This interview contributes to the conversation around the automobile industry by focusing on the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) sector. Both of the discussants’ research interests encompass China's industrial competitiveness, innovation, science and technology policy, and the evolution of Chinese manufacturing industries. Professor Feng Lu, the interviewee, has conducted continuous and substantial fieldwork tracing the development of the Chinese automobile industry. He was one of the first experts to urge the Chinese government to help local automobile manufacturers develop innovation capabilities and proprietary products. Further, his 2005 book, The Policy Choice to Develop China's Automobile Industry with Independent Intellectual Property Rights, profoundly influenced the national policy transition toward emphasizing in-house innovation.

Literature has advanced two contrasting theoretical perspectives related to the governance structure of business groups: the ‘value-constraining’ perspective, which focuses on principal–principal agency conflict and organizational inertia theory, and the ‘value-enabling’ perspective, which emphasizes the role of business groups in mitigation of institutional voids. Building on these two competing lenses, we develop hypotheses to examine post-acquisition performance of affiliate firms relative to stand-alone firms. As our empirical context, we study 440 majority-stake, domestic and cross-border merger and acquisition deals closed by Indian firms during the period 2002–2013. The results imply that in emerging markets, despite concerns of organizational inertia and principal–principal agency issues, the value-enabling impact of group affiliation persists. We also examine the contextual impact of intergroup heterogeneity owing to group diversification on post-acquisition performance and find that greater group diversification leads to better performance for affiliate acquirers.

This editorial essay addresses the importance of independent thinking in the process of developing outstanding scholarship. Through analysing the difficulties of maintaining independent thinking in the Chinese culture, the paper proposes four approaches: understanding the power of the minority; transforming outside pressure into intrinsic motivation; listening with an open mind; and developing a passion for research.

The existing literature does not provide adequate insight into the initial diffusion of new management practices, especially those that yield no immediate economic benefits, and have not yet gained legitimacy. We study how firms’ local institutional environments influence early adoption behavior, examining the spread of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports in China's banking industry from 2006 to 2011. We find that banks are more likely to be first movers of CSR reporting if they operate in communities where more companies publish CSR reports or where there are guidelines encouraging CSR reporting, and the impacts of these two institutional factors are further moderated by the length of time that banks have operated in communities. Our study highlights the usefulness of institutional theory in understanding the initial adoption of new management practices, when the organizational field is defined as a geographic community instead of an industry sector and its supply chain.

Although research in cultural psychology has established that virtually all human behaviors and cognitions are in some ways shaped by culture, culture has been surprisingly absent from the emerging literature on the psychology of technology. In this perspective article, we first review recent findings on machine aversion versus appreciation. We then offer a cross-cultural perspective in understanding how people might react differently to machines. We propose three frameworks – historical, religious, and exposure – to explain how Asians might be more accepting of machines than their Western counterparts. We end the article by discussing three exciting human–machine applications found primarily in Asia and provide future research directions.

Organizational hybridity refers to the combination of multiple institutional logics and identities that, within an organizational setting, do not conventionally complement one another. In such conditions, organizations must develop strategies to combine logics and sustain their hybrid forms. Success, however, is not inevitable. In this article, we take a legitimacy-as-process perspective to focus on a failed Microfinance Organization (MFO) in the African context of Zambia. MFOs represent a fascinating context because of their hybrid nature and need to balance several competing institutional demands. We utilise field interviews to analyse the process through which MFOs fail, analysing actor legitimation responses to emerging hybridity demands. We identify three phases associated with these changes: 1) dependent coupling, (2) misaligning legitimation, and (3) circumnavigating over conformity. Our findings emphasise that legitimation efforts in a failed hybrid are not simply the reverse of those that succeed. We observe adaptive processes consistent with successful hybrids but that ultimately sow the seeds of eventual failure. This demonstrates the need to re-think the role of legitimation strategies in hybrids alongside their potential deleterious consequences.

Managing a successful research team involves a variety of activities and potential issues. In this article, we discuss these issues based on our experience of having worked together for 20 years with regular team meetings that include Ph.D. and undergraduate students and occasionally other faculty colleagues. We attempt to describe the challenges that occur, including some ethical issues, and distil the knowledge we have gained over the years. We pose and answer nine questions about our team processes and procedures and end with a brief summary of key learning.

