2022-2023

Prof. Ella MIRON-SPEKTOR (INSEAD) 

June 6, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Harnessing the Paradox Mindset for Enhanced Team Performance and Creativity 

To maximize team performance and foster creative solutions, it is crucial for teams to navigate conflicting perspectives and integrate competing task demands. In this talk, I will discuss recent and ongoing research on the effectiveness of a collective paradox mindset in enhancing team performance and creativity. I will present two studies on teams. The first (N= 323), demonstrated that teams primed with a paradox mindset (i.e., paradoxical frames), coupled with high epistemic motivation, generate more creative solutions compared to teams with paradox mindset but low epistemic motivation. Teams with high epistemic motivation that solely emphasize information sharing, without embracing paradoxes, fall short in producing creative outcomes. Teams with paradoxical frames and high epistemic motivation are more creative because they engage in idea elaboration – they exchange, consider, and integrate diverse ideas and perspectives. By contrast, other teams settle on suboptimal middle-way solutions that do not address task demands. The second study investigated highly diverse teams (N=131) over an extended period and unveiled the protective effects of having team members with a paradox mindset in the face of relationship conflicts. These team members were found to buffer the negative impacts of relationship conflict on team potency and performance. Together, the studies show that when teams collectively work through their tensions, they improve their performance and creativity. By shedding light on the underlying processes that enable teams to harness task and team tensions, this research contributes valuable insights into the advantages of embracing a paradox mindset within teams.  

Jill PERRY-SMITH (Emory University)

May 25, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Creativity and the idea journey: Social network pathways to success 

The creative idea journey involves a series of distinct phases: idea generation, idea elaboration, idea championing, and idea implementation. Instead of traversing across phases and moving through the journey, promising ideas sometimes get stuck or permanently stall. We investigate the first and second half of the idea journey across two papers and illuminate when creative ideas may not advance. In the first paper, we identify the types of network ties (weak or strong) that are helpful in idea generation and idea elaboration, and given this understanding, whether individuals activate ties accordingly. In a series of experiments, we provide evidence of the causal effects of weak and strong ties for each phase. We also find that individuals with large networks, despite providing more opportunity to activate both strong and weak ties, activate fewer weak ties and are less likely to switch ties across phases than individuals with smaller networks, particularly when creativity is perceived as a high-risk endeavor. Finally, we find that activating the wrong ties leads to either dropping creative ideas or pursuing uncreative ones. In the second paper, we focus on idea championing. Building on social approaches to creativity and evaluation, we theorize that what fosters attention and inclusion in the consideration set, may not necessarily lead to final positive evaluation and selection for implementation. We test our theory in an original archival dataset of 983 screenplays selected between 2005 and 2017. Our results reveal that promising scripts handled by socially active champions receive gatekeepers’ attention yet are also less likely to advance to implementation. 

Elisabeth CLEMENS  (University of Chicago)

May 23, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Private Action, Public Goods: From Civic Gifts to Social Entrepreneurship    

Government, philanthropy, mutual aid, even commercial activities – all of these may produce public goods that alleviate suffering or promote the quality of life.  The mix of methods for creating public goods is central to processes of political development.  In historical perspective, the shifting reliance on different forms of public-oriented action defines periods of expansive state-building, deconstruction, and, importantly, anti-statist state-building.  These dynamics are traced over the course of U.S. political history to illuminate how “social entrepreneurship” has emerged as a legitimate, and even celebrated, mode of addressing social problems and producing public goods in a democratic society. 

Nilanjana DUTT  (Bocconi)

May 16th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Autonomy and the Management of Knowledge in Multi-Unit Firms   

Autonomy is an essential managerial tool, especially for firms that are managing knowledge units in several locations. Although these firms typically monitor their subsidiaries, monitoring may be too costly with geographically distant units. Autonomy could support the development of distant subsidiaries' knowledge assets efficiently. We examine the conditions under which multi-unit firms use autonomy to manage their subsidiaries. Specifically, we focus on the link between autonomy and subsidiaries' level of knowledge assets. We find that when distant units have autonomy, they have greater knowledge assets. As these results are stronger in thicker markets, these subsidiaries likely build their knowledge by interacting with the local market. On the other hand, proximate units that are autonomous have fewer knowledge assets. This result supports the conventional wisdom that most subsidiaries benefit from control and knowledge transfer from the headquarter. Our research highlights the importance of autonomy as a strategic tool to improve the organizational performance of distant subsidiaries.

Kevin CORLEY (Imperial Business School)

April 18th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Beyond Terroir : Tracing the Origins of a Strategic Group Identity in the Shadow of an Established Market Category Identity 

Two particularly notable, but distinct, theoretical foundations for understanding collective identity, one advocating a social actor conception and the other a social constructivist view, suggest that collective identity plays an important role in the ultimate success of organizational groupings. Neither view alone, however, can explain how and why, despite the existence of a market category identity (MCI), a strategic group identity (SGI) originated amongst a set of organisations for whom the MCI was not of significance. Nor can they explain how and why such a SGI triggered a reinterpretation of the MCI. Our in-depth inductive study of the Franciacorta group of wineries allowed us to gain insight into the micro-level mechanisms at play in the SGI origination process, as well as how that nascent SGI helped create a new MCI. Our model helps scholars better understand the heretofore unexamined mechanisms responsible for the initial emergence of a collective identity in the shadow of an existing one, and the important role independent agents play in those origination mechanisms. In so doing, it provides novel theoretical grounding to the dynamics underpinning collective identity formation and the interactions between different types of collective identities. 

