This conceptual paper examines the considerable scope of leadership theories built from literature originating in the West to focus on the ‘process’ of leadership. By opening the door to include traditional Chinese thought, the worldview of Western tradition is challenged using the work of philosopher and sinologist François Jullien. Chinese culture views process as the basis of transformation and renewal in the world. It is explained through ‘the propensity of things’ in relation to European ontology and causality. Recognizing the evolving nature of reality through the generic Chinese notion of shi 勢, which serves as a conceptual tool for Jullien, leadership process is understood as an aspect of organization propensity. Shi 勢 is then recognized as a leading force encompassing human agency that is able to open a new avenue for research nurturing the emerging quantum phase of leadership.

This study provides a behavioral account of opportunistic diversification. We argue that top executives’ social comparison with peer firms based on business segment performance can lead them to increase their investments in high-profitability new businesses (i.e., opportunistic diversification). Specifically, when the performance of a firm's main business relative to its peer firms’ high-profitability business segment falls short of their aspirations, the firm's top executives will engage in problemistic search and subsequently increase opportunistic diversification. This effect is stronger when the firm is similar to peer firms along key firm characteristics and when top executives of the firm are underpaid. Although opportunistic diversification helps improve a firm's short-term accounting performance, it may weaken its long-term performance. Using Chinese non-real-estate firms’ diversification investment in real estate as our empirical context, we find support for our arguments.

Integrating the resource-based view (RBV) and attention-based view (ABV), this study explores the impact of firm-specific knowledge (FSK) on a firm's exploratory innovation and the role of government support in this process. We argue that firms with a high degree of specificity in their knowledge assets tend to have a more localized attention focus, leading to those firms with less exposure to distant and diverse information and knowledge. Consequently, such firms are likely to have reduced exploratory innovative outputs. However, government resource support could expand a firm's attention focus beyond local searches, mitigating its negative effects. Based on a unique combined two-wave survey and archival data from over 500 firms in China, we find that the level of FSK is negatively related to a firm's exploratory innovation output. We provide evidence that localized attention focus partially mediates the negative effect of FSK on firms’ exploratory innovation. We further reveal that state ownership and state financial support for firm innovation weaken the negative main effect. This study makes important contributions to the literatures on the RBV, FSK, and firm innovation.

Job knowledge characteristics have long been regarded as relatively fixed. However, this may no longer be the case given the dynamic and complex situations faced by employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the basis of event system theory and the work design literature, we argue that the onset of COVID-19 created an immediate decrease in job knowledge characteristics, which gradually increased over time in the post-onset period because of employees’ coping with the pandemic. The rate of increase in job knowledge characteristics is higher for those with higher individual task adaptivity than for others. We further argue that changes in job knowledge characteristics produced changes in job stress, and that this effect is weakened by job security. We conducted a 6-month, 6-wave longitudinal survey to gather data from 235 employees in Macau, China covering the pre-onset, onset, and post-onset periods of the COVID-19 outbreak. The results, based on discontinuous growth modeling and latent change score modeling, support our arguments. Our study advances the dynamic view of work design by identifying how a macro event may shape job knowledge characteristics and the implications of a time-to-time change in job knowledge characteristics. Overall, we suggest that there are psychological costs when employees cope at work with the business interruptions caused by COVID-19.

Institutional logics are interrelated sets of cultural elements (norms, values, beliefs, and symbols) that help people and organizations make sense of their everyday activities and order those activities in time and space. In this paper, we describe the rise of a robust literature on institutional logics, which mostly focuses on Western societies. We then describe changes in Chinese society and economy over the past four decades, as it shifted from state-controlled planning and redistribution to market-mediated exchange. We detail how the institutional logics that guide Chinese firms have been transformed in the wake of the economic transition. The state logic, which developed in the Maoist era, valorizes equality, national community, and political stability. Although it is still in evidence, it has been partly supplanted by a market logic that encourages efficiency, competition, and property rights. But this market logic differs from the one that prevails in Western capitalist economies. The Chinese version of the market logic valorizes the central role that the state and the Communist Party continue to play in economic life. Therefore, in the Chinese version of the market logic, efficiency, competition, and property rights are tempered by a continued concern for political stability. We review and summarize the existing literature on institutional logics and Chinese firms, and then identify fruitful lines that future research could take.

Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li's (2023) perspective article contributes important insights into China's transition away from central planning and redistribution toward greater market coordination of economic exchange. In our commentary on their insightful article, we build on and extend their arguments in three main ways. First, we discuss how future studies might extend the authors’ work by leveraging the ‘messiness’ of institutional change to explore the cross-level dynamics involved in transforming institutional logics. Second, we build on the authors’ call for more historically grounded, contextualized research on institutional logics to argue that the conditions surrounding logic emergence have important implications for inter-logic dynamics and organizational responses. Third, we build on the authors’ suggestions for future research to underscore the broader consequences of institutional logics and their potential to perpetuate or exacerbate social inequalities and other societal challenges.

The institutional logics perspective provides a powerful theory that emphasizes how symbolic beliefs and material practices are intertwined in relatively enduring configurations that can profoundly shape behavior across space and time. In this article, we build upon the arguments and insights of Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li, suggesting the need for a broader research agenda on the dynamics of institutional logics in China and around the world. Building on some of our recent writings, we argue for the need to go beyond the study of how logics have effects, to understand how logics themselves cohere, endure, and co-evolve in dynamic interrelationships with other logics.

This commentary applauds Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li's (2023) efforts to build arguments around institutional logics to explain China’s remarkable economic progress since 1978. But it also calls for broadening the focus of this inquiry so it can more generally explain why and how some societies are able to build connections between cultures and institutions that enable widespread societal progress, while other countries fail to do so. In particular, I suggest that this line of inquiry would benefit from drawing more deeply on the extensive body of writings by economic historians who have compared the economic progress of different societies over a long period.