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Accounting  |  Economics and Public Policy  |  Finance
    Information Systems  |  Marketing  |  Operations and Decision Technologies
Organization and Management  |  Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Organization and Management Abstracts

"A place in the world: Vulnerability, wellbeing, and the ubiquitous evaluation that animates participation in institutional processes"

Professor(s): Gerardo Okhuysen
Co-author(s): W. E. Douglas Creed, Bryant Ashley Hudson, and Kristin Smith-Crowe
Accepted at: Academy of Management Review (Journal on Financial Times Top 50 list)

We explain how and why people become motivated to participate in institutional processes. Responding to recent efforts to address the micro and meso in institutional analysis, we introduce two interrelated constructs, a person’s embodied world of concern and a community’s shared world of concern, which shape how people experience, evaluate, and participate in institutional arrangements. The world of concern, which is the product of people’s sedimented experiences of thriving and suffering, becomes the basis for their commitments to antagonisms towards certain social arrangements. The world of concern, as a lens, sheds light on the complex ways the macro, meso, and micro levels are co-implicated in constructing commitments and attachments that animate action in institutional arenas by providing a new metaphor, one that links the realism of participant concerns to the micro dynamics that underpin institutions. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these ideas for future research.


"Show me the … family: How photos of meaningful relationships reduce unethical behavior at work"

Professor(s): Professor Christopher W. Bauman
Co-author(s): Ashley E. Hardin and David M. Mayer
Accepted at: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Despite scholarly understanding of how individual differences and social aspects of situations influence unethical behavior, our understanding of how the physical environment within work organizations influences unethical behavior is less developed. In this paper, we examine a common but overlooked aspect of workspaces: photos of loved ones. Drawing on the literatures on symbols at work and behavioral ethics, we theorize that having photos of close others in sight decreases the hegemony of an economic schema in people’s minds, which in turn decreases their propensity to commit unethical behavior, specifically financial transgressions. Supporting our theory, a field survey and three experiments examined the effect of photos on financial cheating behavior and provided evidence of the relationship in the workplace, the causal direction of the effect, and the mechanism responsible for driving this relationship. We discuss implications of the results for the literatures on behavioral ethics, symbols at work, and work-life integration.


"A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relationship Between Dispositional Gratitude and Well-Being"

Professor(s): Doctoral Candidate Florencio Portocarrero
Co-author(s): Katerina Gonzalez and Michael Ekema-Agbaw
Accepted at: Personality and Individual Differences

What is the impact of dispositional gratitude on well-being? By synthesizing the literature, we evaluate the association between dispositional gratitude and mental well-being as a function of its various categories (i.e., positive, negative), dimensions (i.e., subjective, psychological), and indicators (e.g., life satisfaction, happiness, stress). Our meta-analytic aggregation of 404 effect sizes from 158 independent samples (N = 100,099) provides evidence that dispositional gratitude is moderately to strongly correlated with well-being, and that the strength of these associations varies by the indicator of well-being examined. We also evaluate potential moderators (i.e., religiosity, individualistic orientation, age, gender, dispositional gratitude measure, and sample type) of the association between dispositional gratitude and well-being. We find that countrylevel individualistic orientation, sample mean age, and sample type (i.e., clinical vs. nonclinical) present moderating effects for several of the relationships examined. We conclude the paper by presenting avenues for future research.


"Incivility, Workplace Communication, Rudeness, Email and Performance Evaluation"

Professor(s): Distinguished Professor Emerita Jone L. Pearce
Co-Author(s): Sarah Lyon (Merage PhD '14), Kimberly McCarthy (Merage PhD '14), and John Morton (Merage PhD '19)
Accepted at: Organization and Management Journal

In this study, we provide evidence that exposure to email rudeness has a negative effect on individual task performance. We found that email rudeness does not just affect self-reported attitudinal outcomes such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction, but is also detrimental to task performance. Our results also indicate that individuals exposed to email rudeness perform worse on the same task than those exposed to face-to-face rudeness, contrary to the intuitive expectation that face-to-face rudeness to be more distressing. In addition, we find powerful effects of cyber incivility on uninvolved third parties. Our findings are consistent with the argument that exposure to rudeness reduces the powerful normative restraint displayed by individuals to provide favorable feedback to others. We show that participants in both the email rudeness and face-to-face rudeness conditions gave less favorable evaluations of uninvolved others after being treated rudely. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that the negative consequences of exposure to rudeness may damage organizations extensively, and that rudeness can facilitate a vicious circle of poor performance and lower evaluations of others' performance.


