As the world struggles to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, the stark inequalities in our societies have been laid bare, and the interplay between organizations and societies has also become evident yet again. This crisis underscores the need for management scholars to take a societal turn and examine how organizational practices interact with societal economic inequality. To illustrate this approach, we discuss organizational practices—corporate social responsibility, work design, recruitment and selection, and compensation management—that can contribute to the normalization, reinforcement, and reduction of economic inequalities in society. We conclude by calling on scholars of inequality, as well as of broader management research, to take a societal turn to enhance the relevance and impact of management research.
We study how the reputation and status of resource providers affect the two organizational outcomes of product quality and revenues, hiring decisions, and prices paid to resource providers. We argue that reputation and status have different effects on outcomes: reputation has a stronger effect on product quality, and status has a stronger effect on revenues. Building on this, we argue that actual quality mediates the effect of reputation on revenues more than the effect of status on revenues. Moreover, reputation and status have different effects on how organizations acquire resources: when their product quality is low relative to their aspiration level, organizations will display a preference for recruiting high-reputation resource providers over high-status ones. Conversely, organizations will display a preference for recruiting highstatus resource providers over high-reputation ones when their revenue is low relative to their aspiration level. Finally, although both reputation and status have positive effects on the price paid for a resource, we argue that the relationship between reputation and pay is weaker for highstatus resource providers. We find support for our hypotheses in a sample of NBA players and teams.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.