This article reports partial results of an eight-year field study of the Top Management Teams (TMTs) of a global multidivisional financial services corporation and compares those results with large-sample work in the TMT literature. In particular, it investigates the operationalization of TMT cognitive diversity by the proxies of age, team tenure, industry experience, and functional background heterogeneity most often used in statistical work, and compares those operationalizations with cognitive diversity itself. In addition to highlighting which proxies seemed to most closely approximate cognitive diversity and why, it demonstrates the confounding impact of power on all operationalizations. A comparison of the field results with three representative studies with respect to the operationalization of the dependent variables of diversification, innovation, and performance helps to explain why previous TMT heterogeneity research has often produced inconsistent results or nonfindings. It offers some suggestions that should improve the robustness of statistical research and demonstrates the reciprocal usefulness of case and large-sample research.

Despite calls for more visual methodologies in organizational research, the use of photographs remains sparse. Organizational research could benefit from the inclusion of photographs to track contemporary change processes in an organization and change processes over time, as well as to incorporate diverse voices within organizations, to name a few advantages. To further understanding, the authors identify researcher choices related to the use of photographs in organizational research, clarify the advantages and disadvantages of these choices, and discuss ethical and other special considerations of the use of photographs. They highlight several organizational areas of research, primarily related to the management discipline, that could benefit from the inclusion of photographs. Finally, the authors describe how they used photographs in a study of one organization and specifically how their intended research design with photographs changed over the course of the study as well as how photographs helped to develop new theoretical insights. Photographic research methods represent a viable—but underleveraged—method that should be more fully incorporated in the methodological tool kit of organizational scholars.

Social networks are an important source of information for entrepreneurs and small firms.In this study, we consider the influence of social networks on survey response rates from small firms, focusing on effects of trade association endorsement and regional affiliation. Our findings show that trade association endorsement has a positive effect on survey response rate. In addition, the demonstration of the researcher's social ties to the firm's region has a positive effect on survey response rate. Our results lead to several practical implications for survey research on small firms and on industrial populations in general. Targeted personal follow-up with managers in close geographic proximity to the sponsoring university(ies) appears to be a particularly cost-effective strategy to increase response rates.

This study focuses on a particular form of family businesses-businesses with at least two unrelated founding families-and how their organizational form of a multifamily business persists over several generations. Using an inductive approach to study five multifamily cases, we discovered that these firms did not meet complexity with complex structures and processes. Instead, four cases developed and utilized simple rules imprinted by the founders and pulled through to current generations, enabling effective mutual monitoring and persistence of the multifamily organizational form. The lack of simple rules development is associated with one multifamily business to abandon this organizational form.