Organizations & Markets

Merit-based recruitment and higher pay in Chile’s public hospitals attracted better-trained managers – leading to lower mortality rates and improved healthcare performance.

This editorial examines the empirical foundations of Chinese management research through an analysis of data sources and research designs in all empirical papers published in Management and Organization Review (MOR) over the past five years. Our review shows that 53.2% of studies rely on archival or secondary data, with 37% of quantitative studies focusing on publicly listed firms. While established datasets provide consistency and comparability, their prevalence may limit opportunities to explore China’s diverse organizational ecosystem.

We study whether the quality of managers can affect public service provision in the context of public health. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we show how the introduction of a competitive recruitment system and better pay for public hospital CEOs reduced hospital mortality by 8 percent. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition. We find that the policy changed the pool of CEOs by displacing doctors with no management training in favor of CEOs who had studied management.

We quantify the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on firm productivity through a series of large-scale randomized field experiments involving millions of users and products at a leading cross-border online retail platform. Over six months in 2023-2024, GenAI-based enhancements were integrated into seven consumer-facing business workflows. We find that GenAI adoption significantly increases sales, with treatment effects ranging from 0% to 16.3%, depending on GenAI’s marginal contribution relative to existing firm practices.

Social media platforms have become vital channels for businesses to reach consumers through advertising. But in the United States, the digital advertising market in which these platforms operate is dominated by a few major players, raising concerns for antitrust regulators. In such a concentrated market, the entry or exit of a single platform can reallocate billions in ad spending, affecting businesses and users.

The global rise of nationalism has distorted the neoliberal vision of a borderless world where the nationality of businesses would be rendered obsolete. While nationalism can promote solidarity and progress, it also has the potential to deepen social divisions and fuel conflict-realities that organizations cannot ignore. In this paper, we propose a theory of organizational nationalism, which positions organizations not merely as passive responders to nationalist institutional pressures or geopolitical risks but as active agents in shaping nationalistic beliefs, values, and policies.

Existing theories present a mixed account of how perceivers’ views of a target person’s antagonism relate to their perceptions of the target’s general competence and leadership effectiveness. We argue that, rather than being universal, the relationship between these perceptions varies according to perceivers’ idiosyncratic worldviews. In particular, we theorize and find across seven studies (total N = 2,065) that competitive worldview (CWV) serves as a lens through which perceivers interpret and evaluate others’ antagonistic behavior.

Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a significant gender pay gap, which is largely attributed to women working at lower-paying employers. To interpret this fact, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, amenities, and hiring. We provide a constructive proof of identification of all model parameters. The estimated model suggests that amenities are important for both men and women, and that compensating differentials account for half of the gender pay gap.

Firms with political connections to a regime with an authoritarian history face a dilemma when the regime undergoes a democratic transition. Such connections provide an essential competitive advantage when the regime is in power but become a liability when an institutional transition brings democratic change. This study theorizes that when mass protests expose a regime’s distorted policies favoring elites over others and signal a high probability of regime turnover, firms may hedge against the risks associated with their political connections by engaging in philanthropy.