Organization and Management

Professor Denis Trapido
Title: "Dual Signals: How Competition Makes or Breaks Interfirm Social Ties"
Accepted at: Organization Science
February 2012

Research has documented the benefits of social ties across boundaries of competing firms but has not specified when competition enables such ties or when it damages them.  Ninety semi-structured interviews sought to elicit answers to this question from leaders of drug development companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. The informants reported withholding social ties from counterparts in competing companies if these companies affirmed to them the goal conflict aspect of the competition relation; they reported social connectedness to individuals in competing companies if these companies affirmed to them joint professional affiliation, the other necessary aspect of competition. Unique quantitative data on competition and social relations in the Bay Area’s drug development industry confirmed this pattern for weak social ties (acquaintance). Strong social ties (friendship) were not affected by any examined organizational or interorganizational factors.

Professor Jone Pearce
Title: "The Decreasing Value of our Research to Management Education"
Co-author: Huang, Laura (PhD student)
Accepted at: Academy of Management Learning and Education
February 2012

We tested our suspicion that the scholarly research published in our best management journals has become less conceptually and instrumentally useful to executives, managers and others who want to participate in and run organizations more effectively, and so, less useful to us as teachers of management. We found a significant decrease in the proportion of journal articles that generated actionable knowledge from 1960 to 2010. We then examined the previous five years of reports of research from a practitioner-focused publication, finding that rigorous student-subject laboratory studies from a journal with no pretense to producing research useful to managers was discussed much more often than research from either Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly or Journal of Applied Psychology. Several speculations for the decline in the proportion of actionable research include greater favoring of complex moderator-mediator analyses, and studies demonstrating that abstract economic theories have not been implemented in practice. We reminded readers that this decline is not just an incentives problem, but that producing quality actionable research is difficult and so more likely an ability problem. This, when combined with growing demand for faculty to publish only in journals used in business school rankings has increased pressure to produce more publications without a proportional increase in actionable research. We proposed that the decline in actionable research may also be the result of an abdication of editors’ own judgments to demanding that all reviewers’ requests be met. Finally, we speculated that the absence of a sufficiently powerful constituency for actionable management research also played a part in this decline.

Professor Christopher Bauman
Title: "The Pursuit of Missing Information in Negotiation"
Co-authors: Young, M.J., Chen, N., & Bastardi, A.
Accepted at: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
October 2011

A large body of research has focused on how people exchange and use information during the negotiation process. This work tends to treat information as if it all were readily available upon request. The current research investigated how delays in the pursuit of missing information can influence people’s ex-ante priorities and the final settlements they reach. Study 1 found that negotiators achieved more value on an issue after seeking missing information about that issue compared to when the same information was readily accessible. Study 2 found that the effect of searching for information on outcomes was mediated by changes in how important negotiators perceived the issue to be. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Professor Kristin Behfar
Title: "Conflict in Small Groups: The Meaning and Consequences of Process Conflict"
Co-authors: Elizabeth Mannix, Randall Peterson, and William Trochim
Accepted at: Small Research Group
October 2010

Through three studies of interacting small groups, we aimed to better understand the meaning and consequences of process conflict. Study 1 was an exploratory analysis of qualitative data that helped us to identify the unique dimensions of process conflict, in order to more clearly distinguish it from task and relationship conflict. Study 2 used a broader sampling of participants to (a) demonstrate why process conflict has been difficult to discriminate from task conflict in many conflict scales, and b) develop a two factor process conflict scale that effectively distinguishes process from task conflict. Study 3 used this new scale to examine the relationship between process conflict and group viability (group performance, satisfaction, and effective group process). The results showed that process conflict negatively affects group performance, member satisfaction, and group coordination.

