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We report the results of an ethnographic study of a natural food cooperative in which we found an inherent tension in its mission between idealism and pragmatism, and we explore the dynamics through which that tension was managed and engaged in day-to-day governance and activities. Insights from participant observation, archival data, semi-structured interviews, and surveys provide a detailed and holistic account of the intergroup and intragroup processes through which the co-op negotiated its dualistic nature, as embodied in its hybrid organizational identity. The findings suggest that the value of each side of the duality was recognized at both the individual and organizational levels. Members' discomfort with the duality, however, led them to split the mission in two and identify with one part, while projecting their less-favored part on others, creating an identity foil (an antithesis). This splitting resulted in ingroups and outgroups and heated intergroup conflict over realizing cooperative ideals vs. running a viable business. Ingroup members favoring one part of the mission nonetheless identified with the outgroup favoring the other because it embodied a side of themselves they continued to value. Individuals who exemplified their ingroup's most extreme attributes were seen by the outgroup as prototypical, thus serving as \"lightning rods\" for intergroup conflict; this dynamic paradoxically enabled other ingroup members to work more effectively with moderate members of the outgroup. The idealist-pragmatist duality was kept continually in play over time through oscillating decisions and actions that shifted power from one group to the other, coupled with ongoing rituals to repair and maintain relationships disrupted by the messiness of the process. Thus ostensible dysfunctionality at the group level fostered functionality at the organizational level.

Previous research focuses on firm and business unit level ambidexterity. Therefore, conceptual and empirically validated understanding about ambidexterity at the individual level of analysis is very scarce. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by investigating managers' ambidexterity, delivering three contributions to theory and empirical research on ambidexterity: first, by proposing three related characteristics of ambidextrous managers; second, by developing a model and associated hypotheses on both the direct and interaction effects of formal structural and personal coordination mechanisms on managers' ambidexterity; and third, by testing the hypotheses based on a sample of 716 business unit level and operational level managers. Findings regarding the formal structural mechanisms indicate that a manager's decision-making authority positively relates to this manager's ambidexterity, whereas formalization of a manager's tasks has no significant relationship with this manager's ambidexterity. Regarding the personal coordination mechanisms, findings indicate that both the participation of a manager in cross-functional interfaces and the connectedness of a manager to other organization members positively relate to this manager's ambidexterity. Furthermore, results show positive interaction effects between the formal structural and personal coordination mechanisms on managers' ambidexterity. The paper's theoretical contributions and empirical results increase our understanding about managers' ambidexterity and about how different types and combinations of coordination mechanisms relate to variation in managers' ambidexterity.

A central reason to worry that managers should not use nudges to influence employees is that doing so fails to treat employees as rational and/or autonomous (RA). Recent nudge defenders have marshaled a powerful line of response against this worry: in general, nudges treat us as the kind of RA agents we are, because nudges are apt to enhance our limited capacities for RA agency by improving our decision-making environments. Applied to managerial nudges, this would mean that when managers nudge their employees, they generally bolster their employees’ limited RA agency and, thus, treat employees as the kinds of RA agents they are. My aim is to vindicate a qualified version of the initial worry from the nudge-defender response and, as a result, provide a clearer, more plausible framework for evaluating managerial nudges than what nudge critics have previously given. I do this, first, by showing how nudge defenders rely on equivocation between two different senses of “treating someone as RA.” The value-preserving notion that supports the nudge-defender prescription to protect and enhance RA capacities is different from the authority-recognizing notion that underwrites the initial worry about nudging. Second, I argue that the authority-recognizing notion of treating someone as RA implies that managerial nudges treat employees as RA just when the nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals. Third, I explain how, to determine when managerial nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals, we need to consider how employees surrender aspects of their equal, agency-grounded authority to managers.

Research on how discrimination lawsuits affect corporate diversity has yielded mixed results. Qualitative studies highlight the limited efficacy of lawsuits in the typical workplace, finding that litigation frequently elicits resistance and even retribution from employers. But quantitative studies find that lawsuits can increase workforce diversity. This article develops an account of managerial resistance and firm visibility to reconcile these divergent findings. First, we synthesize job autonomy and group conflict theories to account for resistance that occurs when dominant groups perceive non-dominant groups to be attempting to usurp managerial authority, in this case through litigation. Second, we integrate insights from organizational institutionalism, which suggests that highly visible firms seek to demonstrate compliance with legal and societal norms. Drawing on this theory, we predict that only large, visible firms will see increases in diversity following lawsuits, and, by the same token, that the most visible workplaces of those large firms, their headquarters, will see the greatest changes. We test our hypotheses with data on litigation and workforce composition from a diverse set of 632 firms that were sued by the EEOC between 1997 and 2006. This study shows that understanding the consequences of lawsuits across firms, and across organizations within them, is key to tackling workplace discrimination.

