SPEAKER

Prof. Letian Zhang
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

We examine the role of a society’s social trust in shaping its organization’s job design. We use a dataset comprising over 60 million job postings from 28 European Union countries. Our most rigorous analytical models employ bilateral trust measures to predict job design choices, including fixed effects on country, firm, and occupation, as well as relying on an instrumental variable approach. This study underscores the role of social trust in shaping organizational practices.

SPEAKER

Prof. Virginia Minni
Assistant Professor of Economics
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

ABSTRACT

Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational firm. The data covers200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 10 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers as the top 30% by their speed of promotion and lever-age exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through latera land vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. Seven years after the manager transition, workers earn 30% more and perform better on objective performance measures. In terms of aggregate firm productivity, doubling the share of good managers would increase out put per worker by 61% at the establishment level. My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.

SPEAKER

Prof. Florian Englmaier
Professor of Organizational Economics
LMU Munich

ABSTRACT

Psychological safety (PsyS) is an important driver of teams’ performance and organizations are keen to foster it. However, there is little causal evidence on what drives it and how to increase it. This paper implements a randomized control trial with over 1000 teams (over 7000 employees) in a global healthcare company to evaluate the impact of  individualized attention of the manager to each team member team by encouraging managers to hold frequent 1-to-1 meetings and to focus them on mechanisms expected to increase PsyS. We exogenously vary the content of those meetings: focusing on employees’ needs and aspirations as individuals, or on allowing employees’ to better execute tasks and remove blockers that may hinder their best work. We find that, despite this very non-invasive intervention, the behavior of managers changed as they increased the number of meetings. PsyS also increased as did the relationship to and perceptions of the manager, particularly in the treatment arm that focused on the employees’ individual needs. We discuss potential channels and document tangible effects on self-reported and “hard” outcome metrics.

SPEAKER

Prof. Jia Lin Xie
Professor in Management
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

ABSTRACT

Work constitutes an essential part of human life. Research on job design has been considered as a “mature” field with abundant studies on how job characteristics influence employee attitudes, behaviors and well-being. In this seminar, the presenter will provide a critical review of extant research on job design and employee well-being, including her own research, to reveal the opportunities and challenges inherent in this field.

From a conceptual perspective, the presenter will introduce three lines of research that her research teams involved in charting new terrain in the job design literature. For each line of the research, she will discuss how it attempted to move the literature forward, and meanwhile, the unresolved research gaps and challenges. Methodologically, she will share her experience in collecting immunological and physiological health data through blood and saliva samples; and discuss how the integration of self-reported and non-self-reported data enhances research objectivity and facilitates cross-cultural comparative research. At the end of seminar, the presenter would like to open the discussion for future research directions and highlight the importance of taking a contingency perspective in studying the changing world of work.

SPEAKER

Prof. Michael Parke
Assistant Professor of Management
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Existing research on voice often suggests that employees should minimize or avoid expressing negative emotions when raising work-related issues or ideas because such negative expressions can cause managers to discredit or discount their voice. We aim to shift this belief to propose that the act of verbalizing one’s negative feelings (i.e., affect labeling) when raising issues to managers can help transform negative feelings (e.g., frustration or anxiety) from being seen as a harmful disruption to being seen as useful data. Drawing on self-disclosure research and the social-functional approach to emotions, we hypothesize that voicers’ use of affect labeling of negative emotions enhances (rather than detracts from) their credibility, thus leading to higher voice endorsement from managers. We find support for these hypotheses across three studies using field and experimental methodologies. Additionally, we explore a situational moderator (issue ambiguity) and three micro-mechanisms (vulnerability, self-control, and affective information) that further expand our understanding of the effects of voicer affect labeling. Our findings offer a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom that employees should avoid expressing their negative emotions when speaking up with ideas or issues; instead, we find that employees can label their negative feelings and still offer credible and compelling voice.