"The Hidden Cost of Worker Turnover: Attributing Product Reliability to the Turnover of Factory Workers"

Professor(s): Professor Patrick Bergemann
Co-Author(s): Ken Moon, Prashant Loyalka and Joshua Cohen
Accepted at: Management Science (Journal on Financial Times Top 50 list)

Product reliability is a key concern for manufacturers. We examine worker turnover as a significant but under-recognized determinant of product reliability. Our study collects and integrates (1) data reporting factory worker staffing and turnover from within a major consumer electronics producer’s supply chain and (2) traceable data reporting the component quality and field failures—i.e., replacements and repairs—of nearly 50M consumer mobile devices over four years of customer usage. Devices are individually traced back to the factory conditions and staffing, down to the assembly line-week, under which they were produced. Despite the manufacturer’s extensive quality-control efforts, each percentage-point increase in the weekly rate of workers quitting from an assembly line (its weekly worker turnover) is found to increase field failures by 0.74-0.79%. In the high-turnover weeks following paydays, eventual field failures are strikingly 10.2% more common than for devices produced during the lowest turnover weeks immediately before paydays. In other weeks, the assembly lines experiencing higher turnover produce an estimated 2-3% more field failures on average. The associated costs amount to hundreds of millions USD. We demonstrate that staffing and retaining a stable factory workforce critically underlies product reliability and showcase the value of traceability coupled with connected workplace and product data in supply chain operations.


"Overcoming Conflict between Symmetric Occupations: How “Creatives” and “Suits” use Gender Ordering in Advertising"

Professor(s): Professor Sharon Koppman
Co-Author(s): Beth A. Bechky and Andrew C. Cohen
Accepted at: Academy of Management Journal (Journal on Financial Times Top 50 list)

In knowledge-based organizations, conflict among interdependent occupations can be exacerbated by the absence of a clear hierarchical ordering of these occupations within the organization. Moreover, given women’s inroads into some traditionally male-dominated occupations but not others, these workplaces are increasingly horizontally gender segregated. In this paper, we study how members of these symmetric and segregated occupations manage conflict in U.S. advertising agencies through the case of relationships between ‘creatives’ (copywriters, designers, and creative directors) and ‘suits’ or account practitioners (account executives, strategists, and managers). Creatives and suits are at the same organizational level in their agencies. While creatives are primarily men, suits, traditionally also men, are now primarily women. Drawing on participant observation in five different U.S. advertising agencies and over 100 interviews, we show how creatives and account practitioners use gender ordering to overcome jurisdictional conflict. These practices are grounded in enacting essentialist gender differences that transform symmetric occupational relationships into hierarchical ones by embedding the gender hierarchy. We find that while gender ordering helps women and men in cross-occupational pairs get work done, it also reinforces women’s disadvantage because for women it involves low-status and emotionally taxing scut work that it does not involve for men.


"Broadening our Understanding of Human Resource Management for Improved Environmental Performance"

Professor(s): Professor Emerita Jone Pearce and Ph.D. Student Florencio F. Portocarrero
Co-Author(s): Anne-Laure Winkler
Accepted at: Business and Society

This article evaluates the effect of different human resource management (HRM) practices on organizations’ environmental performance. We develop a model to evaluate the influence of a broad range of HRM practices, including environmental performance criteria in managers’ performance evaluations and two types of internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices: socially responsible employee benefits and corporate volunteering practices. To this end, we analyze a sample of 142 manufacturing companies that have completed B Lab’s Impact Assessment process to certify their environmental performance. The results show that including environmental criteria in a higher proportion of managers’ performance evaluations directly impacts organizations’ environmental performance and strengthens the positive effect of other environmental management practices. The findings also demonstrate the direct effects of both types of CSR practices on an organization’s environmental performance. Our study advances recent work on Green HRM and CSR by identifying the specific HRM practices that allow organizations to move from being part of the world’s environmental problem to being part of the solution.


“Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results”

Professor(s): Chris Bauman
Co-author(s): Landy, J. F., Jia, M., Ding, I. L., Viganola, D., Tierney, W., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Pfeiffer, T., Ebersole, C. R., Gronau, Q. F., Ly, A., van den Bergh, D., Marsman, M., Derks, K., Wagenmakers, E., Proctor, A., Bartels, D. M., Brady, W. J., Cheung, F., Cimpian, A., Dohle, S., Donnellan, M. B., Hahn, A., Hall, M. P., Jiménez-Leal, W., Johnson, D. J., Lucas, R. E., Monin, B., Montealegre, A., Mullen, E., Pang, J., Ray, J., Reinero, D. A., Reynolds, J., Sowden, W., Storage, D., Su, R., Tworek, C. M., Van Bavel, J. J., Walco, D., Wills, J., Xu, X., Yam, K. C., Yang, X., Cunningham, W. A., Schweinsberg, M., Urwitz, M., The Crowdsourcing Hypothesis Tests Collaboration, Uhlmann, E. L.
Accepted at: Psychological Bulletin
To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from two separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then randomly assigned to complete one version of each study. Effect sizes varied dramatically across different sets of materials designed to test the same hypothesis: materials from different teams rendered statistically significant effects in opposite directions for four out of five hypotheses, with the narrowest range in estimates being d = -0.37 to +0.26. Meta-analysis and a Bayesian perspective on the results revealed overall support for two hypotheses, and a lack of support for three hypotheses. Overall, practically none of the variability in effect sizes was attributable to the skill of the research team in designing materials, while considerable variability was attributable to the hypothesis being tested. In a forecasting survey, predictions of other scientists were significantly correlated with study results, both across and within hypotheses. Crowdsourced testing of research hypotheses helps reveal the true consistency of empirical support for a scientific claim.

“The Cognitive and Behavioral Impact of Promotion and Prevention Contracts on Trust in Repeated Exchanges”

Professor(s): Chris Bauman and Libby Weber
Accepted at: Academy of Management Journal
Although contracts certainly facilitate exchange, scholars debate whether contracts and trust are complements or substitutes. Recent theoretical work suggests that contract frames influence the relationship between contracts and trust. We test and extend this theorizing by examining the effects of prevention and promotion contract frames on trust and some potential cognitive and emotional mechanisms responsible for them. We also explore how unexpected negative events affect trust developed under different contract frames. Experiment 1 found that promotion contracts fostered stronger attributions of benevolence than prevention contracts, but emotional experiences of the exchanges did not differ. Additionally, trusting intentions were higher following positive exchange experience under promotion than prevention contracts. Experiment 2 found that people were more willing to engage in trusting behavior following positive exchange experience under promotion than prevention contracts. However, violations of exchange expectations were more damaging to trust developed under promotion than prevention contracts. Together, the studies indicate that contract frames and whether exchange experiences are positive or negative affect the relationship between contracts and trust, likely because contract frames influence attributions of benevolence.

“Taking a Pass: How Proportional Prejudice and Decisions Not to Hire Reproduce Gender Segregation”

Professor(s): Sharon Koppman
Co-author(s): Ming Leung
Accepted at: American Journal of Sociology
The authors propose and test a novel theory of how decisions not to hire reproduce gender segregation through what they term proportional prejudice. They hypothesize that employers are less likely to hire anyone from an applicant pool that contains a large proportion of gender-atypical applicants--that is, those whose gender does not match the occupation stereotype--as this leads employers to form negative impressions of all of the pool’s applicants, regardless of gender. Analyses of over 7 million applications for over 700,000 job postings by more than 200,000 freelancers in an online contract labor market support their argument. A supplemental survey experiment isolates the mechanism: applicant pools with a larger proportion of gender-atypical applicants were evaluated as less likely to contain people who “seemed skilled enough for the job.” The authors conclude by demonstrating how their theory reconciles the conflicting findings as to whether gender-atypical job seekers are disadvantaged in the hiring process.

“Who Moves to the Methodological Edge? Factors that Encourage Scientists to Use Unconventional Methods”

Professor(s): Sharon Koppman
Co-author(s): Erin Leahey
Accepted at: Research Policy
Breaking from tradition is necessary for scientific advancement, yet we know little about the factors that encourage individual scientists to break from tradition in their research, particularly to do so by using methods that are unconventional in their fields. To address this gap, we integrate the sociology of science with insights from organization theory, which delineates the evaluative advantages bestowed on those with elite status and a consistent professional identity. We use a mixed methods design. Bibliometric data on articles using three unconventional methods in sociology—Correspondence Analysis, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and Sequence Analysis—allow us to identify which types of scholars have a greater hazard of using unconventional methods and the conditions under which these associations hold. Interviews with published, unpublished, and likely users reveal how scholars manage the career risks associated with unconventional method use. We find that scholars who are male and affiliated with top-tier universities, as well as those already committed to an identity consistent with the use of unconventional methods, have a greater hazard of using them in published work, though these associations depend on the extent to which the method diverges epistemologically from conventional methodology and the visibility of its lineage. In addition, we identify five successful (and two unsuccessful) strategies scholars use to manage their use of unconventional methods. Taken together, results from this mixed methods study advance knowledge on scientific practice, extend theory on valuation risk, and provides guidance to policymakers and administrators who aim to foster risky, path-breaking research.

