Management and Strategy - HKU Business School

16 January

Better Safe Than Sorry: Strategic Nay-Saying in Idea Evaluation

SPEAKER

Prof. Linus Dahlander
Professor
ESMT Berlin

ABSTRACT

Managers often struggle to evaluate novel ideas, which by their nature have no proven commercial and technological value yet. Their evaluations can be overly optimistic or overly pessimistic, either over- or underestimating the idea’s actual performance. How do managers respond to these evaluation errors? We answer this question using unique panel data from the idea management system of a large firm in the aviation industry. With a difference-in-differences framework, we find that managers reject more ideas following overestimation errors but are unresponsive to underestimation errors. We explain this finding with strategic nay-saying: fearing the career costs of additional errors, managers preemptively reject ideas because their value remains unknown. We also consider alternative accounts of managers’ error responses, including learning from errors and intensified search for information, but find inconsistent evidence. Our study uncovers a new source of managerial conservatism rooted in an asymmetry in the observability of false negatives and positives.

16 January

The Cost of Communal Stereotypes: Communality Expectations as a Source of Burnout and Turnover among Women

SPEAKER

Prof. Lisa Leslie
Professor of Management and Organizations
Stern School of Business
New York University

ABSTRACT

Gender stereotypes dictate that women both are and are expected to be high in communality (warm, compassionate, and friendly), but low in agency (not competent, ambitious, or assertive). Abundant evidence documents that stereotypes of low agency have a negative effect on women’s work outcomes. Less attention has been paid to stereotypes of high communality, and specifically the possibility that managing communal stereotypes creates a burden for women that limits their career outcomes. Drawing from theory on impression management, we propose that the need to conform to stereotypic expectations that their group is high in communality motivates women to engage in higher levels of ingratiation—an impression management strategy intended to convey warmth and likeability—relative to men. We furthermore propose that ingratiation operates as a job demand, with the result that it increases burnout and turnover. Our theorizing collectively suggests communal stereotypes are costly for women’s careers, in that they contribute to higher turnover rates among women than among men. We provide support for these ideas in three studies using a variety of different methods. Our theory and findings contribute to the literature by expanding understanding of how gender stereotypes constrain women’s work outcomes and providing new insight into the strategies women use to manage gender stereotypes and the associated career consequences.

09 December

How immigration status shapes entrepreneurial strategy

SPEAKER

Prof. Dan Wang
Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise
Columbia Business School
Columbia University

ABSTRACT

How does entrepreneurial strategy vary by a business owner’s immigration status? Immigrants are often touted as more entrepreneurial than their non-immigrant peers, but heterogeneity in immigrant status creates variation in access to resources and networks that can factor into venture success. Immigration status often reflects one’s social position in a host country, permitting some immigrants access to more lucrative economic opportunities and better social services while excluding other immigrants. With a sample of 1,004 immigrant founders, 62% of whom are undocumented, we analyze applications they each submitted to a California state administered program that distributes grants to support the growth of their ventures. Findings reveal that undocumented immigrants — who represent the group with the most vulnerable immigration status — are most likely to plan for the expansion of their businesses, with a higher proportion of their projected spending devoted to capital expenditures (CapEx) than other immigrant groups. Furthermore, from a natural experiment, wherein some applicants received a higher grant amount than they expected, undocumented immigrants were more likely to invest the unanticipated surplus into expanding their businesses than immigrants with other status. These results permit novel theorization into how immigration status shapes an immigrant founders’ critical agency, which in turn, manifests in their decisions about entrepreneurial strategy.

02 December

The Psychology of Board Chairs: How Rivalry Shapes Corporate Governance

SPEAKER

Prof. Oleg Petrenko
Associate Professor
Michael F. Price College of Business
University of Oklahoma

ABSTRACT

Although board of directors are designed to ensure effective oversight, similar designs often yield sharply different outcomes. This study examines how the motivational dimensions of board chairs shape the chair–CEO relationship and, through it, whether the board’s governance emphasizes control or collaboration. Drawing on a dataset comprising 980 firm-year observations across 153 publicly listed firms between 2000 and 2023, we integrate videometric assessments of chair personality with measures of board orientation towards control or collaboration. The results show that narcissistic rivalry drives a control-oriented approach characterized by defensive monitoring and procedural dominance, whereas admiration counterbalances these tendencies by promoting openness and constructive oversight. These effects are moderated by contextual boundaries: rivalry’s control bias is weakened when the top management team holds greater relative power, when boards include more independent directors. By linking the inner motives of board chairs to the behavioral tone of governance, the study advances a behavioral perspective on corporate oversight that reveals the psychological and relational microfoundations of board functioning and explains why structurally similar boards enact governance so differently in practice depending on who the chair is and how they engage the CEO.

