Superstitions are unproven beliefs that shape decision-making. While many studies have examined their influence on corporate financial decisions, few have addressed their impact on corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this study, we focus on the superstition associated with the Chinese zodiac year – a belief linked to bad luck – and investigate its effect on firms’ charitable donations. Drawing on literature concerning stress appraisal, resource building, and corporate philanthropy, and using data from Chinese listed firms from 2008 to 2020, we find a positive association between a CEO’s zodiac year and corporate donations. Furthermore, this effect is weakened by CEO’s overconfidence and amplified by increased negative media coverage of CEOs during zodiac years. This study contributes to the literature on the outcomes of superstitions in management, the antecedents of corporate philanthropy, the boundary conditions of stress appraisal, and the agency motivations of corporate philanthropy. Managerial implications are also discussed.

Drawing on attribution theory and impression management research, we investigate when and how abused employees engage in different coping strategies and what the interpersonal consequences of the coping strategies are for employees. Specifically, from an employee actor–based perspective, we develop and test a dual-path-mediated moderation model that represents the double-edged sword effect of abusive supervision. Using data from 444 front-line employees, we find that injury initiation motives attribution enhances the positive relationship between abusive supervision and revenge motivation, which in turn is positively related to intimidation, exemplification, and supplication. Conversely, performance promotion motives attribution strengthens the positive relationship between abusive supervision and motivation to reconcile, which in turn is positively associated with ingratiation, self-promotion, and exemplification. Intimidation and supplication are then related to increased interpersonal conflict with leaders, while ingratiation is related to reduced interpersonal conflict with leaders. Theoretical contributions, practical implications, and limitations are discussed.

Women entrepreneurs face distinct gender-specific challenges, including restricted access to venture capital, work–life conflicts driven by stereotypes, and competing demands from their roles as business owners, caregivers, and community leaders. These pressures often foster polychronicity – a temporal orientation favoring simultaneous task management. Grounded in role accumulation theory, we conduct a two-stage survey of 129 Chinese women entrepreneurs to investigate the relationship between polychronicity and resilience. We further examine three moderators – frequent interruptions, entrepreneurial experience, and emotional intelligence – that amplify polychronicity’ s resilience-building effects. This study highlights the positive association between polychronicity and women entrepreneurs’ resilience, offering new insights into temporal dynamics in entrepreneurship. It also provides women entrepreneurs with practical strategies to help them navigate multiple role challenges and thrive amid adversity by leveraging their preference for multitasking.

As emerging markets rise, some incumbent firms that once occupied follower positions are now striving for industry leadership, surpassing competitors to become new frontrunners. These firms must overcome both competitive barriers and organizational identity (OI) challenges, constructing a leading organizational identity (LOI) that aligns with their new roles. This study delves into these transformations through the temporality lens of OI, using a comparative analysis of two Chinese firms, and identifies two distinct modes: progressive evolution and radical change. The progressive evolution mode adopts a more gradual, layer-by-layer iterative transition, whereas the radical change mode follows a ‘break and (re)build’ logic to identity structure. Both modes demonstrate a ripple effect of OI’s three structural layers, radiating outward from the core. Temporal dynamics play a pivotal role: the progressive evolution mode aligns with a more stable environment and a future-oriented, long-term temporal perspective, while the radical change mode is linked to a dynamic, unstable environment and a past-oriented, short- and long- term interactive temporal pattern. This study highlights how temporal orientation and temporal horizon shape the construction of an LOI, advancing research on OI construction and its temporal dynamics while providing insights into high-position leaps in emerging markets.

Previous studies have primarily advocated enhancing the deterrent effects of sanctions against offending firms to prevent organizational environmental violations. However, despite stricter regulatory environments, violations that cross the ‘red line’ remain pervasive. Limited research has delved into the factors that influence an organization’s ability to learn from environmental sanctions imposed on others. To address this gap, inspired by social learning theory, we examine whether environmental sanctions imposed on violating firms deter environmental governance among their industry and regional peers using a sample of Chinese-listed firms from 2008 to 2021. Our findings indicate that increasing the frequency and severity of penalties for offending firms – particularly those leading firms and state-owned-enterprises or those with close ties – can affect the environmental governance practices of their peers, both in terms of process and outcome, underscoring the critical role of peer influence in enforcing environmental regulations. Additionally, the current article also concludes that the general deterrence effect on peers is more pronounced in competitive industries and regions with underdeveloped legal frameworks.

