It is with great honor and pride that I present the first issue of 2022 to you as Editor-in-Chief of Management and Organization Review (MOR)! With a new editorial team consisting of 9 deputy editors, 37 senior editors, and more than 100 editorial board members, MOR is committed to its new mission of becoming a premier journal publishing groundbreaking research related to Chinese management.
New initiatives have also been put in place to make MOR more accessible, more transparent, and greener than before. First, MOR will publish six issues annually, making it a bi-monthly publication. Second, all issues will be published online, making it a paperless publication. Third, all published articles will make their study materials available on secured websites such as the Open Science Framework. In addition, we have newly accepted articles available on FirstView. We also make one paper freely available to readers every month as the ‘FirstView Article of the Month’.
More excitingly, our new editorial team, together with guest editors, have made great efforts to promote under-explored research topics unique to Chinese organizations that could reveal new insights to advance management theory and practice in general. So far, five Special Issue ‘Calls for Proposals’ have been developed and are open to proposals.
Now let me turn to the articles in this issue. Together they study important organizational phenomena from multiple perspectives and levels, offering significant theoretical and practical insights. For example, in ‘Implicit voice delivery: Its antecedents, consequences, and boundary conditions’, Dr. Ren and colleagues reveal that subordinates’ implicit voice delivery approach facilitates voice endorsement by the supervisor due to Chinese people's consideration for face saving, and such effect is stronger when the supervisor is better at inferring meaning from nonverbal communicative cues. In ‘Management innovation and middle managers: The role of empowering leadership, voice, and collectivist orientation’, Dr. Rohlfer and colleagues find that the voice of middle managers mediates the effect of CEOs’ empowering leadership behavior on perceived management innovation. In this case, it is the middle managers’ collectivist orientation that positively influences their attention to CEOs’ signals and their contributions to management innovation.
Related to leadership, Drs. Yi, Chen, and He discover that CEO empowering leadership positively affects firm strategic decision comprehensiveness, which can be weakened by top management team's cognitive conflict. Meanwhile CEO directive leadership generates an inverted U-shaped effect on firm strategic decision comprehensiveness, which is positively related to firm performance. Moreover, to examine corporate philanthropy, Dr. Xu and colleagues compare the role of CEO versus CFO and find that CEO organizational identification positively affects corporate philanthropy, whereas the opposite is true for CFO organizational identification. Moreover, the positive influence of CEO organizational identification on corporate philanthropy is weakened by CFO organizational identification, especially when the CFO has a different gender than the CEO, or when the CFO has ownership.
This issue also includes two papers on China's advancement in technology. One paper is on the manufacturing industry's technology catch-up, which deconstructs technological learning processes into technology decomposition and technology recombination and proposes a unique ‘ladder-like’ catch-up context. The authors (Chen, Guo, Guo, & Li) find that only technology recombination has a positive relationship with industrial catch-up performance, which is further strengthened by the market ladder. The other paper is on Chinese mobile phone industry. The authors (Shi, Luo, Hou, Rong, & Shi) conducted a longitudinal qualitative study, through which they developed a two-dimensional process model of ecosystem emergence: the temporal dimension that delineates three stages of, and the spatial dimension that highlights an architectural pattern of reciprocities between value chain and resource pool to enable, the ecosystem emergence.
Lastly, this issue features two Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion pieces. First, the essay ‘Solving paradox by increasing technological capacity: A critique of the concept of business model innovation at TikTok’, comments on Yulun Ma and Yue Hu's (2021) recent article ‘Business model innovation and experimentation in transforming economies: ByteDance and TikTok’. The author (Dr. Li) challenges the original authors’ attribution of TikTok's international success to business model innovation; instead, he argues that it is because of ByteDance's increasing technological capacity (a non-location bound algorithm) supported by national policies that helped TikTok overcome three major hurdles facing emerging market firms pursuing internationalization, namely, liability of foreignness, liability of origin, and paradoxical tension between global integration and local responsiveness. Second, Dr. Tucci comments on both Li (2022) and Ma and Hu (2021) by exploring the different ways that business models and business model innovation are defined in management research.
I truly hope that you find these papers insightful. I also hope that you are inspired by MOR's new mission and initiatives!
Happy Chinese New Year of the Tiger, everyone!
