An official website of the United States government
Abstract Research SummaryWe study the processes of firm growth in the evolution of the Japanese cotton spinning industry during 1883–1914 by integrating strategy and historical approaches and utilizing rich quantitative firm‐level data and detailed business histories. The resultant conceptual model highlights growth outcomes of path dependencies as firms evolve across periods of single versus shared leadership, establish stability in shared leadership, or experience repeated discord‐induced top management team (TMT) leader departures. While most firms do not experience smooth transitions to stable shared TMT leadership, a focus on value creation, in conjunction with talent recruitment and promotion, enabled some firms to achieve stable shared leadership despite discord‐induced departures, engage in long‐term expansion, and emerge as “centers of gravity” for output and talent in the industry. Managerial SummaryWe demonstrate stable shared leadership is at root of firms who emerge as centers of gravity in an industry and account for the lion's share of output. Stable shared leadership enables growth strategies such as talent recruitment, product diversification, downstream integration, and acquisitions. Stable shared leadership, however, is extremely difficult to maintain. Most firms experience discord‐induced departures in TMTs due to politics and power struggles. Firms that deviate from this norm to become industry leaders achieve stable shared leadership by adhering to fundamental principles related to long‐term value creation as opposed to short‐term gain, adoption of merit‐based promotion systems in defiance of stereotypes, sharing of power within TMT leadership to enable efficient division of labor, and honorable resolution of conflicts and ethical breaches.
more »
« less
Voluntary leadership and the emergence of institutions for self-governance
Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10223740
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 117
- Issue:
- 44
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 27292 to 27299
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
ABSTRACT Incentives are a widely used tool for addressing deforestation and are often implemented as collective contracts. Local institutions are crucial to the solution of collective action problems associated with forest conservation, but we still have little knowledge of how to encourage institutional creation through policy. Since collective contracts do not eliminate freeriding incentives, we argue that their success hinges on their ability to stimulate the creation of institutions for collective action. To test these ideas, we analyze data from an incentivized lab‐in‐the‐field experimental collective action game played with natural resource users in four developing countries. The experiment simulates management of a common forest, and groups were randomly assigned to a conservation incentive payment condition. We observe how much group members attempt to coordinate on the creation of institutional rules and find experimental evidence that an external incentive program can stimulate the endogenous creation of informal institutions.more » « less
-
This qualitative study investigates the behaviors and strategies of effective leadership teams within ethnic community-based organizations (ECBOs) operating in the United States that consist of leaders who are themselves former refugees. Through analysis of four focus group interviews, each with three to five leaders from local Bhutanese, Burundian, Congolese, and Syrian communities, we identified ways in which these leaders exhibit transformational leadership behaviors proposed by established frameworks. Results reveal that effective ECBO leaders exhibit strong transformational leadership qualities, such as empowering community members, modeling behavior, and projecting a community vision. The study emphasizes the unique context of ECBOs and their leaders, showcasing their thoughtfulness, competency, and profound awareness of community members’ backgrounds. The implications include recognizing and valuing the skills of ECBO leaders and considering formal support mechanisms. This study contributes insights into the leadership exhibited within local community organizations serving refugee populations—enhancing our understanding of quality leadership among grassroots refugee organizations.more » « less
-
Ribeiro, Haroldo V. (Ed.)Societal responses to crises require coordination at multiple levels of organization. Exploring early efforts to contain COVID-19 in the U.S., we argue that local governments can act to ensure systemic resilience and recovery when higher-level governments fail to do so. Event history analyses show that large, more urban areas experience COVID-19 more intensely due to high population density and denser socioeconomic networks. But metropolitan counties were also among the first to adopt shelter-in-place orders. Analyzing the statistical predictors of when counties moved before their states, we find that the hierarchy of counties by size and economic integration matters for the timing of orders, where both factors predict earlier shelter-in-place orders. In line with sociological theories of urban governance, we also find evidence of an important governance dimension to the timing of orders. Liberal counties in conservative states were more than twice as likely to adopt a policy and implement one earlier in the pandemic, suggesting that tensions about how to resolve collective governance problems are important in the socio-temporal dynamic of responses to COVID-19. We explain this behavior as a substitution effect in which more urban local governments, driven by risk and necessity, step up into the action vacuum left by higher levels of government and become national policy leaders and innovators.more » « less
-
Abstract The introduction of formal collective property rights to forest lands appears to have improved both environmental and economic outcomes, but there is limited evidence on how these reforms affect cooperative behavior among local resource users. We propose that when national governments issue collective land rights, they strengthen the collective psychological ownership among coowners and produce increased levels of cooperative behavior. Analyzing data from 213 forest user groups in 10 countries, and a framed field experiment in a subset of sites, we find that collective land titling is associated with significantly higher levels of cooperative behavior including increased levels of trust, more frequent interpersonal interactions related to both forestry and nonforestry activities, more self‐governing institutions, and greater equality in resource extraction patterns.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007230117