Sarah HARVEY (UCL) 

April 4th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Elaborative Play: How Creative Groups Crystalize Novel Ideas 

How can group members collaborate on developing new ideas when those ideas are too vague for individual group members to understand, communicate, or assess? To investigate how groups crystallize novel ideas (i.e., give a fuzzy, abstract concept form and make it clearer, more comprehensible, and communicable), we conducted a qualitative study of experimental circus groups in the early phases of creating a new show. Using field observations of nine groups over ten months (approximately 360 hours), and 39 interviews, we found that crystallizing ideas was critical, yet rare and unpredictable. Much of groups’ time was spent on elaborative work, which provided and refined necessary raw materials, but paradoxically, made crystallizing a particular idea more difficult. Instead, ideas crystallized during infrequent, emergent bursts of elaborative play, during which members became engrossed in the process and the process decoupled from the intentional pursuit of creating a circus show. Our study contributes to understanding the “messy middle” of collective creativity, revealing that, rather than linear and progressive, iteration is an unpredictable, tedious process punctuated by sudden leaps forward during bright spots of play; and showing how, rather than possessing inherent value, novel ideas are imbued with value through groups’ intuition- and emotion-fuelled interactions with them. 

Ming Leung  (UC Irvine)

March 14th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

An Uphill Battle: Employer Learning and the Persistence of Occupational Gender Segregation (with Claire Daviss)

Extant work recognises that gender biases in hiring contribute to occupational gender segregation. However, little attention has been paid to the ways that employers’ experiences with women and men workers may contribute to undermine these biases. The authors propose that employers update their preferences for gender typical workers based on their experiences with workers. We test for evidence of employer updating drawing on rare access to longitudinal hiring data from an online labor marketplace. Results of linear probability regressions demonstrate that employers more strongly favor women as they accumulate more experiences with women workers. A simulation of employer hiring decisions over time elucidates implications of gendered employer learning for occupational gender segregation. Employer updating leads to a persistence of gender segregation in highly gender segregated occupations but leads to gender integration where employers have more frequent experiences with gender atypical workers, such as in more moderately segregated occupations. This paper therefore highlights the link between micro-level gendered employer updating and the persistence of macro-level occupational gender segregation. 

CANCELLED John Mawdsley (HEC Paris), Claudia Gabbioneta (Univ. of York), Daniel Muzio (Univ. of York) 

Tuesday, February, 14th 2023 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 am in room N405 

Intra- and Inter-Group Dynamics and the Market for Quality: Examining Mobility of Elite Professionals   

Knowledge-based organizations rely on the human and social capital of their professional workers for competitive advantage. This creates incentives to recruit elite professionals. Yet, prior research challenges the assumption that recruiting exceptional talent necessarily improves group and firm performance. In this study, we investigate how intra-and inter-group factors moderate the relationship between recruiting a talented individual into a group and that group’s quality-performance. Using a longitudinal panel dataset of UK law firms, we show that while recruiting an elite professional into a group reduces the quality of services delivered to buyers, this negative weakens when the average quality of group-incumbents is higher and strengthens when the organization has a higher number of other high-quality groups. Additional analyses dig deeper into the mechanisms of our findings. Our study contributes to the strategic human capital, employee mobility, and group dynamics literatures.  

CANCELLED  Nilanjana Dutt,  Bocconi University - Department of Management and Technology & iCRIOS  

Tuesday, January, 17th 2023 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 AM

Autonomy and the Management of Knowledge in Multi-Unit Firms  

Autonomy is an essential managerial tool, especially for firms that are managing knowledge units in several locations. Although these firms typically monitor their subsidiaries, monitoring may be too costly with geographically distant units. Autonomy could support the development of distant subsidiaries' knowledge assets efficiently. We examine the conditions under which multi-unit firms use autonomy to manage their subsidiaries. Specifically, we focus on the link between autonomy and subsidiaries' level of knowledge assets. We find that when distant units have autonomy, they have greater knowledge assets. As these results are stronger in thicker markets, these subsidiaries likely build their knowledge by interacting with the local market. On the other hand, proximate units that are autonomous have fewer knowledge assets. This result supports the conventional wisdom that most subsidiaries benefit from control and knowledge transfer from the headquarter. Our research highlights the importance of autonomy as a strategic tool to improve the organizational performance of distant subsidiaries.

