Acting with the best of intentions… or not: A typology and model of impression management in leadership

Impression management (IM) is important for effective leadership. Followers accept influence from individuals who meet their perceptions of what it means to be a leader, and IM is an important way of impacting those perceptions. Yet, the extant literature on leader IM is fragmented. We unify the literature in this area by creating a multi-dimensional typology and multi-level model of IM in leadership. We examine the multi-dimensional nature of IM as a construct composed of information processing, communicative, and goal-directed components, thereby creating eight IM archetypes. Then, we examine how IM can be used to impact follower perceptions of the leader through the lenses of transformational/charismatic, authentic, and leader categorization theories. This research unites a currently fragmented area of research and sparks new questions about how leader behaviors can be used to influence followers toward multi-level leadership outcomes.     

Good Night,and Good Luck: Perspectives on Luck in Management Scholarship

It is not insignificant that seminal contributions to management scholarship have highlighted luck as an alternative explanation for performance differences between individuals and organizations. Yet it has rarely taken center-stage in scholarship. The principal purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the application of luck in the management literature and in such foundation disciplines as economics, sociology, and psychology. Our analysis finds five common perspectives on luck: (a) luck as Attribution; (b) luck as Randomness; (c) luck as Counterfactual; (d) luck as Undeserved; and (e) luck as Serendipity. We outline various ways in which research on luck may be advanced along each of these perspectives, and develop an underexplored, sixth, perspective on (f) luck as Leveler to provide a possible solution to such issues as social inequality and (unwarranted) executive compensation.     

Scholarship and decision cases: pedagogy and standards for publication

Case studies represent an important form of scholarly output for educators of agribusiness management. This article defines scholarship with respect to case writing.First, it explains how case studies are scholarship in the educational process. The pedagogical foundation of the case method is this method’s effectiveness in developing the critical thinking skills of students. This in turn enhances learning and advances scholarly understanding.Second, it examines criteria that are used to assess the quality of cases and their accompanying teaching notes when being considered for journal publication. The standards of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review are used to illustrate these criteria. Only by reaching these standards of scholarship will teaching notes and cases be of the quality needed to ensure that their use in the case method will develop the scholarly capabilities expected of graduates in agribusiness management.     

Internationalization from Central and Eastern Europe: A systematic literature review

Economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has led to a dramatic increase in CEE firms' participation in international markets. This applies to different types of firms – from large emerging market multinationals to small international new ventures. In this paper, we systematically review the research on CEE outward internationalization, which we define as internationalization of CEE-based firms in the form of exporting or FDI, and contribute to literature by providing a complete picture of the state of the art and outlining potential avenues for future research. We find that while the CEE region has been described as a fruitful ground for developing new and testing existing theories, it heavily loads on the latter. We suggest that greater reliance on theories and concepts from the field of entrepreneurship and a stronger focus on internationalization decision processes might further enrich our understanding of internationalization from CEE.     

Dangerous Knowledge: The Political,Personal, and Epistemological Promise of Feminist Research in Management and Organization Studies

Feminism is a theoretical perspective and social movement that seeks to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, sexist inequality and oppression. Yet feminist research remains marginal in the most prestigious management and organization studies (MOS) journals, as defined by the Financial Times 50 (FT50) list. Based on a review of how feminism is framed in these journals (1990–2018), we identify three overlapping categories of how feminism is represented: (i) as a conceptual resource which is used to address specific topics; (ii) as an empirical category associated with the study of specific types of organization or organizing practice; and, rarely, (iii) as a methodology for producing knowledge. While feminist knowledge exists beyond these parameters, such as in the journal Gender, Work & Organization, we suggest that the relative absence of explicitly feminist scholarship in the most prestigious MOS journals reflects an epistemic oppression which arises from the threat that feminism presents to established ways of knowing. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's work, we use the ‘sweaty concept’ of dangerous knowledge to show how feminism positions knowledge as personal, introducing a radical form of researcher subjectivity which relies on the acknowledgment of uncertainty. We conclude by calling for the epistemic oppression of feminist scholarship to be recognized and redressed so the potential of feminism as a way of knowing about organizations and management can be realized. This, we argue, would enable feminist research praxis in MOS to develop as an alternative location of, in bell hooks' term, healing that challenges the main/malestream.     