Researchers have paid much attention to the performance implications of authoritarian leadership. However, less effort has been devoted to exploring its ethical consequences at work. Drawing on the social cognitive theory of morality, this study explores the indirect relationship between authoritarian leadership and subordinates’ unethical pro-organizational behaviors (UPB) via displacement of responsibility. A vignette-based experimental study (Study 1) and a time-lagged field study (Study 2) were conducted to test our hypotheses. Consistent findings were accumulated for the indirect relationship between authoritarian leadership and UPB through displacement of responsibility (both Study 1 and 2). Furthermore, this indirect relationship was stronger among employees with low level of moral efficacy (Study 2). We conclude this study by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Previous research has debated whether guanxi persists or declines with the development of formal institutions. This study addresses this debate by investigating how the development of formal institutions in China's state-owned organizations influences employees’ guanxi behavior. Building on institutional logics theory, I propose that guanxi behavior is a reaction to the socialist institutions adopted by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and is associated with the collective identity of SOEs. Thus, employees’ identification with SOEs is the mechanism that influences their guanxi behavior. A survey of 721 employees from 12 organizations compared guanxi behavior across three types of organizations with different degrees of state ownership: SOEs, public firms, and joint ventures. The results showed that the employees of joint ventures identify less with SOEs and engage in less guanxi behaviors than do SOE employees. The employees of public firms still identify with SOEs, and their guanxi behavior did not differ from that of SOE employees. Identification with SOEs mediated the effect of organizational type on guanxi behavior, whereas formalization did not. Therefore, the development of formal institutions does not necessarily decrease guanxi behavior, and its effect depends on whether the collective identity underlying guanxi is changed. This study has important implications for guanxi research, institutional logics theory, and transition economies.

Meso-institutions are weak, intermediate forms of institutions that bridge the gap between institutional disintegration and the development of new, more firmly established institutions. Meso-institutions lack the stronger behaviour-guiding signs and symbols of more established institutions, but instead contain fragments of former institutions mixed with emerging, but fragile, components of developing institutions. Institutional disintegration leads to a disorienting period characterized by the dissolution of fundamental, widely held ideologies. This offers an opportunity for actions rather than institutions to guide actions. Because meso-institutions are weak, only after actions are repeated will they solidify into specific patterns that may be retrospectively granted legitimacy. Using archival data supplemented by interviews, we identified three meso-institutional occurrences with the phenomenologically based manifestations of fractured ideology, actions as rules and retrospective legitimization.

I feel very fortunate to be able to open the MOR Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion editorial section with a striking perspective advanced by Shawn Pope and John W. Meyer of Stanford University. They point to the rise of a global corporate organization that is shedding its national distinctiveness and any remaining local rooting. Instead, they envision global standardization as no longer related to national origins and as managed according to abstract, universalistic principles. The global standard is furthermore run by managers who graduated from the same homogenous business programs, who gain advice from like-minded consultants, and who, of course, go to the same Davos meetings. The new standard, the universal corporation, seeks to convey its socially responsible character by confirming, sometimes voluntarily, to the standards of excellence as decreed by other organizations perhaps increasingly like itself. This provocative perspective invites debate – refutations and support alike – in future MOR issues and blogs. Where does your research lead you to take a stand?

This study seeks to answer the following question: What are the organizational attributes that influence organizational responses to institutional complexity? Building on core ideas of organizational imprinting, I argue that organizational response is influenced by the imprint from the dominant logic of organizing during the founding period and from the institutional position an organization possessed at founding. Empirically, I examine the variation in board composition of Chinese state-owned firms listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange market. It is found that state-owned firms founded in the market logic dominant period tend to have more non-state directors on the board in that they were organized around the prescription of the market logic and more responsive to shareholders’ demands for legitimacy reasons. Besides, state-owned firms founded by central government agencies tend to have fewer non-state directors because they were born at the center of the socialist system to accomplish strategic goals of the central government and non-state directors may challenge the vested interests. This study contributes to the organizational imprinting and institutional literature and resonates with the contemporary call for a more systematic examination of organizational attributes that influence organizational responses to institutional complexity.

Drawing on the threat-rigidity hypothesis, we examine how managerial opportunity and threat interpretations of external environments affect a technology venture's choice of external knowledge search strategies in an emerging market. Results from a sample of 141 technology ventures in China reveal that opportunity interpretation directly and positively influences both the breadth and depth of external search, whereas threat interpretation directly and negatively influences only external search depth. Furthermore, managerial ties strengthen the positive relationship between opportunity interpretation and external search breadth but weaken the positive relationship on external search depth. Managerial ties weaken the negative relationship between threat interpretation and external search breadth but strengthen the negative relationship on external search depth. Implications for both research and practice are offered.

