Xiaowen Tan

This study examines how feminist protests influence employee turnover in organizations. Based on the integration of stakeholder theory and social information processing theory, we argue that large-scale feminist protests send social information that values gender equality. This raises employees’ (male in particular) awareness of gender inequality in the workplace, which prompts employees to leave their firm that misalign with the social information, leading to a higher turnover rate. Using the context of Women’s March protests from 2017 to 2022 and employee turnover records from online professional profiles, we show that the scale of feminist protests in the local community where a firm is headquartered increases the firm’s male employee turnover rate. We further argue that the influence of feminist protests on male employees’ turnover rate depends on the degree of value alignment between a firm and the protests: the influence of protests is mitigated for firms with a more female-friendly environment, and better employee treatment (i.e., firms with positive media coverage and fewer safety violations). Our findings contribute to research on social movements by identifying employee turnover as a new mechanism through which social movements can reshape an organization’s workforce, moving beyond external institutional pressure on which literature has mainly focused.

This study examines how organizational culture influences employee whistleblowing. Based on an integration of stakeholder governance theory and organizational culture research, we argue that organizational culture clarify normative boundary of wrongdoing and lead em-ployees to internalize reporting as an act of stakeholder duty, leading more whistleblowing. Us-ing establishment-level employee whistleblowing on health and safety issues from 2003 to 2022 with machine-learning derived culture scores, we show that clear organizational culture in-creases employee whistleblowing. We further argue that culture's influence on whistleblowing depends on the broader governance environment: the influence of culture is amplified for firms with higher board independence, Big 4 audits, higher cultural tightness in establishment states. Our findings contribute to the stakeholder governance conversation by identifying organization-al culture as a critical yet underexplored mechanism through which activates employees’ bot-tom-up governance of firm behavior.

Stakeholder research has made significant progress over the past decades, with a grow-ing interest in the unintended consequences of stakeholder management, situations where a firm’s actions targeted at the stakeholder group(s) trigger opposite reactions or reactions from other non-targeted stakeholder groups. Despite many studies documenting the unintended con-sequences caused by stakeholder management, the literature lacks a comprehensive framework that spans across different disciplines. Through a systematic literature review and summary of research on unintended consequences of stakeholder management, we aim to reveal (1) the channels through which unintended consequences happen (within-stakeholder groups and/or cross-stakeholder groups), (2) the types of unintended consequences (desirable vs. undesirable), (3) the mechanisms through which firms’ actions lead to unintended stakeholders’ reactions, and (4) boundary conditions of the impact of firms’ stakeholder management on unintended conse-quences. Based on the systematic review of the current research in this area, we provide a roadmap for future research to extend knowledge in the relationship between firm-stakeholder relations and unintended consequences.

Research has studied hiring and training as two sequential stages of human capital de-velopment and emphasized the benefits of education on later training. However, for firms, these two stages involve a trade-off in "make” or “buy" decisions for human capital. We investigate how changes in training costs affect firms’ hiring decisions on employees’ education level. Lev-eraging the quasi-exogenous reform of the 2015 tax incentive for high-tech firms’ training in China, we find that high-tech firms hire higher numbers of low-educated employees in response to cost reduction in training. Firms use training to replace hiring high-educated employees to achieve satisfying human capital. The effect is stronger for firms needing more production workers, in the growth stage, and located in regions with lower minimum wages. Our findings suggest that training could substitute formal education and create opportunities for low-educated workers.