This study examines how individuals succeed in the U.S. director labor market. Our theory suggests how two categories of director behavior could influence the likelihood of receiving additional appointments at corporate boards: behaviors that are believed to contribute to effective governance and social influence behavior in the form of ingratiation directed at fellow directors. We also theorize that demographic minorities derive fewer benefits from engaging in such behaviors. We test our hypotheses with original survey data on the behavior of 760 outside directors at large and medium-sized U.S. firms. We discuss implications for theory and research on corporate governance, social discrimination, and social capital.

Using survey data on interpersonal influence behavior from a large sample of managers and chief executive officers (CEOs) at Forbes 500 companies, we examine how ingratiatory behavior directed at individuals who control access to board positions can provide an alternative pathway to the boardroom for managers who lack the social and educational credentials associated with the power elite. Findings show that top managers who engage in ingratiatory behavior toward their CEO, with ingratiation comprising flattery, opinion conformity, and favor-rendering, will be more likely to receive board appointments at other firms where their CEO serves as director and at boards to which the CEO is indirectly connected in the board interlock network. Further results suggest that interpersonal influence behavior substitutes to some degree for the advantages of an elite background or demographic majority status. Our findings help explain why norms of director deference to CEOs have persisted despite increased diversity in the corporate elite and have implications for research on corporate governance, social networks in the corporate elite, and for the sociological question of whether demographic minorities and individuals who lack privileged backgrounds have equal access to positions of leadership in large U.S. companies. Our study ultimately suggests that such individuals face a rather subtle and perhaps unexpected form of social discrimination, in that they must engage in a higher level of interpersonal influence behavior in order to have the same chance of obtaining a board appointment.

A central proposition in the literature on corporate elites is that access to board appointments is to some extent restricted to individuals who are endowed with elite social and educational credentials and who are demographically similar to incumbent members of the power elite. We extend the literature on corporate elites by suggesting that interpersonal influence behavior, in the form of ingratiatory behavior directed at individuals who control access to board positions, provides an alternative pathway to the boardroom for managers who lack elite credentials. Specifically, our theory leads to the expectation that (i) top managers who engage in ingratiatory behavior toward their CEO, where ingratiation is comprised of flattery, opinion conformity, and rendering personal favors, will be more likely to receive board appointments at other firms where their CEO serves as director, and (ii) interpersonal influence behavior will substitute to some degree for the advantages of an elite background or demographic majority status, such that ingratiation toward the CEO will be particularly beneficial in garnering board appointments for managers who lack such credentials. An analysis of survey data on interpersonal influence behavior from a large sample of managers and CEOs at Forbes 500 companies supports our theoretical claims. Our findings can help explain why norms of director deference to CEOs may have persisted despite increased diversity in the corporate elite. They also reveal a subtle form of social discrimination, in that managers who are demographic minorities or who lack privileged backgrounds must engage in a higher level of ingratiatory behavior in order to have the same chance of obtaining a board appointment.

To understand the effects of selection on firm-level learning, this study synthesizes two contrasting views of evolution. Internal selection theorists view managers in multiproduct firms as the primary agents of evolutionary change because they decide whether individual products and technologies are retained or eliminated. In contrast, external selection theorists contend that the environment drives evolution because it determines whether entire firms live or die. Though these theories differ, they describe tightly interwoven processes. In assessing the coevolution of internal and external selection among personal computer manufacturers across a 20-year period, we found that (1) firms learned cumulatively and adaptively from internal and partial external selection, the latter occurring when the environment killed part but not all of a firm; (2) internal and partial external selection co-evolved, as each affected the other's future rate and the odds of firm failure; (3) partial external selection had a greater effect on future outcomes than internal selection; and (4) the lessons gleaned from prior selection were reflected in a firm's ability to develop new products, making that an important mediator between past and future selection events.

This study extends diversification research to a new level of analysis, examining how within-business diversification, which occurs when firms extend existing product lines or expand into new ones, affects organizational survival. While prior research suggests that corporate-level diversification accounts for relatively little variation in performance, within-business diversification matters a great deal, by influencing which startups survive and which firms better cope with rapid environmental change. Specifically, we find that the relationship between within-business diversity and survival is contingent on the amount of environmental change wrought by a firm’s competitors as they simultaneously diversify their own product portfolios and innovate technologically. Analysis of the population of U.S. personal computer manufacturers from the industry’s founding in 1975 through 1994 supports our premise: Regardless of its effects across businesses, diversification matters a great deal within them.

In this study, we examine some of the factors affecting organizations’ susceptibility to frequency-based imitation pressures. We do so by testing two competing sets of hypotheses: one predicting that size and performance will enhance an organization’s susceptibility to frequency-based imitation pressures, the other predicting the opposite. Contrary to prior studies, our analysis of joint ventures in technology-intensive industries supports the second set of hypotheses: both size and prior technological success negatively moderate the effect that frequency-based imitation pressures have on an organization’s likelihood of forming a joint venture. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on organizational imitation, organizational change, practice diffusion, joint ventures and institutional theory.

We examine the decision criteria firms use when assessing newly created companies as potential partners. We expect the academic credentials of the founding chief scientists to increase the likelihood of forming alliances with firms early in the commercialization process of the product for which the alliance was formed, yet predict this effect to weaken as the company grows. An analysis of 325 pharmaceutical-biotechnology alliances shows that company size not only weakens the credentials effect, it reverses it.

A popular belief in both academic and business quarters is that joint ventures (JVs) are inherently unstable. This study questions this premise by arguing that the high failure rate of JVs observed in prior studies is, in part, an outcome of a selection process in which, paradoxically, out of all possible JVs, the ones that are especially likely to be formed are also the ones that are most likely to fail. That happens, we argue, because the same factors that make a JV partner attractive – high social status and expertise in established technologies – constrain its ability to adapt to environmental change, which is vital to new ventures in rapidly changing, technology-intensive industries. Thus, social status and established expertise increase firms’ propensity to joint venture but decrease their ability to do so successfully. Analysis of JV formation in 26 technology-intensive industries in the United States between 1986 and 2001 support our premise, indicating that JVs, rather than being inherently unstable, are hindered by an adverse selection process in which executives are seduced by a partner’s status and existing skills rather than considering whether that partner can create a venture flexible enough to survive in a dynamic setting.