For additional information about the M&O Seminars, please contact Shelly Whitmer at [email protected].
monday, september 9
Michael Parke, Wharton
Title: Putting Feelings into Words: How Voicer Affect Labeling of Negative Emotions Influences Voice Endorsement
Abstract: Existing research on voice often suggests that employees should minimize or avoid expressing negative emotions when raising work-related issues or ideas because such negative expressions can cause managers to discredit or discount their voice. We aim to shift this belief to propose that the act of verbalizing one's negative feelings (i.e., affect labeling) when raising issues to managers can help transform negative feelings (e.g., frustration or anxity) from being seen as a harmful disrution to being seen as useful data. Drawing on self-disclosure research and the emotions as social information framework, we hypothesize that voicers' use of affect labeling of negative emotions enhances managerial perceptions of employee vulnerability and affective information, thus leading to higher voice endorsement from managers. We find support for these typotheses across three studies using field and experimental methodologies. Additionally, we explore voicer affect labeling of positive emotions (e.g., hope and excitement) and intense negative emotions (e.g., anger and fear) to further expand our understanding of the effects of voicer affect labeling. Our findings offer a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom that employees should refrain from expressing their negataive emotions when speaking up with ideas or issues; instead, we find that employees can label their negative feelings and still offer valuable and compelling voice.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, september 16
Yan Chen, UM School of Information
Title: Group Identity and Belief Formation: A Decomposition of Political Polarization
Abstract: To evaluate the impact of group identity on belief formation, we conducted three waves of online experiments with a representative sample in the US, using the setting of the 2020 presidential election. We find evidence of intergroup preferences across three components of belief formation: people start with partisan priors; they pay money to avoid outgroup information, and attribute lower weight to this information when updating initial beliefs. Effects are more pronounced among participants who favor ingroup members in bystander allocation games (``groupy'' participants). An intervention which unlabels information sources decreases outgroup information avoidance by 50%, an effect driven by groupy participants. A second intervention aiming at equalizing the instrumental values of information sources affects only non-groupy participants. Our interventions isolate source utility as a new mechanism driving political polarization: information affects beliefs based on the group association of the information independent of its instrumental value or content.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, september 23
Christina Bradley, Ross M&O
Title: Getting to the Heart of Issues: Emotional Acknowledgment Reduces Team Negative Emotional Expression Intensity and Improves Joint Value Creation in INtra-Team Negotiations
Abstract: Emotions pervade modern workplaces, yet all too often we struggle to engage with the emotions of our colleagues in a meaningful way. We explore how the phenomenon of emotional acknowledgment, defined as the act of expressing recognition of another person’s emotional state, may help teams collectively regulate emotions and perform better. Emotional acknowledgment may be particularly useful in difficult situations, such as intra-team negotiations, where negative emotions often impair a team’s ability to collaborate and perform effectively. To reduce the intensity of negative emotions, leaders are often advised to and tend to avoid directly engaging with their teams’ emotions, such as by suggesting the team take a break until emotions subside. However, research suggests that avoiding others’ emotions may heighten the intensity of negative emotional expressions. We explore whether leaders can mitigate the escalation of negative emotional expressions by acknowledging their team’s emotions, thus facilitating joint value creation. Specifically, in Study 1, we examine the consequences of emotional acknowledgment in an experiment of 190 face-to-face teams. In Studies 2 and 3, we uncover an important antecedent to leaders acknowledging the emotions of their employees in a team lab experiment of 103 teams and a field survey with 139 teams composed of full-time employees and matched with their supervisors. We show that by acknowledging emotions, leaders can reduce the extent to which negative emotional expressions hinder their team’s capacity to reach optimal agreements.
