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Scholars within institutional theory have consistently directed their focus toward the institutional and organizational determinants that explain why certain organizations engage in institutional decoupling. While these studies offer valuable insights, there remains a significant gap in understanding how individual employees respond to institutional decoupling. This study addresses this theoretical gap by examining South Korean organizations ostensibly adopting the 40-hour work policy while discreetly maintaining overtime work to sustain productivity. Through a multi-level analysis involving 6,576 individual employees across 209 organizations, our findings reveal a negative relationship between institutional decoupling, organizational identification, and proactive performance, attributed to the cognitive dissonance arising from the incongruence between external expressions and internal values. We argue that cognitive dissonance can be mitigated through normative attitudes and behaviors associated with social identities, along with individual motivations for self-enhancement. As organizations gain greater appeal in the labor market, employees rationalize institutional decoupling as a means to enhance their identity and status. Additionally, when organizations make efforts to achieve a desirable future image, they interpret institutional decoupling as a transitional phase aimed at reinforcing their social identity. These findings highlight the role of social identity in shaping how individual employees address cognitive dissonance arising from institutional decoupling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the multidivisional form can foster efficient organization of diverse lines of business, it requires a complementary mechanism to share resources across businesses. This study explores whether the transfer of executive managers across business divisions is driven by inter-divisional resource sharing, and how external market conditions shape the relative advantage of inter-divisional executive transfer over alternatives like within-division appointment or external recruitment. Focusing on Korean business groups, our empirical analysis reveals that the availability of corporate-level resources and given exchange relationships among business divisions influences inter-divisional executive transfer. We also find that intensified product market competition and stronger external capital market control diminish the value of inter-divisional executive transfer and instead promote external recruitment of executives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how social cues from stakeholders and from third-party bureaucratic actors can serve as symbolic signals that can affect the decision-making of regulatory agencies. We find that social cues from reputation stakeholders and bureaucratic agencies positively affect approval rates of GMO-products by threatening the regulatory agency's reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have shown that collective activists can negatively affect performance of individual firms, little is known about how firms respond to field-level private politics--activist attacks that threaten the legitimacy of collective identities shared by all firms in the field. We suggest that firms may promulgate an alternative collective identity while shifting away from the tarnished identity to address the issue of legitimacy threats. Using the U.S. wood-biomass sector as an empirical setting, we describe how wood pellet producers attempted to frame a collective identity of sustainable, renewable energy producers and shift away from a negative identity portrayed by forestry conservation activists of exploitative forest product manufacturers. We empirically examine the consequences and contingencies of this tactic on pellet firms being legally recognized as renewable energy producers and its subsequent impact on the growth of the biomass sector. We also discuss the implications of these findings for research on social movements, organization theory, and nonmarket strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]