SPEAKER

Dr. Li Huang
Associate Professor
Organisational Behaviour
INSEAD Business School

ABSTRACT

Influenced by a classical philosophical notion that a person’s authentic self is their fount of happiness, organizational scholars have adopted an affective and introspective lens and studied employees’ experience of personal inauthenticity as an obstacle to their own wellbeing and work engagement. Overlooked is a parallel notion corroborated by recent psychology research that people also see their authentic self a source of virtue and inauthenticity a threat to their moral self-concept. Drawing from the distancing account of the self-concept protection theory in social psychology, the current research proposes a two-stage, organization-specific defense response through which organizational members experiencing personal inauthenticity are motivated to espouse organizational cynicism, a negative attitude comprising of the belief that the organization lacks integrity as well as organization-directed negative affect and disparaging behaviors. Adopting a full-cycle research approach, we conducted a cross-lagged survey study, an experiment, and three multi-wave survey studies (with one of them pre-registered) to provide consistent support for our theoretical model and exclude trait cynicism and negative affectivity as alternative explanations. We discuss implications of this defense response for the personal authenticity of organizational members and the moral legitimacy of organizations.

SPEAKER

Dr. Yonghoon Lee
Assistant Professor
Department of Management
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

ABSTRACT

Informal networks can help fund managers access information embedded in the networks, but they can also expose managers to the hazard of social herding. Drawing on hedge funds industry, we theorize that the type of information managers use provides a condition under which the value of information access outweighs the hazard of social herding, and vice versa. We test our hypotheses with a triple difference design, leveraging 1) the collapse of Lehman Brothers that caused managers to exchange information through informal networks and 2) the difference between long–short funds relying on soft information, and relative value funds relying on hard information. We find that being connected to informal networks has a net-positive effect on the performance of long–short funds but has a net-negative effect for relative value funds.

SPEAKER

Dr. Isabel Fernandez-Mateo
Adecco Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Chair, Strategy and Entrepreneurship Faculty
London Business School

ABSTRACT

We argue that gender inequality in the innovation process means that scientific ideas are less likely to be used for technology development if their author is a woman versus a man. Testing this claim empirically is difficult because men and women may work on different ideas whose technological potential is largely unobservable. To address this challenge, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries in science – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. We find that scientific papers receive 37% fewer citations in patents, that is, they have a lower technological impact, when they are authored by women. This gap does not appear driven by gender differences in the saliency of the scientists’ publications, but rather by inventors’ paying more attention to male-authored research. We also examine the work that the scientists in our data produce based on their simultaneous discoveries. While women subsequently publish at the same rate and in better journals than their male colleagues do, their publications have nevertheless a much lower technological impact. Our research highlights that gender inequality shapes more than individuals’ careers. It also shapes the extent to which ideas are used to create new technologies. We discuss the implications of this finding for research on innovation and gender inequality in science and technology.

SPEAKER

Dr. Justin M. Berg
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Stanford University

ABSTRACT

Creators who generate hit products enjoy outsize success in creative industries. But too often, creators fail to learn from their initial hits, as their subsequent products lack the audience appeal of their initial hits. In this paper, I develop theory on when and how creators learn to sustain success in creative industries, focusing on how creators’ learning is shaped by the novelty (vs. typicality) of their initial hits. I propose that creators who develop relatively novel initial hits are more likely to learn sustainable capabilities that enhance the audience appeal of their subsequent creations, helping them generate additional hits after their initial one. I tested the proposed theory using two studies: an archival study of 1,601 authors in the U.S. book publishing industry, as well as a complementary experiment to address causality. Results from the archival study showed that book authors with relatively novel initial hits had better subsequent hit rates—a likely indicator of learning—than authors with relatively typical initial hits. In the experiment, participants developed two ideas for television shows, and the novelty and purported success of their first ideas were both manipulated. Participants’ performance improved from their first to second ideas only when their first ideas were novel and (ostensibly) hits with the audience, providing causal evidence that creators learn more effectively from novel than typical initial hits. Whereas prior research suggests that individuals learn best from multiple episodes of success, failure, or both over time, this research suggests that creators who achieve novel initial hits can and do learn from one episode of extreme success.

This is a joint seminar organized by HKU Business School’s Marketing Area and Management & Strategy Area.

SPEAKER

Prof. Maggie Chuoyan Dong
Head of School and Professor 
School of Marketing
UNSW

ABSTRACT

Although the supply chain (SC) literature has discussed the influence of the political environment on global SC decisions, the role of political leaders has been overlooked. To fill this research void, we predict and show that the turnover of a country’s top political leader (hereafter, “politician turnover”) increases policy uncertainty in the country, which drives multinational corporations (MNCs) to adjust their SC involvement there. We also identify three politician-related contingency factors: the market-friendliness of the successor relative to the incumbent, the length of the successor’s political career, and corruption in the turnover country. In an analysis of politician turnover events from 2003 to 2018 and the global supplier-customer relationships of US-incorporated MNCs, we find that politician turnover causes MNCs to reduce SC involvement (measured as the proportions of an MNC’s customers, suppliers, and the transaction volume that are located in the turnover country). The negative effect of politician turnover on SC involvement is exacerbated by corruption in the turnover country, mitigated when the successor has a long political career, and exacerbated when the successor is less market-friendly than the incumbent; the effect becomes positive when the successor is more market-friendly than the incumbent.

