Management and Strategy - HKU Business School

03 November

Should Workplace Programs be Voluntary or Mandatory? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Mentorship

SPEAKER

Dr. Chris Stanton
Associate Professor of Business Administration
Entrepreneurial Management Unit
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

There is substantial variation in whether workplace training and mentorship programs are voluntary or mandatory. When programs are voluntary, many workers do not participate. We conducted a natural field experiment on a mentorship program in a sales call center where in one treatment arm, labeled the Mandatory-Condition, all subjects were either randomly assigned a mentor or not. A second treatment arm, labeled the Voluntary-Condition, required subjects to opt into the program before randomization into receiving a mentor. In the Mandatory-Condition, the mentorship treatment raised workers’ daily revenue by 17% in their first two months of tenure. In the Voluntary-Condition, those who opted out of the program were substantially less productive than those who opted in, and treatment gains conditional on program participation were negligible. Comparing the conditions indicates that treatment effects are largest for workers who are most likely to opt out of participating in the program. We conclude that workplace programs can raise the productivity of lower performing employees but these workers may require inducements or mandates to participate.

24 October

Who steps into the void? A third-party perspective on US sanctions on Huawei in international standard-setting

SPEAKER

Dr. Qingqing Chen
Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Economics
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the role of third-party companies in the standard-setting process when the cooperation between two groups of key players is exogenously disrupted. By jointly considering technology interdependence and cooperative interactions between players in an innovation ecosystem, the paper builds a framework to understand the third party’s technological and sociological salience in the face of disruptions. The paper argues that after a disruption, a third-party player will become more influential in the standard setting process if it (1) has the technical potential to replace either party in the disrupted relationship (the substitution effect); or (2) serves as an information broker, connecting the two groups of players (the brokerage effect). Social familiarity magnifies the substitution effect, and the technology proximity between the disconnected two parties negatively moderates the brokerage effect. The theory hypotheses are supported by evidence collected in 3GPP, an international telecommunication standard-setting organization, during the recent US sanctions on Huawei. By tracking 67 active third-party companies’ standard proposals in 535 3GPP meetings, I find supportive evidence for the substitution and the brokerage effects.

24 October

So Many Bosses, So Little Time: The Challenges of Establishing a Career in Project-Based Organizations

SPEAKER

Ms Minseo Baek
Ph.D. Candidate in Management (Human and Social Capital)
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

How new employees get onboarded and established inside organizations is critical to their subsequent careers and organizational success. These initial adjustments are typically guided by a formal manager and team members within a clearly defined and stable team boundary. However, in project-based organizations, employees work with many managers and move around to different project teams. Therefore, their team membership is constantly in flux and they must take on many of the tasks of deciding which projects to work on and at what pace themselves in many of these settings. When new employees lack a formal structure and manager to guide them, how do they get onboarded and establish their careers successfully? Will it be equally challenging for all or more so for some than others? Drawing on an 18-month case study of junior attorneys at a top 50 US Big Law firm, I articulate how a fluid organizational structure creates a dilemma for junior attorneys when dealing with work requests from many partners. I also identify three approaches juniors take in response to this dilemma, which varies according to their conceptions of work requests and concomitant networking patterns with partners: Ally- Building, All-Encompassing, and Drifting. Interestingly, these approaches are closely related to their social background. My findings suggest that Ally-Building is the most effective, yet juniors from the firstgeneration college graduate background are predominantly All-Encompassing or Drifting due to their greater feelings of insecurity and difficulties in sourcing work. This study draws attention to the new challenges employees face in establishing themselves in the fluid work environment and the variations in their degree of success in addressing these challenges according to their social background.

24 October

Standing Out Only to Get Hammered Down: CEO Compensatory Actions and Board Ratcheting Responses

SPEAKER

Dr. Shelby Gai
Assistant Professor in Management
Eli Broad College of Business
Michigan State University

ABSTRACT

While research examining the motivation behind CEO goal attainment has often focused on monetary incentives, this study analyzes the social factors motivating CEO behavior. Drawing on self-determination theory, we consider how differences between the CEO and the board may motivate the former to engage in compensatory actions—defined as attempts to overcome feelings of inferiority or inadequacy by overperforming—due to the need for relatedness. We identify three dimensions of difference that could lead to CEO compensatory action in the form of goal over-attainment: 1) demographic differences; 2) occupational differences; and 3) status differences. We also address the possible consequences of CEO compensatory action by examining board responses in the form of ratcheting up subsequent performance targets. Bringing in research from the social identity perspective, we expect that compensating attempts by the CEO will lead to backlash such that boards will increase subsequent targets, and the likelihood for this backlash will be higher for CEOs that reflect one of the three difference dimensions. We test our hypotheses using an original dataset consisting of nearly 1000 firms from 2006-2019, and discuss the implications of our theoretical perspective and supportive empirical findings for future research on corporate governance, CEO/Board relationships, and compensatory actions.

20 October

Social capital in startups: Hiring through direct and indirect connections

SPEAKER

Prof. Olav Sorenson
Professor of Strategy
Faculty Research Director
University of California

ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurs rely heavily on their social networks to recruit employees to their startups. On the one hand, these hiring patterns may stem from the fact that the information flowing through these relationships helps to resolve uncertainty on the part of both parties. On the other hand, it might reflect bias or favoritism in favor of the familiar. Using Danish registry data, we explore who most frequently hires through social connections, who gets hired, the probable mechanisms underlying these processes, and the implications of this network-based hiring for firm performance. On average, startup employees hired through connections appear to be of higher quality than those hired without them. Startups with more early employees hired through these channels perform better.

