Search results

The purpose of this study is to examine how informational faultlines on a board affect the management of knowledge owned by directors and the consequences on organizational performance. In this study, informational faultlines are defined as hypothetical lines that divide a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the alignment of several informational attributes among board members.

The study uses unique hand-collected panel data covering 7,247 board members at 106 publicly traded firms to provide strong support for the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. The authors use a fixed effects approach and a system generalized method of moments approach to test the hypothesis.

The study finds that the relationship between informational faultlines on a board and organizational performance is U shaped, with the least optimal organizational performance experienced when boards have moderate informational faultlines. More specifically, informational faultlines within boards are negatively related to organizational performance across the weak-to-moderate range of informational faultlines and positively related to organizational performance across the moderate-to-strong range.

By explaining the mechanisms through which informational faultlines are related to organizational performance, the authors contribute to the literature in a number of ways. By conceptualizing how the management of knowledge plays an important role in the particular setting of corporate boards, the authors add not only to literature on knowledge management but also to the faultline and corporate governance literature.

This study offers a rationale for prior mixed findings by providing an alternative theoretical basis to explain the effect of informational faultlines within boards on organizational performance. To advance the field, the authors build on the concept of knowledge demonstrability to illuminate how informational faultlines affect the management of knowledge within boards, which will translate to organizational performance.

This study aims to focus on the resource-based faultline of a top management team (TMT) and intends to investigate the impact of TMT resource-based faultline on corporate green innovation, by indicating the environmental management as a mediator and slack resources as a moderator to understand the relationship.

Based on the empirical data of Chinese listed manufacturing companies from 2008 to 2020, this study assesses the hypotheses using an OLS model with fixed effects of time and industry.

The results indicate that TMT resource-based faultline is significantly negatively correlated with corporate green innovation. The conclusion remains valid after endogeneity tests and robustness checks. Mechanism test shows that environmental management plays a mediating role in the association between TMT resource-based faultline and corporate green innovation. Moreover, slack resources diminish the negative association between TMT resource-based faultline and corporate green innovation.

The study not only expands the theoretical understanding of the deeper motivation of TMT faultline on corporate green innovation, but also provides a practical reference for optimizing the human resource allocation of the TMT and accelerating green transformation development.

Despite the oft made argument that demographic diversity should enhance creativity, little is known about this relationship. We propose that group diversity, measured in terms of demographic faultlines, affects creativity through its effects on group members’ felt psychological safety to express their diverse ideas and the quality of information sharing that takes place across subgroup boundaries. Further, we propose that the relationship between faultlines and creativity will be moderated by task interdependence and equality of subgroup sizes. Finally, we provide suggestions for how organizations can establish norms for self-verification and use accountability techniques to enhance creativity in diverse groups.

The inconsistent results shown in previous group faultline research have created a need for investigating the underlying mechanisms of the faultline's effects. This study focuses on clarifying the competing mediating roles of information diversity and team conflict in the nonlinear relationship between board faultlines (BF) and decision quality.

This study is empirically tested with the questionnaire data from 105 Chinese listed companies.

This study finds: (1) an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between BF and board decision quality and (2) that the joint mediating effect of team conflict and information diversity leads to the inverted U-shaped curve relationship between BF and decision quality. Specifically, BF shows a U-shaped curve relationship with team conflict and an inverted U-shaped curve relationship with information diversity. Either too weak or too strong faultlines will inhibit the positive effects of information diversity and amplify the negative effects of team conflicts, leading to low-quality decisions.

This study contributes to the research on: (1) board governance as it clarifies the effect of BF on the board decision-making process and its quality, which helps to open the black box of board decision-making and (2) group faultlines as it reveals how information diversity and team conflict can play a joint mediating role in the functioning of team faultlines.

Demographic faultlines (i.e., potential subgroup splits based on demographic attributes) have been argued to have effects over and above those of diversity. Yet, faultlines, much like diversity, do not seem to have positive or negative effects on performance per se, but to be affected by contextual variables as well as intermediate outcomes, such as relationship conflict. Relationship conflicts, a major threat to teamwork, are particularly likely to arise between subgroups. Thus, with the objective to shed some light on why and how exactly faultlines impact group outcome, we investigate the effect of faultline strength and distance on performance through relationship conflict as well as the effect of faultline strength on performance via relationship conflict, contingent on the level of faultline distance. To test our hypotheses we used data gathered in a laboratory setting with 267 graduate students. Results provide strong support for the extension of the faultline model.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of a team’s personality faultlines on entrepreneurial performance. Additionally, this paper verifies the moderating effect of shared leadership on the connection between the two varies. The authors focus on the upper echelons theory and social identity theory as well as personality faultlines in entrepreneurial teams.

