Anu WADHWA (Professor from Imperial College London)

Tuesday, September 22nd 2020 online  at 9:15 am

"How Founder Experience Shapes Entry Strategy: Evidence from Dominant Designs in the Disk Drive Industry" 

This paper investigates the role of strategic positioning choices and pre-entry endowments in determining the post-entry innovative performance of firms entering new markets. We hypothesize that entrepreneurial entrants that possess greater levels of pre-entry endowments and those that choose to operate in multiple segments and position themselves aggressively in new markets will introduce products with dominant design features earlier. We also hypothesize that pre-entry endowments positively moderate the relationship between post-entry technology strategy choices and early introduction of dominant design features. Our hypotheses are tested using longitudinal data on entrepreneurial startups that operate in the computer hard disk drive industry in the period 1974 to 1995.  

Jerker DENRELL (Professor from   Warwick University)

Tuesday, March 24th 2020  online  at 9:15 am

"Do experience and markets eliminate opportunities due to poor dynamic decision making?"

Managers regularly deal with dynamic tasks, where choices impact immediate payoffs as well as long-term capabilities. Prior research has shown that people perform poorly in dynamic tasks but it is not clear if experience can improve decision-making and eliminate strategic opportunities. In a task trading off short-term gains and long-term investments we experimentally remove challenges to learning due to ambiguity, large state space, complex exploration, and memory and updating, finding that none explains the observed learning failures. Instead, poor performance is due to difficulties in balancing short-term payoffs against promising investments. We also show allowing participants to trade in a market surprisingly exacerbates failures and induces erroneous learning. We discuss the implications for understanding individual learning, role of markets, and the behavioral view of strategy. 

Isabel FERNANDEZ-MATEO  (Professor from London Business School)

Tuesday, February 4th 2020   at ESSEC in room N517 at 9:15 am

"Brokered Careers: The Role of Search Firms in Managerial Career Mobility" 

Although traditional theories of careers emphasize the matching processes that take place between workers and employers, job matches often involve a third party: executive search firms. We examine how the introduction of this third party affects movement between jobs and the unfolding of careers. Building on theories of market intermediation and labor market matching, we argue that the moves mediated by search firms are less likely to involve changes in functions and industries - which constrains opportunities for horizontal career mobility. We also suggest that search firms are most likely to mediate mobility into the kinds of roles that offer more rewards and responsibilities. As a consequence, search firms are particularly likely to constrain career paths into more senior positions. To test these arguments, we employ longitudinal career data from a survey of MBA alumni. We find evidence that labor market intermediaries may indeed shape the paths that individuals take through the labor market. However, we find no evidence that the matches created by search firms actually result in a better fit between workers and employers. We discuss the implications of these results for research on the dynamics of career advancement. 

Hart POSEN (Professor   from Wisconsin School of Business University, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Tuesday, Ocotber 7th 2019   at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 9:15 am

"UNCERTAINTY IN LEARNING CURVES: IMPLICATIONS FOR EARLY MOVER ADVANTAGE" 

The existence of a learning curve, in which costs decline with cumulative experience, suggests that early entry (and production) provides learning opportunities that create competitive advantage by reducing future production costs relative to later entrants. We argue that this proposition is subject to an under-appreciated limitation — that progress down the learning curve may be uncertain. If there is uncertainty in the learning curve, then the taken-for-granted wisdom regarding the benefits of learning curves may over- or under-emphasize the value of early entry. We consider two forms of uncertainty — prospective (future production costs) and contemporaneous (current production costs). We demonstrate computationally that while prospective uncertainty in the learning curve enhances the learning benefits of early entry and production, contemporaneous uncertainty reduces these benefits. Further, we examine the implication of these findings for learning curve spillovers between leader and laggard firms. We conclude with implications for future research regarding learning curves and the pursuit of early mover advantage.

