SPEAKER

Ms. Hyesook Chung
Ph.D. Candidate in Human Resource Studies
Cornell University

ABSTRACT

The use of variable work schedules – altering the numbers and timing of employees’ work hours from week to week – is one of the widely used HR practices to increase staffing flexibility. However, little research has examined whether and how the use of variable work schedules influences unit-level financial performance. Despite the common assumption that the use of variable work schedules can help firms achieve higher performance (by allowing for timely response to demand fluctuations), especially during a crisis such as COVID-19, this study demonstrates otherwise. I propose that greater use of variable schedules can lead to higher employee turnover at the unit level and the effect is stronger during the pandemic. I also argue that managerial reliance on variable work schedules can decrease not only the level of unit performance but also its recovery during the pandemic via employee turnover. Using data from 1,678 units of a quick service restaurant chain in the US across periods spanning different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, I find support for these predictions. The findings suggest that scholars and practitioners should reconsider the general assumption that organizations are better able to adapt to uncertain environments through staffing flexibility.

SPEAKER

Ms. Hyoju Jeong
Ph.D. Candidate in Business Administration
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how the ownership structure of entrants affects incumbents’ reaction to entry. Consumer cooperatives internalize consumer surplus and community externalities; thus, they are incentivized to maximize them, leading to high-quality service provision, greater consumer trust and loyalty. Moreover, formed to serve consumers/members and often to countervail existing market power, cooperatives are unlikely to have a mutual understanding with incumbents. Therefore, I argue that cooperative entry may be a bigger threat than investor-owned firm entry, forcing incumbents to react more competitively to cooperative entry than to investor-owned firm entry. I test and find support for these arguments in the US broadband industry from 2014 to 2018, showing that incumbents are more likely to upgrade their internet deployment technology to high-tech when facing cooperative entry than when facing investor-owned firm entry. Such an effect is stronger in markets with only one or two high-quality internet provider(s) and stronger for big national incumbents than for small local incumbents.

SPEAKER

Mr. Jung H. Kwon
Ph.D. Candidate in International Management Studies
Jindal School of Management
University of Texas at Dallas

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the Coase theorem, we consider a firm’s decision to transfer patent ownership to another firm in the markets for innovation. We deem that the proximity of a patent’s technology structure to that of a firm’s patent portfolio will generally result in greater marginal productivity of the patent, leading to enhanced prospects for the firm’s economic return. We thus predict that firms are more likely to trade patents when the technology structure of a patent is closer to the technology stock of a potential buyer compared with that of its original assignee. However, such a relationship will be weaker when a potential buyer and the original assignee have greater product-market overlap or when the assignee has superior technological capability. We test these predictions by employing a dyad-level analysis of transactional decisions during the 1987−2016 period on 40,110 U.S. patents assigned to 57 major biopharmaceutical firms. Our study provides novel insights on factors that facilitate or inhibit patent trade in the markets for innovation.

SPEAKER

Ms.Young Eun Lee
Ph. D. Candidate in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
Mays Business School
Texas A&M University

Miss Lee plans to present two studies :

Employee See, Employee Do. Or Employee Don’t? Unpacking When And Why Employees Mimic (Or Don’t) Coworkers’ Helping Behavior

ABSTRACT

The literature on helping behaviors has focused on the episode as a dyadic event. Yet, helping in organizations does not occur in a vacuum—there are third party individuals who may be witnessing the event without being directly involved in it. Indeed, other literatures have acknowledged the impact third parties may experience upon observing certain behavior. Thus, I draw from four theories that explain the witnessing effect as a social phenomenon to find out if third party observers of helping behaviors are affected. Two theories (social learning theory and social exchange theory) suggest that individuals would engage in helping behaviors upon observing others engage in it, and the other two theories (moral licensing theory and social loafing theory) suggest that individuals would be less likely to engage in helping behaviors upon observing others engage in it. I conduct a competitive test of these theories to find out if observers are affected by the observed event, and if so, which mechanism would be the cause. In addition, I also adopt self-perception theory to suggest a moderator (relational identity) which would strengthen each of the paths such that the stronger the identification with one’s group, the stronger the activated path (engaging in helping vs. not engaging in helping). I test the hypothesized model across two field studies and two experimental studies. Study 1 will be an experiment where participants will be asked to read a short vignette and answer a survey. Study 2 will be a critical incident recall study, and study 3 will be a two wave study where participants are asked to answer surveys twice sent two weeks apart. Study 4 will be a two wave study where participants answer the first survey and their colleagues provide observational ratings of the focal employee in the second survey.

