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.

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.

SPEAKER

Ms. Seoin Yoon
Ph.D. Candidate in Management & Organization
Mays Business School
Texas A&M University

ABSTRACT

Since its inception by Ferris and colleagues in 2008, workplace ostracism has emerged as a solid research area, with at least six reviews documenting its ubiquity and seriousness. The consensus in this vast literature is that leaders are “domineering perpetrators” who ostracize employees. However, recent evidence suggests that leaders may be ostracized by their own employees. Despite the potential implications of workplace ostracism for leaders, we know very little about whether leaders are indeed ostracized, and if so, how those ostracized leaders feel and manage these experiences. The lack of attention paid to ostracized leaders implies that it is unlikely to develop new theory on ostracism by simply reversing the lens. Yet, there are reasons to disagree. The purpose of this dissertation is to advance ostracism literature by developing a leader-centric model that elucidates consequences, mechanisms, and boundary condition of leader experience of workplace ostracism. Drawing from a dual-motive perspective, I theorize a dual-path model wherein leader experience of workplace ostracism threatens two important goals of leaders—getting along and getting ahead—and thus leads to its downstream consequences. Specifically, I theorize that leader experience of ostracism represents belongingness threat and status threat, each of which in turn prompts divergent behavioral efforts to manage the threats (i.e., self-sacrificial behavior, abusive supervision, feedback giving). I further explore the moderating role of leader gender by developing competing hypotheses for how being ostracized may yield differential effects on male vs. female leaders. This model will be tested via a critical incident study and a within-individual examination.

SPEAKER

Dr. Andy Back
Ph.D. Candidate in Strategic Management
Joseph L. Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

ABSTRACT

When social actors narrate their network ties with high-status others, the ties not only endorse the actors’ quality but also attract audience attention. Although such network ties’ functions are two-fold, prior research primarily focuses on the quality-endorsing effect. By leveraging random ties, I am able to tease out the attention-attracting effect from the quality-endorsing effect. Specifically, I examine how actors of different status positions narrate their random ties. I argue that actors generally narrate their ties with higher-status others because doing so facilitates the trickle down of attention. Furthermore, I argue that high-status actors are more likely to narrate their high-status ties than low-status actors. While high-status actors enjoy magnified attention when associated with high-status others, low-status actors risk being perceived as instrumental or manipulative when narrating high-status ties. Using a natural experimental research design where gaming YouTubers are randomly assigned to others, I find support for my hypotheses about how network ties are leveraged when their main value stems from attracting attention. My results suggest that actors leverage their network ties differently depending on whether the source of value is endorsement or attention. This paper advances social network research by disentangling the attention and endorsement effects of ties.

SPEAKER

Mr. Stefan Maric
Ph.D. in Strategic Management (Minor in Finance)
Eli Broad College of Business
Michigan State University

SPEAKER

Dr. Yanhui WU
Associate Director, Institute of Digital Economy and Innovation
Associate Professor
HKU Business School

ABSTRACT

This paper studies whether and how public opinion on social media affects local governments’ procurement of vaccines in China during 2014-2019. We exploit city-level variation in the eruption of social-media opinion on vaccine safety triggered by leaked information on a vaccine scandal, instrumented by the early penetration of social media into each city. We find that governments in cities exposed to stronger information eruption increased the frequency and share of more-transparent procurement. The effect is larger in cities where local officials are ranked lower or have stronger career concerns and where the information environment was more strictly controlled. Interestingly, the effect is muted in a silent real scandal but present in a heated fake scandal. Our findings support that social media enhances the top-down-pressure mechanism in policy implementation in nondemocracies.

SPEAKER

Dr. Shipeng YAN
Assistant Professor
HKU Business School

ABSTRACT

Strategy implementation requires competent middle managers, but few have examined their career experiences which shape such competence. We address this deficiency by extending research on career specialization and leveraging the implementation variations in the social distancing policy across Chinese municipal governments during the initial outbreak of COVID-19. We theorize and find that municipal government leaders with a generalist career background implement social distancing less strongly than specialist leaders and suffer less from citizens’ economic discontent. Compared to generalists, specialist leaders are more skillful in focusing and optimizing a given strategy, thus better at achieving the intended consequence of a strategy. In contrast, generalists are more skillful in reflective and holistic thinking, thus better at avoiding the unintended consequence of a strategy. As generalists and specialists differ in focusing on a strategy or reflecting on it, a prior experience in the central ministry of the government, which helps appreciate the intended consequence of social distancing – pandemic control, mitigates the implementation gap between generalists and specialists. A prior experience in the grassroot level of the government helps municipal leaders better understand the unintended consequence of social distancing – economic discontent and widens the implementation gap.

SPEAKER

Prof. Ivan Png
Distinguished Professor in Strategy & Policy, Economics
National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

How does research in economics progress? Is the agenda directed by senior scholars at top universities or does it emerge organically from competition in the marketplace of ideas? Previous research showed that top-five journals were more likely to publish work of scholars connected with journal editors. Here, we examine one potential explanation – that editors were more likely to publish papers that were related to their own research. Using the Pachinko Allocation Method, we classify over 54,600 abstracts of articles published in the top-five journals, next-five (EER, EJ, IER, JEEA and REStat), or AEA and Econometric Society journals and all other articles published by their editors between 1986-2019 into 35 topics. The top-five published 62% more articles in editors’ own topics. The empirical relation might be due to editors attracting more submissions on their own topics (“editorial activism”) or editors favouring submissions on their own topics (“editorial favouritism”). Estimates so far rule out editorial activism.

SPEAKER

Dr. Joshua D. Gottlieb
Associate Professor
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago

ABSTRACT

We quantify the roles of increasing returns and trade costs in medical services.  Using data on millions of Medicare claims, we document that “imported” medical procedures—defined as a patient’s consumption of a service produced by a medical provider in a different region—constitute about one-fifth of US healthcare consumption.  Larger markets specialize in the production of less common procedures, and these procedures are more traded between regions. These patterns reflect economies of scale: larger regions produce higher-quality care because they serve more patients.  The revealed-preference estimates of quality have a scale elasticity of 0.77 and are positively related to external measures of quality of care.  We use our estimates to evaluate the proximity-concentration tradeoff associated with various policy options for improving access to care.

SPEAKER

Dr. Letian Zhang
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the changing role expectation of managers could help explain the rise of women managers in the United States. Traditionally, a major impediment for women’s advancement into management has been role incongruity: the communal stereotype ascribed to women is inconsistent with the agentic expectation for ideal managers. To explain women’s recent progress into middle management, this paper underscores the changing expectations for middle managers. Instead of commanding and controlling their employees, today’s middle managers are increasingly expected to be collaborative and empathetic, qualities that align more closely with the communal stereotype about women. Through analyzing millions of managerial job ads and detailed firm demographic data, we find that managerial expectations have become increasingly collaborative and that firms expecting more collaborative managers have a much higher proportion of women in management. We conducted several placebo tests to account for endogeneity concerns, replicated the key conclusions using a separate individual-level dataset, and conducted additional survey and experiment to identify mechanisms. Together, these findings suggest that the changing expectations for managers contributed to women’s rise into middle management, indicating that women’s advancement into traditionally authoritative positions remains a challenge.