Entrepreneurial reentry after business failure is an important area of research in the field of entrepreneurship. However, previous studies have largely overlooked the crucial role of time factors – both objective and subjective – in the context of failure and subsequent entrepreneurial endeavors. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of firm lifespan on entrepreneurial reentry and the moderating effect of entrepreneurs’ temporal focus. Through manual matching across multiple databases, we obtain a sample of 368 entrepreneurs. The results show that a longer firm lifespan negatively influences entrepreneurial reentry and that a past focus further amplifies this negative relationship. This study contributes to research on the determinants of entrepreneurial reentry and provides theoretical insights into the role of time in entrepreneurial reentry.

Despite extensive media coverage on issues related to intellectual property (IP) in China, the academic literature on this topic has been sporadic. Two factors might be at play here. One is the multifaceted nature of IP: as IP is a legal asset with significant implications for firm performance and social welfare, the literature is scattered in various disciplines such as law, economics, strategy, and political science. The other is the unique institutional environment in China: policy-driven investments in IP have resulted in the decoupling of IP as a value appropriation mechanism in market competition and IP as a nonmarket strategy to engage with regulators. This review aims to bring the multiple streams of literature into a structured framework, with a side-by-side comparison with research based in developed countries, mostly in the US. Building on the combined research streams, we then recommend avenues of future research that can potentially speak to a broad audience in innovation, competition, and nonmarket strategies.

Digital technologies are often seen as a powerful means for poverty reduction. Yet, much of the existing research focuses on macro-level outcomes, leaving gaps in understanding individual-level mechanisms and the processes behind successful digital interventions. This study addresses these gaps by examining how online platforms, developed as social innovation efforts, enable smallholder farmers in Japan to escape poverty. Using a qualitative, case-based approach, we analyze six social enterprises and explore how stakeholder mobilization drives the success or failure of these platforms. We developed a schematic model that captures the nonlinear, collaborative nature of the social innovation process. Our findings reveal a systemic account of why and how only two of the six platforms achieved meaningful impact, offering insights into the factors that shape the effectiveness of digital technologies in reducing poverty. In the end, our model offers practical implications for future digital poverty reduction initiatives.

Cross-functional coordination is common in contemporary work and requires professionals with different expertise and roles to cooperate to complete tasks. However, conflicts can exist between functions. This study focuses on a specific factor that impedes cross-functional coordination – status–authority asymmetry, where professionals with lower status are assigned functional authority to supervise higher-status professionals and demand their compliance with particular processes or tasks. The existing literature suggests strategies for the low-status group to elicit the high-status group’s compliance; however, neither approach is cost-effective. We identify new opportunities in the digital age and investigate how low-status professionals can utilize digital technology to improve cross-functional coordination. We conducted a 17-month ethnographic study in a Chinese hospital to determine how low-status pharmacists obtain compliance from high-status doctors in the prescription review process. We propose that contingent exploitation (i.e., strategically restricted utilization of digital technology) is an effective strategy to achieve the low-status function’s purposes. Through strategic configuration of process streamlining, knowledge imprinting, and compliance enforcement, the low-status group can exert functional authority without evoking fierce resistance from the high-status group. This study contributes to the literature on cross-functional coordination and extends our understanding of technological adaptation in a cross-functional context.

This editorial examines the empirical foundations of Chinese management research through an analysis of data sources and research designs in all empirical papers published in Management and Organization Review (MOR) over the past five years. Our review shows that 53.2% of studies rely on archival or secondary data, with 37% of quantitative studies focusing on publicly listed firms. While established datasets provide consistency and comparability, their prevalence may limit opportunities to explore China’s diverse organizational ecosystem. We identify three promising avenues for advancing the field: (1) expanding empirical attention to include a wider variety of organizational forms, (2) leveraging emerging computational methods, digital trace data, and AI-enabled technologies, and (3) recognizing the development of novel datasets as valuable scholarly contributions in their own right. We also examine how recent regulatory developments are creating new considerations for research design while reinforcing the value of collaborative approaches between international and Chinese scholars. We contend that by embracing methodological pluralism and adapting to evolving data landscapes, management scholars can generate additional novel insights that illuminate the complexity and distinctiveness of Chinese organizational life.