“Will We Ever Meet Again? The Relationship between Inter-Firm Managerial Mobility and the Circulation of Client Ties”

Professor(s): Sharon Koppman
Co-author(s): Joseph Broschak, Emily Block, and Idris Adjerid
Accepted at: Journal of Management Studies
A large body of research shows that manager mobility weakens provider-client relationships because managers bring relationship-specific knowledge and expertise—i.e., human and social capital—with them to their new employers. This study extends this research by introducing a bi-directional perspective of social capital in which both firms and managers may exploit these relationship-specific resources. We use theory on social capital to build arguments about how employee mobility between two service providers in a single market can both lead and lag the movement of client ties between those providers, and signaling theory to hypothesize the conditions under which this is likely to occur. Analyses using longitudinal data on New York City advertising agencies generally support our arguments. Our findings contribute to theory and research on manager mobility, social capital, and signaling, and raises new questions for how the portability of relationship-specific social capital shapes markets.

“Choosing Surgery: The Impact of Decision Aids for Shared Title: Decision Making among Adults with Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis”

Professor(s): Ming D. Leung
Co-author(s): Vanessa Hurley, Hector P. Rodriguez, and Stephen M. Shortell
Accepted at: Health Affairs
Trials of decision aids (DAs) for shared decision-making (SDM) find that patients engaged in SDM tend to choose more conservative treatment for preference-sensitive conditions. We examine whether routine provision of DAs for hip or knee osteoarthritis was associated with reduced surgical utilization compared to a matched comparison group of patients. Data from patients with hip and knee osteoarthritis within ten High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC) systems between 2012-2015 were analyzed to determine their likelihood of joint replacement surgery after being exposed to DAs prior to consultations for hip or knee osteoarthritis. Compared to matched comparison group patients, patients exposed to DAs had two and a half times the odds of undergoing hip replacement surgery and nearly twice the odds of undergoing knee replacement surgery. Health systems that use DAs for hip and knee osteoarthritis consultations should not expect reduced surgical utilization.

“Strategic Redundancy in the Use of Big Data: Evidence from a Two-Sided Labor Market”

Professor(s): Ming D. Leung
Co-author(s): Moshe A. Barach, Aseem Kaul, and Sibo Lu
Accepted at: Strategy Science
In this study, we examine how firms use the big data capabilities of third-party platforms to find transaction partners. While use of the platform’s big data capabilities creates value by lowering search costs, firms may capture little of this value if they become entirely dependent on the platform. We therefore argue that firms will invest in strategic redundancy, i.e., they will continue to rely partly on their internal screening capabilities to identify partners so as to maintain their bargaining power relative to the platform. We further predict that this reliance on internal screening will be greater the lower the relative advantage of the platform’s big data capabilities and the more salient the threat to the firm’s bargaining power. We test these predictions in the context of an online labor platform, using a research discontinuity design to examine the effect of the platform’s recommendations on the firm’s decision to hire an applicant. Consistent with our theory, we find that firms' use of the platform’s recommendations is lower in later stages of the hiring process, in larger sub-markets, and for firms with greater experience on the platform. Our study thus sheds new light on how firms make use of (third-party) big data techniques, showing that firms may strategically choose to limit such use in order to maintain independence.

“Eyes Wide Open: Perceived Exploitation and Its Consequences”

Professor(s): Jone L. Pearce
Co-author(s): Ephrat Ofer and Jacqueline Coyle-Shapiro
Accepted at: Academy of Management Journal
Drawing on the array of literature on exploitation from several social science disciplines, we propose a new way of seeing employer-employee relationships by introducing the concept of perceived exploitative employee-organization relationships, distinguish it from related concepts, and conduct five studies to develop a scale and test our theoretical model of the effects of such employee perceptions. Contributing to the Employee-Organization Relationships and workplace emotions literatures, perceived exploitation is defined as employees’ perceptions that they have been purposefully taken advantage of in their relationship with the organization, to the benefit of the organization itself. We propose and find that such perceptions are associated with both outward-focused emotions of anger and hostility toward the organization and inward-focused ones of shame and guilt at remaining in an exploitative job. In two studies including construction workers and a time-lagged study of medical residents, we find that the emotions of anger and hostility partially mediate the effects of perceived exploitation on employee engagement, revenge against the organization, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions, whereas the emotions of shame and guilt partially mediate the effects of perceived exploitation on employee burnout, silence, and psychological withdrawal.