Ella MIRON-SPEKTOR (INSEAD) 

June 6, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Harnessing the Paradox Mindset for Enhanced Team Performance and Creativity 

To maximize team performance and foster creative solutions, it is crucial for teams to navigate conflicting perspectives and integrate competing task demands. In this talk, I will discuss recent and ongoing research on the effectiveness of a collective paradox mindset in enhancing team performance and creativity. I will present two studies on teams. The first (N= 323), demonstrated that teams primed with a paradox mindset (i.e., paradoxical frames), coupled with high epistemic motivation, generate more creative solutions compared to teams with paradox mindset but low epistemic motivation. Teams with high epistemic motivation that solely emphasize information sharing, without embracing paradoxes, fall short in producing creative outcomes. Teams with paradoxical frames and high epistemic motivation are more creative because they engage in idea elaboration – they exchange, consider, and integrate diverse ideas and perspectives. By contrast, other teams settle on suboptimal middle-way solutions that do not address task demands. The second study investigated highly diverse teams (N=131) over an extended period and unveiled the protective effects of having team members with a paradox mindset in the face of relationship conflicts. These team members were found to buffer the negative impacts of relationship conflict on team potency and performance. Together, the studies show that when teams collectively work through their tensions, they improve their performance and creativity. By shedding light on the underlying processes that enable teams to harness task and team tensions, this research contributes valuable insights into the advantages of embracing a paradox mindset within teams.  

Jill PERRY-SMITH  (Emory University) 

May 25, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Creativity and the idea journey: Social network pathways to success 

The creative idea journey involves a series of distinct phases: idea generation, idea elaboration, idea championing, and idea implementation. Instead of traversing across phases and moving through the journey, promising ideas sometimes get stuck or permanently stall. We investigate the first and second half of the idea journey across two papers and illuminate when creative ideas may not advance. In the first paper, we identify the types of network ties (weak or strong) that are helpful in idea generation and idea elaboration, and given this understanding, whether individuals activate ties accordingly. In a series of experiments, we provide evidence of the causal effects of weak and strong ties for each phase. We also find that individuals with large networks, despite providing more opportunity to activate both strong and weak ties, activate fewer weak ties and are less likely to switch ties across phases than individuals with smaller networks, particularly when creativity is perceived as a high-risk endeavor. Finally, we find that activating the wrong ties leads to either dropping creative ideas or pursuing uncreative ones. In the second paper, we focus on idea championing. Building on social approaches to creativity and evaluation, we theorize that what fosters attention and inclusion in the consideration set, may not necessarily lead to final positive evaluation and selection for implementation. We test our theory in an original archival dataset of 983 screenplays selected between 2005 and 2017. Our results reveal that promising scripts handled by socially active champions receive gatekeepers’ attention yet are also less likely to advance to implementation.

Elisabeth CLEMENS (University of Chicago)

May 23, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Private Action, Public Goods: From Civic Gifts to Social Entrepreneurship    

Government, philanthropy, mutual aid, even commercial activities – all of these may produce public goods that alleviate suffering or promote the quality of life.  The mix of methods for creating public goods is central to processes of political development.  In historical perspective, the shifting reliance on different forms of public-oriented action defines periods of expansive state-building, deconstruction, and, importantly, anti-statist state-building.  These dynamics are traced over the course of U.S. political history to illuminate how “social entrepreneurship” has emerged as a legitimate, and even celebrated, mode of addressing social problems and producing public goods in a democratic society. 

Nilanjana DUTT  (Bocconi)

May 16th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Autonomy and the Management of Knowledge in Multi-Unit Firms   

Autonomy is an essential managerial tool, especially for firms that are managing knowledge units in several locations. Although these firms typically monitor their subsidiaries, monitoring may be too costly with geographically distant units. Autonomy could support the development of distant subsidiaries' knowledge assets efficiently. We examine the conditions under which multi-unit firms use autonomy to manage their subsidiaries. Specifically, we focus on the link between autonomy and subsidiaries' level of knowledge assets. We find that when distant units have autonomy, they have greater knowledge assets. As these results are stronger in thicker markets, these subsidiaries likely build their knowledge by interacting with the local market. On the other hand, proximate units that are autonomous have fewer knowledge assets. This result supports the conventional wisdom that most subsidiaries benefit from control and knowledge transfer from the headquarter. Our research highlights the importance of autonomy as a strategic tool to improve the organizational performance of distant subsidiaries.

Kevin CORLEY (Imperial Business School)

April 18th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Beyond Terroir : Tracing the Origins of a Strategic Group Identity in the Shadow of an Established Market Category Identity 

Two particularly notable, but distinct, theoretical foundations for understanding collective identity, one advocating a social actor conception and the other a social constructivist view, suggest that collective identity plays an important role in the ultimate success of organizational groupings. Neither view alone, however, can explain how and why, despite the existence of a market category identity (MCI), a strategic group identity (SGI) originated amongst a set of organisations for whom the MCI was not of significance. Nor can they explain how and why such a SGI triggered a reinterpretation of the MCI. Our in-depth inductive study of the Franciacorta group of wineries allowed us to gain insight into the micro-level mechanisms at play in the SGI origination process, as well as how that nascent SGI helped create a new MCI. Our model helps scholars better understand the heretofore unexamined mechanisms responsible for the initial emergence of a collective identity in the shadow of an existing one, and the important role independent agents play in those origination mechanisms. In so doing, it provides novel theoretical grounding to the dynamics underpinning collective identity formation and the interactions between different types of collective identities. 

