SPEAKER

Prof. Lamar Pierce
Professor of Organization & Strategy
Olin Business School
Washington University in St. Louis

ABSTRACT

Behavioral economists have proposed that incentive contracts result in higher productivity when bonuses are “loss framed”—prepaid then clawed back if targets are unmet. We test this claim in a large-scale field experiment. Holding financial incentives fixed, we randomized the pre- or post-payment of sales bonuses at 294 car dealerships. Prepayment was estimated to reduce sales by 5%, generating a revenue loss of $45 million over 4 months. We document, both empirically and theoretically, that negative effects of loss framing can arise due to an increase in incentives for “gaming” behaviors. Based on these claims, we reassess the common wisdom regarding the desirability of loss framing.

SPEAKER

Prof. David Hsu
Richard A. Sapp Professor of Management
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

How does inventor team commingling, which we define as integrating human capital from the target and acquiring firm for R&D collaboration, impact innovation outcomes in technology acquisitions? Organizing post-acquisition R&D production teams in this manner holds the potential of sidestepping the classical integration-autonomy tradeoff. Structural integration facilitates task coordination but may dampen individual motivation, while an autonomous post-acquisition organization presents the opposite tradeoff. We argue that commingling is especially suited to technology acquisition integration and innovation, as it helps address task uncertainty (not just task coordination) while at the same time facilitating organizational and human know-how recombination (not just motivation). We assemble a sample of technology acquisitions, with some firms also experiencing prior R&D alliances with the acquirer. We find that inventor commingling and structural integration are substitutes as related to innovation outcomes. Furthermore, innovation outcomes are strongly increasing post-merger for firms with more intensive inventor commingling. All of these effects are distinct from team knowledge diversity. We instrument direct flights between the acquisition party locations to address the issue of endogenous commingling, and find consistent results. This supports a causal interpretation of commingling on innovation. Finally, as initial evidence that the commingling design may also depend on managerial authority and control, we find that the same individuals who engaged in post-acquisition commingling and pre-acquisition R&D alliance collaboration experienced greater innovation outcomes under the former structure.

SPEAKER

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

Miss Yun Hou
PhD Student in Department of Strategy & Policy
National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

How do businesses respond to benchmarking information? Benchmarking — information about peers on relative performance and practices — is widely used but there is little scientific information on its effectiveness. Theoretically, benchmarking can help new entrepreneurs to resolve uncertainty about their own ability. Performance depends on the entrepreneur’s own ability, practices, and market-level uncertainty common to all entrepreneurs. By revealing the performance and practices of high performers, benchmarking enables subjects to infer the market-level uncertainty and deduce their own ability.

To investigate the causal impact of benchmarking, we carried out a randomized controlled experiment among owners of food stalls. 194 business owners operating food stalls at 17 hawker centres across Singapore were recruited into the study. Both the control and treatment owners were informed of their own performance. Additionally, treatment owners were told their relative performance and best practices. The experiment started in September 2019, and finished in December 2020.

Empirically, on the extensive margin, benchmarking affected exit. Compared to control owners, treatment owners who performed relatively poorly were more likely to exit and less likely otherwise. The treatment effects were more pronounced among those who were less informed about their ability. On the intensive margin, benchmarking increased the adoption of back-of-house management practices, both benchmarked and non-benchmarked, with the effects more pronounced among more educated owners and those with lower costs of adoption. Benchmarking also substantially increased performance, but the estimates were not statistically significant, perhaps due to the Covid-19 pandemic and small sample.

BIOGRAPHY

Yun Hou is a PhD student in the Department of Strategy & Policy, National University of Singapore. She received her bachelor’s degree in 2014 and Master’s in 2016, both from Peking University. She enjoys researching innovation and entrepreneurship.

 Ivan Png is a Distinguished Professor at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the economics of innovation and productivity.  He is the author of Managerial Economics, which has been published in multiple editions. He is the Principal Investigator of SPIRE, a S$4.75 million research project on service productivity. In free time, he exercises with his wife and plays tennis and the violin (both badly).

SPEAKER

Dr. Jongsoo (Jays) Kim
Assistant Professor of Strategic Management
Department of Management, School of Business
Hong Kong Baptist University

ABSTRACT

While acquisitions that seek technology can be an effective way for acquiring firms to achieve new technology and breakthrough innovations, extant research on strategic management and technology management and innovation has overlooked how the acquired technology or products can be a hazard due to the acquisition. Are there any negative impacts of acquisitions that are done to obtain new innovative products from the external market? Do acquiring firms have a thorough understanding of the technological features of the new products they acquire? In this paper, we applied a multi-level approach (i.e., at firm- and product-level) regarding acquisitions and product recalls in the U.S. medical device industry. We found evidence that firms that engage in more acquisition activity experience more product recall incidents, but that quality failure is more prevalent when their acquisitions are less related to their core technology domain. Moreover, our data showed that product quality failures are deeply related to asymmetric information and coordination processes. Furthermore, we confirmed that acquired products are more likely to result in more serious recalls.

SPEAKER

Dr. Hyunjin Kim
Assistant Professor of Strategy
INSEAD Business School

ABSTRACT

To what extent are firms knowledgeable of available information on key competitor decisions, and how does competitor information change their own strategic choices? These questions are fundamental to understanding how firms compete and make strategic decisions, yet systematic evidence on them remains limited. I designed a field experiment across 3,218 firms in the personal care industry, where firms randomly assigned to treatment received easily accessible information on competitor prices. At baseline, nearly half of treatment firms were unable to specify competitor prices. However, once treatment firms received competitor information, they were more likely to change their prices, aligning their decisions with competitors rather than differentiating from them. These changes were driven by firms that were more misaligned in their price and quality decisions, and treatment firms subsequently observed higher measures of performance. If competitor information was both easily accessible and decision-relevant, why did firms not use this information on their own? Results from a follow-up experiment suggest that their lack of knowledge may have been driven by managerial inattention. These findings highlight the role that attention may play over information access in improving firm decisions, and suggest that the growing availability of competitor data across many markets may lead firms to become increasingly similar.

SPEAKER

Ms. Yiduo Shao
Ph. D. Candidate in Business Administration
University of Florida

ABSTRACT

The aging population across the globe is driving substantial changes in workforce demographics. Accordingly, engaging the aging workforce becomes an important mission for organizations. However, empirical findings regarding the age-work engagement relationship remain elusive and theoretical explanations have been equivocal and disjointed, suggesting both age-related advantages and challenges in staying engaged at work. Additionally, it remains unclear how organizations may implement age-related HR practices to leverage the age-related advantages while mitigating the challenges. Guided by lifespan development theories and the workplace aging literature, I take a two-study, multi-method approach to address these research questions in my dissertation. In Study 1 (a meta-analytic study), I examine multiple theory-based countervailing mechanisms (i.e., occupational future time perspective; the use of selection, optimization, and compensation [SOC] strategies; physical health; and age discrimination experience) that simultaneously link age to work engagement. In Study 2 (a field investigation), I propose and test a multilevel research model to probe how these mechanisms are shaped by age-specific HR practices (i.e., older worker-specific HR practices) and age-neutral HR practices (i.e., age-inclusive HR practices). Taken together, my dissertation will further scholarly understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of aging processes at work and provide implications for organizations to design age-wise HR practices in managing the aging workforce.

SPEAKER

Dr. Andy Wu
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur’s strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that entrepreneurs make less accurate predictions as they gain experience executing projects: they miss their predicted timeline to bring a product to market by nearly six additional weeks on each successive project. Although learning should improve prediction accuracy in principle, we argue that entrepreneurs also learn of opportunities to augment each successive product, which drastically expands the interdependencies beyond what an entrepreneur can anticipate. We find that entrepreneurs encounter more unforeseen interdependencies in their subsequent projects, and they sacrifice on-time delivery to address these interdependencies.

SPEAKER

Mr. Jack H. Zhang
Ph. D. Candidate in Organizational Behavior
Washington University in St. Louis

ABSTRACT

In my dissertation, I study employment uncertainty (inability to predict the future of the employment relationship)’s psychological and behavioral impacts on furloughed workers along with factors that could affect the strengths of these impacts. Through a qualitative study with 28 employees who were furloughed in 2020, I found that employment uncertainty could bring higher intensities of negative emotions and lower occupational commitment. The occupational commitment could then positively associate with hedging behaviors (preparing for a permanent job loss) and negatively associate with “live like working” behaviors (living one’s life during furlough as if one is still working). Moreover, work orientations might moderate these impacts, with a job orientation (seeing one’s work as a way to make money) strengthening uncertainty’s impacts, whereas a calling orientation (seeing one’s work as personal enjoyment and socially meaningful experience) weakening uncertainty’s impacts. Results of a quantitative survey study with 141 furloughed workers generally supported the hypotheses from the emergent theory. These results reveal the particular harm that employment uncertainty can do to furloughed workers and how employees’ perceived meaning of their work may affect their coping with uncertainty.

SPEAKER

Dr. Liwen Zhang
Assistant professor of Management
School of Management and Governance
University of New South Wales

ABSTRACT

Human capital resources (HCRs) are thought to be one of the most important resources for organizations. However, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the degree to which extant HCR measures capture the construct. This two-study paper aims to better understand the measurement and effects of HCRs. In Study 1, we use recent theoretical frameworks (e.g., Ployhart & Moliterno, 2011) to conduct a content analysis of HCR measures (k = 126). Results revealed that only 29% of measures actually focused on HCRs. Most measures focused on other constructs, such as variables that theoretically are antecedents of HCRs (e.g., education, high-performance work practices) or other types of resources (e.g., physical resources), rather than on HCRs. Further, of the measures that did focus on HCRs, most assessed only a portion of the construct domain (e.g., collective knowledge but not collective skills). In Study 2, we tested whether direct measures of HCRs have a stronger relationship with collective performance than proxy measures that prior research has frequently used to assess HCRs (e.g., education, work experience). A meta-analysis of 93 independent samples and 22,065 units/firms suggested a positive and moderate relationship between HCRs and collective performance (ρ = .29). Further, HCRs have a stronger relation with collective outcomes than constructs such as collective education (ρ = .08) and work experience (ρ = .15). Overall, these findings suggest that researchers often are using contaminated or deficient measures of HCRs and that doing so underestimates the potential value of this key resource to organizations.

SPEAKER

Mr. Haoying (Howie) Xu
Ph. D. Candidate in Organizational Behavior/Human Resource Management
Department of Managerial Studies
University of Illinois at Chicago

ABSTRACT

This research develops a theoretical model that explains how and when perception of being envied by the supervisor is associated with the focal employee’s approach and avoidanceoriented interpersonal behaviors toward the supervisor, and in extension, elucidates the downstream relational consequences of the divergent interpersonal behaviors. Drawing on cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion, this research explores two discrete emotions—relationship hope and relationship anxiety—as key mechanisms in translating perception of being envied by the supervisor into organizational citizenship behavior toward the supervisor (OCB-S; a form of approach-oriented interpersonal behavior) and interaction avoidance behavior toward the supervisor (IAB-S; a form of avoidance-oriented interpersonal behavior), respectively. Integrating cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion with approach-inhibition theory of power, this research suggests that the positive indirect effect of perception of being envied by the supervisor on OCB-S via relationship hope is stronger when the employee’s sense of power with respect to the supervisor is higher, whereas the positive indirect effect of perception of being envied by the supervisor on IAB-S via relationship anxiety is stronger when the employee’s sense of power with respect to the supervisor is lower. In turn,the impact of these two forms of interpersonal behaviors on the supervisor’s perception of leader-member exchange (LMX) is examined. The research model will be tested with a vignette experimental study and a two-source, three-phase time lagged field study.