“The Relationship between Belief in Stable Luck and a Propensity for Superstition: The Influence of Culturally-Conferred Agency Beliefs”

Professor(s): Maia Young
Co-author(s): Ning Chen
Accepted at: Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
Superstition is known to be positively associated with the belief in luck. However, prior research that has demonstrated the link between luck belief and superstition has not distinguished between two different types of luck beliefs – stable luck and fleeting luck – and their concomitant relationships with agency beliefs and superstition, as those vary by culture. The current research focused on the belief in stable luck and investigated the relationship between this belief and the propensity for superstition among Asians and Americans (Study 1) or Asian-Americans and non-Asian-Americans (Study 2). We found that belief in stable luck is positively associated with the propensity for superstition among Asians (Study 1) and Asian Americans (Study 2) but not among individuals without Asian cultural background. Furthermore, belief in collective agency mediated the effect of stable luck on superstition, but again, only for Asians (Study 3). The implications of these findings for the study of culture are discussed.

“Motivated to Confront: How Experiencing Anger Affects Anchoring Bias”

Professor(s): Maia Young
Co-author(s): Heajung Jung
Accepted at: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
Prior research has asserted that emotions affect anchoring bias in decision making through the emotion’s certainty appraisal (Inbar & Gilovich, 2011) or through the emotion’s action tendencies (Jung & Young, 2012) but these prior studies investigate the role of each component—appraisal or action tendency—without accounting for potential effects of the other one. The current research investigates whether anger exerts a significant effect on anchoring bias by activating a desire to confront a potential anchor. Importantly, the studies compare the effect of anger versus disgust, emotions that differ in their action tendency but are similar in their certainty appraisal. In Study 1, participants completed an emotion induction task and then a negotiation task where the first offer from the negotiation partner served as a potential anchor. Anger led to more deviation from the anchor compared to disgust or neutral feelings. Subsequent studies provide evidence that the angry participants are less anchored when the anchor value comes from a more confrontable source (someone else versus themselves in Study 2 and an out-group member versus an in-group member in Study 3).

“The Cognitive and Behavioral Impact of Promotion and Prevention Contracts on Trust in Repeated Exchanges”

Professor(s) Chris Bauman and Libby Weber
Accepted at: Academy of Management Journal
 
Although contracts certainly facilitate exchange, scholars debate whether contracts and trust are complements or substitutes. Recent theoretical work suggests that contract frames influence the relationship between contracts and trust. We test and extend this theorizing by examining the effects of prevention and promotion contract frames on trust and some potential cognitive and emotional mechanisms responsible for them. We also explore how unexpected negative events affect trust developed under different contract frames. Experiment 1 found that promotion contracts fostered stronger attributions of benevolence than prevention contracts, but emotional experiences of the exchanges did not differ. Additionally, trusting intentions were higher following positive exchange experience under promotion than prevention contracts. Experiment 2 found that people were more willing to engage in trusting behavior following positive exchange experience under promotion than prevention contracts. However, violations of exchange expectations were more damaging to trust developed under promotion than prevention contracts. Together, the studies indicate that contract frames and whether exchange experiences are positive or negative affect the relationship between contracts and trust, likely because contract frames influence attributions of benevolence.

“The Relationship between Belief in Stable Luck and a Propensity for Superstition: The Influence of Culturally-Conferred Agency Beliefs”

Professor(s) Maia Young
Co-author(s): Ning Chen, Clarion University of Pennsylvania
Accepted at: Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
 
Superstition is known to be positively associated with the belief in luck. However, prior research that has demonstrated the link between luck belief and superstition has not distinguished between two different types of luck beliefs – stable luck and fleeting luck – and their concomitant relationships with agency beliefs and superstition, as those vary by culture. The current research focused on the belief in stable luck and investigated the relationship between this belief and the propensity for superstition among Asians and Americans (Study 1) or Asian-Americans and non-Asian-Americans (Study 2). We found that belief in stable luck is positively associated with the propensity for superstition among Asians (Study 1) and Asian Americans (Study 2) but not among individuals without Asian cultural background. Furthermore, belief in collective agency mediated the effect of stable luck on superstition, but again, only for Asians (Study 3). The implications of these findings for the study of culture are discussed.

