacy struggles’ and practices to resolve them in the case of development cooperation by drawing on documents of a development project applying open forms of organizing, interviews with project participants from different sectors, and an ethnography in Nepal. The findings show how OI allows for legitimacy of the development project granted by heterogeneous audiences by ‘coupling openness with global beliefs’ related to economic progress, social justice, and participation. Depending on the project phase, openness requires legitimacy as it involves exclusion and resistance of project participants. I observe a shift from OI’s emphasis on establishing organizational legitimacy in the early stage (and late stages) to a growing requirement for legitimacy in middle phases due to closing dynamics. This study contributes to the growing literature on OI by theorizing the altering dynamics of achieving and requiring legitimacy throughout the process as what constitutes OI as a self-sustaining organizing principle. I conclude that the resolution of legitimacy struggles depends much on pragmatic actors on the pragmatically acting, competent, and capable actors involved that navigate arising struggles in a world that appears as intersected by a multitude of conflicts, and attempts to resolve disputes, and navigate uncertain situations.

Recent research has focused on how organizations grapple with alternative versions of the

future and craft preferred ones. This paper investigates how managers imagine and protect

their preferred futures vis-à-vis different audiences within the organization. We draw upon

the secrecy literature to explore the role of concealment and revelation practices in future-making.

In organizational settings, secrecy has been found to foster creativity and innovation

by circumventing corporate norms and to be useful in situations that are contested and

subject to power games. Adopting a process perspective, we examine a large firm in the

industrial goods sector to understand how near and distant futures are sustained. Our

findings reveal that managers face a visibility dilemma. Over time, they use different

varieties of concealment and revelation to protect their preferred futures from the reactions

of different organizational audiences. Our study holds implications for emerging research on

future-making in large corporations and for research at the nexus of secrecy and

transparency in organizations.

The present study is based on a netnography of the development of “HackerToy”, an ready-to-use physical hacking device, which can be purchased and used by lay-people to reveal and tinker with the hidden wireless signals that penetrate the world all around us.

We find that this open source development process is based on the public secret of the potentially illegal affordances of the device , which organises the crowds activities. It protects the crowds development processes from regulatory constraints and interference, while at the same time attracting new developers as members of the crowd thereby pushing innovation boundaries. More specifically we discuss how public secrecy contributes to crowd cohesion and ambiguity, both of which enables and maintains the ongoing development. We do so by engaging with debates on the performative effects on secrecy, which moves beyond an understanding of secrecy as value protection or hiding misconduct, but reconsiders the intricate and productive relationship between publicity and secrecy. This also challenges the functionalist premise of secrecy deployed in the open innovation literature.

Recent developments in AI have been proposed to improve diversity and inclusion in the personnel selection process. The paper explores the potential and characteristics of AI tools aiming at contributing to a more inclusive HR policy. Two key research questions are answered on the basis of qualitative interviews with HR managers from Germany and Australia and a "Wizard of Oz" Experiment: Can AI tools effectively assist human resource managers in creating a more inclusive personnel selection process, thereby expanding opportunities for improved team performance through diversity? What specific characteristics should these AI tools possess in terms of explanation to ensure their suitability for HR managers’ adaptation within the personnel selection decision-making processes? The paper bridges the gap between research on team diversity, the inclusion of minorities, and team performance with the realm of AI tool development for personnel selection. This approach enables to discern which tools are best suited for fostering an inclusive selection process in face of performative team interaction.

