Management and Strategy - HKU Business School

11 March

Managing The Boundaries Between Pain And Profession: A Study Of Senior Executives With Depression And Anxiety

SPEAKER

Prof. Sally Maitlis
Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Leadership
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how senior executives with depression and/or anxiety navigate the tensions between a challenging and highly stigmatized mental health condition and the demands and expectations of their professional roles. Based on 41 in-depth interviews, I found that participants engaged in a “protective cycle” of intensive boundary work that maintained social and intrapsychic boundaries around their emotional pain. At the social boundary, executives did boundary work such as always showing up for work and strategizing for obligatory work interactions; this allowed them to function professionally while concealing their emotional pain. The executives also carried out intrapsychic boundary work, much of it unconscious, that included working very hard, using alcohol, and other practices that limited their awareness of their emotional pain. For most participants, this protective cycle was disrupted by a revelatory experience, often involving a panic attack or breakdown, that revealed the limits of their boundary work and triggered a shift in their approach to dealing with their emotional pain. This shift led to a “restorative” cycle in which the executives managed their intrapsychic and social boundaries toward greater permeability, including increasing their understanding of their pain, sharing their emotions with work colleagues, and leading others with greater care and compassion. Using psychodynamic theory to theorize the mechanisms that animate these cycles and the shift between them, this paper offers insights into the little understood experience of leading with a common mental health issue and highlights the importance of attending to unconscious as well as conscious boundary work in organizations.

04 March

The Dual Pressures of Gender Equality: What Women’s Cinematic Presence Can Teach Us About Reception of DEI Initiatives

SPEAKER

Prof. Oliver Hahl
Associate Professor of Organization Theory, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University

ABSTRACT

Many organizations seek to increase the role of women, but how are these attempts received? Integrating gender discrimination and tokenism theories, we argue that women’s inclusion in key roles is often penalized. However, such penalties can diminish when the macrosocial environment legitimizes women’s inclusion, provided that such inclusion is genuine and substantive (i.e., non-tokenistic) rather than superficial or performative (i.e., tokenistic). We test these predictions in a panel dataset of movie series from 1991 to 2021. Results suggest that increasing women in principal roles (i.e., female increase) may hurt film evaluations. However, these penalties diminish when societal gender equality is high. Analogous patterns emerge at the state level: female increase movies receive greater audience interest in markets where genders are more equal. Crucially, evidence suggests that when gender equality is high, only non-tokenistic (vs. tokenistic) female increase is favored by the audience, measured variedly as films (a) passing (vs. failing) the Bechdel test, (b) featuring more than (vs. fewer than) two women in principal roles, or (c) casting female actors with high (vs. low) performance credentials. Text analyses of over 140,000 movie reviews reveal that female actors receive more positive attention from audience when genders are more equal and when their engagement is non-tokenistic. Lastly, we conduct a preregistered vignette-based experiment that allows us to directly identify the negative influence of tokenism concerns on film evaluations when gender equality is salient. Collectively, these results highlight the dual expectations that arise with gender equality: engaging women and doing so meaningfully.

25 February

Managerial Endorsement of Employees’ Novel Ideas: Balancing Newness and Familiarity

SPEAKER

Prof. Vijaya Venkataramani
Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Innovation
Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

Novel ideas often do not receive positive assessments from decision-makers and, therefore, lose the opportunity to be implemented. Drawing on optimal distinctiveness theory (ODT; Brewer, 1991; Zuckerman, 2016), we propose that ideas need to be optimally distinct in order to secure support and endorsement from decision-makers. Specifically, rather than treat novelty as a monolithic construct, we identify idea functionality and design/form as distinct dimensions of novelty and argue that novelty in functionality needs to be optimally balanced with familiarity in form. We further propose that this strategy of balancing functional novelty with design familiarity is more necessary when idea creators lack legitimacy; when creators have greater legitimacy, this gives them greater leverage in selling ideas that are novel in functional as well as form. We find support for these ideas in an experimental study as well as an archival study using data scraped from Kickstarter. Both studies highlight the mediating role of perceived idea usefulness in affecting decision-makers’ willingness to support and implement these novel ideas.