“Improving Micro-Retailer and Consumer Welfare in Developing Economies: Replenishment Strategies and Market Entries”

Professor(s): Luyi Gui and Shuya Yin
Co-author: Chris S. Tang
Accepted at: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, November 2017

Micro-retailers in remote rural areas in developing countries face high replenishment cost due to poor road infrastructure and the lack of formal distribution channels. This paper investigates the effectiveness of two innovative replenishment strategies (purchasing cooperatives and non-profit wholesaler) deployed by NGOs to reduce micro-retailers' replenishment cost and improve consumer welfare. The problem is relevant in practice as travel cost has been documented as a major cost burden that leads to meager earnings for the micro-retailers, few retailers in the market, and high prices to the consumers (due to less competition). Analyzing how these innovative strategies alleviate the above problems enable us to develop practical insights as well as fill an important gap in the literature. We adopt a stylized model that captures price competition, consumer welfare, and market entry decision of micro-retailers under the replenishment strategies considered. We compare the equilibrium retailer profit, consumer welfare, and the number of retailers entering the market under these strategies. We find that in a regulated market, a non-profit wholesaler creates supply chain inefficiency, and thus can lead to a higher retail price, which benefits the retailers yet harms the consumers. However, with free market entry (unregulated market), we show that under certain market conditions, both the cooperative and the non-profit wholesaler strategies can be Pareto improving. Yet between these two strategies, there typically exists a trade-off in both regulated and unregulated markets, i.e., the cooperative strategy enhances consumer welfare while the wholesaler strategy leads to higher retailer profits. Our results indicate that the policy maker needs to be mindful about the market conditions and the relative emphasis between the profit and market participation of micro-retailers and consumer welfare when choosing and implementing the purchasing cooperative and the non-profit wholesaler strategies.


“Discovery within validation logic: Deliberately Surfacing, complementing, and substituting Abductive Reasoning in Hypothetic-Deductive Inquiry”

Professor(s) Gerardo Okhuysen 
Co-author(s): Kristin Behfar
Accepted at: Organization Science, November 2017

We propose a more explicit role for abductive reasoning, or the development of initial explanation, in hypothetic-deductive (H-D) inquiry. We begin by describing the roots of abduction in pragmatism and its role in exploration and discovery. Recognizing that pragmatism treats abductive reasoning as inevitable, we argue that it can also be a deliberate form of reasoning in scientific inquiry, articulating the unique place it can have in hypothetic-deductive theorizing. We explain the opportunities from surfacing abductive reasoning in H-D where it already exists, from explicitly acknowledging abductive reasoning as a complement in building logical chains in H-D, and from using abductive reasoning as a substitute for H-D logic when a body of knowledge exhibits inconsistent, contradictory, or discrepant results. We elaborate strategies for data search/selection, data production and compilation, and analytical corroboration. Our overall argument is that the deliberate use of abductive reasoning in hypothetic-deductive projects has distinct advantages stemming from an explicitly tight connection between data and theory. We end by explaining the benefits of actively recognizing the role of abductive reasoning in organizational and management theorizing.


“IT Investment under Competition: The Role of Implementation Failure”

Professor(s): Mingdi Xin and Vidyanand Choudhary
Accepted at: Journal: Management Science, September 2017

How does competition impact firms' incentive to innovate through information technology (IT) investment? Prior literature suggests opposite predictions on the direction in which competition drives IT investment. This paper analyzes a game theoretic model of duopoly competition and shows that an important feature of IT sheds new light on firms' investment decisions: IT implementation can fail. Without the possibility of implementation failure, the opportunity to invest in IT hurts firms' profits because the productivity gains are competed away. Implementation failure creates a possibility of cost- based differentiation and mitigates competition, although these two effects can drive firms' IT investment in opposite directions. Interestingly, a higher probability of implementation failure can lead to lower investment risks and higher expected profits. Firms in highly competitive markets are better able to recoup the returns to their IT investments and, therefore, more motivated to invest in risky IT than firms in less competitive markets.


“A Patchwork of Identities: Emergence of Charter Schools as a New Organizational Form”

PhD Student Harsh Jha
Co-authors: Christine Beckman
Accepted at: Research in the Sociology of Organizations, June 2017

We examine the emergence of an organizational form, charter schools, in Oakland, California. We link field-level logics to organizational founding identities using topic modeling. We find corporate and community founding actors create distinct and consistent identities, whereas more peripheral founders indulge in more unique identity construction. We see the settlement of the form into a stable ecosystem with multiple identity codes rather than driving toward a single organizational identity. The variety of identities that emerge do not always map onto field-level logics. This has implications for the conditions under which organizational innovation and experimentation within a new form may develop.


