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Past research has found that married men have advantages in the labor market. In this paper we examine the extent to which the advantage of married men is evident in research and development organizations with different characteristics. Specifically, we examine the extent to which each of the following organizational characteristics enhance or limit the advantages that married men enjoy both in access to favorable work experiences on the job and in the evaluation of their performance: the extent of involvement in basic research, the proportion of funding from corporate sources, the extent of external contracting, the tightness of work schedules, and the use cross-functional teams. Using information from managers to measure organizational characteristics, we find that married men are advantaged in all types of R&D organizations.

This paper aims to evaluate alternative theories about how perceived innovativeness and perceived relational skills interact with gender to explain evaluations by managers of scientists and engineers' promotability into management.

A cross‐sectional design is used. The sample (n=2,278) is drawn from 24 large US corporations. Separate surveys are administered in each corporation to scientists and engineers and to managers evaluating them.

Managers rate men and women equally promotable. Furthermore, women whom managers perceived to be especially innovative receive higher evaluations of promotability than similarly accomplished men. And, among those perceived to have low relational skills, women and men are evaluated similarly.

More research is needed to evaluate how ambivalent stereotypes and pressures from organizations to suppress categorical thinking might combine to affect evaluation and selection processes in diverse work settings.

Companies should be concerned about the potential tendency for managers to reward a few individuals when they exceed stereotypical expectations. Employees should be aware of and actively manage the impressions that managers have of them with regard to innovativeness and relational skills.

This paper calls attention to the role of ambivalence and legitimacy theories that predict that women will receive higher evaluations when they exceed stereotypical expectations of innovativeness and that when women do not meet stereotypical expectations of relational skills, managers will temper their harshness in evaluating them. In developing this analysis, it seeks to contribute to the understanding of evaluation processes by considering the context in which evaluations take place.

A creative identity, the incorporation of creativity into self-definition, is associated with creative outcomes. Given the importance of creativity to organizational success, understanding creative identity and in particular creative identity work (the formation and maintenance of creative identity) can be useful in understanding creatives within organizations. To be considered creative, individuals need to not only produce unique artefacts, but these artefacts need to be assessed by legitimate judges as being creative. Judges may be within an organization (e.g., senior researchers within a laboratory) or may be external to an organization (e.g., award judges in international advertising competitions). Underpinning creative identity work is the creative assessment, however this assessment is ambiguous and contextual. In other words, what is considered creative in one context or by one judge may not be considered creative in another context or by different judges. The ambiguity of the creative assessment makes creative identity work a precarious undertaking. Based on two case studies – a R&D laboratory and an advertising agency – this research explores the strategies which creative individuals employ in their creative identity work in response to the ambiguity of the creative assessment. This research contributes to the growing area of creative identity research by unpacking three specific strategies used as part of identity work of creatives: defending, emotional distancing and differentiating. These strategies assist the creatives in maintaining a coherent sense of who they are within the organizational context despite the unpredictability of the creative assessment.

Brand managers in packaged goods firms are under pressure to increase or maintain high sales promotion spending at the expense of media advertising. This study investigates the antecedents and outcomes of brand managers’ advertising and sales promotion budget allocations by adopting a bounded rationality perspective. Based on survey data collected from 165 brand managers in the USA, higher advertising (vs sales promotion) allocations are associated with: single, relatively high priced brands in the early phases of the product life cycle; and more experienced brand managers who are subject to less retail influence. Also, brands with higher budget allocations to advertising, relative to sales promotion, tend to have more favorable consumer attitudes, stronger brand equity, and higher market share increases and profits. Managerial implications and areas for future study are discussed.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Drawing on role theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate a curvilinear relationship between employee’s perceived overall time pressure and creativity. Apart from this, it explores a three-way interaction of perceived time pressure, satisfaction with work-family balance (SWFB), and leader-member exchange (LMX) on creativity.

The paper reports a quantitative study of 251 employees from a European company. An online survey was used to collect data. The proposed hypotheses were tested using moderated hierarchical regression analysis.

Results demonstrate a U-shaped curvilinear relationship between perceived time pressure and creativity. Results further confirm the proposed three-way interaction of perceived time pressure, SWFB, and LMX as joint predictors of creativity.

The cross-sectional research design limits the ability to demonstrate causality. Moreover, the data were collected from a single source causing concern for common method bias. Nonetheless, recent research suggests that common method bias cannot create an artificial interaction effect.

This study is one of the rare attempts to examine a curvilinear relationship between perceived time pressure and creativity. Moreover, it contributes to the work-family literature by providing the first empirical examination of the linkage between SWFB and creativity. Furthermore, the authors find a three-way interaction between time pressure, SWFB and LMX, and creativity. These findings broaden our understanding of how personal and contextual factors interact to foster creativity.