 When, Why, and For Whom is Receiving Help Actually Helpful?  Differential Effects of Received Help Based on Recipient Gender

ABSTRACT

Helping is a foundational aspect of organizational life and the prototypical organizational citizenship behavior. Most research on helping implicitly assumes that helping benefits its recipients. Comparatively, the literature on helping recipients is relatively small, and in contrast depicts receiving help as something that may reduce recipient perceptions of competence. Thus, a disconnect exists in the helping literature, with an assumption that help benefits recipients, and evidence seeming to suggest the opposite. We submit that instead of questioning whether receiving help is beneficial, we should instead investigate when and for whom this may be the case. Regarding when, we differentiate between receiving help that is empowering (i.e., offers tools to empower recipients to become more self-reliant) or non-empowering (i.e., offers only immediate, short-term solutions). With regard to whom, drawing from research on receiving help, as well as theory and research on stereotype threat and benevolent sexism, we expect both types of help to benefit men in terms of increasing felt competence, but only empowering help to benefit women. We present data from three studies (a preliminary study in which we provide validity evidence for measures of receiving empowering and non-empowering help, a critical incident study, and a daily experience-sampling study) to support our hypotheses.

SPEAKER

Mr. Tommy Pan Fang
PhD Candidate in Business Administration
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

A considerable body of work has examined how platforms govern complementors—third-party firms who offer complementary products and services that enhance the overall ecosystem value. Yet, platform owners need to capture a share of the ecosystem value to remain viable. Platform owners, thus, face a conundrum in governance design: encouraging complementor value creation for the platform ecosystem, while finding ways to capture value simultaneously. In this paper, I capture this critical tradeoff that platform owners face by examining how platforms govern complementors’ business models—the value creation activities and value capture methods of a complementor. I conduct a large-scale quantitative study of 15,604 mobile applications in 2021, supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews. I leverage an unexpected Apple policy impairing in-app advertising business models of complementors, and find that these applications are more likely to exit from the platform after the policy change. Moreover, impacted applications shift effort from developing new features to fixing existing issues, diminishing the overall value creation. While this change negatively affected the revenues that Apple received from third-party applications, Apple was able to increase value capture from its own applications and advertising network. These findings enrich our understanding of how platform owners use governance to balance between value creation and value capture in an ecosystem.

SPEAKER

Miss Ji Hyun Kim
Ph.D. Candidate in Management and Human Resources
Wisconsin School of Business
University of Wisconsin

ABSTRACT

There has been a longstanding debate about whether pay-for-performance (PFP) enhances or undermines creative performance. Traditional motivation and revised creativity theories suggest that PFP and intrinsic task interest can be combined additively to enhance creative performance, whereas self-determination theory (SDT), which incorporates the earlier cognitive evaluation theory (CET), posits an undermining effect of PFP. To resolve the two conflicting predictions and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of PFP on creative performance, the current study incorporated both incentive and sorting mechanisms of PFP, varying levels of PFP intensity, and moderators of central theoretical importance. A novel laboratory experiment was developed with a focus on incorporating key elements of workplace settings. They are reflected in the designs of the creative work tasks (creating advertising slogans and writing magazine articles), task autonomy (low or high), PFP conditions (three levels based on common organization practices), and allowing mobility between PFP conditions to enable participants to sort themselves into their preferred PFP condition. Risk attitude was included as a key person variable, given its central importance in PFP. Results showed that high PFP intensity more strongly enhanced creative performance through both incentive and sorting mechanisms. In addition, the role of creative self-efficacy in sorting behaviors was exploratively investigated. Finally, the implications of the results and future research directions were discussed.

