Journal of Managerial Issues

Journal of Management, Ahead of Print. Employees’ career trajectories in project-based organizations are closely associated with their project participation history. Yet, little is known about what features make a project stand out as a career booster for its participants and who obtains more career benefits than others from working on “hotshot” projects. In this study, we focus on a unique feature of projects—project status—and theorize about potential network-related sources from which it derives. Specifically, we develop arguments for how the pattern of a project’s social relations with other projects in the project network reflects the project’s status. Then, we deduce hypotheses regarding the impact of project status on employees’ career advancement and the moderating role of one’s hierarchical level in this relationship, drawing on the literature on status diffusion, endorsement, evaluative uncertainty, and attribution. Our empirical examinations entailed two studies. Study 1 provides evidence for the validity of using a network structural feature of a project to indicate its status using data from a high-tech company’s R&D projects. Study 2 tested our hypotheses by leveraging a sample of over 1,000 IT specialists in a multinational accounting firm tracked over five years. We found that employees assigned to higher-status projects received faster promotions. This career advantage was moderated by a person’s organizational hierarchical level in a complex way such that middle-level people obtained more rapid promotions when assigned to high-status projects than their bottom- or top-level counterparts.

Journal of Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>Research on subnational institutions is largely motivated by the observation that formal and informal institutions within countries are unevenly configured over geographical space. Although diverse, this relatively nascent body of work has yet to explicate firm activity across subnational locales that exhibit institutional dissimilarity and isomorphism with both proximate and distant centers of political-economic power. To characterize firm activity over such spatially continuous institutional landscapes within countries, we synthesize insights from the subnational institutions literature by introducing a topography framework with its characteristic dimensions comprised of (1) polycentricity, (2) elevation, and (3) slope. We discuss theoretical contributions from using this framework to review 92 articles in the period 1999 to 2024 from 24 journals before concluding with directions for future research. This work integrates knowledge on subnational institutions across management sub-fields, including, but not limited to, international business, strategic management, and entrepreneurship.

Journal of Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>Cross-sector partnerships formed to address societal challenges are widely advocated and increasingly common. Joint goal setting is an essential phase in the collaborative process that can determine the course of a partnership. Yet, little is known about how cross-sector goals change and evolve because goal alignment between partners is often taken for granted. In this article, we qualitatively investigate a case of goal setting within a high-profile partnership across the academic and business sectors called Action2020, which aimed at accelerating global corporate sustainability action based on the planetary boundaries framework. We find that cross-sector goal setting is an iterative, multiphase process complicated by deep-seated sectoral differences that trigger paradoxes and conflict. Our main contribution is a process model of cross-sector goal setting comprising three phases: coalescing, protecting, and reconciling sectoral interests. Our model offers three unique insights that advance the cross-sector paradox literature: Altering the cross-sector goal can harness new opportunities of key turning points in the collaboration, shifting the opposing poles of paradoxes may be a necessary management approach to overcome collaborative barriers, and intermediaries may dampen the ambition of collaborative goals in order to temper paradoxes. We also contribute to the corporate sustainability literature and discuss the implications of moving from organization-centric to systems-based sustainability targets.

Journal of Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>Despite the personal, financial, and social implications of divorce for employees, research on the intersection of divorce and work has been mainly conducted across disparate literatures, with limited attention paid within the organizational sciences. In this review, we bring together research on employee divorce across multiple disciplines, including sociology, public health, legal studies, economics, family studies, and psychology. We identify three major areas of prior research that can be applied to our understanding of divorce within organizational contexts: interrole interdependencies, economic dependency, and social dynamics. We also highlight overarching themes that emerge from prior research on divorce and work. Building on our review, we then provide recommendations about how to theoretically and empirically advance research on divorce and work. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of our review.

Journal of Management, Ahead of Print. This study examines the influence of firms’ internal control weakness (ICW) reported under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on their subsequent divestiture decisions and the performance of these decisions. We argue that following ICW disclosure, firms are inclined to pursue corporate divestitures because such divestitures can reduce organizational complexity and help remedy firms’ ICW. We also propose that the positive influence of ICW disclosure on divestitures is stronger when a firm has recently appointed a CEO but weaker when there is a higher prevalence of ICW within the industry. Furthermore, we investigate the dual performance implications of divestitures following ICW disclosure. Although these divestitures, compared to divestitures not following ICW disclosure, are associated with higher stock market performance, they are also associated with slower sales growth for firms’ core businesses. We present empirical evidence that supports our arguments using a sample of S&P 1500 firms from 2003 to 2020. This study advances corporate strategy research by highlighting the role of ICW in shaping corporate divestiture decisions and documenting the multifaceted performance implications of such divestitures.