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, september 30
Mark Mizruchi, UM Sociology
Title: Economic Concentration, Political Influence, and Societal Legitimacy: The Private Benefits and Public Costs of Concentrated Economic Power
Abstract: A high concentration of economic power can increase the ability of large corporations to accomplish their political goals. It can also, however, negatively affect the legitimacy that firms achieve among the broader public. We examine these arguments with two longitudinal, cross-national datasets. First, building on previous work, we show that firms with high levels of market power report disproportionately high levels of political influence. Second, we demonstrate that the greater a nation’s concentration of economic assets, the lower the public’s confidence in the country’s major firms. This negative effect is amplified in countries in which business has a high level of political influence. The very factor that allows large corporations to benefit politically has the paradoxical effect of reducing their legitimacy within the larger society.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, OCTOBER 21
Derek Lief, Strategy
Title: Exploring the Role of Religion in How Organizations Create Firm-Specific Advantage in their Approach to the Labor Market
Abstract: The management and strategy literature has demonstrated that a firm’s approach to the labor market can be a significant source of competitive advantage. One stream in these literatures has focused on how corporate purpose can increase worker attraction and serve as a source of competitive advantage. Yet this stream has largely left out what is one of the most strongly held sources of purpose for many people around the world: religion. This is surprising since existing theory, like the rational choice theory of religion, suggests that religion may be a meaningful form of purpose. This paper examines whether incorporating religion into corporate purpose – what I term “organizational religiosity” – is causally associated with the increased attraction of talent. I test this relationship in turn by responding to the call for field experiments that involve real jobs and real stakes. A conservative estimate of the economic significance of organizational religiosity is an increase in applications by up to 5.19%. This increase is relative to a baseline number of applications with the religious condition absent. This percentage increase is on its face economically meaningful but should also be understood as an underestimate. This is because the demographic mix across U.S. metropolitan areas has on average fewer high-skilled workers and more workers from highly ethnically fractionalized neighborhoods, and it was low-skilled workers and those from highly ethnically fractionalized neighborhoods that drove the increase in applications.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, OCTOBER 28
Justin Frake, Strategy
Title: Symbolic vs. Substantive Support: The Impact of Black Lives Matter on Black-Owned Businesses
Abstract: This study examines the impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement on consumer behavior toward Black-owned businesses, using George Floyd’s murder as a shock to the salience and support for BLM. Utilizing a difference-in-differences design with data on reviews, revenues, and foot traffic from Yelp and SafeGraph, we analyze changes in symbolic (review frequency and valence) and substantive (revenues and foot traffic) support. Our findings show a significant increase in symbolic actions for Black-owned businesses following Floyd’s murder, especially amongst White and Democrat-leaning consumers. However, we observe no substantial evidence for a corresponding increase in substantive support. This indicates that while the BLM movement heightened visibility and prompted short-term symbolic gestures, it did not translate into large, lasting economic benefits for Black-owned businesses. Additionally, we observe an increase in "Not Recommended" (i.e., suspicious) reviews on Yelp following Floyd’s murder, suggesting that that on explanation is that consumers may be leaving inauthentic reviews without visiting the stores. These results highlight the complexities of sociopolitical consumerism and suggest that social movements like BLM may be insufficient on their own to address the economic disparities faced by minority-owned businesses.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, NOVEMBER 4
Matthew Bidwell, Wharton
Title: Orderly but Unequal: Differential Returns to Career Typicaltiy
Abstract: The cross-organization moves that are a building block of modern careers vary in their typicality. Sometimes, people follow well-trodden paths, moving within and across occupations in similar ways to other people. At other times, people make much less usual transitions. In this paper, we explore how that move typicality relates to wage attainment. Drawing on human capital and structural theories of careers, we argue that typical moves can assist in the development and leveraging of focused human capital. At the same time, though, we suggest that making typical moves can sometimes mean foregoing the opportunity to move into much more rewarding kinds of work. We therefore suggest that the value of typical career moves will differ substantially between those who are advantaged in the labor market, such as those with more education, whites, and men, and those who are less advantaged. We explore these arguments using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which follows 8416 workers from high school through the first 20 years of their careers. The average worker in our sample reaps wage benefits for typical job moves, but surprisingly, we find that workers in low-wage jobs benefit from atypicality. We also find that African American and female workers reap fewer rewards for typical moves compared to white and male workers, respectively. This paper sheds light on an important aspect of careers and adds further understanding of structural inequalities in the labor market using a careers perspective.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, NOVEMBER 11
Adam Cobb, UT Austin
Title: How Industry Categories Influence the Incidence and Effects of Horizontal Directorships