The academic profession is challenged by the changing environment. Global trends, such as managerialism and new public management, have been influencing all public organizations, including universities. The academic profession is dynamic by its nature; it reflects any changes in its environment. However, the academic profession is also characterized by continuity. In this study, we describe the current changes and continuities of the academic profession in Finland, as perceived by top and middle managers employed in Finnish Universities. We found out that logics and values by organizational professionalism are emphasized; however, occupational professionalism is also deeply rooted in the practices of Finnish universities. Additionally, we found out that changes are often associated with managerial values, such as control and evaluation, and in contrast, the continuities of academic work are commonly related to professorial authority and academic identity. These two aspects of the profession and organization are not opposite, they occur simultaneously; however, there are tensions between them. In this article, we would like to emphasize that change of the academic profession is a hybrid, there exists both, changes and continuities in the logics and values related to the profession and the organization.

Researchers have highlighted how gendered associations of femininity with emotional labor can complicate professional women’s attempts to exercise managerial authority. However, current understandings of how race and gender intersect in professional women’s emotional labor remain limited. We draw on 132 interviews from eight white women and 13 women of color who are novice principals. White women began the principalship wanting to establish themselves as emotionally supportive leaders who were open to others’ influence. They viewed emotional labor as existing in tension with showing authority as a leader. Over time, however, most white women reported adopting more directive practices. By contrast, women of color reported beginning the principalship with a more directive, take-charge leadership style. They viewed emotional labor and authority as part of a blended project and did not talk about these two aspects of leadership as existing in tension. Over time, their self-reported leadership style changed little. We analyze our findings in light of recent theorizing about gender and intersectionality.

Connecting teachers’ professional well-being and managerialism, this study explored how teachers experience their professional well-being in navigating challenging working conditions. Supported by the well-being theory, document analyses were carried out and open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers at Chinese HEIs. The findings portray a landscape of tensions, conflicts, and challenges, where teachers’ professional well-being is dramatically confronted and even systematically overlooked. In a managerial culture in favor of performance and competence, teachers’ engagement, their perception towards the meaning of education, and their understanding of self-actualization were consistently informed, controlled, and rewarded against a reducible list of skills and outcomes. In this way, the meaning of being a teacher is narrowly focused but broadly standardized. The findings deepen understandings of teachers’ professional well-being, enable more critical examinations of managerialism in higher education, and allow promotion of teachers’ professional well-being for sustainable development.

Chhaochharia and Grinstein estimate that CEO pay decreases 17% more in firms that were not compliant with the recent NYSE/Nasdaq board independence requirement than in firms that were compliant. We document that 74% of this magnitude is attributable to two outliers of 865 sample firms. In addition, we find that the compensation committee independence requirement increases CEO total pay, particularly in the presence of effective shareholder monitoring. Our evidence casts doubt on the effectiveness of independent directors in constraining CEO pay as suggested by the managerial power hypothesis.

A central notion of performance management reform is that outcome-based accountability should be accompanied by increased managerial authority, thereby granting managers the flexibility to engineer performance-oriented change. Studies have revealed, however, that managerial authority does not follow automatically when performance management is adopted. This article examines whether increased managerial authority does indeed promote the effectiveness of performance management. The article relies on a 4-year panel on management and the performance of more than 45,000 students in 314 Danish schools and includes detailed socioeconomic controls, which allows for a differences-in-differences design. Unlike previous studies, these data provide simultaneous variations in both performance management reform and managerial authority. Testing four dimensions of managerial authority, the article finds that managerial authority over human resources positively moderates the effect of performance management, whereas decentralizing goal setting works in the opposite direction. These findings may help account for the differing effects of performance management found in previous studies and suggest that decision makers should be cautious about only partially adopting accountability-based reform.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: (1) the objection from a difference in ends, (2) the objection from shareholders' property rights, (3) the objection from worker's consent, (4) the objection from workers' exit opportunities, (5) the objection from workers' (lack of) expertise, and (6) the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms.