Management and Strategy - HKU Business School

10 April

Polishing the prism: The interplay between network prominence and symbolic actions in entrepreneurial resource acquisition

SPEAKER

Prof. Anne ter Wal
Professor of Technology and Innovation Management
Imperial College London

ABSTRACT

The networks-as-prisms perspective establishes that ventures seeking to acquire resources can signal legitimacy based on prominent positions in social networks. Meanwhile, the symbolic management perspective establishes that symbolic actions can equally convey legitimacy. What is less clear is how the prismatic effects of networks and symbolic actions interplay in entrepreneurial resource acquisition. In this study, we propose that generalized symbolic actions help ventures with low network prominence to attract investment, while fine-grained symbolic actions are more effective for ventures with high prominence. In line with these arguments, our analysis of a comprehensive dataset of London-based technology ventures combining Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and Twitter data shows that generalized actions that convey credibility and connectedness (i.e., mimicking conversational topics of role-model entrepreneurs and frequent engagement with events in the local ecosystem) are more effective for low-prominence ventures, whereas fine-grained symbolic actions conveying credibility and connectedness (i.e., spreading information about their own startup and high-status connections) aid resource acquisition primarily for high-prominence ventures. Our study contributes to theories of social networks, symbolic management, and entrepreneurship by documenting how symbolic actions can either amplify the legitimacy premium associated with prominent network positions or mitigate a shortfall in legitimacy arising from a lack of network prominence.

10 April

Team Hierarchical Adaptability: Benefits For Team Coordination And Performance

SPEAKER

Prof. Lindy Greer
Gerald and Esther Carey Professor of Business Administration
Professor of Management and Organizations
Stephen M. Ross School of Business
University of Michigan

ABSTRACT

We introduce the concept of hierarchical adaptability, which we define as a team’s relative capability to repeatedly and bidirectionally shift between different shapes of its influence hierarchy (i.e., more hierarchical or flatter) across tasks, while the team’s formal hierarchy remains constant. We provide a first investigation of the effects of team hierarchical adaptability, proposing that team hierarchical adaptability enables teams to achieve better coordination and team performance outcomes as they move across different tasks, compared to consistently hierarchical or flat teams. Five multimethod studies, including field data of intact teams and a laboratory experiment of interacting teams, provide support for our hypotheses.

02 April

How imprints of environmental turbulence influence board chairs’ political network adaptation.

SPEAKER

Prof. Dean Xu
Professor of Management
Monash Business School
Monash University

ABSTRACT

Corporate leaders respond to political turbulences by adapting their political strategies. Without knowing how long turbulences will last, they often base their actions on their personal perceptions about the time length of the turbulences. Drawing from imprinting theory, we propose that board chairs’ early life experiences with transient versus lasting political turbulences create an imprinting effect on their subjective evaluation of the duration of the current political turbulence. An imprint of transient turbulence leads them to perceive current turbulence as short-lived, prompting them to remove existing political ties and establish new ones more swiftly. Conversely, an imprint of lasting turbulence causes them to perceive the current turbulence to be long-lasting, inclining them to wait longer to make a move. We further suggest that board chairs who are more deeply embedded in the existing political networks are likely to experience more difficulty adjusting their political ties, whereas the less embedded firms can more easily do so. We use Chinese firms’ political connection adaptation after anticorruption shocks to construct a DID design to test the above theoretical predictions. Results based on a sample of 20,645 firm-year observations of 2,562 firms between 2012 and 2019 provide support for our hypotheses.

02 April

Engineering Opportunity: A Longitudinal Field Experiment Reveals How Convergent Versus Divergent Network Exposure Influences Social Belonging, Network Trajectories, and Career Attainment

SPEAKER

Prof. Sameer Srivastava
Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy
Haas School of Business
UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT

Social belonging is a fundamental human need that people seek in the workplace. While traditional approaches to engendering belonging focus on mindset interventions, the authors instead develop a novel structural intervention that fosters belonging by altering opportunity structures for interaction. They distinguish between two forms of exposure to unfamiliar colleagues: convergent (within the same network community) and divergent (across communities). In a longitudinal field experiment at a non-profit organization (N=213), participants were randomly assigned to convergent or divergent groups for a professional development experience. Convergent exposure produced greater group solidarity and, three months post-intervention, more persistent ties and greater social belonging. Conversely, divergent exposure moved participants to structurally advantaged positions of lower constraint and greater centrality, resulting in faster promotion rates. Using a ground-truth network survey, digital trace data, and computational linguistics, the authors reveal a fundamental tradeoff: While even a brief experience of convergent exposure provides persistent psychological benefits, a comparable experience of divergent exposure produces enduring structural advantages that support career attainment.

02 April

How to Train Your AI When Humans Matter

SPEAKER

Prof. Kevin Bryan
Associate Professor of Strategic Management
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

ABSTRACT

AI predicts; its prediction is used by humans in decisions. The value of AI therefore depends on how humans extend, verify, and act on that prediction. We model AI as part of a composite experiment where agents can verify predictions at cost, delegate to AI, or avoid the model altogether. We derive the optimal coverage–conditional accuracy tradeoff for training, showing that maximizing unconditional accuracy is generally suboptimal. The optimum is discontinuous where users switch between autonomous and verified AI regimes. Heterogeneous users disagree on the ideal model. Because the optimal model maps directly from the economic environment – downside risk, verification cost, adversarial pressure, task complementarities – knowledge of the economic environment can inform about the nature of optimal training ex-ante.

