Research summary: We examine the variety of activist groups and their tactics in demanding firms' social change. While extant work does not usually distinguish among activist types or their variety ...of tactics, we show that different activists (e.g., social movement organizations vs. religious groups and activist investors) rely on dissimilar tactics (e.g., boycotts and protests versus lawsuits and proxy votes). Further, we show how protests and boycotts drag companies "through the mud" with media attention, whereas lawsuits and proxy votes receive relatively little media attention yet may foster investor risk perceptions. This research presents a multifaceted view of activists and their tactics and suggests that this approach in examining activists and their tactics can extend what we know about how and why firms are targeted. Managerial summary: The purpose of this study was to examine how different types of activist groups behave differently when targeting firms for social change. We find that traditional activist groups rely on boycotts and protests, whereas religious groups and activist investors rely more on lawsuits and proxy votes. Additionally, we find that protests and boycotts are associated with greater media attention, whereas lawsuits and proxy votes are associated with investor perceptions of risk.
Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities' attempts to avoid anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing or downplaying racial ...cues in job applications, a practice known as "résumé whitening." Interviews with racial minority university students reveal that while some minority job seekers reject this practice, others view it as essential and use a variety of whitening techniques. Building on the qualitative findings, we conduct a lab study to examine how racial minority job seekers change their résumés in response to different job postings. Results show that when targeting an employer that presents itself as valuing diversity, minority job applicants engage in relatively little résumé whitening and thus submit more racially transparent résumés. Yet our audit study of how employers respond to whitened and unwhitened résumés shows that organizational diversity statements are not actually associated with reduced discrimination against unwhitened résumés. Taken together, these findings suggest a paradox: minorities may be particularly likely to experience disadvantage when they apply to ostensibly pro-diversity employers. These findings illuminate the role of racial concealment and transparency in modern labor markets and point to an important interplay between the self-presentation of employers and the self-presentation of job seekers in shaping economic inequality.
Scholars in sociology, criminology, and political science have long recognized that vigilantes emerge within communities, monitoring for and punishing deviance without formal authority to do so. ...Recent descriptive research also suggests that vigilantes can emerge in workplace communities, and that many people over the course of their careers report having worked with at least one vigilante. However, we presently have little understanding about the organizational factors and psychological mechanisms that explain why employees become vigilantes. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model specifying the antecedents of adopting the workplace vigilante role identity. By doing so, we introduce organizational and psychological conditions that could lead employees to administer unauthorized punishment as a means for exercising social control over their coworkers.
Millions of employees are victims of violent crimes at work every year, particularly those in the retail industry, who are frequent targets of robbery. Why are some employees injured while others ...escape from these incidents physically unharmed? Departing from prevailing models of workplace violence, which focus on the static characteristics of perpetrators, victims, and work environments, we examine why and when injuries during robberies occur. Our multimethod investigation of convenience-store robberies sought evidence from detailed coding of surveillance videos and matched archival data, preregistered experiments with formerly incarcerated individuals and customer service personnel, and a 3-y longitudinal intervention study in the field. While standard retail-industry safety protocols encourage employees to be out from behind the cash register area to be safer, we find that robbers are significantly more likely to injure or kill employees who are located there (versus behind the cash register area) when a robbery begins. A 3-y field study demonstrates that changing the safety training protocol-through providing employees with a behavioral script to follow should a robbery begin when they are on the sales floor-was associated with a significantly lower rate of injury during these robberies. Our research establishes the importance of understanding the interactive dynamics of workplace violence, crime, and conflict.
The purpose of this editorial is lo explain when a suhmission is considered "original" by AMJ, and to DlOVide an update to the Ireland (2009) "From the Editors" (I'TIi) essay on this topic. Although ...previous FTE essays have covered several topics about the types of research AMJ seeks to publish, describing how new submissions are evaluated and how AMJ responds to changes in the expectations and practices of the field will still bit useful for prospective authors. Discussing what constitutes original empirical research by AMJ might, for instance, help those who plan to contribute to the scholarly conversations about their research topics by sharing their work in our journal for the first time.
We theorize that anger incited by a social movement, which has a mobilizing effect among outsider activists, might immobilize collective action intentions for institutional insiders—those sympathetic ...to the movement and employed by its target. We conducted initial field surveys across a spectrum of social movements, including Occupy Wall Street and #metoo, as well as those related to business sustainability and gun control, which showed that institutional insiders are often just as angry as outsider activists. But the evidence from those surveys did not show that social movement anger translated into collective action intentions among institutional insiders. We tested our theory deductively with an experiment conducted with participants who were supportive of social movement issues in their organizations. Overall, our results show that anger about a social movement issue relates to greater collective action intentions among outsider activists but not among institutional insiders. Instead of anger emboldening institutional insiders to act despite the potential costs, anger triggers fear about the potential negative consequences of collective action in the workplace, which in turn results in withdrawal. While social movements often rely on anger frames to mobilize sympathizers, our work suggests that this practice may paradoxically cause fear that immobilizes those uniquely positioned to be able to influence organizations to change.
Using a mixed methods design, we examine the role of self-evaluations in influencing support for environmental issues. In Study 1—an inductive, qualitative study—we develop theory about how ...environmental issue supporters evaluate themselves in a mixed fashion, positively around having assets (self-assets) and negatively around questioning their performance (self-doubts). We explain how these ongoing self-evaluations, which we label "situated self-work," are shaped by cognitive, relational, and organizational challenges individuals interpret about an issue from a variety of life domains (work, home, or school). In Study 2—an inductive, quantitative, observational study—we derive three profiles of environmental issue supporters' mixed selves (self-affirmers, self-critics, and self-equivocators) and relate these profiles to real issue-supportive behaviors. We empirically validate key constructs from Study 1 and show that even among the most dedicated issue supporters, doubts play an important role in their experiences and may be either enabling or damaging, depending on the composition of their mixed selves. Our research offers a richer view of both how contexts shape social issue support and how individuals' self-evaluations play a meaningful role in understanding the experiences and, ultimately, the issue-supportive behaviors of individuals working on social issues.
Research has documented conflicting evidence about the relationship between a leader's unpleasant affective displays and team performance. Drawing on the dual threshold model of anger, we propose a ...novel explanation for this paradox such that the positive relationship between leaders' unpleasant affect and team performance turns negative at high levels of intensity. We examined our hypothesis in a multilevel field study of 304 halftime locker room speeches involving 23 high school and college basketball teams and a follow-up experiment. Our results show support for the prediction and suggest that the curvilinear effect of leaders' unpleasant affective displays may be explained by team members' redirection of attention and approach, which is positively associated with team members' effort at moderate levels of leader unpleasantness but leads to lower effort at high and low levels of leader unpleasantness. We discuss the theoretical contributions for scholarship on leadership, emotions as social information theory, and practical implications of the results.
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