Acquisitions As Exaptation: The Legacy of Founding Institutions in the U.S. Commercial Banking Industry

Marquis, Christopher; Huang, Zhi

doi:10.5465/amj.2010.57318393

Cited by 147 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…This finding is in keeping with the broader imprinting literature, and with the characterization of the environment as a varied n-dimensional space in which a set of economic, technological, and other conditions jointly constitute the imprint of the period (Marquis and Tilcsik 2013). Third, our secondary findings on acquisition of specific skills during deployment to a challenging context are related to the construct of "exaptation" in the imprinting literature (Higgins 2005, Marquis andHuang 2010), a process whereby a capability developed as an adaptive response to initial conditions later becomes useful for a different purpose. Finally, our finding that challenge is not associated with upper echelon promotions suggests a novel limitation of the effect of early conditions on subsequent individual performance.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development

Chattopadhyay

Choudhury

2017

Organization Science

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We develop and test predictions on how early-career challenges arising from the workplace context affect short-and long-term career advancement of individuals. Typically an organization's decision to deploy a manager to one of several possible contexts is endogenous to unobservable factors, and selection makes it challenging to disentangle the effect of workplace context on individual career advancement. We work around this problem by studying an organization, the Indian Administrative Services, which deploys entrylevel managers quasi-randomly across India. We find that managers deployed to more challenging contexts early in their careers experience faster career advancement in the short term. We present suggestive evidence that this is because challenging contexts provide managers more opportunities to develop skills ('crucible experiences'), and a greater motivation to relocate out of the challenging context. We also find that managers deployed to a challenging context early in their careers continue to experience faster advancement in the long term, suggesting that initial deployment to a challenging context is associated with human capital development. Managers initially deployed to more challenging contexts were not, however, more likely to break into the upper echelons of the organization Key words: context; location; workplace context, career advancement, performance; individuals; promotion; crucible experiences; motivation; internal mobility; human capital development; microfoundations.1 The authors thank Janet Bercovitz, Ethan Bernstein, Gina Dokko, David Kryscynski, Joseph Mahoney, Mario Schjiven, Deepak Somaya, Olav Sorenson, Michael Toffel, seminar audiences at Sumantra Ghoshal Conference, London Business School, The Wharton Business School and University of Washington at St. Louis, the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their comments, suggestions and advice on this paper, and Katie Moore for editorial help. 2Career advancement measured in terms of promotions, and human-capital development during employment, are important topics for both individuals and organizations (Coff 1997, Wang andBarney 2006). The path to career advancement affects future rewards for both individuals and organizations (Bidwell and Mollick 2015), and prior literature has shown that career experiences can shape and reveal human capital and affect career advancement of individuals (Campbell 2013, Dokko et al. 2009). The literature has also documented that early career experiences have a lasting effect on subsequent job performance via socialization, approaches to problem solving (Tilcsik 2014), and access to reputationbuilding opportunities (Briscoe and Kellogg 2011).Past work has studied how contextual features like resource munificence affect individuals, but much of this work has focused on the impact of economic and technological factors on individual performance (Tilcisk 2014). A relatively unexplored area is studying the impact of workplace challengeuncertainty and threats arising from the broader sociopolitical cont...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development

Chattopadhyay

Choudhury

2017

Organization Science

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“…Specifically, we examine how key features of a firm's political embeddedness that shape its need for legitimacy-e.g., state versus private ownership (Chen 2007, Li and, network connections to national political congresses (Hillman 2005, Ma andParish 2006), political legacy (Kriauciunas andKale 2006, Marquis andHuang 2010), and financial resources-result in firms being more or less likely to follow government signals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in China: Symbol or Substance?

Marquis¹,

Qian

2014

Organization Science

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1,054

1,157

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T his study focuses on how and why firms strategically respond to government signals on appropriate corporate activity.We integrate institutional theory with research on corporate political strategy to develop a political dependence model that explains (a) how different types of dependency on the government lead firms to issue corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and (b) how the risk of governmental monitoring affects the extent to which CSR reports are symbolic or substantive. First, we examine how firm characteristics reflecting dependence on the government-including private versus state ownership, executives serving on political councils, political legacy, and financial resources-affect the likelihood of firms issuing CSR reports. Second, we focus on the symbolic nature of CSR reporting and how variance in the risk of government monitoring through channels such as bureaucratic embeddedness and regional government institutional development influences the extent to which CSR communications are symbolically decoupled from substantive CSR activities. Our database includes all CSR reports issued by the approximately 1,600 publicly listed Chinese firms between 2006 and 2009. Our hypotheses are generally supported. The political perspective we develop contributes to organizational theory by showing that (a) government signaling is an important mechanism of political influence, (b) different types of dependency on the government expose firms to different types of legitimacy pressure, and (c) firms face a decoupling risk that makes them more likely to enact substantive CSR actions in situations in which they are likely to be monitored.

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“…Third, this article contributes also to research on founder imprinting (Marquis & Huang, 2010;Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Founder commitment to green and banking logics was similar in these two organizations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Different Shades of Green: Environment Uncertainty and the Strategies of Hybrid Organizations

Almandoz¹,

Lee²,

Marquis³

2017

Emergence

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How does environmental uncertainty affect the process of starting new hybrid organizations? Our comparative analysis of the formation of two "green" banks À with hybrid goals linked to banking and environmental logics À reveals that shifts in their strategic orientations resulted from attempts to align uncertain and changing resource environments with the composition and goals of the organizations' top leadership. While the initial idea and goals of the founders were similar, the organizations they established ended up with divergent strategic orientations and senior leadership groups.

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Acquisitions As Exaptation: The Legacy of Founding Institutions in the U.S. Commercial Banking Industry

Cited by 147 publications

References 78 publications

Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development

Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development

Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in China: Symbol or Substance?

Different Shades of Green: Environment Uncertainty and the Strategies of Hybrid Organizations

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