Papers by Nishani Bourmault
Academy of Management Proceedings
Administrative Science Quarterly, 2023
Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from th... more Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from their professions' core cultural tenets. When these individuals face external pressure (e.g., via new technology or regulation), they typically turn to peers for guidance in such involuntary reinventions of their work. But it is unclear how some professionals may voluntarily break from deeply ingrained views. Through our study of French anesthesiologists who practice hypnosis, we aim to better understand this little-explored phenomenon. Adopting hypnosis, a technique that many anesthesiologists consider subjective and even magical, contradicted a core tenet of their profession: the need to only use techniques validated by rigorous scientific-based research. Drawing on interviews and observations, we analyze how these anesthesiologists were able to change their views and reinvent their work. We find that turning inward to oneself (focusing on their own direct experiences of clients) and turning outward to clients (relying on relations with clients) played critical roles in anesthesiologists' ability to shift their views and adopt hypnosis. Through this process, these anesthesiologists embarked on a voluntary internal transformation, or reboot, whereby they profoundly reassessed their work, onboarded people in adjacent professions to accept their own reinvention, and countered isolation from their peers. Overall, we show a pathway to such reinvention that entails turning inward and outward (rather than to peers), a result that diverges significantly from prior understandings of professionals' transformations.
Academy of Management Proceedings
Journal of Management Studies, 2022
Past literature has documented the liability of foreignness (LOF) that foreign MNEs face when the... more Past literature has documented the liability of foreignness (LOF) that foreign MNEs face when they introduce organizational practices abroad that work well in their home countries, particularly practices that conflict with local cultural norms. However, when foreign MNEs adopt practices that resemble those of their local counterparts, whether and why foreign MNEs still face a LOF is unclear. This study explores why foreign MNEs that implement a compensation practice used by local counterparts – collective bonuses – may not experience the same performance benefits. Our data consists of interviews and longitudinal survey data of the organizational practices of MNEs in France, a country where commitment to egalitarian resource distribution is culturally strong. We find that foreign MNEs, especially those from countries where egalitarian commitment is relatively low, benefit significantly less in terms of productivity when implementing collective bonuses than do their French counterparts. We show how even when foreign MNEs adopt local practices, they can subtly transfer the cultures of their home countries. In other words, they transfer informal, elusive norms (e.g., non-egalitarian attitudes of top management) that can be problematic. Tension persists between the informal requirements to facilitate the practice in the host country and the MNE’s home-country culture, a core part of their tacit knowledge. It is one of the first pieces to show that imitating local practices may not suffice to reduce LOF because cultural conflicts make such imitation ineffective. Our findings shed light on how MNEs’ cultural heritage can shape the effectiveness of their practices abroad.
Organization Science, 2020
Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that correspon... more Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that corresponds to a gain in responsibility. There is evidence, however, that some individuals experience "managerial blues" or disenchantment with their managerial jobs after being promoted. While past scholarship points to individual differences (such as skills inadequacy) or the promotion circumstances (such as involuntary) as possible explanations for such blues, less is known as to how the expectations that people carry with them from past jobs – such as expectations about what responsibility entails – may shape their first managerial experience. To answer this question, we compare the experiences of supervisors coming from different jobs – i.e., former Paris subway drivers (working independently and impacting the lives of others) and station agents (working interdependently with limited impact on others’ lives) – that left them with distinct sets of expectations around responsibility. Drawing on interviews and observations, we find that former drivers developed a deep sense of "personal" responsibility. After promotion, their perceived managerial responsibility paled in comparison to their expectations of what it felt like to have personal responsibility, leading the majority to experience managerial blues. In contrast, former agents had few expectations of what responsibility entailed and reported no disenchantment once they joined the managerial ranks. Overall, we show how imprinted expectations shape people’s future managerial experiences, including their managerial blues, and discuss the implications of our findings for literatures on job mobility and job design.
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Papers by Nishani Bourmault