The digital transformation of Chinese companies offers a new frontier for organizational research. Widespread use of workplace platforms creates rich archives of unobtrusive data, providing continuous, real-time insights into organizational life that traditional surveys cannot capture. The central challenge for scholars is turning this data abundance into meaningful theory. This special issue highlights three studies that meet this challenge by using innovative methods to convert granular data into valuable knowledge. The papers employ digital-context experiments, real-time behavioral tracking, and machine-learning-assisted theory building to study phenomena from interpersonal dynamics to crisis productivity. Looking ahead, we explore the potential of unstructured multimodal data and new AI tools to make complex analysis more accessible. We conclude with a research agenda calling for methodological rigor, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a firm balance between technological innovation and theoretical depth.

Digital transformation presents a crucial strategic imperative for family businesses seeking to maintain competitiveness and long-term viability. The academic literature reveals divergent perspectives on how family businesses approach digital transformation initiatives. This study adopts a socioemotional wealth perspective to examine the relationship between family ownership and digital transformation. The research specifically investigates how family formal business networks and next-generation dispersion moderate this relationship. Analysis of panel data from Chinese listed family firms between 2016 and 2020 reveals that family ownership negatively influences digital transformation efforts. However, this negative effect diminishes when family firms participate in formal business networks or involve multiple next-generation members in leadership positions. These findings yield important theoretical contributions regarding the intricate relationships between family dynamics and technological advancement. The research also provides practical insights for family business leaders navigating digital transformation challenges. This study advances understanding of how different dimensions of socioemotional wealth shape family firms’ strategic responses to technological change.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way firms pursue technological diversification (TD), yet its distinct effects on related and unrelated diversification remain insufficiently explored. Based on the knowledge-based view, this study examines the distinct effects of AI on related and unrelated TD to elucidate AI’s specific role in facilitating both the optimization of existing knowledge and the exploration of new domains. Using a multi-period difference-in-differences model and panel data from China’s listed manufacturing firms (2013–2022), our empirical analysis demonstrates that AI significantly promotes firm TD, particularly in unrelated TD. Additionally, we identify that core-technology competence strengthens the positive effect of AI on unrelated TD, while knowledge stocks weaken it. These results contribute to the literature on TD by underscoring the role of AI. Practically, the study offers actionable insights for managers to harness AI in balancing exploration and exploitation within their TD strategies.

Building on recent advancements in moral disengagement theory and shared reality theory, we propose that employees do not need to directly experience frequent customer mistreatment to trigger their moral disengagement. Specifically, when employees frequently share their mistreatment experiences with coworkers, even infrequent instances of customer mistreatment can evoke heightened levels of moral disengagement. Conversely, when social sharing occurs less frequently, infrequent instances of customer mistreatment are associated with lower levels of moral disengagement, while more frequent customer mistreatment is linked to higher levels of moral disengagement, which then positively relates to service sabotage, indicating a positive indirect effect of the frequency of customer mistreatment on service sabotage through moral disengagement. Results from two independent time-lagged studies involving samples of call center employees (Sample 1 of Study 1), casino cage cashiers (Sample 2 of Study 1), and service representatives (Study 2) recruited from an online research platform, lend support to our propositions.

With the goal of achieving carbon neutrality, the green transformation of manufacturing firms has become a major trend, and exploring its influencing factors is of great practical significance. This study examines whether the carbon emissions trading policy can promote firms’ green transformation by analyzing its characteristics through both institutional pressures and incentives. Using a fixed-effects panel data model and data from Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms during 2010 and 2020, the basic empirical results confirm their positive relationship. We further examine the moderating roles of both external institutional environments and internal resources. The results suggest that, as external moderators, regions with high public environmental attention and government subsidies can amplify the positive impact. Internally, for firms with executives who have environmental experience, the carbon emissions trading policy has a greater impact on their green transformation, while higher resource slack plays the opposite role. Additional analyses suggest that, in the short term, this policy may hinder the green transformation of firms in adjacent regions and potentially lead to economic losses for the pilot firms.