Die Nutzung von Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) in Organisationen ist in den letzten Jahren im Recruiting stark angestiegen. Obwohl diverse Studien darauf hinweisen, dass der Einsatz von KI zu adversen Reaktionen seitens der Bewerber:innen führen kann, gibt es kaum Forschung zu Maßnahmen, die Organisationen ergreifen können, um die Akzeptanz von KI in Auswahlprozessen zu erhöhen. In dieser Studie wird auf Grundlage der organisationalen Gerechtigkeitstheorie und der Signaltheorie die Wahrnehmung von Bewerber:innen in einem KI-basierten Auswahlprozess im Vergleich zu einem menschenbasierten Auswahlprozess untersucht. Mit einem Between-Subject Design einer Vignettenstudie (n = 167) wurden verschiedene Szenarien analysiert, in denen Zusatzinformationen über die Vorteile von KI entweder durch eine Informationsgrafik, ein Erklärungsvideo eines männlichen HR-Mitarbeiters oder ein Erklärungsvideo einer weiblichen HR-Mitarbeiterin dargestellt wurden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der Einsatz von KI in der Auswertung ohne Zusatzinformationen zu einer negativeren Wahrnehmung von Fairness gegenüber der menschlichen Auswertung führte. Gleichzeitig konnte durch die Bereitstellung zusätzlicher Informationen und der Übermittlung von Signalen die Wahrnehmung der KI-Auswertung signifikant verbessert werden, sodass die KI-Auswertung von Bewerbungen sogar positiver als die menschliche Auswertung wahrgenommen wurde. Insbesondere das Video der weiblichen HR-Mitarbeiterin führte zu einer besonders positiven Wahrnehmung, da Bewerber:innen eine weibliche Person als Ansprechpartner:in im HR-Bereich erwarten und dieses Video daher als authentischer empfanden.

The identification of ecological innovation and ecologically innovative firms is important for understanding the role of innovation and technology in the transition to a greener economy. Information from patent and trademark data offers an objective, transparent, fast, and cost-effective way to identify ecological innovation, particularly compared to information gathered from surveys. However, the validity of this measurement approach has not been fully established yet. This study combines survey, patent and trademark data and investigates whether ecological patents and trademarks can help to identify ecologically innovative firms by using two characteristically different samples from Germany and Italy. The results show that many ecologically innovative firms are overlooked when only patent and trademark-based measures are used. While ecological trademarks are a useful indicator for varying types of ecological innovation, ecological patents as a measure show mixed results. The predictive power of ecological patents and trademarks is most pronounced for ecological product innovation. Further analyses show that ecological patents as a measure produce better results for large firms while trademarks as a measure also produce good results for small firms. Also, the identification works better for established than for young firms. The predictive power of both patents and trademarks is better in manufacturing than in other industries. Comparing different ecological patent identification approaches, no apparent differences are revealed. The results of our study have implications for policymakers and investors seeking to identify ecologically innovative firms or investment targets.

The prevailing linear economic model is faltering as non-renewable, finite natural resources dwindle and become more expensive. Due to this fatal evolution, the concept of sustainable development has emerged. It can be described as an approach that considers the present, satisfying one's own needs without compromising the capacities of future generations. Within this paradigm, circular economy (CE) plays an important role and is seen as an operationalization model for sustainable development.

To encourage a circular transition new ventures are key players in the innovation process, especially those classified as "born circular startups" that inherently align with CE principles. It is theorized that CE-focused accelerator programs foster those new ventures. Accelerator programs serve as hybrid support organizations combining entrepreneurial-market logic and community logic. The study employs institutional theory to investigate how accelerator programs influence the development of new ventures and, subsequently, the transition to a circular economy.

Therefore, a systematic literature review on accelerator programs is examined, followed by an analysis of the CE acceleration ecosystem in Germany. Expert interviews are conducted by identifying born circular startups that have participated or not participated in CE accelerators.

Preliminary results suggest that CE-focused accelerators provide essential services and resources for startups. These programs offer a mix of entrepreneurial behavior knowledge and community value creation, impacting CE from economic and societal perspectives. Outcomes are measured on a startup and an accelerator level, ranging from funding and product development to increased participant numbers and survival rates.

In conclusion, this paper addresses the research gap regarding the influence of accelerator programs as hybrid support organizations on the transition to a CE through new ventures. The research is ongoing, but preliminary findings indicate that CE-focused accelerator programs play a vital role in advancing the CE transition.

How can family-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) unlock their potential for sustainable innovation? Considering the collective impact of family-owned SMEs, they have the potential to surpass larger corporations in contributing to true sustainability in society. As the succession phase in family-owned SMEs has been identified as crucial for innovation opportunities, we investigate the absorptive capacities that are needed to implement sustainable innovations in 8 succession case studies in Germany. In the course of our exploratory multiple-case studies, we conduct over 50 interviews involving founders, various generations, successors, and long-term employees. We gain valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners, by first linking sustainable innovation research to the theory of absorptive capacities and second by identifying resources and capabilities that leverage the sustainable innovation potential for SMEs in their succession phase.

