Management and Strategy - HKU Business School

21 April

Do Well, Say Good: Transforming Green Innovation into Financial Return through Tone Management

SPEAKER

Prof. Shibin Sheng
Professor of Marketing
Collat School Of Business
University of Alabama at Birmingham

ABSTRACT

Although firms see green innovation as a means to manage regulatory pressures and meet customer needs, little is known about its impact on firm performance. The underlying mechanisms and contingent conditions of the relationship between green innovation and firm financial performance also remain underexplored. Drawing on institutional theory, this study examines the mediating effect of tone management, including media tone and manager tone, on the relationship between green innovation and firm financial performance, as well as the moderating effect of state ownership on the relationship between tone management and financial performance. Using a dataset consisting of 10,064 observations of 1,460 Chinese high-tech firms over a 20-year period (2000–2019), this study reveals that green innovation can improve firm financial performance through positive media and manager tone. In addition, state ownership attenuates the positive effects of media tone and manager tone on firm performance. These findings offer important implications for academic research and managerial practice.

17 April

Gender Inequality and the Direction of Ideas: Evidence from the Weinstein Scandal and #MeToo

SPEAKER

Dr. Hong Luo
Associate Professor
Business Administration in the Strategy Unit
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

How do the Harvey Weinstein scandal and #MeToo affect women’s likelihood of working in male-dominated domains and the types of ideas developed in Hollywood? To discern these events’ impact, we exploit the variation in whether a producer previously collaborated with Weinstein. We find that compared to their non-associated counterparts, Weinstein-associated teams with female talent are more likely to work on male-oriented stories after the shock, and their depiction of female protagonists is less traditionally feminine. Finally, we find no change in the share of female-oriented stories by Weinstein-associated producers, even though they now work substantially more with female talent. Our findings suggest that these events have helped counteract gender stereotypes for women, but they do not mitigate the shortage of female-oriented ideas.

30 March

Thinking About Thinking: How Considering Mindsets Can Inform The Way We Understand Our Relationship With Work

SPEAKER

Dr. Trevor Foulk
Associate Professor
Management & Organization
The Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

In two papers, I will discuss how considering employees’ internal mindsets can help us both identify and solve important work problems that employees may be experiencing. In the first paper, taking an identity perspective, I will demonstrate that domain-incongruent self-affirmation (defined as affirming an important non-work identity while at work) can change employees’ mindsets in a way that induces anxiety, and that this affirmation-induced anxiety can have costs for employees, both at work and at home. In the second paper, taking a goal perspective, I will demonstrate how non-work goal reflection (thinking about important non-work goals at the end of the workday) can shift employees mindsets in a way that helps them stop ruminating about work during non-work time, and how rumination mediates the effect of non-work goal reflection on employees’ after-work well-being. Taken together, these studies highlight the importance of employees’ internal mindsets, and provide insights into how employees understand and interpret the work environment and their relationships with it.

29 March

Outside Options and Worker Motivation

SPEAKER

Dr. Matthias Fahn
Associate Professor
An affiliate of the CESifo Network
Johannes Kepler University Linz

ABSTRACT

We study the relationship between outside options and workers’ incentives to exert effort. We first set up a relational contracting model where effort is constrained by the future surplus of an employment relationship. To test the predictions from this model, we evaluate changes in outside options arising from age and experience cutoffs in the Austrian unemployment insurance (UI) system. Results indicate that a 9-week UI benefit extension increasesworker absenteeism at the intensive margin by 0.5 days per half-year, on average. Consistent with our model predicting that these effort reductions are more pronounced if the perceived relationship value is small, we find that our effects are stronger for workers with higher potential cost of unemployment, for older workers, in declining rather than in growing firms, in low-wage firms, and for women who have children.

28 March

Management practices and firm performance during the Great Recession – Evidence from Spanish survey data

SPEAKER

Prof. Florian Englmaier
Professor of Organizational Economics
Department of Economics
LMU Munich

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically examines whether management practices that work well during an economic boom are also e ective in times of economics crisis, using plant-level survey data collected in Spain in 2006 just prior to the Great Recession. By employing unsupervised machine learning, we leverage high-dimensional human resource policies at each plant to describe clusters of management practices (“management styles”). We establish a positive correlation of a management style associated with structured management with performance prior to the crisis starting in 2006. Even accounting for firm survival, this correlation turns negative during the financial crisis. Further results suggest that more structured management correlates with relatively higher holdings of non-liquid assets and lower employee turnover. This suggests that a structured management style allows firms to strive during a boom but may be an impediment to adjusting to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.