This commentary targets the core ideas of the composition-based view (CBV). First, we argue that the deployment of compositional capabilities (CCs) to combine ordinary resources fits the resource-based view (RBV) and that there is therefore no need for a CBV. Second, we argue that the CCs should be presented as a specific type of dynamic capability (DC). We show that even where ordinary resources are being combined, superior combinatory capabilities are needed as competitive advantage cannot otherwise be achieved. Third, we argue that Luo and Child (2015) focused too much on the emerging economy enterprises (EEEs) as the conceptual setting. We conclude with a future research agenda to prepare the ground for research on compositional capabilities within the composition-based view of the firm.

This research examines how people perceive and respond to potential conflict in work settings. When individuals highly value their interpersonal relationships with others, they may take the potential costs to relationships into consideration in deciding how to handle conflict. We propose that individuals take an avoidance approach to conflict to prevent disruption in relationships from confrontation. Specifically, the value that individuals place on superficial harmony is positively related to their negative anticipation of relationship costs, which in turn leads to conflict avoidance. Furthermore, the direct relationship between superficial harmony and negative anticipation and the indirect relationship between superficial harmony and conflict avoidance are negatively moderated by the closeness of relations between the parties involved. The results of two studies conducted in workplace settings supported our hypothesized moderated mediation model. Highlighting the role of superficial harmony in conflict avoidance, this research contributes to the existing literature on conflict management and has practical implications for effectively managing conflict in the workplace.

This article offers a contextualised explanation of the process of institutional bridging by Delta, a British SME, in order to internationalise to China across high institutional distance. The study uncovers three novel mechanisms of ‘Cross-institutional Dissonance Mitigation’, ‘Multi-level Strategic Embedding’, and ‘Cross-institutional Consonance Retuning’ to explain how and why a failing SME with limited resources and networks was able to bridge the institutional distance and internationalise to the challenging Chinese market. This article contributes to the literature on SME internationalisation across high institutional distance by opening the ‘black box’ of SME institutional bridging, hence demonstrating the benefits of contextualised explanations to extend research into internationalisation phenomena that span multiple institutional boundaries.

Management scholars have suggested that our research is lacking in both relevance and meaning. In this article, I argue that a primary reason for this lack of relevance and meaning is the failure of our research to be responsive to all potential research stakeholders. Adopting the committed-to-participant research perspective, I offer suggestions for how both journal editors and organizational researchers can meaningfully include our research participants as valued stakeholders of the research process.

The concept of socioemotional wealth (SEW) has become a dominant perspective in family business studies. In this article, we review the SEW literature, the explanatory power of SEW in family firm behavior, and the heterogeneity of family firms. Although we find that SEW distinguishes the behavior of family firms from that of nonfamily firms, the concept has been used and operationalized differently across studies. The few studies that measure SEW directly do not find clear and consistent explanatory power of the construct. Moreover, not many studies are conducted in Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and China, raising the question as to whether the concept applies equally across institutional and cultural contexts. This article takes a pragmatic perspective on SEW by discussing and distinguishing between key dimensions of social wealth and emotional wealth, which we believe can enhance understanding of the behavior and heterogeneity of family businesses. Based on our deconstruction of the SEW concept, we propose various directions of future research.

Leung and Morris (2015) propose conditions under which values, norms, and schemata drive cultural differences in behavior. They build on past theories about dimensions of situational strength to propose that personal values drive behavior more in weak situations and perceived norms drive behavior more in strong situations. Drawing on this analysis as well as two recent models of cultural tightness-looseness, country-level effects are predicted on the assumption that tighter cultures more frequently create strong situations and looser cultures more frequently create weak situations. Using secondary data, I examine values as well as perceived descriptive norms and injunctive norms relevant to collectivism in relation to two key dependent measures: helping strangers and emotion regulation. The relation of embeddedness values to helping strangers is moderated negatively by tightness (in that high embeddedness reduces helping less in the context of tightness), and its relation to emotion regulation is moderated positively (in that embeddedness increases emotion regulation more in the context of tightness). Furthermore, descriptive norms show main effects for both dependent variables that are predominantly unmoderated by tightness. Finally, the link of injunctive norms with emotion regulation is moderated positively by tightness (in that injunctiveness heightens emotion regulation more in the context of tightness). Results support the relevance of nation-level tightness to reliance on values and norms, but the strength of effects depends on how it is operationalized.

In this commentary, I discuss some philosophical issues related to contextualizing Chinese management research. First, it should be noted that contextualization can be interpreted in different ways by different philosophical perspectives. Second, the Duhem-Quine thesis implies that replications, in the form of empirical generalization, are an appropriate means of testing Western theories in a Chinese context. Third, owing to the difficulty of conclusively falsifying management theories, attempts to create theories that explain unique Chinese management phenomena may lead to theory proliferation and the perpetuation of weak, or even false, theories. Finally, I propose the study of empirical regularities as an alternative to the theory application and theory creation approaches.