Society faces major global challenges, such as the climate crisis and poverty (Johnson & Schaltegger, 2020). Efforts are being made at the political level to address these challenges, but political systems struggle to meet society’s needs (Hoogendoorn, 2016). At this point, entrepreneurial ventures pursuing social motives become particularly relevant since they occupy a central role in filling the gap left by institutions (Chen et al., 2018).

Research shows that entrepreneurs’ interest in social issues is influenced by institutional factors (Bruton et al., 2010). Institutions create underlying conditions that establish social, political, and economic structures (North, 1991). Two distinct theories emerged that discuss institutions and their impact on prosocial venturing (Stephan et al., 2015). On the one hand, the institutional void theory states that the absence of strong formal institutions and the political failure to meet the social needs of society foster prosocial venturing (Hoogendoorn, 2016). On the other hand, the institutional support theory states that the government supports prosocial venturing and, thus, the pursuit of social motives, e.g., through subsidies (Korosec & Berman, 2006).

Although knowledge on the role of institutions in shaping entrepreneurial ventures’ motives has proliferated (Angulo-Guerrero et al., 2017), there is still little empirical evidence on which institutions promote the pursuit of social motives. To fill this void, we draw on institutional theory and focus on different institutional factors such as democracy, economic freedom, ideology, and cultural tightness to assess their impact on prosocial venturing. To determine the extent to which these institutions affect the pursuit of social goals in entrepreneurial ventures, we will conduct a multilevel model.

We aim to contribute to the discussion on the influential role of institutions in prosocial venturing. Furthermore, we would like to enrich the debate on institutional void and institutional support theory.

Most entrepreneurial ventures fail. Yet, research on entrepreneurial failure is sparse. In particular, we know very little about the process of how entrepreneurial failure evolves. To fill this gap, we applied an explorative qualitative meta-analysis. Thereby, we analyzed and synthesized 30 single-case studies on entrepreneurial failure. As a result, we developed three process archetypes of entrepreneurial failure: the non-scalable, the blitzscaling, and the disrupted failure archetype. Our findings contribute to an empirical foundation for process research on entrepreneurial failure. Moreover, using a configurational approach, we offer a more differentiated understanding of the complex and multi-faceted phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure.

We draw on attribution theory (Heider, 1958; Weiner, 1985, 2010) and employ a two-study design (conjoint study, experimental vignette study) to disentangle the decision logic with which recruiters attribute failure to former entrepreneurs and thus inform their employability perception in job interviews. Our study offers new insights into how failure narratives are processed by demonstrating that recruiters evaluate former entrepreneurs’ failure narratives more positively when congruent with gender-specific stereotypes.

Entrepreneurs deal with complex and unforeseeable situations and tackle stressors, some of them being unique to entrepreneurial activity. The break-out of the COVID 19 pandemic threatened the existence of entrepreneurs who were particularly vulnerable during the pandemic due to business interruptions and high financial losses, which worsened their well-being and elevated their stress levels. As a result, entrepreneurs experienced significant increases in their burnout levels, and the need to reorganize their businesses led to elevated stress levels. Each stressor has a different strength and impact and, therefore, needs to be assessed correctly to generate an adequate response. Since recovery is seen as an essential factor in maintaining entrepreneurial well-being, we ask in our study to what extent patterns of stressors and patterns of coping mechanisms that entrepreneurs rely on can be identified. Thus, by applying a qualitative research design using 22 interviews with solo self-employed in Germany, the aim of this study is to identify patterns of coping strategies by examining, on the one hand, the stressors experienced by solo self-employed during the COVID 19 pandemic and, on the other hand, possible strategies for coping with stress, in particular recovery. Insights into the negative psychological consequences of the COVID 19 crisis are particularly relevant for the group of solo self-employed, as they make up more than half (54.4%) of the self-employed in Germany, but at the same time, have fewer resources and are thus particularly exposed to economic risks.

Wir diskutieren die Einsatzmöglichkeiten von KI in der Lehre. Dazu laden wir verschiedene Experten ein ihre Ansätze vorzustellen.

Die Wissenschaftliche Kommission Öffentliche Betriebswirtschaftslehre (WK ÖBWL) des Verbands der Hochschullehrerinnen und Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft e. V. (VHB) vergibt 2024 erneut den WK ÖBWL Best Paper Award, um Publikationserfolge der WK-Mitglieder zu honorieren und wissenschaftliche Exzellenz zu fördern.