13 October

Environmental Transparency and Value Appropriation from Innovation: Evidence from US Hydraulic Fracturing 2000–2020

SPEAKER

Ms. Shirley Tang
Ph.D. Candidate in Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Olin Business School
Washington University in St. Louis

ABSTRACT

Firms are under greater pressure to be transparent about the negative externalities they impose on society. In some cases, these externalities are caused by proprietary technology on which they rely for competitive advantage. This creates a “transparency dilemma”; more transparency relieves public pressure but increases the risk of imitation. I argue that firms under greater public pressure can rely on complementary assets to strategically choose which technologies to disclose and which to keep secret. Using data on over five million chemical ingredients reported at more than 170,000 hydraulically fractured wells across the US, I find that trade secret rates in chemical reporting decrease by 10% with one standard deviation increase in the support for environmental regulation at the congressional district level. In addition, I find that this negative effect is stronger for firms possessing more complementary assets—geological resources specific for the chemical recipes, suggesting that such assets can substitute for secrecy in sustaining competitive advantage as firms disclose the technologies from which competitors cannot profit to appease stakeholders who expect minimum secrecy. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that post-chemical disclosure regulations, firms in states with greater public pressure are more likely to hoard drilling permits. Greater public pressure is also associated with faster drilling, indicating the use of lead time as an additional value appropriation mechanism. Implications for competition and environmental policy are discussed.

11 October

Decoupling in International Business: Evidence, Drivers, Impact and Implications for IB Research

SPEAKER

Prof Peter Ping Li
Professor
Department of International Economics, Government and Business
Copenhagen Business School

ABSTRACT

We argue that decoupling, defined as the process of weakening interdependence between two nations, has been ongoing between China and the United States and is likely to accelerate, with major implications for IB and MNE strategies and management. We show how the world has both deglobalized and decoupled in recent years and discuss the underlying dynamics at the heart of decoupling and their implications for IB. We propose an initial framework of variations in decoupling by industry characteristics, and we outline novel and important questions for IB research growing out of our analysis. We conclude with a brief exposition of possible alternative scenarios.

05 October

A prosocial contributor or status grabber? How and why newcomer proactive knowledge sharing impacts inclusion perception via ambivalent coworker attributions

SPEAKER

Ms Zhishuang Guan
Ph.D. Candidate in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management
Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

Newcomers are often referred to as “new blood” because they are expected to bring fresh insights to organizations. This research tackles how newcomer proactive knowledge sharing with coworkers impacts socialization outcomes. Drawing on attribution theory, I propose that newcomer proactive knowledge sharing is subjected to different attributions by coworkers, driving coworkers to demonstrate ambivalent reactions: due to its prosocial nature, proactive knowledge sharing can be attributed to newcomers’ prosocial motives, which in turn motivates coworkers to provide more socialization support. Meanwhile, because it shows off newcomers’ potential to make an impact, newcomer proactive knowledge sharing can also be interpreted as driven by status striving motives, which makes coworkers less likely to appreciate the knowledge shared. I further propose that the ambivalent coworker reactions will have opposing impacts on the extent to which newcomers perceive they are valuable and respected organizational insiders. In addition, I also identify two strategies that will make coworkers more prone to interpret newcomer proactive knowledge sharing as prosocial: newcomers’ information-seeking behavior and leaders’ encouragement of learning. I’m conducting two studies to test my predictions. In Study 1, I’m collecting large-scale multiphase, multisource, and multilevel field data. In Study 2, I plan to conduct a field experiment to test the interventions.

30 September

Structure-as-Practice: The Decentralized Organizational Design by Middle Managers in a High-Growth Technology Company

SPEAKER

Mr. Haochi Zhang
Ph.D. Candidate in Management and Organizations
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

ABSTRACT

Formal structure is not just something that an organization has, but also something that an organization and its actors do. It manifests the delegation of authority through the practices of designating formal role relationships among organizational members. This paper advances a structure-as-practice perspective in parallel with the dominant structure-as-policy perspective, which has tended to overstate the top managers’ role in designing the formal hierarchy of a growing organization. In developing this epistemological turn, I call for taking seriously the fact that, in practice, with increasing organizational size, the task of authority delegation generally becomes decentralized to senior middle managers in governing their units. In other words, the middle managers are the de facto practitioners who collectively construct the organizational hierarchy. With qualitative and quantitative data at a high-growth technology company, I build upon the communities-of-practice perspective to theorize the knowledge creation and sharing underlying how middle managers undertake this decentralized task. In particular, contingent upon functional and unit-level characteristics, the (non)conformity to the shared knowledge about how to appropriately design the unit structures, which I label as organizational design codes, significantly affects unit performance. I present causal evidence for such normative sanctions by using a quasi-random mentorship program at the company for identification strategy. I also explore the varying effects of different types of deviation (i.e., excessive flatness and excessive tallness). In this context, both types of deviation dampen the overall unit effectiveness and also increase the unit turnover rate, whereas excessive flatness appears particularly detrimental to the unit effectiveness. I discuss the implications of the structure-as- practice perspective and the analytical framework developed in this study for the literature on practice theory, organizational design, and organizational learning.

30 September

Shortcuts to Innovation: The Use of Analogies in Knowledge Production

SPEAKER

Dr Soomi Kim
Ph.D. Candidate in Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management
Sloan School of Management
MIT

ABSTRACT

Old ideas serve as critical inputs into new ideas, but how do knowledge workers innovate when there are only few existing ideas to build on? In this paper, I explore how analogical reasoning—and technologies that automate it—can serve as “shortcuts” that allow innovators to import knowledge from an adjacent domain, bypassing the need to build knowledge from the ground up. Yet, because analogies require the availability of other domains as templates, they may also constrain the direction of innovation towards areas of research with available templates. Using the setting of structural biology, I document a tradeoff: while the arrival of an analogy-based technology increased the rate of innovation, it led to workers herding around solving less impactful problems.