Sarah HARVEY (UCL) 

April 4th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

Elaborative Play: How Creative Groups Crystalize Novel Ideas 

How can group members collaborate on developing new ideas when those ideas are too vague for individual group members to understand, communicate, or assess? To investigate how groups crystallize novel ideas (i.e., give a fuzzy, abstract concept form and make it clearer, more comprehensible, and communicable), we conducted a qualitative study of experimental circus groups in the early phases of creating a new show. Using field observations of nine groups over ten months (approximately 360 hours), and 39 interviews, we found that crystallizing ideas was critical, yet rare and unpredictable. Much of groups’ time was spent on elaborative work, which provided and refined necessary raw materials, but paradoxically, made crystallizing a particular idea more difficult. Instead, ideas crystallized during infrequent, emergent bursts of elaborative play, during which members became engrossed in the process and the process decoupled from the intentional pursuit of creating a circus show. Our study contributes to understanding the “messy middle” of collective creativity, revealing that, rather than linear and progressive, iteration is an unpredictable, tedious process punctuated by sudden leaps forward during bright spots of play; and showing how, rather than possessing inherent value, novel ideas are imbued with value through groups’ intuition- and emotion-fuelled interactions with them. 

Ming Leung  (UC Irvine)

March 14th, 2023 from 9:15 am to 11:30 am, Online / N231

An Uphill Battle: Employer Learning and the Persistence of Occupational Gender Segregation (with Claire Daviss)

Extant work recognises that gender biases in hiring contribute to occupational gender segregation. However, little attention has been paid to the ways that employers’ experiences with women and men workers may contribute to undermine these biases. The authors propose that employers update their preferences for gender typical workers based on their experiences with workers. We test for evidence of employer updating drawing on rare access to longitudinal hiring data from an online labor marketplace. Results of linear probability regressions demonstrate that employers more strongly favor women as they accumulate more experiences with women workers. A simulation of employer hiring decisions over time elucidates implications of gendered employer learning for occupational gender segregation. Employer updating leads to a persistence of gender segregation in highly gender segregated occupations but leads to gender integration where employers have more frequent experiences with gender atypical workers, such as in more moderately segregated occupations. This paper therefore highlights the link between micro-level gendered employer updating and the persistence of macro-level occupational gender segregation. 

CANCELLED John Mawdsley (HEC Paris), Claudia Gabbioneta (Univ. of York), Daniel Muzio (Univ. of York) 

Tuesday, February, 14th 2023 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 am in room N405 

Intra- and Inter-Group Dynamics and the Market for Quality: Examining Mobility of Elite Professionals   

Knowledge-based organizations rely on the human and social capital of their professional workers for competitive advantage. This creates incentives to recruit elite professionals. Yet, prior research challenges the assumption that recruiting exceptional talent necessarily improves group and firm performance. In this study, we investigate how intra-and inter-group factors moderate the relationship between recruiting a talented individual into a group and that group’s quality-performance. Using a longitudinal panel dataset of UK law firms, we show that while recruiting an elite professional into a group reduces the quality of services delivered to buyers, this negative weakens when the average quality of group-incumbents is higher and strengthens when the organization has a higher number of other high-quality groups. Additional analyses dig deeper into the mechanisms of our findings. Our study contributes to the strategic human capital, employee mobility, and group dynamics literatures.  

CANCELLED Nilanjana Dutt (Bocconi University - Department of Management and Technology & iCRIOS ) 

Tuesday, January, 17th 2023 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 AM

Autonomy and the Management of Knowledge in Multi-Unit Firms  

Autonomy is an essential managerial tool, especially for firms that are managing knowledge units in several locations. Although these firms typically monitor their subsidiaries, monitoring may be too costly with geographically distant units. Autonomy could support the development of distant subsidiaries' knowledge assets efficiently. We examine the conditions under which multi-unit firms use autonomy to manage their subsidiaries. Specifically, we focus on the link between autonomy and subsidiaries' level of knowledge assets. We find that when distant units have autonomy, they have greater knowledge assets. As these results are stronger in thicker markets, these subsidiaries likely build their knowledge by interacting with the local market. On the other hand, proximate units that are autonomous have fewer knowledge assets. This result supports the conventional wisdom that most subsidiaries benefit from control and knowledge transfer from the headquarter. Our research highlights the importance of autonomy as a strategic tool to improve the organizational performance of distant subsidiaries.