This paper examines how self-managing modes of organizing (SMOs) can be sustained within hierarchical organizational settings. Such embedded SMOs are inherently precarious due to the paradoxical tensions between principles of self-management versus the hierarchies in which they are embedded. We conceptualize the question of how to sustain embedded SMOs as a matter of paradoxical boundary work. We draw on this perspective in our qualitative case study of a self-managing team within an international medical technology company. Our findings reveal how this team was able to perpetuate its SMOs through the dialectical interplay of three main and recursively combined communicative practices of day-to-day nurturing and two forms of strategic intra-organizational positioning: exposing and blending in. Our study makes two main theoretical contributions. First, we contribute to research on embedded SMOs by highlighting how a team can navigate between the risks of either a too rigid or too permeable boundary, both of which are likely to have discontinued the embedded SMOs. Second, we add to research on paradoxes in organizational boundary work. While prior works have focused on more established boundaries between job roles or professions, we explore the role of paradoxes in maintaining precarious boundaries between distinct modes of organizing. By adopting a constitutive view, our study highlights that paradoxes are not merely a side-effect of boundary work but rather that the ongoing communicative negotiation of such paradoxes creates and sustains these boundaries over time – and that way allowed the team to uphold their SMOs in an otherwise hierarchical setting.

It is undisputed that universities have undergone the transformation from being loosely coupled systems into being more tightly coupled organizations since competition in the higher education system has increased at multiple levels. There is no single modus operandi of governance for universities to respond. In this paper, we provide a configurational perspective to analyse the congruence between external contingencies and internal organisational arrangements. Relying on a comprehensive qualitative meta-study based on 36 case studies, we mixed theoretical reasoning with data analysis and synthesized four archetypal configurations: The Diffuser, the Cascader, the Absorber, and the Modifier. They reflect robust strategy-structure patterns and provide an understanding of universities’ transformation into an organizational actor responding to competition.

Middle managers have a central, usually powerful and agentive position in the hierarchy. However especially in situations of changing governance structures their position of ‘being in the middle’ can be tensional. This paper seeks to better understand the complexity of agency of middle managers’ identity work against the backdrop of changing power relations, and the paradoxical tensions this creates for them. We take a critical lens on middle managers’ identity discourse constituted within relations of power. By doing so we aim to get at the bottom of the micro-dynamics of paradoxes and their development, that are considered important and yet still not well understood. The results of our linguistic analysis including an extended pronoun analysis (Harding et al., 2014) reveal two different discourses: (1) The discourse of agency where the middle managers can agentively position themselves as subjects and objects when talking about situations within the hierarchical space, (2) and the discourse of paralysis where our results show how the same managers are stuck in their own discourse and thus actively constitute their own inability to act. They discursively struggle over leadership meaning and power relations when they find themselves in positions that are outside the scope of hierarchical space.

Digital peer-to-peer service platform organizations need to mobilize users’ trust in order to attract and retain users. While prior research has provided a rich picture of the use and effectiveness of platform-inherent institutional mechanisms to build trust, we know little about how institution-based trust is mobilized in the early stages of platform organizations, when those mechanisms are not yet effective. Drawing on in-depth qualitative data from early-stage peer-to-peer service platform organizations in Panama and Mexico, we find that platform entrepreneurs engage in a delicate process of “grounding institution-based trust”—iteratively combining technology- and data-based mechanisms with practices that eliminate high risks, personally familiarize users, and leverage platform communities. The process model we develop shows how these practices depend on one another, how they develop over time and gradually enable institution-based mechanisms to become effective. We contribute to our understanding of trust in the context of digital peer-to-peer platform organizations, of institution-based trust and its production more generally, and of resource mobilization in early-stage organizations.

In this paper we argue that a depiction of platform work as market-based is too simplistic, because platform-mediated work also involves highly skilled tasks that require some coordination and even cooperation, e.g. in the case of design or software development. Platform workers in these sectors offer professional services, have a high level of technical skills, and can secure a stable income by building and maintaining long-term business relationships with their clients (Vallas & Schor, 2020). Platforms, thus, do not just organize markets, but organize labour markets in which workers build their careers and develop psychological contracts. Given recent regulatory contestations around the classification of platform-mediated work, we hence believe that the underlying employment-like system of platforms as a particular form of organization that is neither hierarchy, nor market, nor network (Grabher & König, 2020; Schüßler et al., 2021; Watkins & Stark, 2018) deserves further consideration, which promises broader insights about “platformisation” as a mode of organizing more generally.

