Administrative Science Quarterly,  September 2007, volume 52, issue 3. Johnson Graduate School of Management / Cornell University, NY.

1. Arijit Chatterjee and Donald C. Hambrick. It´s All about Me: Narcissistic Chief Executive Officers and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance.

This study uses unobtrusive measures of the narcissism of chief executive officers (CEOs) –the prominence of the CEO´s photograph in annual reports, the CEO´s prominence in press releases, the CEO´s use of first-person singular pronouns in interviews, and compensation relative to the second-highest-paid firm executive- to examine the effect of CEO narcissism on a firm´s strategy and performance. Results of and empirical study of 111 CEOs in the computer hardware and software industries in 1992-2004 show that narcissism in CEOs is positively related to strategic dynamism and grandiosity, as well as the number and size of acquisitions, and it engenders extreme and fluctuating organizational performance. The results suggest that narcissistic CEOs favor bold actions that attract attention, resulting in big wins or big losses, but that, in these industries, their firms performance is generally no better or worse than firms with non-narcissistic CEOs.

2. Jesper B. Sorensen. Bureaucracy and Entrepreneurship: Workplace Effects on Entrepreneurial Entry.

Using a study of the relationship between bureaucratic work environments and individual rates of entrepreneurship, I revisit a fundamental premise of sociological approaches to entrepreneurship, namely, that the social context shapes the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity, above and beyond any effects of individual characteristics. Establishing such contextual effects empirically is complicated by the possibility that unobserved individual traits influence both the contexts in which people are observed and their likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs. This paper presents the first systematic study of the effects of bureaucracy on entrepreneurship that accounts for such unobserved sorting processes. Analyses of data on labor market attachments and transitions to entrepreneurship in Denmark between 1990 and 1997 show that people who work for large and old firms are less likely to become entrepreneurs, net of a host of observable individual characteristics. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that this negative effect to bureaucracy does not spuriously reflect self-selection by nascent entrepreneurs into different types of firms. An important implication of this finding is that the structure of organizational populations effects the supply of nascent entrepreneurs, as well as the availability of entrepreneurial opportunities.

3. Brayden G. King and Sarah A. Soule. Social Movements as Extra-institutional Entrepreneurs: The Effect of Protests on Stock Price Returns.

This paper uses social movement theory to examine one way in which secondary stakeholders outside the corporation may influence organizational processes, even if they are excluded from participating in legitimate channels of organizational change. Using data on activist protests of U.S. corporations during 1962-1990, we examine the effect of protests on abnormal stock price returns, and indicator of investors´ reactions to a focal event. Empirical analysis demonstrates that protests are more influential when they target issues dealing with critical stakeholder groups, such as labor or consumers, and when generating greater media coverage to the firm prior to the protest event. Past media attention provides alternative information to investors that may contradict the messages broadcast by protestors.

4. Lee Fleming, Santiago Mingo, and David Chen. Collaborative Brokerage, Generative Creativity, and Creative Success.

Analyzing data on utility patents from 1975 to 2002 in the careers of 35,400 collaborative inventors, this study examines the influence of brokered versus cohesive collaborative social structures on and individual´s creativity. We test the hypothesis that brokerage –direct ties to collaborators who themselves do not have direct ties to each test interaction hypotheses on the marginal benefits of cohesion, when collaborators have independent ties between themselves that do not include the individual. We identify the moderators of brokerage and argue for contingent benefits, based on the interaction of structure with the attributes, carrer experiences, and extended networks of individuals and their collaborators. Using a social definition of creative success, we also trace the development of creative ideas from their generation through future use by others. We test the hypothesis what brokered ideas are less likely to be used in future creative efforts. The results illustrate how collaborative brokerage can aid in the generation of an idea but then hamper its diffusion and use by others.