An online survey was conducted using data collected in China. Data from 618 members from 144 new venture teams were collected to examine the authors’ hypothesis.

The authors find a U-shaped relationship between the strength of entrepreneurial teams' personality-faultline and entrepreneurial performance. Additionally, shared leadership negatively moderates this U-shaped relationship. Specifically, when the entrepreneurial team has a high level of shared leadership, both the positive and negative relationships between the strength of the personality faultlines and entrepreneurial performance are weaker.

The research offers important theoretical and practical implications for the formation of entrepreneurial teams.

With an increasingly diverse workforce, teams need to handle differences among team members and be aware of the impact these differences have on team meetings. As meetings are strongly shaped by team member interactions, communication between team members is central to meeting success. In diverse teams, effective communication and information sharing is even more crucial than in homogeneous groups due to distinct perspectives and knowledge that group members bring to a team. However, effective communication is also more challenging in groups with diverse members than in homogeneous groups. Especially when there is a strong faultline, that is, when multiple attributes align and teams fall into subgroups, communication within the whole team is impaired and might only take place within subgroups. In this chapter, the authors discuss the role of faultlines in meeting interactions and turn to subgroup formation and its impact on interaction patterns within teams. The authors see intersubgroup communication as an important process that links faultlines to meeting outcomes such as performance or satisfaction. By spanning research areas connecting faultline and meeting research, the authors provide scholars with important research questions to be examined in the future. The authors further introduce a new measure of intersubgroup communication that provides insights into dynamics between subgroups. By relating intersubgroup communication to overall communication within a meeting and taking team size as well as different subgroup constellations into account, this measure facilitates studying intersubgroup communication in meetings. The authors provide formulas that scholars could apply to their research.

In this chapter, we develop a theoretical model of group splits, culture shifts, and creativity in diverse groups. This model explains how the strength of informational faultlines can elicit a culture shift from a desired to an actual culture of creativity in a team, which then might differentially influence team creativity and group performance. We further argue that subgroup support and team creative efficacy may enhance the interaction of informational faultlines with a desired culture of creativity to facilitate the shift toward an actual culture of creativity. We also discuss future research directions and practical implications for stimulating creative behaviors in organizations.

This study aims to examine the effect of faultline based on job responsibility and their interaction with the incentive scheme on knowledge-sharing behavior.

This research is an experimental study with a 2 × 2 factorial design between subjects. Faultline and incentive schemes are manipulated into two groups (strong faultline–weak faultline and group incentive–individual incentives). This study involved 89 undergraduate accounting students as participants.

This research shows that a strong faultline created a strong social identity effect. Hence, the knowledge-sharing behavior among group members tends to be lower than the weak faultline. Knowledge-sharing behavior tends to be higher in group incentive schemes than individual ones. However, there is no support for interactions between incentive schemes and faultline effects on knowledge-sharing behavior. The results indicate that forming a working subgroup based on informational characteristics attributes reduces cooperative behavior and knowledge sharing between groups.

This study adds a new addition to faultline literature by examining the effect of faultline and incentive schemes on knowledge-sharing behavior based on informational characteristics attributes. Previous research on faultline and knowledge sharing was limited and primarily focused on faultlines created by demographic attributes. This study also enriches faultline literature on knowledge-sharing behavior using an experimental design.

Top executive hubris is associated with positive/negative outcome. Little is known about the antecedent of hubris in top management team (TMT) and how they can be weakened to capitalize on TMT size and market complexity. This paper aims to address these issues.

This study draws on the social information processing theory. Subsequently, it proposes and tests an inverted U-shaped relationship between task-related faultlines and top executive hubris. Top management team size and complexity can weaken the relationship between them. Panel data were collected longitudinally from 2011 to 2016 on China's listed firm on growth enterprises board.

Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that medium task-related faultlines experience stronger than weak and strong faultlines. TMT size and market complexity can weaken the inverted U-shaped relationship between them.

This study provides pioneering evidence for an inverted U-shaped relationship between task-related faultlines and top executive hubris. These findings inform practice by suggesting a tipping point of team faultlines.