Economic Evaluation of Systems that Expedite Inventory Information

Information delays exist when the most recent inventory information available to the Inventory Manager (IM) is dated. Such situations arise when it takes a while to process the demand data, count the inventory, and pass the results to the IM. We show that the optimal total inventory‐related cost decreases when the length of the information delay decreases. The amount of the decrease is an important datum for an IM interested in considering whether or not to invest in reducing the delay. The investment is required to finance design and acquisition of an information (collection and dissemination) system that can reduce the information delay. Such systems include phone calls, business meetings, and the use of information collection mechanisms such as radiofrequency identification tags.     

Reflections on the distinctiveness of European management scholarship

Management scholarship and the journal publication process has been increasingly criticised for being overly elitist and largely irrelevant to the needs of business. There is some justification for such criticisms. Yet, paradoxically, university business schools must resist the urge to be superficially relevant in order to be genuinely useful. I argue here that the very best of management research scholarship relies on a ‘scholarship of common sense’ that actively mirrors the very best of business and management practices. Artistic rigour, much more than technical rigour is needed. Openness, empirical sensitivity and the capacity for achieving ‘flying leaps’ of imagination, are to be preferred to procedural adherence in the research process. This alternative understanding of academic rigour and the intellectual richness and diversity of perspectives associated with it is clearly more evident in the British and European intellectual traditions. Such a European-styled management scholarship can help in actively reshaping the intellectual landscape, priorities and parameters of management research by encouraging the kind of scholarly contributions that is not simply technically rigorous, but imaginatively interesting and often counterintuitive.     

Towards Common Ground and Trading Zones in Management Research and Practice

The purpose and nature of management scholarship is contested, evidenced by debates about the ‘academic–practitioner divide’ and attendant remedies for addressing it, including mode 2 and mode 3 research, engaged scholarship, evidence‐based management and design science. In this paper the authors argue that, without a culture of dialogical encounter, management scholarship will never be able to emerge from its adolescence, and management will not develop into the profession that it should and can become. The central proposition is that the highly fragmented landscape of management (practice and scholarship) lacks sufficient capability for dialogue among the plurality of actors situated across that landscape. Developing the dialogical capability ultimately required to break this fundamental impasse demands, first, a shared sense of purpose and responsibility (akin to the Hippocratic Oath in medicine) and, second, institutional entrepreneurship to establish more and better ‘trading zones’. Drawing on the philosophy of pragmatism, the authors further this endeavour by identifying and proposing key elements of a statement of shared purpose and responsibility. Finally, they explore the nature and characteristics of successful trading zones, highlighting particular examples that have already been created in management studies.     

Impression management in corporate annual reports during the global financial crisis

This paper analyses impression management (IM) during the global financial crisis (GFC). It examines the differences in multiple textual characteristics and attributions between a highly positive performance period (2002–2007) and the GFC period (2008–2012), within the setting of Spain, where these two economic cycles were extreme. In contrast to previous research, companies' extreme poor performance in our sample is driven by an exogenous event. The findings do not show clear evidence of IM based on textual characteristics specifically linked to the GFC. Companies tried not to use overt IM and, to some extent, tried to clarify the impact of the crisis on performance. They were under great scrutiny and probably preferred to tell a more careful story. However, a general pattern of IM was still present during the GFC in the form of consistent positive attributions, favourable benchmarks and enhancement practices. In essence, the crisis did not fully stop IM practices, but rather influenced the way IM was produced. Overall, our results show that IM was lower during the GFC than in the case of poor performance in normal macroeconomic conditions found by previous literature. The results also show that the narratives of firms in the finance and real estate sectors were the most reactive to the GFC, probably linked to their key role in the crisis.     

The Informal Sector: A Review and Agenda for Management Research

Despite its connotations of non‐compliance, illegality, social exploitation and marginality, the informal sector is a substantial contributor to economic life in developing countries and, increasingly, in more technologically advanced activities. Its prevalence in developed economies has also become more widely recognized. In light of its significance, this paper reviews research on the informal sector from a management and organization scholarship perspective, rather than from an entrepreneurship view, as has been the focus until now. It sets out the atypical management practices that are inherent in the sector, explores the under‐researched relationship between formal and informal firms, and highlights definitional, conceptual and other limitations in extant research. As a step in resolving these issues, the authors present a conceptual model of formality and informality in a three‐dimensional framework that highlights an organizational infrastructure dimension, a view of firms operating along a continuum, and a multi‐level analytical context. Building on this, the authors detail opportunities for enhanced appreciation of in situ management and organizational practices in the informal sector and outline tools for pursuing a management and organization scholarship agenda. Overall, the authors argue that management scholarship has great potential to improve understanding of the informal sector, and that the informal sector provides opportunities to advance management theory, research and practice.     

