We study when CEOs with legal expertise are valuable for firms. In general, lawyer CEOs are negatively associated with frequency and severity in employment civil rights, contract, labor, personal injury, and securities litigation. This effect is partly induced by the CEO’s management of litigation risk and reduction in other risky policies. Lawyer CEOs are further associated with an increase in gatekeepers providing additional legal oversight and a decrease in innovative activities with high litigation risk. Lawyer CEOs are more valuable during periods of enhanced compliance requirements and regulatory pressure and in industries with high litigation risk or better growth opportunities.

In this article, we show that statements of U.S. CEOs on contentious social issues are not necessarily an expression of their political views. Republican-donor CEOs are three times more likely to make social statements with a liberal slant. CEO activism is more likely if firms’ operating environment is politically polarized and employees are Democrat-leaning. Such statements are associated with a 3% increase in consumer visits to a firm’s Democrat County stores without significantly reducing them in Republican counties. CEO activism is associated with a 0.12% gain in firm value, increased quarterly sales, and a reduced likelihood of shareholder activism on social issues.

Although a growing body of literature on star employees has focused on top performers, the influence of moral stars has been neglected, an unfortunate situation given that employees’ moral behavior has prolonged impacts on organizations and society as a whole. In this case, we propose the concept of the moral star, defined as the employee (not the team leader) who exhibits disproportionately high and prolonged morality relative to others and has a reputation of being moral on his or her team. We further draw upon self-categorization theory and investigate the double-edged sword effect of the presence of a moral star on the prosocial behavior of other team members. Specifically, we propose that for nonstar employees who have high levels of moral identity, the presence of a moral star is positively related to their felt moral responsibility and prosocial behavior. In contrast, for nonstar employees with low levels of moral identity, the presence of a moral star is negatively related to their felt moral responsibility and prosocial behavior. We found support for our hypotheses across an experiment and a multi-wave and multi-source field study. Taken together, our findings call for closer attention to the recognition of moral stars, as well as their potential unintended negative impact on teams and organizations.

Integrating the literature on talent management and teams, and drawing upon the signaling theory as the overarching framework, we investigated the moderated indirect effects of talent inducements on employee creativity via employee work engagement in teams. Empirical data from matched leader-members indicated that team talent inducement was positively related to member work engagement, which was then positively associated with team and member creativity. In addition, individual learning and performance-approach goal orientation positively moderated this indirect relationship, whereas individual performance-avoidance goal orientation negatively moderated this indirect relationship. Together, these results illuminate a cross-level influence process of team talent inducements on creativity and individual goal orientations as boundary conditions.

MOR's D3 section seeks to stimulate dialogue, debate, and discussion among scholars. When I took over as editor of D3, MOR's editorial team brainstormed how to further develop the D3 feature. We agreed that in addition to seeking original articles, we also wanted to encourage debate on articles that have already appeared in MOR. In this issue, we publish a commentary on Shaalan, Eid, and Tourky's (2022) article ‘De-Linking from Western Epistemologies: Using Guanxi-Type Relationships to Attract and Retain Hotel Guests in the Middle East’. The commentary, entitled ‘Questioning the Appropriateness of Examining Guanxi in a Wasta Environment: Why Context Should Be Front and Center in Informal Network Research’, has been written by Horak, Abosag, Hutchings, Alsarhan, Ali, Al-Twal, Weir, ALHussan, and AL-Husan (2023). As their title suggests, the commentators take issue with transferring the concept of guanxi into an environment in which another idea about informal interpersonal networks, wasta, already exists. I sense that the desire to write a critical comment was fueled by the fact that Shaalan et al. (2022) never referred to the concept of ‘wasta’ in their original article. We invited the authors of the original article to write a rejoinder (Shaalan, Eid, & Tourky, 2023) in which they emphasize even further that they only argue that guanxi-type relationships exist in the Middle East and not that guanxi itself exists.

This article traces the patterns of sugar consumption in seventeenth-century New England, from port to countryside, and the way in which economic exchange between New England and Barbados shaped the development of both regions. It deepens understanding of the rise of slavery-based tropical commodity production and consumption in the Atlantic world and examines the ways in which the emergence of capitalism and global imperialism was connected to the primacy of sugar as one of the most widely distributed early modern commodities.

This article examines how and why renowned Republican-era Chinese firms raised debt capital to finance their businesses by accepting savings deposits from ordinary people instead of borrowing from financial institutions. The article argues that in the absence of a powerful unitary state and centralized financial institutions, Chinese firms innovated sophisticated, decentralized financial instruments capable of amassing large quantities of capital from a broad host of depositors without the involvement of financial intermediaries. Savings deposits not only provided these firms with a cheaper and more flexible source of debt capital than that on offer from banks but also they fueled the Chinese economy by creating a sizable credit supply, a phenomenon that Chinese business and financial history scholarship focusing on the role of indigenous and modern banks has hitherto largely neglected.