SPEAKER

Prof. Steve Gray
Assistant Professor
McCombs School of Business
The University of Texas at Austin

ABSTRACT

Founding team members typically have a founder role identity while also having distinctive professional role identities (i.e., engineer, marketing). Drawing from role identity theory and research on organizational identity, we theorize that founding teams whose members strongly identify with the founder role are likely to experience more startup identity conflict. These negative effects can be mitigated, however, when founding team members strongly identify with their professional roles. We test our hypotheses using a multi-informant three-wave survey of 318 founders in 102 startups. Findings demonstrate that identifying with distinctive role identities (profession) limits the negative effects of identifying with a shared role identity (founder). We discuss implications for theory on multiple identities in founding teams, founding team conflict, and organizational identity.

SPEAKER

Prof. Jason Greenberg
Associate Professor of Management
Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

ABSTRACT

Research Summary: We investigate the extent to which the increasing availability of ratings information has affected heterogeneity in firm performance and, if so, what market segments are responsible for these changes. A unique dataset was constructed with restricted-access government data to examine these questions in the context of the New York City restaurant industry between 1994 and 2013. We find that firms serving tourist and expensive price point market segments experienced increasing sales discrepancies as a function of rating differentials when ratings information became more easily accessible with the advent of online rating platforms. These findings depict how the prevalence of online rating systems have shaped competition and value capture, thus providing insight into the determinants of firm performance heterogeneity.

Managerial Summary: We examine the extent to which increasing availability of ratings information has affected firm performance by estimating changes in comparative sales between New York City restaurants between 1994 and 2013. Analyses indicate that increased access to ratings information during this period had a considerable effect on comparative sales for firms serving the tourist and the expensive price point market segments. These results provide insights into other industries where access to evaluations and rating systems have also increased. This work suggests that online ratings have affected how firms compete and capture value, and managers have opportunities to use rating systems to their advantage.

SPEAKER

Prof. Ling Zhong
Assistant Professor of Economics
Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the gender gap among full time college educated workers born between 1931 and 1984. Using rich data from the National Survey of College Graduates and other sources on college graduates and their labor market outcomes, we decompose trends in the gender earnings gap across birth cohorts into trends due to differences in the relative returns to undergraduate and graduate degree field combinations, trends in gender differences in undergraduate field, graduate degree attainment, and graduate field, and trends in a cohort and gender specific “residual component”  that shifts the gender gap in earnings by the same amount for all college graduates. We have three main sets of findings. First, we find that much of the large gap in earnings between the 1931 and 1950 cohorts is due to the “residual component”. Most of the decline is within occupation, especially for the early cohorts. The residual gap varies little from 1951 to the late 70s, after which it resumes its decline. Second, we find that gender differences in the relative return to undergraduate and graduate degree combinations matter for the gender gap, but contribute very little to the decline in the gender gap over the full time period. Third, we study and further decompose the “education gap” the contribution of college major, graduate degree attainment and graduate field to the gap. When evaluated at fixed relative returns to each degree type, the education gap declines substantially and is an important part of the narrowing of the gender gap. But this decline is largely offset by cohort trends in the relative returns to specific fields that worked in favor of men against women. Overall, the education gap varies in a narrow range around 0.2 and accounts for very little of the decline.

SPEAKER

Prof. Christopher M. Barnes
Professor and Provost Chair
Department of Management and Organisation
National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In this presentation, Prof. Barnes will walk through the topic of human sustainability. Human sustainability focuses on how employees can meet their needs for maintenance without neglecting their needs for growth and generativity, such that they can maintain a (preferably high) level of performance over long periods of time. Prof. Barnes will discuss Restricted Employee Sustainability Theory (REST), as well as a theoretical extension to REST which focuses on the role of the leader. Following this, Prof. Barnes will discuss a construct validation process in which my coauthors and he developed new measures associated with REST, and how these constructs relate to employee health. Prof. Barnes will devote special attention to the topics of preventive versus corrective maintenance, which seem very similar on the surface but are better differentiated in predicting outcomes over time. Finally, Prof. Barnes will discuss potential future directions for research on the topic of human sustainability.

SPEAKER

Prof. Yiqun Chen
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
University of Illinois at Chicago

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians, two professions performing overlapping tasks but with starkly different backgrounds, training, and pay. Using quasi-experimental variation in patient assignment to NPs versus physicians in Veterans Health Administration emergency departments, we find that, on average, NPs use more resources and achieve less favorable patient outcomes than physicians. However, the NP-physician performance difference varies by case complexity and severity. Importantly, even larger productivity variation exists within each profession, leading to substantial overlap between the productivity distributions of the two professions; NPs perform better than physicians in 38 percent of random pairs.