Digital commons possess immense potential for promoting global sustainable value creation in terms of a more open, democratic and knowledge-sharing favorable society. However, digital commons face severe challenges in today’s capitalist political economy due to misconceptions about resource dependencies and the blend of private and public communal interests. In this conceptual piece, I challenge two overly optimistic notions about digital commons: that they rely exclusively on financially independent volunteerism and mainly cater to communal interests. To illustrate this, I explore open-source software (OSS) as a paradigm for the digital commons and synthesize existing literature on OSS projects’ intricate relationships with private sector, public sector, and civil society actors. I use configurational theorizing to conceptualize three relational configurations: beneath, between, and beyond market and state. These configurations navigate the evolution of OSS as a digital commons by emphasizing two interwoven critical factors: resource de-pendency and interest interdependency. These factors present valuable opportunities for scholars and policymakers by allowing for nuanced reasoning rather than portraying OSS as either fully extracted by capitalism or as a radical alternative form of organizing. I further facilitate nuanced reasoning by identifying three revelatory mechanisms: enlightened governance of communal interests, enlightened private interests, and institutions for collective action.

Hospitals face a variety of challenges when it comes to offering affordable care, optimized treatment processes and innovations to ensure the quality and safety of healthcare, especially in the face of changing environmental and framework conditions. Digital tools can play a critical role with respect to quality in healthcare. For example, new technologies offer the opportunity to unlock efficiency potential while maintaining at least the same or even higher quality, but also pose new risks. Based on our understanding of organizational resilience and the high need for digitalization in hospitals (which have just become apparent during the recent COVID-19 pandemic), our project aims to examine how hospitals deal with the risk resulting from the application of digital technologies in patient care, and how this handling affects organizational resilience. Using digital solutions and tools for patient care as examples and by referring to resilience as a process, we aim to examine how hospitals deal with these digital risks by focusing on the research question: How do hospitals anticipate, cope with and adapt to/learn from digital risks? In addition, we will analyze the question of how this way of dealing with digital risks affects organizational resilience of hospital in general. A multiple case study approach seems to be appropriate to understand an unexplored phenomena like digital resilience, while each hospital represents a potential case. However, before we start with the case study, a quantitative survey shall provide us with an overview of the degree of digitization, the existence of digital technologies to support patient care and the characteristics of organizational resilience. The results of this study form the starting point for a theoretical sampling, whereby our selected cases need to differ in terms of their degrees of digitization and resilience.

The submission is a draft for a project application aiming at global network building among eight universities for context-sensitive responsible AI applications in manufacturing and healthcare against the background of the UN sustainable development goals. The core emphasis is on the critical interface including three layers: the interface between the AI developer domain and the AI user domain in the operational work context, the interface between software companies and user companies and the interface between high-income countries and low-income countries in face of the equality gap. The transdisciplinary cooperation of the research partners is described as a crucial point for facing criteria such as decent work, human well-being and the reduction of inequalities in the process of technology design. Related project activities and expected outcomes are outlined.

Individual actors in modern workplaces are increasingly autonomous and use digital tools to collaborate and develop creative ideas. Despite the widespread use of modern collaboration tools (e.g., Slack, Jira, Miro) in the organizational practice, empirical evidence on the role these tools play for creativity is scarce. This study examines the relationship between modern workplace characteristics (e.g., time- and location-independent work) and individual (team) creativity, and the potential moderator role of digital collaboration tools. I use survey data to test the research model. The study contributes to creativity research by providing quantitative evidence on how digital collaboration tools enable creativity.

This study investigates the effects of deselection mechanisms on leadership behavior, specifically in the realm of leader hubris, characterized by exaggerated self-assessment leading to rule-breaking and risk taking, identified as a root of social unsustainability in organizations. Drawing from a comprehensive survey in German-speaking monasteries and grounded in Karl Popper’s Theory of Democratic Control and public choice theory, we explore how democratic deselection options can mitigate hubristic tendencies. We postulate that in democratic monastic structures, the availability of deselection options for leaders can reduce rule violations, power abuse, and other malpractices, urging members towards sustainable norm-conformity. Our research reveals that monastic communities with deselection mechanisms report fewer discrepancies with oversight entities, and their leaders demonstrate behavior more aligned with community interests. Notably, these communities exhibit sustainable innovations and financial stability. This study suggests that democratic deselection options, as observed in unique monastic settings, can bolster social sustainability, offering a balanced and equitable organizational environment. The findings provide a preliminary framework for broader organizational governance research, emphasizing the potential of deselection in fostering autonomy and reducing the need for external control mechanisms.