19 February

Harnessing Confidence Diversity: Exploring Top Management Team Confidence Diversity And Its Influence On Innovation Efficiency

SPEAKER

Prof. Daniel Gamache
Associate Professor
Terry College of Business
University of Georgia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we introduce the novel construct, top management team (TMT) confidence diversity, which we define as the degree to which confidence levels vary within the TMT. By integrating upper echelons theory and the information processing theory on diversity, we examine the effect of TMT confidence diversity on firm innovation efficiency. Specifically, we argue that TMT confidence diversity will be positively related to firm innovation efficiency due to information processing benefits gained when making decisions about innovation. Additionally, we draw on the group information processing perspective and examine two contexts likely to shape the importance of information processing—industry competitive intensity and firm financial maturity—and thus moderate the relationship between TMT confidence diversity and firm innovation efficiency. We test our theory using a broad panel dataset of S&P 1500 firms between 1992 and 2017, finding strong support for our hypotheses. Our study serves to reconceptualize executive confidence from an individual-level attribute to a TMT-level attribute, moving beyond the CEO-centric focus of prior research. We also advance TMT diversity research to incorporate a dynamic deep-level attribute that directly affects cognition and decision-making, moving beyond extant research that has focused on static surface-level attributes, primarily in the form of demographic characteristics.

12 February

Do You See What I See? The Effects Of Attentional Congruence On Post-acquisition Integration

SPEAKER

Prof. Theresa Cho
Professor of Strategy & International Business
Graduate School of Business
Seoul National University

ABSTRACT

Although prior work has often focused on shifts in firms’ boundaries, we know little about the consequences of the attentional changes that follow such shifts. Drawing from the attention-based view of firm, we develop the notion of attentional congruence—the degree of similarity in managerial attention at the dyadic level between two firms. In the context of acquisitions in high-tech industries, we examine the effects of attentional congruence on two post-acquisition integration outcomes:(1) the degree of turnover among top executives at the target firm and (2)post-acquisition innovation at the firm level. The results of our study highlight the importance of achieving an optimal balance in attentional congruence between two merging firms for post-acquisition integration outcomes.

07 February

The Hidden Contribution of Women to Science

SPEAKER

Prof. Michaël Bikard
Associate Professor of Strategy
INSEAD

ABSTRACT

Gender disparities in visible scientific contributions—such as publications and citations—are well-documented. Yet, these metrics omit important forms of scholarly input such as informal feedback. Because women may be more likely to engage in these less visible activities, exclusive reliance on conventional metrics risks understating their contribution to Science. In this study, we focus on the field of Finance and find that women receive acknowledgments more often than their publication and citation rates would suggest. We then analyze peer-review data from an academic conference, showing that female reviewers, on average, write longer and more positive reviews. Taken together, our findings suggest that relying solely on visible metrics might systematically bias evaluations against women.

23 January

Price Discovery in Labor Markets: Why Do Firms Say They Cannot Find Workers?

SPEAKER

Prof. Benjamin Friedrich
Associate Professor of Strategy
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

ABSTRACT

Managers often report that labor constraints – defined as the inability to find workers – are a major obstacle to firms’ growth. This phenomenon is puzzling, because economic theory offers a simple remedy: increase wages until the worker is found or hiring is no longer profitable. We explore why firms report labor constraints instead of pre-empting them by increasing wages using administrative data from Germany. We confirm that quasi-exogenous variation in labor constraints slows down firm growth. Wages play a role consistent with basic theory: firms that report constraints initially underpay their workers, increase wages later, and a quasi-exogenous increase in wages alleviates their problems. Why then do firms not increase wages earlier to avoid the problem to begin with? Unlike financial markets, labor markets do not have an easily observable price process. Firms set wages based on their beliefs, and when they underestimate market-clearing wages, labor constraints arise. Consistent with this mechanism, labor constraints increase after quasi-exogenous wage increases in other parts of the economy and are more prevalent in settings where firms are less informed.