SPEAKER

Prof. Elizabeth Pontikes
Professor of Management
Graduate School of Management
University of California, Davis

ABSTRACT

In this study, we investigate when scandal gives rise to industry-wide social change. Empirically, we examine firms’ actions taken in response to media reporting on a series of sexual harassment scandals within the U.S. venture capital (VC) industry, 2012-2017. We first content-analyzed media coverage and found that media framings evolved over time from depicting sexual harassment cases as idiosyncratic acts to focusing on the broader context that enabled them. We then sought to understand how different framings impacted two types of industry actions: an increase in (1) women representing VC firms as lead investors and (2) VC funding of start-ups whose founding teams include women. Our findings suggest a two-phase response: limited actions were taken by individuals directly associated with accused harassers when media framed issues as isolated events. This evolved into a stronger collective industry effort after media narratives shifted to depict sexual harassment as a systemic issue. We conducted exploratory interviews with VCs that contextualize these results. We consider implications of our findings to extend understandings of the conditions under which scandals may lead to organizational and industry-wide change.

SPEAKER

Prof. Sonali K. Shah
Professor
Gies College of Business
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to inductively illuminate how new ventures operating in nascent industries build and process knowledge. Our data reveal three knowledge related activities that are associated with early success that have received little attention in the literature: collaborative experimentation, obtaining strategic information through informal interactions with industry players, and discovery-centered organizing. These activities allow new ventures to both create and draw in knowledge by working independently as well as collaboratively with other firms in the industry. In some cases, these efforts reinforce the firm’s initial direction, while in other cases, they lead the firm to alter course, or pivot. Our findings are based on primary source data gathered through interviews and observation, and augmented with archival data, on new ventures in the nascent smart lighting industry.

SPEAKER

Prof. Jon M. Jachimowicz
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

Employees aspire to join high-passion teams, and prior research suggests such teams produce better outcomes because team members effortlessly catch each other’s passion. This view reflects an implicit assumption in the broader emotional contagion literature that emotions are easily caught. We propose that any instance of contagion comprises both effortless (easy and automatic) and effortful (conscious and directed) processes, and the prevalence of each varies with the emotional state being transmitted. Specifically, we argue that the socially valued nature of passion for work coupled with its observability lead high-passion teams to inadvertently set informal display norms. These create social pressures for employees which make effortful processes more prevalent in the contagion mix—thereby detracting from the benefits high-passion teams provide. We provide evidence through an experience sampling study with 829 employees nested in 155 teams who responded to three surveys per day across 20 consecutive workdays (16,574 responses), and a pre-registered experiment with 1,063 full-time employees. Our work reveals the challenges employees experience in high-passion teams. It also deepens our understanding of emotional contagion, highlighting that the process of catching—and the composition of how effortless versus effortful it is—holds distinct implications for outcomes above and beyond the caught emotional state.

SPEAKER

Dr. Will Peichun Wang
Chief Economist
Unity Technologies

ABSTRACT

We estimate welfare benefits of the public cloud and study the impact of customer inertia on welfare. We develop a novel demand model that allows for both multiple product choices and continuous usage, and estimate the model using proprietary customer-level data. We find the average consumer surplus from cloud usage to be 216% of its cost, and that smaller customers disproportionately benefit from public cloud. We also find significant inertia on the cloud, reducing welfare benefits by 62%. Finally, we show that cloud migration services and introductory discounts can improve both consumer surplus and provider revenue.

SPEAKER

Prof. Yeonsin Ahn
Assistant Professor in Strategy and Business Policy
HEC Paris

ABSTRACT

Forming an atypical organizational culture is unusual and may require agreement among founding team members. We propose that startup teams with high diversity in the cultural legacies that co-founders bring from previous employers resolve cultural disagreements by converging to the culture that is already taken for granted, and hence have low atypicality. The convergence is amplified when the co-founders have similar power. However, teams with individual co-founders who are equipped with more diverse cultural elements can cultivate a more atypical culture by recombining elements. Furthermore, these co-founders can attenuate the cultural disagreements in a team and lessen the convergence to typicality, but only when they are the CEOs. These ideas are examined in an analysis of U.S. technology startup teams in CrunchBase and their parent organizations. We use 3.1 million employee reviews of the total technology company population from Glassdoor to identify the key cultural elements of technology companies over the past 12 years. The findings are consistent with the predictions. Implications for the study of startup culture, team diversity, and cultural recombination are discussed.