26 November

Incentivizing Inclusion: Experimental Evidence on Lending to Women-Led Firms in Vietnam

SPEAKER

Prof. Markus Taussig
Associate Professor
Rutgers Business School

ABSTRACT

Women-owned or -led small and medium-sized enterprises (WSMEs) face more difficulties accessing credit in much of Asia than men-owned or -led SMEs. This raises questions of how to change employee behavior within lending institutions to extend credit to WSME borrowers. There is little empirical evidence on incentive effectiveness from high-stakes, field experimental settings with workers completing complex, open-ended tasks. In collaboration with a leading Vietnamese commercial bank, we evaluate the impact of two incentives for lending agents to increase recruitment of WSMEs as new borrowing clients. A total of 50 bank branches employing 550 lending staff are randomly assigned to one of the following treatments for 6 months: (i) a monthly multi-category contest; (ii) piece-rate incentives; or (iii) a control. We find that, while any treatment increases new lending by 40%, the contest, in particular, causes an increase in new WSME lending of 58%, with stronger effects among female lending agents and in urban branches. This does not induce strategic reductions in loan size, displace lending to comparable non-WSMEs, or cause lower loan quality (higher delinquency). This suggests there is room for expanded financial incentives for lending agents to extend credit to underserved groups without loss of other business.

24 November

Internal Monitoring and Collective Reputation

SPEAKER

Prof. Volker Nocke
Professor of Economics
University of Mannheim

ABSTRACT

We study how internal monitoring and imperfect public signals together shape the value and sustainability of a collective reputation in organizations that operate across multiple markets. The organization comprises a global player—such as a franchisor—whose actions affect all markets, and market-specific local players—such as franchisees—whose behavior affects other markets only via reputational spillovers. In a repeated game with both imperfect public monitoring (noisy public signals of effort) and partial information (perfect monitoring of local effort by the global player known to the local player), we characterize the conditions under which it is beneficial for the global player to acquire and utilize internal monitoring technology. When internal monitoring is feasible, the global player can employ a contagion strategy, triggering organization-wide disciplinary actions in response to detected shirking by any local player. This mechanism fully eliminates local players’ incentives to free-ride on the collective reputation. However, sustaining such a strategy requires placing the global player under countervailing incentives to ensure the credibility of the contagion strategy, imposing additional costs on the organization. We show how the trade-off between these positive and negative effects determines whether internal monitoring, alongside imperfect public signals, enhances the durability of collective reputation.

19 November

Reputation And Referrals

SPEAKER

Prof. Yi Chen
Assistant Professor of Economics
Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management
Cornell University

ABSTRACT

We study a dynamic model of referrals among experts that are horizontally specialized in treating heterogeneous problems. Demand for an expert’s services increases in their reputation, a decaying record of their historic success rate in solving problems. Experts refer mismatched problems, trading off today’s revenue with a higher demand tomorrow. In the unique steady state of Markov equilibria, the market generally neither supports efficient referrals nor optimal specialization, a problem potentially exacerbated by the adoption of AI. Our results suggest that regulation should allow for referral alliances and partnerships among small numbers of experts with complementary skills.

18 November

Safe but Meek: Psychological Safety and Distributive Negotiation in Teams

SPEAKER

Prof. Brian Gunia
Professor of Management
Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Johns Hopkins University

ABSTRACT

Research has long portrayed psychological safety as an unequivocal benefit for teams and their members. Yet, most evidence comes from cooperative contexts, in which team members share a collective goal. We ask whether the benefits of psychological safety extend to competitive settings. Focusing on distributive negotiations within teams, a common competitive context in which members’ interests conflict, we challenge the prevailing assumption that more psychological safety is necessarily better. Specifically, we suggest that psychological safety may lead individuals to restrain the assertive, self-advocating behaviors needed to secure favorable negotiation outcomes. Across seven studies (a recall study, two scenario studies, three archival studies, and an experiment; supplemented by three additional studies), we find convergent evidence that psychological safety suppresses the competitive behaviors necessary to thrive in distributive negotiations, partially because negotiators fear that such behaviors will undermine the team’s psychological safety. These findings reveal a critical boundary condition for psychological safety and highlight the need for a more contingent theory delineating the conditions under which psychological safety is beneficial and detrimental.

18 November

The Impact of Cartels on Productivity

SPEAKER

Prof. Yasutora Watanabe
Professor of Economics and Public Policy
University of Tokyo

ABSTRACT

We study the impact of cartels on productivity using a unique plant-level dataset from the Japanese ready-mix concrete industry, where cartels can be legally permitted. Our annual panel covers 1993–2004 with information on inputs, outputs, cartel membership, and the timing of cartel formation and collapse. After estimating plant-level productivity, we implement a difference-in-differences analysis around these events. Results show that cartel collapse increases both plant-level and market-level productivity, while cartel formation has no effects. A decomposition indicates that improvements are driven by heightened competition following cartel collapse rather than by reallocation across plants.

18 November

AI and management practice & theory: what is new?

SPEAKER

Prof. Xavier Castaner
Professor of Strategy
Faculty of Business & Economics (HEC)
University of Lausanne

ABSTRACT

The diffusion of AI has recently led to the emergence of the concept of algorithmic management as a new managerial approach. In this presentation, I revisit what AI or more precisely LLMs can currently do and how their use relates to Taylor’s scientific management. I derive some recommendations for universities’ role in both (management) research and education as well as for scholarly associations.