2021-2022

Abhinav Gupta (Foster School of Business)

Tuesday, November 9th, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 AM, online

Stakeholder Ideological Incongruence and Diffusion of Controversial Practices: Evidence from LGBT Domestic Partner Benefits Adoptions by U.S. public universities

Prior research has shown that organizations tend to adopt contentious practices that align with their stakeholders’ values and resist practices that do not. In this study, we introduce the concept of stakeholder ideological (in)congruence, which refers to the degree to which key organizational stakeholders are ideologically (mis)aligned with a practice, and theorize its relevance for how organizations adopt – and justify their adoption of – contentious practices. In a longitudinal analysis of public universities in the United States that were confronted with the decision to adopt domestic partner benefits, we show that having a conservative-leaning state legislature is associated with universities’ heightened susceptibility to emulating adoption decisions of proximally situated corporations. We also show that the universities with conservative-leaning legislature are more likely to justify their adoption decisions using market-based reasoning, an effect that is amplified based on universities’ resource dependence on the state. We discuss the implications of our theory and findings for research on institutional complexity, stakeholder theory, and cross-sector diffusion.

Georg Wernicke (HEC)

Tuesday, November 16th, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 AM, online

The Role of Organizational Implementation Capacities and Constraints in Firms’ Sequential Responses to Stakeholders, coauthored with Nikolas Rather and Brayden King. 

In studying organizational responses to stakeholder pressure, research has often assumed that organizations choose to respond in either a symbolic way or a substantive way. In this study, we consider the possibility that such responses are not an either-or choice when a stakeholder issue first surfaces but instead are sequential. With sequential responses, organizations first adopt a highly visible policy to acknowledge a stakeholder issue and subsequently implement the policy, suggesting that responses can unfold in multiple phases over time. Sequential responses and the resulting time between the distinct phases are the consequence of various challenges organizations face as they seek to implement a policy. Drawing on insights from the literature on policy implementation challenges and the resource-based view of the firm, we develop a theoretical framework around the capabilities and constraints that influence the timely implementation of policies that were previously adopted following stakeholder pressure. Using data that span a 13-year period and pertain to the adoption and implementation of policies by U.S. firms in response to stakeholder pressure around consumer health and safety, we find that firms with structural implementation capacities are more likely to implement policies in a timely manner. In addition, firms with intentional constraints exhibit a lower likelihood of timely implementation. Our study extends research on decoupling and organizational responsiveness by considering an alternative explanation of what are often regarded as symbolic responses and making explicit a new set of mechanisms that drive substantive responses. 

Henry Sauermann (ESMT Berlin)  

Tuesday, December 7th, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 AM, online

Can Early-Stage Startups Hire Talented Scientists and Engineers? Ability, Preferences, and Employee Job Choice  

Early-stage technology startups rely critically on talented scientists and engineers to commercialize new technologies. And yet, these startups compete with large technology firms to hire the best workers. Theories of ability sorting predict that high ability workers will choose jobs in large established firms that offer complementary assets and higher pay, leaving low ability workers to take lower-paying and riskier jobs in startups. We propose an alternative view in which heterogeneity in both worker ability and preferences enables early-stage startups to hire talented workers who have a distinct taste for a startup work environment, even at lower pay. Using a longitudinal survey that follows 2,394 science and engineering PhDs from graduate school to industrial R&D occupations, we overcome common challenges in studying job choice by observing both ability and ex ante stated preferences years prior to first-time employment. We find that higher ability workers are more likely to join early-stage startups, despite receiving significantly lower pay than their established firm counterparts. Supplementary analyses show that preferences predict who applies to startup jobs, while ability predicts who receives startup job offers. We also show that since many more individuals apply to startup jobs than there are openings, startups can “cherry pick” the most talented workers. Despite resource constraints and greater risk of failure, startups are indeed able to hire talented workers with a taste for startup employment at lower pay. 

Keywords: Startup early employees, technology entrepreneurship, human capital, job choice, scientists and engineers. 

Prof. Maria Guadalupe (INSEAD)   

Tuesday, January 18th, 2022 at 9:15 AM, online

Learning, Clarity and Credibility in Teams: Evidence from an Agile Organization   

This paper studies team dynamics in the product development section of a large bank that is structured following the Agile model i.e. around self-managed teams, with few interdependencies among them. In collaboration with the bank, I ran 5 surveys of teams between October 2015 and February 2017 that allow me to describe the evolution of an agile organization and study the main drivers of sustained cooperation and coordination within 382 teams. First, I show that performance and engagement improve over time and this is mostly driven by team learning rather than selection of teams. Then, exploiting within team variation over time and controlling for a rich set of potential drivers of team’s outcomes, I show the importance of trust, common “culture”, quality of communication and several dimensions of clarity for efficiency and employee engagement at the team level. Third, I am able to compare the importance of those features in agile teams relative to non-agile teams and show that, while the drivers of performance are similar, good communication and trust are more relevant for performance in agile teams. I interpret the results as allowing me to test the importance of clarity and credibility for the team relational contract in an agile context. Finally, I show how different people in the organization evaluate performance in a setting with complex, multidimensional tasks that are inherently difficult to obtain hard measures for. I find that different observers have a similar assessment of team performance, but also differ in some interesting ways. The importance of the measured features which are “soft” in nature and dependent on interaction highlight the difficulty in copying key organizational practices across organizations. 

