Abstract:  

I construct a new measure of organizational cultural inconsistency capturing whether the culture communicated by top management is inconsistent with that perceived by employees within an organization. I provide the first large-sample empirical evidence documenting the industry and time-series distributions of organizational cultural inconsistency and explore its correlation with firm characteristics. My findings suggest that both organizational constraints and short-term performance pressures explain organizational cultural inconsistency. Specifically, firms with greater geographical dispersion, weaker monitoring capacity, less emphasis on long-term performance, and more transient institutional ownership are more likely to be culturally inconsistent. Leveraging local public sentiment towards a social movement as an instrument, I show that cultural inconsistency hurts firm value and profitability. Finally, I demonstrate that firms that focus more on culture in employee selection are less likely to experience cultural inconsistency. Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of organizational cultural inconsistency as a management control problem, provides important practical implications on how to mitigate cultural inconsistency, and opens up an avenue for future research on organizational culture.

Abstract:  

Upward influencers, employees that are more favorably perceived by their supervisors than their peers and subordinates, are predicted by economic and accounting theories and are found to be ubiquitous in many organizations. Despite their prevalence, whether having them in teams can impact team performance outcomes is generally underexplored. This paper fills this void by using proprietary data from a service-providing organization that allows for identification of upward influencers based on its 360-degree person evaluation. Our identification strategy relies on the plausibly exogenous team assignment at the organization with team performance being evaluated by clients. We find that the relationship between the proportion of upward influencers in a team and team performance is nonlinear and exhibits an inverted-U shape. Further tests and additional survey evidence show that upward influencers impair team horizontal relationships through worse communication, knowledge sharing, mutual assistance among team members, team satisfaction and perceptions of fairness. Meanwhile, teams with upward influencers build better vertical relationships with supervisors and in returns, supervisors allocate more of their time to provide team members with feedback and guidance. Finally, we show that the impact of upward influencers on team performance is more pronounced when the need for collaboration and information sharing is high and when managers are less experienced. Taken together, this study contributes to the understanding of upward influencers in teams and highlights the importance of team composition and managerial experience.

Abstract:  

Empowered learning, a management control that enables employees to learn proactively and self-sufficiently, has increasingly gained attention in many organizations. This study explores the impact of empowered learning on employee performance and the conditions enhancing its effectiveness. We exploit proprietary data from a service-providing organization that implemented an empowered learning system which empowers employees to actively reflect upon and learn from their prior performance. Our identification strategy relies on the staggered feature of the adoption of the system. We find that, on average, the system significantly boosts employee performance, with a 64.5% standard deviation increase in quarterly performance ratings among treated employees. The performance benefits unfold progressively, underscoring the system's long-term effect. We also find that the impact of empowered learning is amplified with knowledge sharing but reduced with higher self-serving attributions. These findings offer key insights for researchers and guidance for practitioners on implementing empowered learning systems and investing in continuous learning and development.