Towards better understanding and narrowing of the science–practice gap: A practitioner-centered approach to management knowledge creation

The lack of mutual communication and collaboration between academic research and management practice, and the limited implementation of the research findings in strategic and tactical decision-making in practice settings, known as the science-practice ‘gap’, remains an essential issue in management research. We challenge the primary focus on academics for the possibilities of bridging the gap by arguing that the picture remains incomplete without a closer look at the positions, perceptions, and attitudes of practicing managers toward the joint production of relevant management knowledge. Based on the inductive, grounded theory approach, we conducted a qualitative study of 47 practicing managers with different organizational and functional responsibilities across various industry sectors. Although practitioners perceived practice-engaged research design and execution, relevant management research, and benefits from complementary knowledge as enablers of fruitful science-practice collaboration, our emerging findings revealed limited trust, limited cognition, coping strategies, and heuristic information processing to be important barriers for practitioners that hamper the collaboration process. Relying on the cognitive and information processing framework and theory of the conservation of resources, we aimed to explain the antecedent of (un)successful collaboration on the practitioners' side, thus extending our understanding of the scholarship of integration.     

Invisible Whispering: Restructuring Collaborative Decision Making with Instant Messaging

Organizational decision making is dominated by teams. When an important decision is required, a team is often formed to make it or to advise the individual decision maker, because a team has more resources, knowledge, and political insight than any one individual working alone. As teams have become geographically distributed, collaboration technology has come to play an important role in such collective decision making efforts. Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly prevalent workplace collaboration technology that enables near‐synchronous text exchanges on a variety of devices. We examined the use of IM during face‐to‐face, telephone, and computer‐mediated team meetings, a practice we call “invisible whispering.” We introduce Goffman's characterization of social interaction as dramatic performance, differentiable into “front stage” and “backstage” exchanges, to analyze how invisible whispering alters the socio‐spatial and temporal boundaries of team decision making. Using IM, workers were able to influence front stage decision making through backstage conversations, often participating in multiple backstage conversations simultaneously. This type of interaction would be either physically impossible or socially constrained without the use of IM. We examine how invisible whispering changes the processes of collaborative decision making and how these new processes may affect the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative decision making, as well as participation, satisfaction, relationships among team members, and individual attention.     

Unintended agency: Impression management support as a trigger of institutional change in corporate governance

In this paper we describe an emergent process of institutional change in which institutional entrepreneurs are unintentional contributors to the change process. Our theory suggests how change in the predominant institutional logic of corporate governance at public U.S. companies resulted not from deliberate attempts by corporate leaders to change the criteria by which governance is evaluated, but from the cumulative efforts of top executives to provide “impression management support” (IM support) for individual leaders of other firms. We first discuss how IM support has spread among corporate leaders through generalized social exchange. Then we suggest how individual leaders, in seeking to persuade journalists about the quality of corporate leadership at particular other firms, tend to invoke evaluative criteria that deviate from the prevailing institutional logic of governance. We further suggest how the rhetoric of IM support instigated a cascading social influence process that has contributed to changing perceptions about corporate governance among a broad range of other corporate stakeholders. We discuss the implications of our model for sociological perspectives on corporate governance and the corporate elite. Finally, we consider how the occasional negative commentary by corporate leaders about their peers, in combination with IM support, helps to sustain the credibility of the social system in which leaders, journalists, and other information intermediaries operate.     