Prof. Spencer Harrison (INSEAD)   

Tuesday, February 15th, 2022 at 9:15 AM, online

Point Break?

The impact of creative differences on directors’ careers and the process of creative vitrification

Popular images of creative leaders often depict them as difficult to work with and yet, worth the struggle because of their ability to innovate: the so-called “jerk genius.” Leading creative group work requires, by design, managing differences in perspective, vision, and ideas. In this multimethod study, we examine the both the long-term effects of creative leaders fail that spark disagreements that lead to broken collaborations and the process that leads to these breakdowns. Integrating perspectives from research on the social turn in creativity and using an archival sample of Hollywood directors leaving projects due to “creative differences,” we first assess the relationship between creative differences and creative leaders’ future career success. Empirical  evidence support our hypotheses that creative leaders leaving projects due to “creative differences” experience drop offs in future employability and creativity success. In a subsequent qualitative study, we discovered the process of creative vitrification, that explains the underlying social dynamics that harden and subsequently break creative collaborations leading to “creative differences.” Together, our multimethod findings breaks new ground, challenging prevailing notions of the value of disagreeable creative leaders by revealing the long-term consequences of these behaviors while also elucidating the often obscured process of creative vitrification that leads to breakdowns in collaboration. 

Prof. Hila LIFSHITZ-ASSAF(NYU)  

Tuesday, March 10th, 2022 at 9:15 AM, online

To Engage or Not to Engage with AI for Critical Judgments: How Professionals Deal with Opacity When Using AI for Medical Diagnosis

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies promise to transform how professionals conduct knowledge work by augmenting their capabilities for making professional judgments. We know little, however, about how human-AI augmentation takes place in practice. Yet, gaining this understanding is particularly important when professionals use AI tools to form judgments on critical decisions. We conducted an in-depth field study in a major U.S. hospital where AI tools were used in three departments by diagnostic radiologists making breast cancer, lung cancer, and bone age determinations. The study illustrates the hindering effects of opacity that professionals experienced when using AI tools and explores how these professionals grappled with it in practice. In all three departments, this opacity resulted in professionals experiencing increased uncertainty because AI tool results often diverged from their initial judgment without providing underlying reasoning. Only in one department (of the three) did professionals consistently incorporate AI results into their final judgments, achieving what we call engaged augmentation. These professionals invested in AI interrogation practices—practices enacted by human experts to relate their own knowledge claims to AI knowledge claims. Professionals in the other two departments did not enact such practices and did not incorporate AI inputs into their final decisions, which we call unengaged “augmentation.” Our study unpacks the challenges involved in augmenting professional judgment with powerful, yet opaque, technologies and contributes to literature on AI adoption in knowledge work.

Prof. Claudio PANICO (Bocconi) 

Tuesday, May 17th, 2022 from 9 a.m. to 11.30 a.m., Online / Le Club N 231   

“VALUE CREATION, VALUE APPROPRIATION, AND COOPERATION IN TEAM-BASED STRUCTURES” 

The creation and division of a joint value is a defining feature of team-based structures within and between organizations. Members should cooperate by providing their contribution and resisting the temptation to shirk, while avoiding latent conflicts that trigger rent-seeking behaviors. Going beyond examining the opposite situations, when members are cooperative or not, we conceptualize cooperation in relation to the tension between value creation and value appropriation. Using a formal model, we examine scenarios of full, partial, and no cooperation, addressing the effects of team size on members’ behaviors. We then examine members’ willingness to cooperate in the shadow of the future by means of mutual monitoring and reciprocity. To do so, we account for different defections from cooperation and posit that members calibrate retaliation to the non-cooperative behaviors they observe in their team. We show that members of larger teams are less tempted to shirk and more tempted to engage in rent-seeking and provide conditions for full and partial cooperation (i.e., coopetition).

Prof. Giacomo NEGRO (Emory)

June 14th, 2022  from 9 a.m. to 11.30 a.m., Online / N517 

Social Structure and the Refraction of Social Control: Naming Names During the Hollywood Blacklist

Although social control is often conceived as a macro phenomenon imposed on a population, individuals embedded within communities, such as members of a professional group, provide critical information as to who is and is not violating laws and regulations. By calling the police, whistleblowing, or notifying the authorities in other ways, community members simultaneously facilitate and mediate the imposition of social control. Yet reporting others within a community involves potentially endangering neighbors, colleagues, and friends by identifying them for punishment. In this paper, we theorize the ways in which social structure shapes the imposition of social control by influencing individuals’ patterns of reporting others to the authorities. Specifically, we argue that social environments that are more cooperative lead to different patterns of reporting than environments that are more competitive, holding constant the laws, the means of enforcement, and the transgression. We evaluate this theory using data from the Hollywood film industry during the late 1940s and 1950s, when fear of Communist influences in Hollywood led to a series of investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Over 100 creatives were forced to testify, with anyone named in the hearings immediately blacklisted from the industry. Differentiating between writers (who were structurally more cooperative) and actors (who were structurally more competitive), we show how social control diffused differentially through these two populations, revealing a greater impact of accuracy and publicity in competitive environments, and of network diffusion in more cooperative ones. 