13 March

“Clean” Meat? Regulatory Entrepreneurship and Jurisdictional Contestation in the Nascent Cultivated Meat Industry

SPEAKER

Dr. Cheng Gao
NBD Bancorp Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Assistant Professor of Strategy
Ross School Of Business
University Of Michigan

ABSTRACT

In category-defying nascent industries, uncertainty over which regulatory agency has jurisdiction is often a major source of dependence for pioneering organizations. How do organizations manage regulatory jurisdictional uncertainty? We conduct an inductive, in-depth qualitative research study on how organizations pioneering the nascent cultivated-meat industry effectively navigate jurisdictional uncertainty. Drawing on hand-collected semi-structured interviews as well as extensive archival data and field work, we uncover stratagems and processes that entrepreneurial ventures and organizations deploy to induce, manage, and influence contestation over regulatory jurisdiction. Our resulting theoretical framework, organized around three phases consisting of jurisdictional uncertainty, jurisdictional contestation, and jurisdictional convergence, unpacks the underlying mechanisms of such strategies and theorizes how they enable organizations to manage overlapping regulators and ultimately influence the regulatory scaffolding of an emergent nascent industry. A unique aspect of our study is that it examines the rich interactions and dynamics between the wide range of disparate actors that comprise new technology-enabled industries: new ventures, incumbents, non-profit organizations, and regulators. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for research on entrepreneurial strategy, non-market strategy, organization theory, and technological innovation. More generally, it provides a fresh perspective on how organizations navigate and shape the uncertain nascent markets in which they attempt to create.

21 February

Hierarchies in Hierarchy-Free Systems: Understanding the Governance Tradeoffs in Enterprise Blockchains

SPEAKER

Dr. Marvin Hanisch
Assistant professor
Innovation Management & Strategy Department
University of Groningen

ABSTRACT

Blockchain technology presents a potential solution for governing complex organizational networks through partial automation. A critical decision for founders of enterprise blockchains relates to whether the algorithmic governance layer native to the blockchain should be supplemented by costly administrative controls that can facilitate coordination and reduce opportunistic risks. We hypothesize that founders of enterprise blockchains will evaluate this tradeoff in favor of adopting administrative controls as the number and variety of founders and the rivalry and interdependency among founders increase. We test our theory on a unique sample of 128 blockchain initiatives and find that different administrative controls are employed by blockchain founders in response to different costs of coordination and opportunism. We complement our primary analysis with a study of the configurations of governance conditions that lead to blockchain discontinuation. Our study advances theories on network governance and contributes to the emerging literature on blockchains.

13 February

The Wandering Scholars: Understanding the Heterogeneity of University Commercialization

SPEAKER

Dr. Carolyn Stein
Assistant professor
Haas School of Business and Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley

ABSTRACT

University-based scientific research has long been argued to be a central source of commercial innovation and economic growth. Yet at the same time, there have been long-held concerns that many university-based discoveries never realize their potential social benefits. Looking across universities, research and commercialization activities such as start-up formation vary tremendously – variation that could reflect the composition and orientation of faculty research, university-level factors such as patenting and licensing efforts, or broader place-based factors such as location in a technology cluster. We take a first step towards unpacking this heterogeneity in university commercialization by analyzing how the propensity of academic research to spill over to commercial innovation changes when academics move across universities. Our estimates suggest that at least 20–30% of geographic variation in commercial spillovers from university-based research is attributable to place-specific factors.

07 February

To Thine Own Self Be True, Or The Organization Would Seem False Too: Personal Inauthenticity Predicts Employee Organizational Cynicism

SPEAKER

Dr. Li Huang
Associate Professor
Organisational Behaviour
INSEAD Business School

ABSTRACT

Influenced by a classical philosophical notion that a person’s authentic self is their fount of happiness, organizational scholars have adopted an affective and introspective lens and studied employees’ experience of personal inauthenticity as an obstacle to their own wellbeing and work engagement. Overlooked is a parallel notion corroborated by recent psychology research that people also see their authentic self a source of virtue and inauthenticity a threat to their moral self-concept. Drawing from the distancing account of the self-concept protection theory in social psychology, the current research proposes a two-stage, organization-specific defense response through which organizational members experiencing personal inauthenticity are motivated to espouse organizational cynicism, a negative attitude comprising of the belief that the organization lacks integrity as well as organization-directed negative affect and disparaging behaviors. Adopting a full-cycle research approach, we conducted a cross-lagged survey study, an experiment, and three multi-wave survey studies (with one of them pre-registered) to provide consistent support for our theoretical model and exclude trait cynicism and negative affectivity as alternative explanations. We discuss implications of this defense response for the personal authenticity of organizational members and the moral legitimacy of organizations.

07 February

Robustness In Disconnection: Soft And Hard Information And The Contingent Effect Of Network On The Performance Of Hedge Funds

SPEAKER

Dr. Yonghoon Lee
Assistant Professor
Department of Management
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

ABSTRACT

Informal networks can help fund managers access information embedded in the networks, but they can also expose managers to the hazard of social herding. Drawing on hedge funds industry, we theorize that the type of information managers use provides a condition under which the value of information access outweighs the hazard of social herding, and vice versa. We test our hypotheses with a triple difference design, leveraging 1) the collapse of Lehman Brothers that caused managers to exchange information through informal networks and 2) the difference between long–short funds relying on soft information, and relative value funds relying on hard information. We find that being connected to informal networks has a net-positive effect on the performance of long–short funds but has a net-negative effect for relative value funds.