As organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of selecting inclusive leaders, this paper proposes measuring inclusive leadership proficiency as an assessment center (AC) dimension. We propose that ACs present a novel way to effectively assess inclusive leadership using interpersonal behavioral simulation exercises, such as role plays. It is argued that AC-measured inclusive leadership can provide incremental prediction of leader performance beyond commonly assessed AC dimensions; and that it positively predicts follower performance and follower demographic diversity. We conclude by suggesting ways future research might empirically investigate the validity and reliability of AC-measured inclusive leadership in organizational settings.

Forecasts play a central role in the development of energy infrastructure. Since building energy infrastructure is long and costly, energy system planners try to anticipate future demand to avoid both shortages and overcapacity. But energy demand forecasts aren’t neutral: they represent a certain vision of the future that forecasters hope to bring into being. This article uses a historical case study to open the black box of forecasting and the world it contains. It studies electricity demand forecasts made by Hydro-Québec, one of the biggest industrial firms in North America, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Based on linear extrapolation models forecasting exponential demand and endless growth, the state-owned firm embarked on huge hydroelectric megaprojects with deep consequences on the environment and Indigenous lands. The energy crisis of the 1970s, by disturbing energy systems, led to criticism from the provincial government and civil society towards Hydro-Québec’s bullish forecasts that justified its expansionist agenda. This uncertain context favored other methods of predicting the future, like scenario analysis, and brought scrutiny towards the hydroelectric powerhouse’s business. At the crossroads of business history, energy history, and science and technology studies, the article argues that energy forecasts are used by actors like energy suppliers and governments to produce and project power relations onto the future. They become performative when powerful interests coalesce around their vision of the future to implement it.

This study develops a generalized evaluation framework that can be used to quantify the financial, economic, stakeholder, and environmental impacts of renewable energy support programs. The application of this framework is demonstrated by evaluating the feed-in tariff (FIT) program for solar distributed energy resources (DER) in Ontario, Canada. Our analysis reveals that Ontario’s FIT program has successfully promoted the adoption of solar DER across communities. However, the program has caused inequitable societal outcomes through a cross-subsidization with a present value of 9 CAD billion, paid for by the electricity consumer base for the benefit of only the 0.06 percent of electricity consumers who could install solar systems. The cost imposed on the Canadian economy ranges from 2.86 to 5.37 CAD billion, depending on the discount rate applied. The sensitivity analysis results indicate that the burden of this program on the Canadian economy would have been reduced by 50 percent if the program had been delayed and implemented in 2016 instead of 2010 due to the declining trend in solar system investment costs. The lessons from this analysis provide insights for designing future environmental and emission reduction policies.

Following the literature on entrepreneurial framing and identity change, we examined how Chinese shan-zhai phone entrepreneurs have drawn on their cultural resources to reframe their businesses to claim new identities and gain legitimacy over time. Through qualitative procedures, we found that a staged process of collective identity development underlies this entrepreneurial process, consisting of building (a) niche-market identity via pragmatic reframing, (b) socio-political identity via nationalistic reframing, and finally (c) professional identity via comprehensive reframing. There has also been a clear change in the sources of legitimacy from the indigenous market through the wider Chinese society to the more globally defined industry. Our central contribution is a processual model of identity change through cultural reframing specifically focused on how informal entrepreneurs grow into formalization and global competition.

The management literature has extensively explored how firms respond to underperformance through innovation, with prior studies based on the behavioral theory of the firm and the threat-rigidity thesis producing inconsistent results. The shifting focus of attention model provides crucial insights to reconcile this contradiction. We extend this model by highlighting the temporal dimension of performance shortfall. Specifically, we argue that underperformance duration flattens the inverted U-shaped relationship by attenuating both the problemistic search and threat rigidity mechanisms. The empirical results from a sample of Chinese listed manufacturing firms between 2010 and 2019 support our predicted inverted U-relationship between underperformance intensity and research and development (R&D) investment, and the moderating effect of underperformance duration. Interestingly, the inverted U-shape flips to a U-shape if underperformance extends into the long term. We contribute to the literature on performance feedback by considering both underperformance intensity and duration, which conceptualizes their interaction and reconciles extant contradictory findings from a new perspective. We also add new insights into innovation research by theorizing and examining the overlooked boundary condition for the curvilinear relationship between performance shortfalls and R&D investments, which calls for future research to explore the dynamics of the relationship and account for temporal effects.

This study extends the extant literature on executive pay dispersion by exploring the cultural-cognitive social determinants. We investigate how religious institutional environments, including Buddhism- and Confucianism-based institutions, shape vertical executive pay dispersion. We theorize that a Buddhism-based institutional environment is negatively related to vertical executive pay dispersion. In contrast, we propose competing hypotheses regarding how a Confucianism-based institutional environment affects vertical executive pay dispersion. With a sample of Chinese public firms, we find that both Buddhism- and Confucianism-based institutional environments are negatively associated with a firm's vertical executive pay dispersion. Supplementary analyses show that the aforementioned main effects are attenuated when a firm is embedded by a communist party branch and has a younger CEO.

In this article, we develop a computational measure of firm-level rhetorical nationalism. We first review the literature and develop a four-dimensional theoretical framework of nationalism relevant to firms: national pride, anti-foreign, dominant agenda (national revival), and corporate role. We then use machine-learning-based text analysis of over 41,000 annual reports of Chinese public firms from 2000 to 2020 and identify a dictionary of words for each dimension. Using a weighted ratio of nationalism-related words, we describe the overall picture of Chinese public firms’ rhetorical nationalism and provide the first empirical evidence regarding rising rhetorical nationalism among Chinese firms. Firms’ demonstration of rhetorical nationalism is related to both strategic and socialization factors; firms that are state-owned enterprises, older, larger, more profitable, consumer-facing, with more individual investors, and lower sales from overseas demonstrate a higher level of nationalism. Firms that demonstrate more rhetorical nationalism also have a better future financial return. Our study provides a theoretical framework for the organizational study of nationalism and a new measure for firms’ rhetorical nationalism, and demonstrates that rising rhetorical nationalism among Chinese firms is more strongly driven by firms’ motivations to appeal to domestic investors and consumers than to obtain government subsidies. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://sites.google.com/view/firms-rhetorical-nationalism