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Many markets are structurally susceptible to fraud, defined as conscious attempts to deceive stakeholders to obtain something of value. Signaling theory states that entrepreneurs with high-quality attributes normally attract resources by providing signals of their qualities that could not be provided by those with low-quality attributes. However, this mechanism is unlikely to work if communication is easily falsified. In this paper, I study if and how high-quality entrepreneurs can distinguish themselves from lower-quality peers in such markets, drawing on the market for cryptocurrencies as a particularly revealing example. Applying an abductive mixed-method approach, I first identify communicational practices entrepreneurs use to indicate high quality. I then show that these practices in my data do not differentiate between entrepreneurs that perform well or poorly, but a subset of these practices differentiate between entrepreneurs with low and high integrity. Entrepreneurs thus reveal their integrity to investors. A complementary explorative study indicates that the heterogeneous temporal payout structure of different communicational practices may explain this unexpected finding, which differentiates the attractiveness of communicational practices based on an entrepreneur’s temporal horizon. I call this the “temporal alignment mechanism.” 

Background: Health care services are increasingly delivered by ethnically diverse teams. Understanding how these teams function and should be managed to improve clinical performance is critical to improving the quality and safety of care. Purpose The aim of this study was to identify configurations of conditions that enable ethnically diverse health care teams to improve their clinical performance.

Methodology/Approach: This study uses video data from 59 simulations collected at a simulation center in southern Sweden in October 2022 and December 2023, supplemented by survey data. The simulations include 28 observations of CEPS (Concept for Patient Simulation) and 31 observations of PROBE (Practical Obstetric Team-Training). Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was used to explore combinations of conditions that lead to high performance.

Results: A laissez-faire leadership style does not enable high performance in either ethnically homogeneous or heterogeneous teams. Ethnically diverse health care teams excel with shared leadership, especially when these teams are larger and less experienced. In addition, small and experienced teams perform well with shared leadership, regardless of ethnic diversity. Autocratic leadership is ineffective in ethnically diverse teams and effective only in small, ethnically homogeneous teams.

Practice Implications: The study highlights the importance of active leadership for optimal performance in health care teams, regardless of ethnic diversity. These findings provide valuable guidance for managers and practitioners responsible for staffing or leading diverse teams in hospitals.

This paper addresses the question why and how local communities mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility. Employing data on local community protests against a gold mine in Guji, Ethiopia, we develop a sensemaking perspective on local community mobilization. We find that community mobilization is a dual-layered process, where community members, through iterations of individual level sensemaking, collective sensemaking, and action, gradually align towards mobilization (or fail to do so). We theorize the central role emotions play in this process, outlining that enacted emotions spill over from the collective level to the individual level, thus facilitating or preventing the development of a collective sensemaking account. Our theorization contributes to the emerging understanding of why and how local communities, as important stakeholders, mobilize against CSI and extends extant work on sensemaking and emotions. Ours is also one of the few studies in the field that draw on primary data from a developing country, where most CSI takes place, yet little research is done, adding important insights in that regard.

Deceptive signalling occurs when resource seekers provide communication or observable behaviour that seems to indicate high-quality attributes yet actually misleads about the resource seekers' attributes. Deceptive signalling is an everyday phenomenon that hurts investors, consumers and high-quality ventures alike, leading to resource misallocation and market inefficiencies. It is also a challenge for researchers interested in signalling theory, as deceptive signalling defies signalling theory's predictions, leading to ambiguity regarding if and how deceptive signals should be analysed from a signalling theory perspective. Research on deceptive signalling has accumulated, yet it is scattered across disciplines and discourses, which hampers our ability to understand the phenomenon and obstructs progress in signalling theory. To mitigate this state of affairs, this paper provides a cross-disciplinary integrative review, systematizing extant research on deceptive signalling, developing suggestions for the integration of deceptive signalling into signalling theory and outlining a research agenda on currently unresolved questions in signalling research pertaining to deceptive signalling. Developing a better understanding of deceptive signalling seems particularly pressing as recent advances in AI technologies, which reduce the detectability of deceptive signals as well as the costs for producing such signals, will presumably lead to an exacerbation of deceptive signalling problems.