“Product Similarity and Cross-Price Elasticity”

Professor(s): Rajeev Tyagi and Sreya Kolay
Accepted at: Review of Industrial Organization, June 2017

Cross-price elasticity is one of the most commonly used constructs in theoretical and empirical work in the areas of pricing and market structure. A higher cross-price elasticity between two products means that they are more substitutable, and is often suggested as an indication that these products are more similar to each other in their characteristics. This implied positive relationship between cross-price elasticity and similarity between products is used in a large number of academic empirical studies, in implementations of

This paper investigates theoretically the relationship between the similarity between two products and the cross-price elasticities between them. Using a spatial competition model, we show how making two products more similar on product attributes could increase, decrease, or have an inverted-U shaped effect on cross-price elasticity. Thus we show how the relationship between cross-price elasticity and similarity between products is more nuanced than the positive relationship posited in the literature. We also show how the direction of this relationship is affected by the difference in the products' base strengths (e.g., product qualities), the nature of the increase in the firms' marginal costs if costs vary with base strength, and the nature of the disutility that consumers incur by buying a product that is away from their ideal points.


“Dismissing a Tarnished CEO? Psychological Mechanisms and Unconscious Biases in the Board’s Evaluation”

Professor(s): Margarethe Wiersema and Libby Weber
Accepted at: California Management Review, June 2017

In today’s world, CEOs are frequently dismissed following corporate misconduct or poor performance. Yet, it is often difficult to predict when boards will dismiss the CEOs, as the same behavior often results in different decisions across firms. Taking a socio-cognitive perspective, this article explores the factors that lead a CEO to become tarnished. It then uses expectancy violation theory combined with attribution theory as well as stakeholder theory, concepts of legitimacy, and motivational theory to understand how the board evaluates the tarnished CEO. Given the increasing incidence of CEO dismissal, this paper provides an important contribution to both academic research and to corporate boards who face the responsibility of deciding how to respond to instances of poor firm performance and corporate misconduct.

“Blame the shepherd not the sheep: Imitating high-ranking transgressors mitigates punishment for unethical behavior”

Professor(s) Christopher W. Bauman 
Co-author(s): Leigh P. Tost and Madeline Ong
Accepted at: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, September 2016 


Do bad role models exonerate others’ unethical behavior? Based on social learning theory and psychological theories of blame, we predicted that unethical behavior by higher-ranking individuals changes how people respond to lower-ranking individuals who subsequently commit the same transgression. Five studies explored when and why this rank-dependent imitation effect occurs. Across all five studies, we found that people were less punitive when low-ranking transgressors imitated high-ranking members of their organization. However, imitation only reduced punishment when the two transgressors were from the same organization (Study 2), when the transgressions were highly similar (Study 3), and when it was unclear whether the initial transgressor was punished (Study 5). Results also indicated that imitation affects punishment because it influences whom people blame for the transgression. These findings reveal actor-observer differences in social learning and identify a way that unethical behavior spreads through organizations.


“A behavioral understanding of investment horizon and firm performance”

Professor(s) Phil Bromiley 
Co-author(s): David Souder, Greg Reilly, and Scott Mitchell, PhD Alumnus
Accepted at: Organization Science, September 2016 


Observers have argued that firms overly emphasize short term results at the expense of long run value. Using a behavioral perspective, we analyze three hypotheses related to this general argument. First, we examine the association of investment time horizons with firm performance, contributing new theory that argues for a quadratic rather than linear association. Second, because the tendency toward immediate results could reflect stock market pressures, we consider how the interaction of investor patience and firm horizon relates to firm performance. Third, we examine the argument’s implication that most firms have investment horizons at a level where marginal increases in horizon associate positively with firm performance. Measuring horizon as the expected useful lives of capital expenditures, we find empirical support for the hypothesized quadratic relation in a large-scale, multi-year sample of U.S. publicly held manufacturing firms and confirm that a majority of firms have horizons in the region where our models predict increases in horizon positively influence performance. We also find that the most positive returns occur when long horizon investments are aligned with investor patience.


“Intentional sin and accidental virtue? Cultural differences in moral systems influence perceived intentionality”

Professor(s) Christopher W. Bauman 
Co-author(s): Clark, C. J., Kamble, S. V., & Knowles, E. D.
Accepted at: Social and Personality Psychological Science, August 2016 


Indians and US Americans view harmful actions as morally wrong, but Indians are more likely than US Americans to perceive helping behaviors as moral imperatives. We utilize this cultural variability in moral belief systems to test whether and how moral considerations influence perceptions of intentionality (as suggested by theories of folk psychology; e.g., Knobe, 2003). Four experiments found that Indians attribute more intentionality than US Americans for helpful but not harmful (Studies 1-4) or neutral side-effects (Studies 2-3). Also, cross-cultural differences in intentionality judgments for positive actions reflect stronger praise motives (Study 3), and stronger devotion to religious beliefs and practices among Hindus (Study 4). These results provide the first direct support for the claim that features of moral belief systems influence folk psychology, and further suggest that the influence is not inherently asymmetrical; motivation to either blame or praise can influence judgments of intentionality.


