Emily Sarah Block

• Professor at University of Alberta

The authors (Bartkus, Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame; and Block, the George M. Cormie Chair of Management in the Alberta School of Business) write about the applicability of lessons learned in war zones and other extreme environments for today’s business challenges. Dr. Bartkus “founded the Business on the Frontlines Program seek...

A large body of research shows that the migration of managers from one professional service firm to another weakens the old employer’s relationship with its clients, because migrating managers remove their relationship‐specific knowledge and expertise – i.e., human and social capital – from their old employers, redeploying it to their new employers...

Prosocial crowdfunding platforms are venues for individual lenders to allocate resources to ventures that specifically pursue economic and social value. In a setting where hybridity is expected, do crowdfunders respond positively to category-spanning ventures, or do they prefer to fund ventures that are more clearly situated within a single categor...

Most research on the corporate philanthropy of organizations has focused on the external benefits of such initiatives for firms, such as benefits for firm reputation and opportunities. However, many firms justify their giving, in part, due to the positive impact it has on their employees. Little is known about the effectiveness of such efforts, or...

Although it is well established that top management team (TMT) experience is highly valued in new ventures, research has largely focused on the value of experience depth. However, founding teams often bring a myriad of different types of experience to their business. Less is understood about how these experiences are perceived by key stakeholders,...

In this study, we argue that institutional factors determine the extent to which hospitals are symbolic or substantive adopters of information technology (IT) specific organizational practices. We then propose that symbolic and substantive adoption will moderate the effect that IT security investments have on reducing the incidence of data security...

The concept of authenticity - a set of expectations about codes, categories, meanings and intentions to which people, products and organizations ought to conform – has become the focus of increased attention in organizational theory. Although definitions of what is authentic are socially constructed and context-specific, assessments of authenticity...

We use a resource-based view of the firm to test competing theoretical predictions on whether human capital or human processes drive the circulation of client ties – i.e., the dissolution of a market relationship between a client and a professional service firm market relationship and the subsequent establishment of a relationship with the same cli...

Institutional theorists are only beginning to systematically predict the influence of pluralism (Pache & Santos, 2011). Building on Besharov & Smith’s (in press) theory of institutional complexity, this paper aims to help fill that gap by linking the type of pluralism to the source and process of institutional change. I propose that different manif...

Despite the prevalence of financial corporate philanthropy, relatively little is understood about how such giving influences individual employee work attitudes. Building from theories on the joy of giving and social identification with organizations that engage in such activities, we posit a positive effect of such giving on employee work attitudes...

Research on entrepreneurial finance has consistently shown the importance of capability- and opportunity-based factors on investor decisions. However, scholars have not yet explored whether investors are influenced by how the founding team will run the firm. We integrate general theories of orientation to argue that entrepreneurial investors are in...

This paper investigates the relationship between the number of managers who exit advertising agencies and advertisers and the dissolution of dyadic market ties. We investigate how the locus of managerial exit (advertiser vs. agency) and the hierarchical level from which exit occurs (executives vs. exchange managers) influence the likelihood that ma...

The use of telephones as a medium for conducting interviews is becoming an increasingly popular data collection method. Despite both the frequency of use of this data collection method and the many advantages conferred to researchers, this method is often considered suspect within the academic community. In methodological discussions of interviewin...

Drawing upon theory on social judgments and impression formation from social psychology, this paper explores the socio-cognitive processes that shape the formation of favorable and unfavorable organizational reputations. Specifically, we suggest that stakeholders make distinctions between an organization’s capabilities and its character. We explain...

Recent high-profile corporate scandals involving prominent, high-performing firms cast doubt on assertions that the costs of getting caught decrease the likelihood such high performers will act illegally. We explain this paradox by using theories of loss aversion and hubris to examine a sample of S&P 500 manufacturers. Results demonstrate that both...

The authors investigate how nonstandard work arrangements shape work attitudes and behaviors. They find that attitudes and behaviors vary across different types of nonstandard work arrangements. As expected, retention part-time workers have more positive and agency temporary workers more negative attitudes toward their work arrangements than do sta...