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.

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.

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.

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.