Professor Kristin Behfar
Title: “How to manage your negotiating team: The biggest challenge may be on your own side of the table.”
Co-authors: Jeanne Brett and Ray Friedman
Accepted at: Harvard Business Review
August 2009
 
Team members, often unwittingly, routinely undermine one another and thus their team’s across-the-table strategies. We studied 45 negotiating teams from a wide array of industries, including finance, health care, publishing, manufacturing, telecom, and nonprofit. And they told us that their biggest challenges came from their own side of the table. Drawing on the lessons learned from the experiences of these teams, we offer advice on how to manage the two major obstacles to a negotiating team’s success: aligning the conflicting interests held by members of your own team and implementing a disciplined strategy at the bargaining table.

Professor Jone Pearce
Title: “Rating performance or contesting status: Evidence against the homophily explanation for supervisor demographic skew in performance ratings.”
Co-authors: Xu, Q. J. (PhD Alumna)
Accepted at: Organization Science

We propose and test an argument that status contests better explain the well-documented skew in supervisory performance appraisal ratings toward those with the same demography as themselves than does the reigning theory of homophily. We conduct the test in a field study of 358 supervisor-subordinate dyads in ten organizations, using hierarchical linear modeling with various controls, finding that supervisors’ ratings of subordinates’ contextual and task performance only skew toward similar subordinates when supervisors’ status is contested by a higher demographic-status subordinate, as predicted by Social Dominance and Status Characteristics Theories. None of the general homophily preference hypotheses were supported. This study provides a richer theory more consistent with the accumulating evidence about demography effects in organizations, and demonstrates the value of head-to-head strong inference tests and status explanations for the field of organizational behavior.

Professor Jone Pearce and PhD Students Rebekah Dibble and Kenji Klein
Title: “The Effects of Governments on Management and Organization”
Accepted at: The Academy of Management Annals, Volume 3, 2009
August 2009
  
We review and integrate existing research from organization theory, strategy, organizational behavior, economics, sociology and political science on the effects of governments on organization and management, with a focus on  how governing ideology and government capability influence independent organizations’ forms, strategies, and their participants’ behavior. When brought together these works suggest significant research opportunities in the fields of management and organization, as well as new perspectives on public policy challenges. Several avenues of potentially profitable empirical research include more attention to the influence of government on corporate strategies, more research on the strategies of pursuing corruption and government capture for competitive advantage, the role of government in fostering innovation and the growth of entrepreneurial organizations, and extra-organizational contextual effects on managerial and employee organizational behavior. Possible public policy implications are illustrated with an application to the role of organizations in national wealth generation and dispersion.

Professor Claudia Bird Schoonhoven
Title: “Intercommunity relationships and community growth in China’s High Technology Industries 1988-2000.”
Accepted at: Strategic Management Journal
Co-authors: A. Zhang & H. Li
March 2009
 
This paper reports on a unique panel study of 53 national technology development zones in China spanning 1988 - 2000.   Conceptually zones are organizational communities which contain several related industries. The zones’ primary purpose is to promote technological innovation in ten areas considered new and “high technology” in China. The first zone was founded in Beijing in 1988, and by 1994, 52 zones had been established in cities throughout China. In ten years, the zones grew dramatically with collective revenues of 460 billion RMB, however the communities have grown differentially. The question we address is what predicts community revenue growth?  We examine how inter-community relationships affect the revenue growth of organizational communities, controlling for community age, provincial versus central government origin, R&D and export intensiveness, political importance of city location, local city GDP, cities' degrees of industrialization, city foreign direct investment, city colleges, and calendar year to control for China’s substantial development since 1988. 
We found that greater community density (number of zones in a given region), a community’s geographic proximity to the nearest community and its domain overlap with the nearest community all have an inverted U-shaped relationship with community growth. These non-monotonic findings support our argument that organizational communities are interdependent and that they share both mutualistic and competitive relationships, which in turn have a significant impact on community growth. For example all else being equal, a community’s expected sales revenue would be 235% times greater if domain overlap with the nearest zone were to increase from 0 to 94% but any further increases would significantly decrease revenues. These findings have both policy and managerial significance which are developed in the paper.

Professor Claudia Bird Schoonhoven
Title: “The Next Wave of Entrepreneurship Research.”
Accepted at: Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence, and Growth
Co-authors: Elaine Romanelli
March 2009