The tone of business model disclosure: an impression management analysis of the integrated reports

The rising emphasis on the business model (BM) as a reportable element reflects the view that it constitutes one of the key starting points for investors’ analysis. In spite of this, recent academic and professional studies describe current reporting on BMs as uninformative: too optimistic, generic and incomplete. The International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) claims that these limitations may be overcome by means of an “Integrated Report”, an innovative report which is expected to offer a complete and balanced representation of how organizations create value by mean of their BMs. The paper investigates the informativeness of BM disclosure questioning whether companies adopt impression management (IM) strategies by manipulating the tone of the BM disclosures provided in their reports. We perform a manual content analysis of all the reports identified in the IIRC website and a multivariate statistical analysis to assess if a positive tone of BM disclosure is significantly associated with weak corporate governance, bad performance and low verifiability of the disclosure itself. Our findings support the idea that managers use BM disclosure as an IM strategy. This evidence has relevant implications for both accounting scholars and practitioners, since it questions the role of integrated reporting in improving corporate reporting on BMs.     

“We have performance appraisal every day and every hour”: Transferring performance management to Russia

Performance management (PM) of employees is an important established practice in multinational corporations (MNC) and therefore one of the key practices to be transferred to subsidiaries. In this study, we use the concept of institutional logics to show how Russian employees experience PM practices that are based on the institutional logic of a Finnish MNC which is contradictory to the one prevailing in Russia where the subsidiaries operate. Our findings contribute to the practice transfer and PM literature by showing how the Russian subsidiaries responded to competing institutional logics by consciously selecting certain elements from each logic, demonstrating “institutional bricolage”, to address both the headquarter's (HQ) requirements and the fast pace of change and uncertainties in an emerging post-Soviet market. Our study also enhances the international business (IB) literature by using the concept of institutional logics in IB and international management (IM) research, where it has been infrequently used.     

The Internationalization of Chinese Firms: A Critical Review and Future Research*

The important phenomenon that the internationalization of Chinese firms (ICF) represents has attracted increasing interest from scholars from multiple fields over the past 20 years (1991–2010). Although this proliferation of research has the potential to significantly improve understanding of Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs), the necessary step of consolidating and integrating extant knowledge is absent. This paper reviews the scholarship on the ICF and offers insights into the specific areas in critical need of further development. By focusing on articles published in major scholarly journals during the period 1991–2010, the authors develop a coherent framework to organize and review conceptual and empirical findings from disciplines as far ranging as management, international business, cross‐culture and area studies. Within the reviewed literature, three primary streams of enquiry are identified which focus on the antecedents, processes and outcomes of the ICF. Achievements within each of the three research streams are carefully reviewed using content analysis, whereby a number of important issues are identified which have remained consistently untouched, and recommendations are provided for future research, aimed at developing a more integrated research agenda on the ICF for management and international business scholars.     

Management Research and Literary Criticism

This paper is concerned with analysing the role of rhetoric and literary criticism in research and scholarship. It is argued that critical debate and dialogue are the hub of the process of research and scholarship and that social science and literature have more in common than is normally recognized. Most of these debates are carried out in writing and involve elaborate writing and reading of texts – or literature as we prefer to call it. We argue the case that management researchers may have something to learn from literary criticism. A model of literary criticism comprising four different modes of criticism – mimetic, expressive, pragmatic and objective – is described and the implications for management research are suggested. The paper concludes with a number of reflections on what can be gained from this type of analysis and on the role of reflexivity in the research process.     

Getting to the Helm: Women in Leadership in Federal Regulation

Why is it important for women to hold leadership positions in organizations? If it is important for women to hold leadership positions in organizations, how do women get into such positions? Both public administration research and organizational research provide answers to these questions. However, the integration of these two bodies of literature remains limited. This study joins public administration scholarship on representative bureaucracy and management scholarship on women in leadership to hypothesize and test institutional, organizational, and political explanations for women’s attainment of leadership positions together in one model. This study examines how women get into upper-level leadership positions in 12 federal regulatory organizations over more than 20 years of time. Findings suggests that women are more likely to gain access to leadership positions when the dominant political ideology is democratic and in agencies that work in feminine policy contexts, are younger, and where the risk of failure is higher.     

HRD university education: an international research agenda

Based on the observation that the systematic study of university-based HRD education - especially in an international comparative approach - is an important but under-explored area of scholarship, this article reports on the results of a need-sensing process among a panel of twenty-one senior HRD administrators and scholars in the United States and Great Britain. The resulting research agenda identified knowledge gaps and research needs in three broad areas: subject matter of HRD education; institutional characteristics, arrangements, and linkages; and outcomes and effectiveness of HRD education. Several categories were identified in each of the three areas and examples described. The implications of this study for research and theory building in international and comparative HRD are discussed.