2020-2021

Kaisa Snellman (INSEAD) and Peter Younkin (University of Oregon)

Tuesday, Janauary 19, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15 AM, online

Do Job Candidates Discriminate Minority Founders? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Do job seekers consider the race or gender of an employer when applying for a job?  While we have extensive research on employer-side discrimination, we know less about employee-side biases and their consequences. In this study, we examine how the gender and race of the employer shapes the willingness of prospective employees to apply for a job. To do this, we need a setting where we can observe not only the applicants who decided to apply but also those who decided not to apply. We address this challenge by conducting a field experiment where we advertise real jobs for real applicants and vary the demographic composition of the employer. We find that applicants were no less likely to apply to jobs in companies with white female founders than white male founders. In contrast, they were significantly less likely to apply to Black founders and when they did apply, they requested ten percent higher salary. In addition, the more qualified a candidate the less likely they were to apply to Black founders. Our findings indicate that Black founders face significant bias from job applicants and, solely because of their race, attract fewer high-quality applicants and face higher salary demands. We conducted a second experiment to help distinguish between several potential explanations and find no evidence that applicants fear that the organization will underperform or that the founders are less qualified. By contrast, white applicants fear that they will not be good cultural fits to startups run by Black founders.

Olenka Kacperczyk (LBS)

Tuesday, February 9, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15, online

Does Entrepreneurship Benefit Society? 

The Effect on Crime using a Natural Experiment

Previous research has focused on the economic effects of entrepreneurship, but little is known about how promoting entrepreneurship impacts societies. Focusing on community crime as a key societal outcome, we posit that initiatives fostering entrepreneurship through lower barriers to entry will reduce crime. The proposed mechanism responsible for this effect is the enhanced socio-economic integration of disadvantaged groups within the community. This is, however, enabled through multiple channels: lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship improves labor market opportunities for disadvantaged groups as founders of their own firms and joiners of new startups, or, more indirectly, as new hires at incumbent firms. Leveraging employer-employee matched data from Portugal between 2002 and 2010 and an exogenous deregulation reform that significantly increased entrepreneurial activity, we find strong support for our theory. Promoting entrepreneurship reduces within-community crime and this result is further amplified in communities with higher socio-economic exclusion. We find significant reductions in different types of crime, though the magnitude, timing, and persistence of the effects varies, which gives important insights into the different integration mechanisms at play.  

Linus Dahlander (ESMT)

Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15, online

Selection regimes and selection errors

How can organizations structure their selection of innovation projects to reduce errors in the form of false positives (investments that should not have been made) and false negatives (investments that should have been made but weren’t)? Although simulations and case studies exist, our understanding of the effects of different selection regimes on both types of errors has been limited due to a lack of decision and outcome data over a large set of projects. We study this question through unique access to data from an accelerator that used three different selection regimes over time: (1) an investment board representing different areas of expertise, (2) delegation where a single expert recommended an investment to be approved by the CEO, and (3) pre-selection that occurred through globally distributed two-day camps to which teams were invited. We combine 121 interviews to understand how decisions were made with unique data of 3,611 innovation project applications. We hand-code the outcomes for both funded and rejected projects years after the decisions were made to construct unique measures of false positives and false negatives at the project-level and analyze how these change in the different selection regimes. 

Christiane Bode (Imperial College Business School)

co-written with Geoff Borchhardt and Balazs Kovacs

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15, online

Expertise, Competitive Overlap, and Partner Choice 

When choosing business partners, organizations ideally prefer partners with the most relevant expertise while avoiding those who also serve their competitors. Hence, in market networks, partner choice often presents a trade-off between accessing expertise and avoiding second-order competitive overlap. We propose that as competitive overlap increases, organizations’ fears of information leakage and concerns about access to resources lead them to select less expert partners. A matched sample analysis of 963,089 US patents with measures of expertise and competitive overlap constructed via a text-based, deep learning algorithm shows that the likelihood a client selects a patent law firm based on relevant expertise decreases significantly as competitive overlap with other clients of the law firm increases. However, when concerns about information leakage or access to resources are lower, in particular when the client and the law firm have a prior relationship, when the law firm is high status, and when few alternatives are available, this effect weakens. Finally, we show that when a client chooses a less expert partner, time to patent acceptance is greater and forward citations are lower, indicating that avoidance of competitive overlap may come at a significant cost. 

