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As organizations strive for more flexibility, decentralized decision‐making has been at the core of many modern HR approaches. Yet, on a company‐wide scale, it remains unclear whether decentralized decision‐making structures improve organizational performance. Our study aims to illuminate prior ambiguous evidence by examining an employee‐level mechanism underlying the organizational‐level relationship between decentralization and performance, and scrutinizing the critical role of formal leaders for empowering employees in decentralized structures. Integrating the perspective of organizational structure as opportunities and constraints with social information processing theory, we argue that transferring decision‐making authority to lower organizational levels positively affects employees' emergent leadership, but only to the extent that direct supervisors engage in empowering leadership and guide employees' behaviors in decentralized structures. Our predictions are supported by a multilevel, multisource field study of 5807 individuals across 144 companies. We further find that emergent leadership yields a positive effect on organizational performance. By developing a multilevel model that explicates both an employee‐level mechanism and a contingency of the decentralization–organizational performance link, our study enriches understanding of the key role that formal leaders play for achieving the strategic goals of decentralized decision‐making in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research suggests that the organizational context supports the emergence of employee ambidexterity; however, the interplay between formal and informal context has been largely unexplored. We analyze this interplay with a multilevel, multisource data set of 2446 individual employees nested in 77 organizations. We find that a promotion climate—unlike a prevention climate—contributes to employee ambidexterity. In addition, formalization positively moderates the effects of both promotion and prevention climate on employee ambidexterity, while centralization weakens the positive effect of promotion climate. Our results advance a contingency perspective that brings together formal and informal contextual drivers of employee ambidexterity and shows that even though an informal climate signals the preferred manner of goal pursuit, a formal structure affects the impact of such signals by delineating opportunity corridors of admissible behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Traditionally, older employees have held higher positions in the organizational hierarchy. However, today, there is significant variation among firms in the extent to which age is correlated with rank. In this study, we integrate the career timetable and social exchange theory to propose that age–rank correlation is related to organizational performance, serially mediated by the perceived age discrimination climate and organizational innovation. We further suggest that the direction of this indirect relationship depends on firms' environmental dynamism. We find support for our moderated serial mediation framework using multisource data from 12,829 employees, 68 top HR representatives, and 229 top managers in 68 firms. Under lower levels of environmental dynamism, age–rank correlation was negatively related to perceived age discrimination climate and had a positive indirect relationship with organizational performance. Under higher levels of environmental dynamism, age–rank correlation was positively related to perceived age discrimination climate and had a negative indirect relationship with organizational performance. Our study provides a more nuanced view of the fading link between age and rank, which has typically been viewed negatively and from an individual perspective only. Additionally, our results have important practical implications for organizations navigating a shifting workforce demographic in increasingly dynamic environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from team‐level job demands‐resources theory, we hypothesize that team workload demands moderate the positive link between team boundary work (i.e., boundary spanning and boundary buffering) and team effectiveness (i.e., team innovation and team performance), such that boundary work is more beneficial for team effectiveness when teams face higher team workload demands. Furthermore, we predict that this interaction occurs through increased team vigor, where team vigor is defined as an affective emergent state characterized by positive valences and high activation levels experienced by team members. We largely find support for our model across two field studies: a cross‐sectional survey using three independent data sources (89 automotive research and development teams, including 724 team members, 89 team leaders and 18 managers) and a time‐lagged survey using two independent data sources (139 teams working in a Chinese utility company, including 640 team members and 139 team leaders). Our article contributes to team research by broadening our understanding of when and how team boundary work is associated with greater team effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with competitive labor markets, firms increasingly use employer branding to build a qualified workforce and engage their employees. However, our understanding of the impact of employer branding orientation on firm performance and the theoretical firm‐level mechanisms underlying this potential impact is very limited. To address this gap, we integrate brand marketing theory with human resource management (HRM) research to develop a model explicating how employer branding orientation is linked to firm performance through a dual route by enhancing both recruitment efficiency (i.e., external route: applicants) and positive affective climate (i.e., internal route: incumbent employees). The results of a multisource study (i.e., top management, human resource managers, employees) with 93 firms show employer branding orientation is positively related to firm performance through positive affective climate but not recruitment efficiency. Using a brand equity approach to HRM, our results advance the literature by demonstrating the generalizability of employer branding effects independent of concrete brand attributes and explaining the firm‐level mediating mechanisms linking it to firm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]