In this paper, we employ a sensemaking lens to expand research on when and how local communities mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility. We draw on data from Guji, Ethiopia, where a local community suffered damages caused by a gold mine. We found that community members establish temporarily stable, emotion-driven sensemaking accounts that shape the community’s beliefs about the causes of the damage they experience and the prospects of a potential mobilization. Upsetting such sensemaking accounts requires sense-breaking events, which lead to a shift in dominant emotions and a re-evaluation of company behavior, whereupon the community settles into new, again relatively stable interpretations of events. We discuss how environmental cues, sensemaking, emotions, and actions, on both the individual and the community level, intersect, potentially leading to dominant sensemaking accounts and dominant emotions in the local community. We develop a model depicting how, through action, observation, and discussion, a local community develops an impetus to mobilize. This theorization addresses how emotions shift in local communities subjected to corporate social irresponsibility and how emotions energize or de-energize a community. Thus, the study contributes to our understanding of why and how local communities mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility and extends extant work on emotional dynamics in the transition between individual and collective sensemaking.

In extreme contexts, actors must often engage in collective sensemaking to enablecoordinated action. While prior research has established that cognitive disparities and emotivedistractions disrupt collective sensemaking, we lack theory on how actors overcome these com-mon challenges in extreme contexts. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a process study,collecting unique multi-perspective video and archival data during a maritime search and rescuemission in the Aegean Sea where actors (i.e., rescue crew members and refugees) faced cognitivedisparities (e.g., different levels of maritime expertise) and distracting emotions (e.g., fear, anxiety,and tension) yet needed to coordinate their actions to ensure a safe evacuation. We draw on thisdata to develop a collective sensemaking model that details the auxiliary process steps and mul-timodal communication – verbal, para-verbal, and non-verbal cues – actors use to alternatelyframe emotional states and convey task-related information. Our model demonstrates howactors, through multimodal collective sensemaking, overcome the challenges posed by cognitivedisparities and distracting emotions in extreme contexts. It thus adds a dynamic emotive andbodily perspective to the predominantly cognitive and verbal understanding in sensemakingtheory, and also has implications for practitioners working in extreme contexts.

Researchers often employ signaling theory to explain the effect of entrepreneurial communication on fundraising success. This focus on signaling can lead researchers to overlook alternative explanations for why communication affects fundraising, resulting in incorrect conclusions. An empirical test of whether a signaling mechanism is a good explanation for an observed relationship would help remedy such problems. We illustrate this idea by reexamining a relationship that has frequently been attributed to signaling, namely, the positive effect that updates in crowdfunding have on fundraising success. We find no support for a signaling mechanism based on a dataset of 5,908 campaign-day observations nested in 175 Kickstarter campaigns. Instead, an alternative explanation, indicating that updates provide affective stimuli, fits the data better. We provide guidance for empirical substantiations of signaling mechanisms in entrepreneurial fundraising with implications for the discussion on the boundaries of signaling theory.

Irresponsible behavior of corporations is rampant, causing tremendous harm on a regional, national, and global scale. Sometimes stakeholders challenge such behavior, sometimes it remains unchallenged. A substantial body of research has emerged on the conditions that affect if and when stakeholders—such as investors, consumers, or local communities—mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility, yet this literature is fragmented, which hampers our understanding of the phenomenon. This paper systematically reviews 151 articles on stakeholder mobilization against corporate social irresponsibility to condense our understanding of the drivers and hindrances for stakeholder mobilization to occur. We develop a model that depicts when stakeholders are likely to mobilize against corporate social irresponsibility. Based on this model, we derive suggestions for future research, depicting what we still need to learn about the conditions that lead to stakeholders’ mobilization against corporate social irresponsibility.

Entrepreneurs can benefit from the communities they build. Therefore, many entrepreneurs create online communities that allow self-selected stakeholders, such as customers, crowd investors, or enthusiasts, to interact with the venture and other like-minded individuals. However, research on how entrepreneurs can successfully engage community members and grow such online communities is only slowly emerging. In particular, it is unclear if, how much, and which content entrepreneurs should contribute to foster engagement in different types of communities and which role these community types play in the community’s overall growth. Based on a longitudinal case study in the video game industry, we first theorize and show that—depending on the community type—both too much and too little entrepreneur-provided content fails to leverage community engagement potential and that different communities require more or less diverging content. We then theorize and show that community growth is largely driven by engagement in open communities, such as those hosted on social media. We outline the implications this has for entrepreneurs, our understanding of online communities, and entrepreneurial communities more generally.