Unsere Projektidee zielt darauf ab, in Deutschland eine dezentrale und gleichzeitig lokal verankerte Allianz für Impact Entrepreneurship zu etablieren.

Wir definieren Impact Entrepreneurship als unternehmerisches Handeln, mit dem Ziel, der ganzheitlichen Entwicklung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft zu dienen. Impact betrachten wir dabei ganzheitlich und integrieren neben wirtschaftlichen Zielgrößen auch ökologische und soziale in unsere Betrachtung. Als "Impact Entrepreneurship Allianz" bringen wir Wissenschaft, Gründungszentren, Start-ups, Unternehmen, politische Entscheidungsträger und die Zivilgesellschaft zusammen, um Impact Entrepreneurship in die Praxis zum Mainstream zu entwickeln und Hochschulen als Treiber des Wandels zu etablieren.

Unsere Mission besteht darin, ökologischen und sozialen Impact neben wirtschaftlichen Zielen zu zentralen Treibern in Unternehmen und Start-ups zu machen. Die Bedeutung dieses Themas ist zuletzt durch die Nationale Strategie für Soziale Innovationen und Gemeinwohlorientierte Unternehmen der Bundesregierung deutlich gestiegen (13.9.2023).

Derzeit ist Impact Entrepreneurship in Deutschland noch stark fragmentiert. Obwohl das wissenschaftliche Fachwissen zunimmt, ist es über verschiedene Regionen und Hochschulen verstreut. Es fehlt nach wie vor an gesellschaftlicher und politischer Akzeptanz sowie an geeigneten Strukturen.

Unser Ziel ist es, das vorhandene Potenzial zu nutzen und Deutschland als weltweiten Vorreiter im Bereich Impact Entrepreneurship zu etablieren. Unser Engagement besteht darin, Impact Entrepreneurship zu etablieren und zu professionalisieren, indem wir eine Wissensinfrastruktur bereitstellen, Synergien nutzen und die Vernetzung aller relevanten Interessengruppen als eine einflussreiche Stimme auf nationaler Ebene stärken.

Dabei setzen wir vor allem auf die Förderung des Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfers zwischen Hochschulen und Impact Entrepreneurship Start-ups sowie Gründungszentren. Wir planen die Einführung co-kreativer und kollaborativer Formate für den Wissenstransfer und den Kapazitätsaufbau an verschiedenen Standorten.

Langfristig möchten wir damit einen Raum und eine Anlaufstelle für Gründer*innen sowie Unternehmer*innen werden, wo wir diese fördern können, den Impact-Gedanken in ihr unternehmerisches Handeln zu integrieren. Unsere Vision ist eine nachhaltige und innovative Zukunft, in der unternehmerische Aktivitäten positive gesellschaftliche Veränderungen bewirken.

This study investigates the justice perceptions of the first generation employees in Germany and contributes to the field of immigrant integration research that accompanies currently ongoing transformation of Germany into a modern immigration country. Labour market research has so far income inequality and structural inequality of migrants addressed. However, not much is known about migrants perceptions of fairness regarding their earnings. In this study, we focus specifically on the perceptions of income justice of migrants and provide - to the best of our knowlegde - the first study that analyzes the justice perceptions of working population with migrant background in Germany.

Based on the large database of Socio-Economic Panel wave 2017, 2019, 2021 with overall sample of 29.353 observations, containing 5.398 first generation migrants and using regression alalysis we aim to contribute to the better understanding of factors that effect the migrant content effect, that is the paradox of more favourable evaluations of own earnings in comparison to employees without migrant background.

The preliminary results support our hypotheses. In line with our expectations, we find that being a migrant significantly increases content with earnings, but with with the years of working experience in anorganisation, the migrant content effect diminishes. This effect is moderated by the number years of work experience within an organisation, which

provides support for our hypothesis.