02 January

After Shocks: Humble Leaders’ Socialization Tactics Improve Employee Reattachment During Organizational Reentry

SPEAKER

Prof. Dan Cable
Professor of Organisational Behaviour
London Business School

ABSTRACT

Shock events can threaten employees’ organizational attachment, but little research has focused on how leaders can help reattach employees to their organizations in the wake of shocks. Drawing on the socialization literature, we build theory about the effectiveness of leaders’ approaches to socialization when employees reenter organizations following shock events. Specifically, we conceptualize reentry as a role transition marked by physical and psychological movement that raises employees’ concerns about self-continuity, creating a need for socialization. We propose that humble leaders – because they are open to learning about and integrating employees’ shock-related experiences – will be more likely to engage in socialization approaches that reduce employee turnover and promote employee performance. Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic as a nearly universal shock event followed by a period of reentry, we find evidence for our hypothesized effects across four studies with complementary methodologies, including online experiments and multi-source field studies (N = 2,974). Specifically, we find that humble leaders are more likely to engage in socialization approaches that affirm employees’ experiences and perspectives as they return to in-person work, which are associated with reduced turnover intentions and behavior as well as enhanced performance.

02 January

Revolutionary Sparks: Exploring the Resource Spillover Effect of Environmental and Social Protests on Entrepreneurship in China

SPEAKER

Prof. Milo Wang
Assistant Professor of Management
Arizona State University

ABSTRACT

Although research has shown that environmental and social protests can indirectly influence untargeted firms through informational spillovers, we propose that these indirect effects are not confined to informational cues alone. Considering local government officials’ responses to environmental and social protests, we argue that activism can also affect untargeted organizations via a resource-spillover effect. Specifically, when politicians perceive street protests as a threat to their job security and prospects for promotion, they may adopt a middle ground approach, taking policy stances that sit between symbolic gestures and directly addressing activists’ environmental and social grievances. These policies, in turn, can contribute to the creation of new organizations. Using a longitudinal dataset organized by city-year observations in China between 2008 and 2019, we examine how street protests over environmental and social issues can indirectly affect the founding of new ventures, which are particularly sensitive to changes in available resources and operating costs. Results show that local government officials’ response to street protests indirectly facilitates entrepreneurship by lowering business operating costs and increasing access to capital. Further, the resource spillover effect on businesses is accentuated by the political-opportunity structure that enhances the impact of street protests on the responses of local politicians.

27 November

Are Guidelines Worth Following? Treatment Decisions Under Scientific Uncertainty

SPEAKER

Prof. David C. Chan
Associate Professor of Health Policy
Stanford University

ABSTRACT

Physicians often deviate from medical guidelines, but most guidelines focus on a single disease while ignoring complex interactions that render treatment harmful. We study prescribing decisions covered by a prominent guideline for treating atrial fibrillation in patients at higher risk for stroke. Following the guideline’s introduction, physicians rapidly demonstrated awareness of it, yet they often declined to adhere to it, even for patients with the highest stroke risk. Using machine learning on eight randomized trials of anticoagulation, we find significant stroke treatment effect heterogeneity. However, the trials do not (and were not designed to) reveal heterogeneity in the bleeding side effect of anticoagulation. In the observational data, we find that bleed risk is positively correlated with stroke reduction, raising the possibility that the patients who benefit most from treatment may also suffer greater harm from it. Analyzing the performance of known and optimal treatment rules, we show that known guidelines may perform worse than randomly treating patients. Finally, we develop a guideline under an objective that maximizes the worst outcome under scientific ambiguity and show that this guideline may significantly improve welfare relative to status quo treatment decisions. Analyzing physician behavior under this benchmark, we find that ranking patients according to predicted physician treatment under the “wisdom of the crowds'” performs better than strict adherence to known guidelines.