SPEAKER

Dr. Giorgio Zanarone
Visiting Associate Professor
Olin Business School
Washington University in St. Louis

ABSTRACT

This paper provides evidence that broad outsourcing scope, whereby a buyer assigns a large share of its outsourced activities to a single supplier, increases both parties’ willingness to cooperate with each other. We also provide evidence that the effect of such broad scope on mutual cooperation is greater when externalities between suppliers, which are internalized in broad scope relationships, are more important. We document these effects in the context of outsourcing agreements between major and regional airlines in the US, where we measure cooperation as landing time slot exchanges during inclement weather. Because outsourcing scope – the share of a major’s routes that are assigned to a regional – varies across airports within a given outsourcing relationship, we are able to include relationship fixed effects in our regressions. This rare feature of our data allows us to separate the externality internalization mechanism from alternative mechanisms that operate at the interorganizational relationship level, and hence do not vary within a relationship, including dependence balancing, self-enforcing agreements, and interorganizational trust. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study showing that broad outsourcing scope governs bilateral interfirm cooperation, and isolating a precise mechanism through which it does so.

SPEAKER

Dr. JR Keller
Assistant Professor of Human Resource Studies
School of Industrial & Labor Relations
Cornell University

ABSTRACT

Recent research demonstrates that reallocating workers to new internal jobs creates value when it occurs through a free-flowing internal talent market in which employees are encouraged to actively pursue new internal opportunities. Yet individual managers often introduce friction into internal talent markets by dissuading or otherwise preventing their subordinates from pursuing other jobs within the firm, a practice known as talent hoarding. While noting that there are clear reasons why managers might engage in talent hoarding, we argue and show that managers who secure promotions for their subordinates actually attract more, better, and more functionally diverse internal candidates for their open jobs. In demonstrating how facilitating internal mobility actually benefits individual managers, we provide a powerful counterargument to the rationale underlying talent hoarding.

SPEAKER

Dr. Johan Chu
Visiting Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

ABSTRACT

Technological advances now allow savvy actors to direct mass attention at scales previously unthinkable, enabling new, potent—but ill-understood—methods for instigating social change and capturing profit. This study investigates durable sources of power and competitive advantage in a setting where technologies for directing mass attention are consequential and highly evolved—the fast-moving, ultra-competitive Korean popular music industry. Drawing on extensive quantitative, archival, and interview data, we examine how a few dominant production companies repeatedly generate widespread attention and consumption for their offerings, focusing on three puzzles: How dominants tame the unpredictability of social influence-driven successes, why dominants’ advantage persists when competitors imitate their techniques, and why these techniques remain effective after consumers learn their attention is being manipulated. We find dominants trigger attention cascades, often by mobilizing fans to rush offerings to the top of rankings charts. Consumer knowledge of such ranking manipulation tactics benefits dominants. Knowledgeable consumers react positively to dominants’ offerings propelled up the charts but punish non-dominants, attributing unexplained non-dominant success to manipulation. Dominant advantage strengthens with increased competition and wider awareness of technologies for directing mass attention. These findings suggest sobering implications of more powerful, democratic, and open social ranking, rating, and recommendation platforms for society.

SPEAKER

Dr. Brian Wu
Associate Professor of Strategy
Stephen M. Ross School of Business
University of Michigan

ABSTRACT

Using market-frictions based logic, we develop an analytical model that examines how online platforms can govern opportunistic behavior of offline service providers, thus allowing market forces to promote the general welfare. Empowered by information technologies, online platforms enable service providers to offer customized services that consumers have increasingly desired. Along with its tremendous value-creation potential, offering customized services encourages greater opportunism from the service providers. While reputation-based mechanisms have been proposed to foster trust, their effectiveness may be limited by excessive competition. To address this problem, we propose a novel platform design where the platform may induce a welfare-enhancing equilibrium where (i) the service providers on the platform enjoy higher capacity utilization than those outside and are motivated to exert effort by future concerns, and (ii) customers prefer service providers on the platform and are willing to pay a premium. Further, we evaluate the implications of our proposed approach on platform profitability by comparing different payment schemes, and generalize the model regarding imperfect monitoring signals and the entry and exit of service providers. Our work sheds new light on how platform design can help reduce market frictions in economic exchanges and potentially shape the evolution of industries.