Employees´ innovative work behavior (IWB) is crucial for organizations’ long-term performance and success. Nonetheless, research on the antecedents of IWB has paid little attention to how leader-member exchange (LMX) translates into IWB through both motivational and cognitive factors of subordinates. Hence, our understanding is still limited as to why scholars presented mixed findings of the relationship between LMX and IWB. We address this shortcoming by building on LMX theory and examine how the relationship from LMX to IWB is translated through creative self-efficacy as motivational factor and subordinates´ perceived support for innovation by their supervisors as cognitive factor. We conducted a field survey with 171 subordinates, matched them with their supervisors and found a positive association between LMX and IWB. However, we find that this relationship is not mediated by creative self-efficacy, but, in line with our hypotheses, by support for innovation. Our study extends the empirical evidence of LMX theory by examining how LMX translates into IWB.

In today’s global business landscape, expatriates play an increasingly pivotal role in the operations of multinational corporations. However, the decision to deploy foreign assignees entails substantial costs for firms. Previous research has recognized that proficiency in English and/or the host country’s language is a critical but often underestimated determinant of expatriate success. Nonetheless, existing research on the relevance and importance of language skills for expatriates’ work-related outcomes has yielded inconclusive and, at times, conflicting findings. Drawing on self-efficacy theory, job embeddedness theory, and experiential learning theory, this meta-analysis integrates the findings of 105 studies comprising 155 samples to investigate the relationships between language proficiency and six essential work-related outcomes (i.e., expatriation intention, cross-cultural adjustment, job satisfaction, job performance, life satisfaction, and turnover intention). Additionally, we examine the moderating influence of international experience, as represented by expatriation experience and country tenure, and assess the robustness of the relationship across various contextual and methodological factors. Our results reveal significant associations between language proficiency and all six work-related outcomes. Furthermore, we identify that international experience mitigates the relationship between language proficiency and both job satisfaction and performance. These findings expand the existing literature in this domain and underscore the pivotal role of foreign language proficiency as a determinant of expatriate success.

Die organisationale Sozialisation (OS) von Newcomern ist für Unternehmen von besonderer Relevanz, um schnellstmöglich das Potenzial der Mitarbeiter abzurufen und sie an das Unternehmen zu binden. Damit sie ihre vorgesehene Rolle erfüllen, Aufgaben bewältigen und sich sozial integrieren können, sind Newcomer auf vielseitige Informationen angewiesen. Vor dem Hintergrund der zunehmenden Normalität des mobilen Arbeitens untersuchen wir die Herausforderungen, denen Newcomer bei der OS in diesem Kontext begegnen. Auf Basis einer qualitativen Interviewstudie (N=13) zeigen unsere Ergebnisse, dass insbesondere der Mangel an Interaktionsfrequenz und Interaktionsqualität als zwei wesentliche Herausforderungen von Newcomer wahrgenommen werden. Mit Hilfe der Uncertainty Reduction Theory und dem Konzept des sozialen Kapitals zeigen wir, welche Gefahren dies hinsichtlich der OS mit sich bringt.

While employees’ sleep quality has already been studied as an outcome of emotion regulation at work, knowledge about sleep quality as an antecedent of emotion regulation remains scarce. This study examines the relationship between employees’ daily sleep quality and their emotion regulation at work, specifically focusing on their daily emotion regulation ability (i.e., as an individual ability), as well as their daily surface acting and deep acting (i.e., as used strategies). We conducted a one-week diary study to collect data on participants’ sleep quality, emotion regulation ability and strategies, and their general perception of display rules in their respective organizations. Employees who experienced better daily sleep quality demonstrated improved daily emotion regulation ability, which was related to a reduction in daily surface acting—a form of emotion regulation where individuals display fake emotions. At the same time, there were no significant effects on deep acting as a more authentic strategy. Furthermore, perceived display rules were found to moderate the relationship between sleep quality and the use of surface acting. This indicates that the impact of sleep quality on emotion regulation can vary depending on individuals’ preexisting beliefs towards emotional displays in the workplace. Overall, this study highlights the important role of good sleep quality, which improves the daily emotion regulation ability and, in turn, reduces the use of surface acting, which has been shown to be detrimental to employee well-being and work behavior and, accordingly, is an important prerequisite for organizational performance.