State ownership is an important phenomenon in the world economy, especially in transition economies. Previous research has focused on how state ownership influences organizational performance, but few studies have been conducted on how state ownership influences employees. I propose that different ownership structures trigger different relational models among employees who pay attention to organizational justice consistent with their model to guide their extra-role behavior. Specifically, state-owned organizations reinforce employees’ relational concern and direct employees’ attention to procedural justice, whereas privatized organizations highlight employees' instrumental concern and direct their attention to distributive justice. I leverage a sample of organizations in China to explore how different ownership structures activate different relational models among employees and alter the relationship between organizational justice and employees’ extra-role behaviors. I find that state ownership attenuates and even reverses the positive relationship between distributive justice and extra-role behaviors. Conversely, state ownership exaggerates the positive relationship between a critical procedural justice dimension (participation in decision making) and employee extra-role behaviors. Implications for the micro-foundations of corporate governance and institutional change, organizational justice literature, and cross-cultural research are developed. This study also generates new insights for transition economies such as China.

We examine the mechanisms through which firm capabilities moderate the impact of institutional forces upon firms’ adoption of environmental management strategy (EMS). Viewing the limitations of the institutional perspective in explaining the heterogeneity in firms’ EMS, we suggest that an important source of variation is the idiosyncratic capabilities of the firm in acquiring and allocating resources. Based on the strategic response theme of institutional theory and the resource-based view, we argue that the influence of institutional forces on EMS is contingent on the presence of environmental orientation and innovation capability. Using data collected from China, we test these notions. Our empirical results suggest that both environmental orientation and innovation capability positively moderate the effect of institutional forces on firm's EMS. By demonstrating how institutional forces and firm capabilities interact with each other, we enhance our understanding of how firms succeed in developing EMS.

Despite extensive research on organizational virtue, our understanding about factors that promote virtue within organizations remains unclear. Drawing on upper echelon theory, we examine the relationship between five top management team (TMT) characteristics and organizational virtue orientation (OVO)—the integrated set of values and beliefs that support ethical traits and virtuous behaviors of an organization. Specifically, we utilize prospectuses of initial public offering (IPO) firms and 10-K post-IPO filings to explore how TMT composition with respect to member age, tenure, education, functional background, and gender influences OVO. Additionally, we examine the moderating effects of organizational size, and argue that the more expansive structures and processes associated with larger organizations diminish the main relationships. Our findings, using two sources of data, are consistent, but somewhat mixed in their support for our hypotheses. Overall, TMT characteristics do appear to influence OVO, but in more complex and counterintuitive ways than initially expected.

In this article, we argue that changes in workplace characteristics over the last few decades may affect work relationships and call for adjustments in the traditional theoretical framework used to understand them. Since the last quarter of the 20th century, there have been theories regarding changes in labor relationships following technological, political, globalization, and economical changes. However, we examine the changes in light of psychological theories rather than labor or industrial approaches. We review four main areas where social exchange theory (SET) has been implemented, address recent changes that challenge the traditional SET perspective, and propose alternative models. We refer to these models as “hybrid” as they integrate traditional SET premises with new-era workplace characteristics. First, we describe several changes in workplace characteristics. Next, we review some of the most conventional applications of SET to work relationships. Finally, we critically examine whether this theory meets the requirements of work relationships in the new world of work and conclude by arguing that SET needs to be adjusted to reflect the assumption that frequent changes in employee and organizational characteristics in the new workplaces require similar frequent adjustments in exchange relationships.

There has been an explosion of within-profession studies examining standings on gender representation in advancement, publication patterns, and conference presentations. However, industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology has yet to take such an introspective look and fully join these conversations. This manuscript aims to initiate and encourage such discussion. Through a brief review of relevant background information and the collection and analysis of recent archival data, we seek to examine where we have been with regard to gender representation, where we currently stand, and what steps are needed moving forward. We aim to stimulate continued examinations on this topic while recommending appropriate action items relevant to achieving equity in representation in our field.

Unwilling to wait decades for the political decline of New Deal liberalism, the core industries of post–World War II America repurposed collective bargaining as a means to reduce the costs of organized labor. New industrial relation strategies known as “wage-price policies” linked labor compensation with productivity in order to stabilize unit labor costs and prices. After reviewing the emergence and diffusion of wage-price policy within the managerial community, the article analyzes its implementation during the tumultuous 1959 bargaining round between the steel industry and the United Steelworkers. The union claimed that the industry's goals centered on management's antipathy to work rules, but industry records reveal that work rules were only part of its broader efforts to contain the inflationary consequences of the New Deal.

This article addresses corruption as a negative practice displaying the ‘darker side’ of social capital in Chinese guanxi and Russian blat/svyazi networks. It presents a conceptual framework integrating several research streams to establish a conceptual linkage between social network characteristics and three forms of corruption between business persons and public officials: cronyism, bribery, and extortion. We argue that the forms of corruption in a society are determined by the nature of social network ties and their underlying morality, with particularistic and general trust being key factors. Our framework depicts networks as three concentric circles representing three types of corruption resulting from their corresponding types of reciprocity: open, closed, and negative. We then apply the framework to the practice of guanxi in China and blat/svyazi in Russia. We propose that different network characteristics and different forms of corruption may help explain what we label the ‘China-Russia paradox’ of why corruption and high economic growth have co-existed in China, at least in the short term, but less so in Russia. We conclude with ethical and legal implications for doing business in those two transforming economies and offer suggestions for future research.

Management journals publish research that can be divided into many fields and originate from many theories, but in one regard all are similar: the presentation of data according to professional conventions. The presentation of empirical findings expresses broad agreement across theories, fields of study, and researcher background, an agreement that is upheld by doctoral training and by scholars learning presentation conventions through reading journal articles. The agreement is most easily uncovered by examining empirical papers in other fields of study, which quickly yields two conclusions. First, the fields are different from the management field; second, many of them have greater internal diversity in evidence presentation than management does. In particular, empirical articles outside management use more graphical displays to show the data in addition to showing model estimates, and have a great variety of graphing techniques.

This issue features three papers related to family businesses, as part of Management and Organization Review’s effort to address research on family businesses in China and other transforming economies. The papers were all accepted by Senior Editor Xiaowei Rose Luo at INSEAD and her ERB team, who shepherded these papers to publication in MOR.

‘The truth is under attack’, I wrote earlier this decade (Levine, 2012). As the replication crisis became apparent, the alarm was timely. But now, a counter-attack is raging. In its arsenal are replications, open data, shared instruments, pre-registration of hypotheses and now – data visualizations.

Research on the mechanisms of organizing and managing via interpersonal relations has a rich history in the management and organization-oriented literature. So far, however, the informal dimension of managing and organizing by drawing on informal networks in an international context has received comparably less attention. Recent research has pointed out that social capital and network theories have largely been developed by Western scholars based on circumstances and social structures that are typical of Western societies. Thus, current theory takes into account to a lesser extent their character and nature and the way in which informal ties and networks are formed in other parts of the world (Ledeneva, 2018; Li, 2007b; Qi, 2013; Sato, 2010). Besides the growing body of literature concerned with informal ties and networks in emerging and transitioning countries, for example guanxi (China), blat/ svyazi (Russia), and wasta (Arab World), a trend for analyzing pervasive informal networks in advanced and industrialized economies, such as yongo (Korea), has arisen. While insights from the latter research stream indicate that informal networks persist, the results generated in both research streams will help in developing the extant informal network theories further.