Agility, autonomy and trust in young firms, and how leadership and competition shape organisations.
Research overview / 6 publications in this theme
Two of her three best-paper awards come from this strand. It looks at what lets people in new ventures work with agility: autonomy, trust in the founder, work engagement, the freedom to work and the quality of a founder’s listening.
It widens to governance and competition: a meta-analysis of executive overconfidence and firm performance, the role of informal competition in innovation in emerging economies, and a teaching case on professionalising a business through HR transformation. It also draws on her own experience of founding two ventures.
Only the concepts named in the papers themselves or in her research statement, with where each comes from.
Authors in published order. Each summary describes what the work examines.
Bhattacharya, B., Maheshwari, S. & Kaur, A. (2026)
IIMB Management Review, 38(1), 100638
How competition from the informal economy affects whether firms in emerging markets innovate, and what labour rules and special economic zones do to that relationship.
Agarwal, P., Edacherian, S., Karna, A., Kaur, A. & Maheshwari, S. (2025)
Cross-Cultural & Strategic Management, 32(2), 414-435
A synthesis of the existing evidence on whether overconfident executives help or hurt the firms they run, and how that varies across countries.
Kaur, A., Maheshwari, S., Srivastava, S., Maheshwari, S. & Varma, A. (2026)
Evidence-based HRM
What makes teams in young companies able to move fast, and how much of it comes down to autonomy and trust in the founder.
Kaur, A., Maheshwari, S. & Dhaigude, A. (2024)
Journal of Organizational Behavior Education, vol. 17, 31-40
A teaching case on the professionalisation of a family-run business through HR transformation.
2023
83rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston, Massachusetts
Best Paper Award, Human Resource Division (top 10%)
How work engagement and trust in the founder relate to employee agility in new ventures, across cultural settings.
2023
Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India Biennial Conference
Best Paper Award: one of the top three of 118 research contributions in entrepreneurship
The freedom to work and the quality of a founder’s listening in start-up firms, and where learning goal orientation fits.
Management Practice Insight, 2024 to 2025. Co-authored.
Entrepreneurial excellence: 11 principles for business success
CXO Today, 2024. Co-authored.
What AI-driven systems do to privacy, trust and engagement inside organisations.
2 publications
How people systems and culture connect with an organisation’s environmental goals.
2 publications
Unfairness, bullying, gossip and loneliness, and what they mean for the people who live with them.
4 publications
Women’s career engagement in India, and what helps people settle into an international assignment.
3 publications
Research collaborations, access to a paper, or a session built on this work.