SPEAKER

Dr. Lindsey Cameron
Assistant Professor of Management
Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

This research explores how a new relation of production—specifically, the shift from human to algorithms as managers on digital platforms—reconfigures and repurposes workplace consent.  Drawing on a five-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ridehailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human-algorithm interactions. While some research suggests that this segmentation creates a hyper-monitored environment system that stifles workers’ discretion, I find that the reconfiguration of the work process actually allows for more frequent choice. These choices, which I label engagement and deviance tactics, while narrow, are real and ultimately and ultimately do the work of manufacturing consent in the on-demand workplace. Yet due to the fungible nature of the algorithm management system and the independent contractor work arrangement, consent is more fragile than previously theorized.

SPEAKER

Prof. John Horton
Economist and the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor
Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER
MIT

ABSTRACT

There is a strong association between the quality of the writing in a resume for new labor market entrants and whether those entrants are ultimately hired. We show that this relationship is, at least partially, causal: a field experiment in an online labor market was conducted with nearly half a million jobseekers in which a treated group received algorithmic writing assistance. Treated jobseekers experienced an 8% increase in the probability of getting hired. Contrary to concerns that the assistance is taking away a valuable signal, we find no evidence that employers were less satisfied. We present a model in which better writing is not a signal of ability but instead helps employers ascertain ability, which rationalizes our findings.

SPEAKER

Dr. Susan Feng Lu
Associate Professor
Gerald Lyles Rising Star Professor of Management
The Krannert School of Management, Purdue University

ABSTRACT

Anecdotal evidence suggests that gender disparity in job assignment might be a main driver behind the gender pay gap. However, existing gender studies have focused on individual workers or C-suite executives, while systematic empirical studies on low-level managers are rare. In this study, we empirically investigate gender disparity in the job assignment of frontline managers, specifically the effect of gender on store-manager assignment, using personnel, sales, and operational data from a large sportswear retail chain. Our estimation strategy is a two-step fixed effects framework: 1) Separately identify manager fixed effects and store fixed effects by exploring manager switching across stores; 2) Estimate the effect of gender on store-manager assignment while controlling for the estimated manager fixed effects from the first step. Applying this estimation framework to the retail chain’s data, we uncover strong evidence for a gender bias in store-manager assignment—male mangers are more likely than their female counterparts to be assigned to stores with high sales potential, i.e., core stores, stores with a large number of sales clerks, or stores with a high sales target. To support our finding on gender bias in store-manager assignment, we test three alternative hypotheses. First, we find that male managers achieve similar sales when replacing their female counterparts in the same stores, and male managers are not better at managing the turnover of sales clerks, neither of which supports an alternative hypothesis of differential managerial abilities; Second, we find that male sales clerks on average achieved similar or lower sales individually than their female counterparts, thereby not supporting a career selection bias hypothesis that males seeking the sales clerk positions at the retail chain tend to have high sales skills. Third, we conduct a maximum likelihood estimation of a discrete-time Markov chain that models the processes of store-manager assignment and manager turnover, and do not find evidence to support the hypothesis that inequitable store-manager assignment is driven by different gender preferences to leave stores with low sales potential. Translating our findings into an actionable insight, we develop a gender inequity index (GII) to help organizations identify potential gender bias in job assignment. Applying this index to a simulation study using the retail chain’s store manager compensation data, we demonstrate the implications of gender-biased job assignment on the gender pay gap.

SPEAKER

Dr. Alison Jing Xu
Associate Professor
Carlson School of Management  
University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT

When consumers shop in luxury boutiques, high-end shopping malls, and even online, they increasingly encounter luxury products alongside immersive art displays. Exploring this novel phenomenon with both field studies and lab experiments, the current research shows that experiencing art reduces consumer desire for luxury goods. Three boundary conditions have been identified. The effect does not materialize in contexts in which the work of art is not experienced as art per se, such as when the work of art appears as decoration on the product or packaging or is processed analytically rather than naturally, and when luxury goods are not seen as status goods. We propose that experiencing art induces a mental state of “self-transcendence,” which undermines consumers’ status-seeking motive and consequently decreases their desire for luxury goods. This research contributes to the literature on consumer aesthetics and has important practical applications for luxury businesses.

SPEAKER

Prof. Christine M. Beckman
The Price Family Chair in Social Innovation
The USC Price School of Public Policy
University of Southern California

ABSTRACT

The impact of board gender diversity on firm-level behavior has been the object of many studies but the mechanisms underlying a diversity effect have been rarely studied. We focus on research demonstrating that firms with female board members engage in more social and ethical practices to begin to unpack why female board members are important to firm-level behaviors. We examine how the unique and diverse experiences of female board members influence firm-level CSR behaviors. Using a sample of S&P 1500 firms, and a hand-collected database on the backgrounds of all female board members over a 19-year period, we find that diverse functional experience and the advanced and elite educational backgrounds of female board members drive the positive association between board gender diversity and firm-level CSR. Our findings support extending the important research on demographics to include deep-level differences in board member experiences, especially as the demographics of board composition shift toward more diverse representation.