“Third World ‘Sloggers’ or Elite Global Professionals? Using Organizational Toolkits to Redefine Work Identity in IT Offshore-Outsourcing.”

Professor(s) Sharon Koppman 
Co-author(s): Elisa Mattarelli and Amar Gupta
Accepted at: Organization Science , March 2016 


Organizations increasingly rely on teams that span national and organizational boundaries, yet team members in emerging countries and vendor firms are not treated as professional peers by their Western and client-based peers. To understand how they respond to this identity threat, we integrate two literatures that suggest two possible answers: an organizational response, based on the critical literature on top-down identity regulation, and an individual response, based on the positive literature on bottom-up identity construction. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival data from three Indian IT offshore-outsourcing firms, we examine how organizational and individual identity processes work in tandem to address this threat. We find that firms do not resolve this threat by regulating employee identity directly as they claim but instead provide workers with an organizational toolkit—a set of organizationally-available cultural resources (e.g., frames and stories) and political resources (e.g., policies and procedures) that workers use selectively and strategically to construct positive identities. By bringing a toolkit perspective to identity processes, we contribute to theory and research on cross-level identity linkages, the strategic nature of identity processes, and the local context of global identity.


“Social, Behavioral, Cognitive Influences on Upper Echelons During Strategy Process: A Literature Review”

Professor(s) Phil Bromiley 
Co-author(s): D. Rau
Accepted at: Journal of Management, January 2016 


This study reviews research on the social, behavioral, and cognitive influences on CEOs, top management teams (TMTs), and the CEO-TMT interface during strategic decision making. We identify the key issues examined in this research over the past ten years and relate developments in the field to previous knowledge in this area. We also attempt to identify what constitutes an established body of knowledge in the field, and therefore, areas that need additional examination. Our review indicates that while there has been an explosion of research on the influence of CEO personality and TMT social processes on strategy process, much remains to be done in terms of examining CEO and TMT cognition, particularly at the level of the CEO-TMT interface.


“Using Organizational Science Research to Address U.S. Federal Agencies’ Management and Labor Needs”

Professor(s) Jone Pearce 
Co-author(s): Herman Aguinis, Gerald F. Davis, James R. Detert, Mary Ann Glynn, Susan E. Jackson, Tom Kochan, Ellen Ernst Kossek, Carrie Leana, Thomas W. Lee, Elizabeth Morrison, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Denise Rousseau, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe
Accepted at: Behavioral Science Policy Journal, October 2016 


We describe important and common management and labor needs across more than 80 federal agencies as identified by the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and offer evidence-based interventions for addressing them based on organizational science research. Our recommendations have the synergistic goals of improving employee wellbeing, employee productivity, and agency performance and innovation, which will result in increased agency efficiency and effectiveness for the taxpayer. Specifically, we describe empirical findings and offer suggestions for interventions to improve (a) employee motivation through engagement, empowerment, and embeddedness; (b) employee voice; and (c) within- and across-unit cooperation, communication, and collaboration. We offer recommendations that are sufficiently general to be relevant to many agencies, while also being concrete and actionable. We also offer suggestions for associated research that could be conducted in federal agencies interested in these topics.


“Are Secret Proceedings Why Longer Tenured Employees Trust Their Organizations Least?”

Professor(s) Jone Pearce 
Co-author(s): Kenji Klein (PhD Alumnus)
Accepted at: Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, December 2016 


We address the effects of secrecy in organizational policy enforcement. First, the legal literature that explains why court proceedings are open is summarized: openness more effectively holds decision makers and claimants accountable for truthfulness and unbiased decisions, demonstrates that the rich or powerful have not bought off the weak, supports adaptation to changing norms, and enhances the legitimacy of state authority. Next, we propose that when organizational policy enforcement is kept secret from other employees, organizations lose these benefits. One reflection of these loses will be lower employee trust in their organizations the longer their tenure there. Using questionnaire data from a large U.S. governmental agency, we found that lower employee trust with tenure is incrementally linearly lower over the course of employment, not the result of an early breach of the psychological contract. This occurs for employees at all hierarchical levels but is steepest for non-supervisory employees, suggesting that employees lack information about policy enforcement may be driving this phenomenon.

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