Abstract: Multiple lines of inquiry in organizational theory and strategic management that emphasize the importance of industry membership and implicitly or explicitly treat industry categories as a meaningful and mostly accurate portrayal of a firm's immediate competitive environment. That is, when determining which other firms constitute a focal firm’s competitors or peers, scholars frequently use existing industry code schemes. In this study, we explore the consequences of that approach in an empirical context where determining competitive environments is particularly important: antitrust. Specifically, we examine the implications of using different industry categorization schemes to examine the incidence and effects of horizontal directorships, which occur when an individual serves as a director of two or more firms that are competitors. Although Section 8 of The Clayton Antitrust Act expressly prohibits such connections out of concern that they would allow firms to coordinate their activities in such a way as to violate antitrust law, such connections exist in practice. We leverage this empirical context to highlight a more general phenomenon whereby scholars’ choice of how best to define firms’ competitive environments plays a significant role in what outcomes are observed. That is, our study reveals that both the prevalence and effects of horizontal directorships depend, in large part, on how we define competitors.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, NOVEMBER 18
Jessica Fong, Marketing
Title: How Effective is Suggested Pricing? Experimental Evidence from an E-Commerce Platform
Abstract: Many platforms face the challenge of not being able to directly set prices for products, instead relying on each seller to do so. However, these sellers often lack the experience and information about market conditions to price their products effectively, leading to price inefficiencies. To address this, some platforms offer suggested prices, but the impact of these recommended prices remains uncertain. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of platform-suggested prices in influencing sellers' pricing decisions and selling outcomes. In collaboration with an e-commerce platform, we conduct a field experiment that varies whether a seller receives a suggested price, and if so, the suggested price itself. We find that a 30% change in suggested prices leads to a 5% change in listing prices in the same direction. Suggested prices are more influential when optimal pricing is more challenging, such as for new sellers and items in non-new condition. Lower suggested prices improve both the likelihood of sale and the resulting seller revenue. We show, in a subsequent experiment, that these results are likely to generalize to the full equilibrium. Our findings imply that platform-suggested pricing is an effective compromise that guides seller pricing while allowing them to incorporate their private information.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, DECEMBER 2
Fabiana Silva, UM Public Policy
Title: Racialized Perceptions of In-Group Favoritism: How White Hiring Agents View Whites', Blacks', Latinos', and Asians' Same-Race Referrals
Abstract: This study examines a novel reason why referral-based hiring may disadvantage Black, Latino, and Asian jobseekers: White hiring agents may perceive these groups’ same-race referrals as reflecting in-group favoritism, rather than credibly signaling applicant quality. Thus, racial minorities’ same-race referrals may be dismissed by skeptical White hiring agents. Drawing on an original two-wave study with a sample of White individuals with hiring responsibilities (N=1,572 completed the two waves), I find large differences in perceptions of in-group favoritism across employee race. While less than one-fifth of White hiring agents stated that White employees prefer to refer applicants of their same race than the “best qualified” applicants, the comparable figures were much larger for Asian (30%), Hispanic (42%), and Black (44%) employees. Building on interdisciplinary accounts of racial attitudes and racial relations, I theorize and test mechanisms plausibly underlying these racial disparities. Accounts of racial group competition—group consciousness, racial resentment, and zero-sum competition—best account for these perceptions. Analyses of open-ended responses further indicate that both racially “liberal” and racially “conservative” White hiring agents attribute in-group favoritism to racial minorities; while racial conservatives often attributed in-group favoritism to false racial grievances, racial liberals often argued that in-group favoritism was necessary to address Black and Latino disadvantage. Even sympathetic accounts of in-group favoritism, however, imply racial minorities’ same-race referrals are much weaker signals of applicant quality than Whites’ same-race referrals, with consequences for understanding whose referrals are rewarded in the labor market.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons
monday, DECEMBER 9
Paul Ingram, Columbia
Title: Class Concealed: Hiding Lower Social Class Identities in an Elite University
Abstract: Processes of identity management are key to understanding the experiences of disadvantaged individuals in education institutions, and therefore, inequality. We use a novel “whole identity” approach, combined with natural language processing, to examine concealment of identity elements associated with lower social class standing in the MBA program of an elite university. Even though our subjects were already accomplished professionals, they were much more likely to hide these elements, fearing repercussions on job opportunities, networks, and social interactions. This inclination persisted regardless of whether the element indicated deficits of economic, cultural, or social capital. Interestingly, increased openness within the context by others reduced the likelihood of concealment. Unlike social class, other devalued identities—related to race, gender, and LGBTQ+ status—did not exhibit a higher likelihood of concealment, indicating distinct identity management strategies for lower social class individuals.
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Location: B1590 Corner Commons