Gerry Mcnamara

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Management

Existing research has shown that greater female membership on the board of directors has the potential to positively impact firm financial performance. However, the specific cognitive means through which these gender effects manifest remains unexplained. Our study sheds light on these cognitive means by examining how female board membership can inf...

Existing research has suggested seemingly contradictory conclusions about the efficacy of impression management (IM) tactics. While a growing body of research highlights the potential benefits of IM, other studies imply that the effectiveness of these tactics in shaping stakeholder perceptions may be limited. Our study advances theory on IM by draw...

The quest to build and expand a firm's human capital is a key driver for mergers and acquisitions (M&As), but acquiring firms often face the threat of losing their targets' key employees in the post‐M&A period. This is particularly true for high‐tech M&As, as human capital is especially important in high‐tech industries. Because non‐executive emplo...

Most professional employees aspire to leadership, and this suggests that a best possible leader self—a personalized representation of who an employee aspires to be at their best as a leader in the future—is likely a relevant and motivating self‐representation for employees at work. Integrating theory on best possible selves with control theory, we...

Past research rooted in the Behavioral Theory of the Firm has extensively examined the impact of performance feedback on organizational change and risk taking, finding robust effects that performance shortfalls enhance the risk taking of firms. We argue that the strength of this effect is likely to be contingent on the attributes of the firm’s top...

Drawing on resource dependence theory and group diversity research, this paper examines how board gender and racial diversity impact corporate divestitures. We argue that due to the diverse experiences, knowledge, and perspectives that female and racial minority directors bring to the boardroom, it is more difficult and time-consuming for the board...

Management scholars have demonstrated that CEOs look to cues provided from external stakeholders when determining the direction and timing of strategic action. Research has focused on “hard” forms of external performance feedback, primarily in the form of stock market reactions. To understand both whether and to what degree “soft” external performa...

Researchers have long been interested in understanding the motives behind CEOs’ actions. On the one hand, CEOs may pursue strategic actions because they are confident they will enhance firm value. Alternatively, CEOs may take actions even when they have low confidence in the value of those actions, perhaps driven by self-interest or social pressure...

Research Summary: Building on the communications and linguistics literatures, we explore the language attributes managers use in interactions with investors and the subsequent reactions of investors. Specifically, we hypothesize that top managers’ use of concrete language attributes in communication with investors broadly associates with positive i...

Competitive aggressiveness has been at the center of competitive dynamics literature for decades, however there is no consensus as to its primary drivers and performance consequences. Thus, we present the results of a meta-analysis of the antecedents to and consequences of competitive aggressiveness using three aggressiveness components—competitive...

Organizations, and the groups and individuals within them, sometimes face the thorny dilemma of whether or not to continue failing courses of action. Escalation of commitment describes the tendency to “carry on” with such questionable endeavors, regardless of whether doing so is likely to result in success. Despite the wide variability between and...

This chapter examines strategic decision‐making by expert organizations during periods of increased competitive and environmental turbulence. It is a rather low‐risk prediction that an entrepreneurial millennium will see decisions affecting the very survival of organizations made less often in the cool, objective context that dominant market positi...

Research Summary: We identify two types of knowledge leverage behaviors undertaken by acquiring firms: integrated and independent knowledge leverage. We address how the prior exploitation or exploration orientation of acquirers influence these two modes of knowledge leverage behaviors. The degree of exploitation of acquirers promotes integrating th...

In this chapter, we review recent work examining the influence individual executive characteristics exhibit on acquisition behavior, often in service of their private interests. In doing so, we outline the findings of this limited research, explore possible alternative explanations and factors, and discuss several novel data collection and methodol...

Numerous studies have focused on CEO charisma as an antecedent to firm performance, but this literature has largely overlooked the possibility that charisma manifests in more proximal strategic initiatives that (unlike performance) are largely under the CEO’s control. In this study we integrate perspectives from the upper echelons and charismatic l...

Justice research examining gender differences has yielded contrasting findings. This study enlists advanced techniques in cognitive neuroscience (fMRI) to examine gender differences in brain activation patterns in response to procedural and distributive justice manipulations. We integrate social role, information processing, justice, and neuroscien...

Guided by principle of cooperative communication, our paper theorized how the structure top managers’ earnings conference call communications would influence investors’ market responses. We tested our hypotheses with top managers’ presentations at firms’ quarterly earnings conference calls. The findings suggested that how information is communicate...

Regulatory focus theory proposes that decision-making and goal pursuit occur via either a promotion focus (a sensitivity to gains and a desire for advancement and growth) or a prevention focus (a sensitivity to losses and a desire for stability and security). Recent theorizing in strategic management research suggests that there may be important fi...

Research on the role of the corporate office in firm performance has focused on establishing how much performance variance can be attributed to a “corporate effect”, with little attention devoted to understanding how this influence occurs. In this study, we model capital allocation competency as a dynamic managerial capability and find that lower l...

We explore whether acquiring CEOs and directors act consistently with the idea that their newly announced acquisitions will increase long-term firm; value. Specifically, we examine postannouncement adjustments to CEOs' equity-based holdings and find acquiring CEOs tend to exercise options and sell firm stock following acquisition announcements. Mor...

Firms making acquisitions often employ investment banks for their experience. Using theories of organizational learning, we explore the nature of that experience and its use for acquiring firms. We argue that investment banks have difficulties learning from experience for future use and that acquiring firms have difficulties integrating the bank’s...

This chapter presents empirical and theoretical evidence that lending decisions are fundamentally and systematically flawed. The first part summarizes a decade of individual and joint research on credit risk and lending based on behavioral and political models rather than "eobjective" economic models alone. It shows individual, organizational, and...

