Ms. Ty N. A. Fezzey

Inclusive leadership (IL) has emerged as a key framework for fostering inclusion and unlocking diversity's benefits. However, questions remain regarding IL's distinctiveness, incremental validity, and (potentially) differential effects on (double-)minoritized employees. This study examines IL's incremental variance over other leadership styles in predicting inclusion climate, innovative culture, recommending your organization to others, job satisfaction, leader effectiveness, mission match, and turnover intention. We establish IL as a uniquely impactful leadership style using hierarchical regression and relative weight analysis on over 300,000 U.S. Federal government employees. Additionally, we examine IL's differential effects across protected employment identities, including women, Black, Asian, Other, Hispanic, disabled, over 40 years of age, and veteran employees, with specific attention to double-minoritized groups. Our findings reveal that while IL broadly benefits all employees above and beyond showing consideration, initiating structure, and developmental leadership, its impact varies across identities, highlighting the need for tailored approaches to inclusion. We also explore IL's variability across agencies, offering insights into how agency-level racial and gender diversity influence IL's effectiveness. By advancing intersectionality research and providing robust evidence of IL's distinctiveness and predictive power, our work contributes to the theoretical understanding of leadership and inclusion. We address calls for more nuanced and large-scale studies on IL, expanding its applicability to diverse institutional settings while highlighting its potential for fostering equitable and inclusive workplace environments.

Miron et al. (2024) provide a compelling framework for understanding how dominant group members have the power to strategically manipulate evidentiary standards to sustain systemic inequities, particularly in gendered workplace contexts. Our commentary extends their argument by illustrating how these standards not only inhibit justice, but actively create cascading injustices. Herein, we argue that excessive resource demands imposed by high evidentiary thresholds disproportionately burden disadvantaged groups, effectively reducing their available resources and thus threatening their ability to meet performance standards, ultimately reinforcing and exacerbating organizational inequities. This compounded impact ensures that inequality remains self-perpetuating and largely unchallenged. We likewise identify covert discrimination and structural biases as contemporary manifestations of inequality, highlighting how systems ostensibly designed to address injustice often serve to sustain and even amplify it. We propose actionable strategies to combat these inequities. Specifically, we advocate for a multifaceted approach that fosters genuine male allyship, disallows reductive arguments about gender inequalities, reevaluates the distribution of efforts to combat gender inequality, and considers employment-related strategies (e.g., revisiting norms for performance evaluations, recruitment, hiring) to level the playing field at a systemic level. In doing so, we propose specific pathways to begin dismantling systemic barriers and creating organizational cultures that promote justice, reinforcing the nascent call for systemic change while offering new insights into actionable solutions.

This paper intersects the delineation of responsibilities for information systems (IS) functions between cloud service users (CSUs) and cloud service providers (CSPs) specified in the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) (2021) “Enterprise Risk Management for Cloud Computing” with control activities in the most recent ISACA Control Objectives for Information Technologies (COBIT) “2019 Governance Management Objectives Practices Activities.” This intersection helps CSUs and CSPs understand their responsibilities for information technology (IT) control activities when establishing service level agreements (SLAs). In addition, it advises CPAs on internal control over financial reporting (ICFR) under Sarbanes-Oxley when performing annual financial statement audits for publicly traded CSUs and CSPs. Furthermore, it informs CPAs on CSPs’ IT control responsibilities when conducting third-party System and Organization Controls (SOC) engagements for CSPs under Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements 18 (SSAE 18).
Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.
JEL Classifications: G31; G32; G33; M21.

