Follow which leader? Spatial mimicry and broad-based equity- and profit-sharing plans

Organizations have both local and nationally prominent peers from which they can model their human resource management practices. How does a focal organization reconcile the influence of smaller, spatially proximate peer organizations with the influence of prominent, distant organizations? We develop the concept of spatial mimetic gravity to estimate the mimetic pressures a focal organization feels from its geographically proximate and distant peers. We examine the population of craft beer brewers in the United States between 2013 and 2019 and find that the propensity to offer a stock ownership or profit-sharing plan is a function of a focal brewery's spatial proximity to its peers and their prominence. We help explain why some firms offer broad-based equity-sharing and profit-sharing plans and others do not. In doing so, we argue that organizational spatial mimicry is best understood from a gravity approach, adding a field-level explanation to previously individually focused theory about organizational choices.