Research in strategic management has shown that the timing of firm participation in a merger wave matters, as early movers have been shown to outperform later ones. However, while the consequences of the timing of action within a merger wave have been assessed, the causes that drive these timing effects remain unknown. We draw on the competitive dy...

The topic of escalation of commitment has intrigued the organizational sciences for over 35 years. A variety of theoretical explanations have been offered for why escalation occurs, and numerous constructs have been examined as antecedents of escalation behavior. However, little effort has been made to systematically investigate these various accou...

A classic debate in the organizational justice literature concerns the question of whether procedural justice and distributive justice are independent constructs. We investigate this question by using fMRI methods to examine brain activation patterns associated with procedural and distributive unfairness. We observed a clear dissociation of activat...

We investigate the firm characteristics that influence whether firms will lead or follow within industry merger waves. We draw on behavioral theory to develop hypotheses on firm characteristics of leaders, and we draw on institutional theory to predict acquisition processes of followers, in industry merger waves. Consistent with behavioral theory,...

A simmering debate in strategic management pits two conflicting views on the impact of corporate-level factors on affiliated business units. "Mainstream" proponents hold that corporate effects on business performance are substantial, while "revisionist" proponents hold that corporate effects are insubstantial compared to the impact of industry-rela...

Scholars from multiple fields have shown increasing interest in the causes and consequences of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). While this proliferation of research has the potential to significantly improve our understanding of M&A activity, absent is the necessary step of consolidating and integrating extant knowledge. Accordingly, we develop a fr...

We examine the influence of CEO equity-based compensation on the strategic risk taking by the firm. Building off of the Behavioral Agency Model, Agency Theory, and Prospect Theory, we develop arguments about when equity-based compensation elements will increase and when they will decrease executive risk propensity and, in turn, strategic risk takin...

This article discusses the roles of electoral politics monitoring and market competition among monitors development of risk assessments for developing countries. Under the political business cycle theory credit ratings would drop in developing countries with leftist presidents who increased economic aid during an election year. This trend is analyz...

Acquisitions often occur in waves within industries. We extend the theoretical understanding of such waves by drawing upon research on early mover advantage and bandwagon effects to develop arguments regarding the likely performance potential of participating at different points in an acquisition wave. In line with our theoretical model, we find ac...

A growing body of research in management and related public policy fields concludes that the 1980s and 1990s saw greater dynamic competition throughout technology-intensive ("TI") industries, with wide-spread, steady increase in TI industry and business performance instability as principal consequences. We test for evidence of these consequences in...

One of the key ways in which many scientific fields (including management) develop is through scholarly journal publication (McWilliams, Siegel, & Van Fleet, 2005; Spencer, 2001). The top journals in a field serve as a collection and dissemination system, annually gathering in thousands of submis-sions that are then carefully evaluated and cri-tiqu...

We integrate theory and findings from the strategic groups and reputation literatures to examine the consequences of cognitive strategic group membership and positioning within strategic groups on the media reputations of firms. We extend past discussions of media reputation to examine substantive media reputations based on the attributes that the...

Hawawini, Subramanian, and Verdin (2003) examined the relative impact of industry- vs. firm-level factors shaping firm performance. They demonstrated that variance in firm performance attributable to industry-level factors increases, while variance attributable t to firm-level factors decreases when ‘exceptionally’ higher- and lower-performing ‘out...

Firms often delegate elements of strategic decisions to outside experts who promise objective assessments, which are especially valuable in unstable environments. However experts themselves may be prone to skewed decision making as the stability of their own industry environment changes and as their positioning within the industry shifts. We examin...

Some strategy scholars and practitioners contend that markets have become increasingly hypercompetitive in recent years. We examine this contention by analyzing industry and business performance patterns in a broad sample of firms drawn from the Compustat Industry Segment database for the 1978–97 period. We find little support for the argument that...

Drawing from economic and cognitive theories, researchers have argued that firms within an industry tend to cluster together, following similar strategies. Their positioning in strategic groups, in turn, is argued to influence firm actions and firm performance. We extend this research to examine performance implications of competitive positioning n...

Examining commercial lending decisions, we found that increased monitoring of decision makers and changing decision makers attenuated escalation of commitment but also produced unintended effects. Some decision makers resisted downgrading the risk of borrowers in the face of organizational intervention, exhibiting "intervention avoidance," and esca...

A developing stream of research in the strategy field explores the competitive structure of industries from the perspective of industry participants. This work has demonstrated that managers develop strategic group knowledge structures in order to make sense of their competitive environment. This study extends this line of research by examining the...

How are decision practices fostered in organizations and how are they linked to decision outcomes? This study addresses these questions by examining one financial institution's efforts to standardize and control decision making across geographically separated organizational units. We argue that decision-maker behavior is situated and is not simply...

Rating agencies play a pivotal role in international credit transactions. Their sovereign risk-assessments are largely thought to reflect objective evaluations of the creditworthiness of potential borrowers. We test this assumption by examining the role that competitive positioning and dynamics play in the risk-assessments these agencies provide. O...

Examining the association between managerial assessments of risk and expected return using nonexperimental data from specific commercial lending decisions, we found that risk-return associations depended on the measures used. However, with a return measure that accounted for the expected costs of riskier decisions, risk and return were negatively r...

In today’s dynamic marketplace, top managers need information available at their fingertips. The Internet can provide this information at little cost and with little training, eliminating the “middleman” effect present today in most organizations. This paper outlines how the Internet can be used as a competitive knowledge tool to provide senior man...

Although management researchers would like to understand management decisions related to risk, almost all previous research an risk has used either experiments or aggregate corporate data rather than data from actual business decisions. In this initial research on risk in actual business decisions, rye examined the risk assessments bankers assigned...