Michelle Rogan (Imperial College Business School)

co-written with Geoff Borchhardt and Balazs Kovacs

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 at Essec, Cergy, 9:15, online

Expertise, Competitive Overlap, and Partner Choice 

When choosing business partners, organizations ideally prefer partners with the most relevant expertise while avoiding those who also serve their competitors. Hence, in market networks, partner choice often presents a trade-off between accessing expertise and avoiding second-order competitive overlap. We propose that as competitive overlap increases, organizations’ fears of information leakage and concerns about access to resources lead them to select less expert partners. A matched sample analysis of 963,089 US patents with measures of expertise and competitive overlap constructed via a text-based, deep learning algorithm shows that the likelihood a client selects a patent law firm based on relevant expertise decreases significantly as competitive overlap with other clients of the law firm increases. However, when concerns about information leakage or access to resources are lower, in particular when the client and the law firm have a prior relationship, when the law firm is high status, and when few alternatives are available, this effect weakens. Finally, we show that when a client chooses a less expert partner, time to patent acceptance is greater and forward citations are lower, indicating that avoidance of competitive overlap may come at a significant cost. 

Arianna Marchetti (London Business School)

Tuesday, May 11, 2021, at Essec, Cergy, 9:15, online

Taking cultural heterogeneity seriously : the distinct forms of cultural distinctinvness in organizations 

Although theories exist that link a distinctive organizational culture to superior performance, our understanding of the different ways in which cultural distinctiveness arises remains limited. I argue that because a culture results from aggregating individuals’ cognition and behavior in the organization, it can be distinctive to a firm either in central tendency (content), distributional properties (configuration), or both, on either idiosyncratic or shared dimensions across firms. By applying topic modeling to 42,982 Glassdoor text reviews posted by corporate employees, I illustrate these forms of cultural distinctiveness by comparing Netflix culture, viewed as distinctive in popular discourse, to that of its peers. I find that both Netflix cultural content and configuration are distinctive on idiosyncratic dimensions, compared to its competitors, and discuss implications for competitive advantage. 

Rocio Bonet (IE Business School)

Tuesday, June 1, 2021, at Essec, Cergy, online

Workers on Demand? Effects of Just-in-Time Schedules on Employee Absenteeism and Patient Dissatisfaction in a Home Healthcare Organization 

Service companies today are increasingly adopting a new employment model characterized by just-in-time scheduling practices in order to adapt to irregular demand patterns while keeping their labor costs low. A direct consequence of these practices is that workers often face irregular schedules characterized by split work within the work day and high schedule variability. The underlying assumption of this model is that workers can adapt to these just-in-time schedules without problems. However, evidence regarding how just-in-time schedules translate into worker behavior and outcomes in the organization is scarce. Using a proprietary dataset of close to a million home visits performed by home caregivers over a 5-year period in a health care service organization in Canada, we study how just-in-time schedules impact worker absenteeism and performance. We find (1) work splits during the day and (2) non-routine schedules across weeks are associated with higher absenteeism and with higher patient dissatisfaction. We also find that workers are more sensitive to these schedule characteristics when they face low task variety and high patient familiarity. Our results cannot be explained by the negative consequences of the irregularity aspect of just-in-time schedules on the pay of the workers and reveal that the temporal precarity imposed on workers may translate into limits of flexibility for organizations.  

Ilze Kivleniece (INSEAD) 

(Joint work with Julien Jourdan and Anita McGahan) 

Tuesday, June 15, 2021, at Essec, Cergy, online

Towards a Stakeholder-Oriented Framework on Value Creation and Allocation

In contrast with value-capture theory in strategy, stakeholder research argues that the maximization by a firm of value capture may undermine value creation. The theory remains ambiguous about how much value firms should capture, under which conditions, and which stakeholders should appropriate the co-created value. To address this ambiguity, we highlight differences in core assumptions across the value-capture and stakeholder perspectives. Discrepancies can be reconciled, we argue, by recognizing that the amount of value that stakeholders co-create is, under conditions we explore, a function of how much they receive. Firms can then be conceived as stakeholder value allocation mechanisms driven towards value creation. By shifting the focus from value capture to value allocation, our framework addresses critical questions in the emerging new stakeholder theory.   

Thomas Roulet (Cambridge Judge) 

Tuesday, June 29, 2021, at Essec, Cergy, online

Playing with Trash: Emotional Bubbles and the Adoption and Early Diffusion of Zero Waste Practices through Gamification 

Previous research has shown how the adoption and diffusion of practices are usually driven by economic and normative incentives. Despite growing attention to the role of emotions in institutional processes, limited work has looked at the role of emotions in the adoption and diffusion of practices. Such a focus would help to fully uncover the interplay between positive and negative emotions in institutional processes at the individual and collective levels. To empirically address those matters, we investigate how local authorities in France convinced households to adopt innovative waste management practices using gamification – a set of principles that subject participants to a complex system of emotions. We draw on rich longitudinal qualitative material including interviews, observations, and secondary data. We find that the interplay of the emotions experienced by adopters forms bubbles, which protect them from push back. We inductively build a model explaining how these emotional bubbles act as concentric circles around individuals, their direct social ties, and their broader social environment, driving adoption and early diffusion. We show how emotional bubbles protect early adopters from negative emotions related to deviating from the norm, and act as an encouraging echo chamber in which positive emotions are magnified.