SPEAKER

Prof. Joon Mahn Lee
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Business
Seoul National University

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examine the causal impact of anticipated employee adverse behavior on the likelihood of a firm becoming an acquisition target. To obtain exogenous variations in anticipated employee adverse behavior, we exploit plausibly exogenous changes in state unemployment insurance benefits that increase the latitude of employees to engage in adverse behavior. We find that a state-level legislation increase in unemployment insurance benefits leads to a significant decrease in the likelihood of a firm becoming an acquisition target. We further argue and provide evidence suggesting that the main relationship is affected by the economic costs and likelihood of employee adverse behavior. Finally, supporting the anticipated employee adverse behavior mechanism, our findings show that UI benefits are associated with weaker synergy creation, acquirers’ lower announcement returns, and acquirers’ worse long-run stock and operating performance after the acquisition.

SPEAKER

Prof. Roman Galperin
Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour
McGill University

ABSTRACT

Occupational licensure is a much-discussed policy issue.  Most analysts assume that, because licensure increases barriers to entry into an occupation, it also depresses entrepreneurship, especially so for disadvantaged workers like racial minorities.  We argue that licensure offers a signal of quality and legitimacy to producers.  We further argue that customers discount services rendered by minority practitioners more in the absence of licensure.  Therefore,  the relationship between  licensure  and  entrepreneurship  can  be  positive,  especially  for  disadvantaged  groups. Using  panel data  on  the  population  of  tax  preparers  in  the  U.S.,  we  test whether state-level licensure is associated with lower rates of entry into tax preparation but also higher rates of entrepreneurship.  We show that the effects vary by race and the average quality of the market.  Our findings suggest that licensure may offer nascent entrepreneurs a signal of quality and legitimacy that may reduce customer discrimination against minority producers.

SPEAKER

Prof. Ilya Cuypers
Associate Professor of Strategic Management
Lee Kong Chian School of Business
Singapore Management University

ABSTRACT

Following extensive investigations into the implications of political ties for firms, researchers have more recently started to study how such ties also impact society. This direction reflects broader changes in the world at large and in management research, where grand challenges are receiving greater attention. We advance this vital area of inquiry by proposing an integrative framework to synthesize the mechanisms that link political ties to firms’ polluting behavior (i.e., bridging, buffering, and binding) and identifying an important contingency (i.e., level of the government). We then apply this general framework to the context of China to derive hypotheses that predict contrasting implications of a firm’s political ties for its pollution, depending on the level of the government to which these ties connect the firm. In line with our hypotheses, we find a positive association between having high-level political ties and firm pollution, but a negative association between having low-level political ties and firm pollution. Our study advances the political ties literature by synthesizing the implications of political ties in multi-tiered governments and contributes to the growing research on grand challenges.

SPEAKER

Prof. Sun Hyun Park
Professor of Strategy and International Management
College of Business Administration
Seoul National University

ABSTRACT

We reconcile prior managerial career imprinting perspectives with managerial experiences, learning, and the development of cognitive frameworks in a fast-changing, cyclical industry. We investigate CEO career imprinting and counter-cyclical investment strategy in the U.S. semiconductor industry. We theorize that CEOs who began their careers in downcycle periods are more likely to implement counter-cyclical strategies when they encounter subsequent industry downcycles in their career. This imprinting effect is reinforced through their individual accumulation of contrarian experiences, i.e., positive performance outcomes following previous counter-cyclical strategies, and the development of a cognitive framework valuing industry downturns as opportunities for long-term investment. Our empirical study of the entire career history of 311 unique CEOs since 1977 and counter-cyclical investment records between 2001 and 2020 supports our hypotheses.

SPEAKER

Prof. Ingrid Haegele
Professor of Economics
Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich

ABSTRACT

Addressing female underrepresentation in leadership positions has become a key policy objective. However, little is known about the extent to which the leadership ladder appeals differently to women relative to men. Collecting new data from a large multinational firm, I document the existence of a broken rung: women at lower hierarchy levels are 27% less likely to apply for early career promotions. Both realized application patterns and large-scale surveys at the firm reveal the role of an understudied feature of promotions—having to assume responsibility over a team—which is less appealing to women. This gap is not accounted for by standard explanations, such as family constraints, risk preferences, confidence, or differences in perceived success likelihood. Instead, my findings suggest that organizations can increase female applications by providing more information about what team leadership entails.