31 March

Wage Expectations and Job Search

SPEAKER

Professor Steffen Altmann
Professor of Economics
University of Würzburg

ABSTRACT

In a field experiment with 9,000 Danish job seekers, we study how unemployed workers’ wage expectations affect job search and re-employment. In our survey, we generate exogenous variation in respondents’ wage expectations by informing a random half of them about re-employment wages of comparable workers. The intervention increases job-finding as measured in administrative data for both initially optimistic and initially pessimistic respondents, but through different channels: initial optimists lower their reservation wages and intensify search, while pessimists raise reservation wages and redirect applications toward local vacancies. Consistent with spatial search frictions, narrowing the geographic scope accelerates job finding among pessimists.

26 March

Mapping AI into Production: A Field Experiment on Firm Performance

SPEAKER

Prof. Hyunjin Kim
Assistant Professor of Strategy
INSEAD

ABSTRACT

AI can deliver productivity gains on individual tasks, yet evidence on whether these gains aggregate to firm performance remains limited. We study a central friction in AI adoption, which we call the mapping problem: discovering where and how AI creates value within a firm’s production process. Across 515 startups from around the world, we run a field experiment in which treated firms receive information about how other firms have reorganized production around AI, exposing founders to use cases across a broader set of firm functions and prompting them to search beyond the familiar applications they would otherwise default to. We find that treated firms discover more AI use cases, a 44% increase, concentrated in product development and strategy. These changes result in economically meaningful performance gains. Treated firms complete 12% more tasks, are 18% more likely to acquire paying customers, and generate 1.9x higher revenue. Revenue and investment gains are largest at the 90th percentile and above, consistent with AI unlocking the potential of especially promising ventures rather than modestly improving marginal ideas. Despite faster growth, treated firms do not scale inputs proportionally. Their demand for external capital investment falls by just over $220,000, a 39.5% decrease, relative to the control group, while their demand for labor remains unchanged. These results provide causal evidence that AI improves firm performance and productivity even at its current capabilities, and that discovering where and how to deploy AI is a key bottleneck in realizing the gains from this technology.

24 March

Organizational research in the era of new technologies: Opportunities and threats

SPEAKER

Prof. Chu-Hsiang (Daisy) Chang
Professor
Michigan State University

ABSTRACT

Technological advancement has shifted the landscape of jobs, work, and organizations at an unprecedented speed and scale. The changes can be seen from a positive light, such that the advancement in science and technology has resulted in the creation of new jobs and industries and improvement in productivity and efficiency. However, these changes also bring challenges to the existing conception of work, the human resource and training pipeline, and skill obsolescence and worker displacement. This talk will discuss how technological changes may lead to both opportunities and threats for workers and organizations. Moreover, it will cover how research in organizational behavior can be positioned to inform workers, organizations, and policy makers to take advantage of the potential opportunities brought on by the new technologies.

18 March

Leader Felt Trust Deficit: A Path to Abusive Supervision via Social-Evaluative Shame

SPEAKER

Prof. Tony Kong
Professor of Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics
Leeds School of Business
University of Colorado Boulder

ABSTRACT

Having a follower’s trust is critical for leadership effective, yet leaders can experience a felt trust deficit — the feeling that they are not fully trusted by a follower — in a leader-follower relationship. Drawing on social self preservation theory and emotional appraisal theory, we propose that when a leader perceives a felt trust deficit from a follower, they view it as a threat to their social self as it suggests that the follower questions them as a leader. This appraisal evokes social-evaluative shame, which in turn leads to abusive supervision toward the follower as a defensive response to protect the self. Moreover, the indirect relationship is amplified when a leader perceives status threat from their colleagues, which reflects a broader sense of social devaluation. Findings from four studies — a multi-source field survey, a scenario-based experiment, a recall-based quasi-experiment, and a multi-wave field survey — support our model. Together, our research highlights the role of felt trust in influencing leaders’ emotions and behaviors and underscores its implications for leader-follower relationships.

04 March

A Relational Theory Of Power Alternation

SPEAKER

Prof. Zhaotian Luo
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
The University of Chicago

ABSTRACT

We study the spontaneous emergence of power alternation from the need for cooperation by developing a model in which two parties repeatedly cooperate and negotiate the position of power, defined as the control right of a productive regime. Unless the party in power, “incumbent,” compromises, the party out of power, “opposition,” would withdraw from cooperation. Central to our analysis are two impediments: the incumbent’s hold-up problem and information asymmetry. We establish a recursive structure of the model, taking into account the endogenous roles—incumbent or opposition—the two parties play. We find that alternation of power is necessary to sustain cooperation in the long run, while within-period compromise is essential for efficiency. In efficient self-enforcing agreements, incumbents always compromise minimally with oppositions insofar as to have cooperation sustained, while two norms endogenously emerge, prescribing an implicit bargaining protocol and the persistence of power. We characterize the implied history-dependent dynamics of political compromise and power alternation and illustrate the results in historical contexts.