The traditional responsibility of a CEO—prioritizing firm performance and shareholder returns—has become increasingly intertwined with expectations to actively engage with sociopolitical issues. These competing expectations have created a scenario where engaging, not engaging, or incorrectly engaging in CEO activism all carry the risk of alienating at least some stakeholders and undermining CEO and firm reputation and performance. Further, extant research has primarily focused on whether CEOs engage in activism rather than disentangling the heterogeneous ways by which they do so. We address these shortcomings and augment existing theory by comprehensively considering distinct CEO activism engagement strategies, their outcomes, and the moderators influencing relations between the two. Moreover, we illuminate the highly heterogeneous nature of CEO activism to better capture the phenomenon’s complexity. We first introduce the CEO Activism Decision Matrix—a typology of four unique activism engagement strategies based on the behavioral dimensions of CEO Talk (leveraging communicative power) and CEO Action (leveraging economic power), successfully addressing the heterogeneity in activism behaviors that existing theory has overlooked. We then present an integrative conceptual model that outlines the short- and long-term consequences and relevant moderators of CEO activism engagement and offer detailed recommendations for future research, including methodological guidance on operationalizing variables and designing research that can infer causality. Altogether, we demonstrate that although CEOs may find themselves “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” engage in activism, they also have the potential to drive meaningful career, firm, and societal change based on how they choose to engage.

Thomas et al. (2024) contribute to research and practice by providing a standardized taxonomy of workplace mental health (MH) resources, a much-needed step toward systematically addressing employee well-being in modern organizations. Yet, its effectiveness hinges on understanding the barriers that prevent certain employees from utilizing these resources. In line with Thomas et al.‘s call for research to identify the “factors that (1) limit workers’ using and (2) foster workers’ using the MH offerings in their workplaces” (p. 24), we draw attention to a critical segment of the workforce that often goes overlooked in conversations surrounding MH: high achievers. Specifically, we argue that high-achieving employees have unique considerations, needs, and challenges surrounding their MH that can impede MH support utilization. Moreover, given these individuals’ impactful role in organizations’ success and cultures, attending to the unique considerations of this population is of paramount concern. We elaborate on how organizations and leaders may be exacerbating high achievers’ MH challenges and thwarting support utilization, as well as how high achievers themselves may perpetuate this damage. We also discuss the MH offerings from Thomas et al.’s taxonomy that are likely to be most beneficial to high achievers and, thus, hopefully attenuate the potential damage done to themselves and others.

Nearly 2 decades ago, Cycyota and Harrison (2006) documented a concerning trend of declining executive survey response rates and projected a continued decrease in the future. Their seminal work has significantly influenced the methodologies of upper echelons survey research. Our study examines the manner in which Cycyota and Harrison's paper has impacted the existing upper echelons literature and replicates their study by analyzing peer-reviewed studies published post-2006. We reveal that executive response rates have largely stabilized since Cycyota and Harrison's initial findings. Furthermore, we expand upon their research by identifying specific geographical contexts and contact methodologies associated with higher (and lower) response rates. Finally, we lend insight into the evolving landscape of executive survey research and offer practical implications for future methodological endeavors in the upper echelons.

Prior research has established that individuals high in narcissism may favor certain professions over others, but the reasons for this remain speculative. The present study employs the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept model to differentiate between two motivational drivers of narcissism – admiration (desire for praise) and rivalry (desire to denigrate others) – and explores their influence on vocational preferences in an online sample of 386 full-time U.S. employees. Further, we examine the role of work values (achievement, comfort, status, altruism, safety, autonomy) as mediators in these preferences. By understanding how narcissism’s two dimensions shape interest in various vocations, we expand upon previous research on subclinical personality and career preferences, offering organizations a way to proactively identify workers with potentially derailing personality characteristics. Finding that work values mediate the relationship between narcissism and vocational interests suggests the importance of investigating this mediating mechanism with other bright and dark traits.

Competitiveness is an important personality trait that has been studied in various disciplines and has been shown to predict critical work outcomes at the individual level. Despite this, the role of competitiveness in groups and teams has received scant attention amongst organizational researchers. Aiming to promote future research on the role of competitiveness as both an adaptive and maladaptive trait – particularly in the context of work – the authors review competitiveness and its effects on individual and team stress and Well-Being, giving special attention to the processes of cohesion and conflict and situational moderators. The authors illustrate a dynamic multilevel model of individual and team difference factors, competitive processes, and individual and team outcomes to highlight competitiveness as a consequential occupational stressor. Furthermore, the authors discuss the feedback loops that inform the different factors, highlight important avenues for future research, and offer practical solutions for managers to reduce unhealthy competition.