Sujin JANG  (Professor from  INSEAD)

Tuesday, October 1st 2019   at ESSEC in room  N231  at  9:15  am  

"Bridging Temporal Divides: Temporal Brokerage in Global Teams" 

Temporal dispersion is an important characteristic of global teams, as members of such teams are often distributed across multiple time zones. This paper introduces the construct of temporal brokerage, which we define as being in a position within a team's temporal structure that bridges subgroups who have little or no temporal overlap with each other. Although temporal brokerage is not a formal role, we argue that occupying such a position makes an individual more likely to take on more coordination work than other members on the team. We suggest that while engaging in such coordination work has advantages in the form of greater learning, it also comes with costs in the form of increased effort relative to other members. We further argue that the increased learning and effort that result from occupying a position of temporal brokerage have implications that go beyond the boundaries of the focal team, spilling over into other tasks the individual is engaged in. Specifically, we predict that being in a position of temporal brokerage on global teams decreases the quantity but increases the quality of an individual's work outside the focal team project. We find general support for these predictions across two studies comprising 8,914 individuals participating in global student project teams and 190,660 individuals participating in global academic research teams, respectively. The framework and findings presented in this paper contribute to theories of global teamwork, temporal dispersion, and the effect of team structures on individual outcomes. 

Martin RUEF (Professor from DUKE UNIVERSITY)

Tuesday, September 24th 2019   at ESSEC in room  N231  at 10:00 am  

"Segregation and the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis" 

A robust body of research has investigated the spatial mismatch hypothesis (SMH), considering the consequences of geographic segregation between minority residential locations and potential opportunities for employment.  Focusing on U.S. and European urban areas between the 1970s and the present, these studies have produced equivocal evidence on the implications of spatial mismatch for minority employment.  In this presentation, I argue that the mixed evidence in the United States may result from a misspecification in both the historical period and mechanisms whereby spatial mismatch affects minority employment opportunities.  I show that national declines in black employment and labor force participation were especially pronounced under Jim Crow segregation, rather than the post-industrial era in which the SMH has generally been tested.  I then investigate the extent to which the SMH should be formulated as a logistical problem, involving the commuting range of minorities to non-residential sites of employment, or a problem of transit segregation and residential ecology.  Analysis of census microdata between 1910 and 1970 suggests that employment suffered when the stigma of segregation prompted black commuters to use more restrictive means of transit and when black housing was separated from the homes of business owners or residential employers.

Charlene ZIETSMA  (Professor from Pennsylvania State University)

Tuesday, June 25th 2019  at ESSEC in room PA115 at 10:00 am  

"The Microfoundations of Belief and Behavior Change: A Field Experiment on the Efficacy of Frame Bridging and Frame Shifting Strategies for Stimulating Innovative Entrepreneurship" 

Although institutions gain their strength through broad-based social agreement, institutional change begins at the individual level, with a shift in individual beliefs or judgments of what is appropriate, acceptable, and legitimate. Prior work suggests that this shift occurs as the mental models, or frames, that individuals use to make decisions change. Frames may be changed either through frame bridging, involving constructing connections between new ideas and analogous or familiar frames, or through frame shifting, involving cutting off an association to a past frame in order to switch to a new one. To understand the relative efficacy of these two framing strategies in changing perceptions and behavior, we tested them in a field experiment conducted in rural Sri Lanka, using entrepreneurship training programs which attempted to reframe entrepreneurship as innovation rather than replication of time-tested models. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the link between the microfoundations perspective on institutional change and the framing literature by identifying factors for predicting how and when a given framing strategy will resonate with its intended audience and lead to belief and behavior change, and to the entrepreneurship literature by shedding light on how individuals are most effectively motivated to identify and act on innovative opportunities. 

Ivana NAUMOVSKA  (Professor from  INSEAD)

Tuesday, May 28th 2019, at ESSEC in room N517  at 10:00 am 

"WHEN AN INDUSTRY PEER IS ACCUSED OF FINANCIAL MISCONDUCT: RECONCILING THE CONTAGION AND COMPETITION EFFECTS ON BLAMELESS FIRMS" 

What are the performance consequences for blameless firms when an industry peer is accused of corporate misconduct? Research on corporate misconduct has revealed that accusations of industry peers generate negative consequences to blameless firms (contagion effect). In turn, research on competitive dynamics implies that such accusations can benefit blameless firms that compete with these industry peers (competition effect). We reconcile these perspectives by arguing that the market value of a blameless firm is dually shaped by the contagion and competition effects, depending on the extent of market overlap between the accused industry peer and the blameless firm. Using fine-grained product data, we analyze the stock market returns of 233 software firms following all the accusations of financial misconduct by their industry peers in the course of a decade. We demonstrate that the negative contagion effect increases with the product market overlap between the accused and blameless firms, but only up to a point, beyond which the positive competition effect becomes stronger. We further show that the competition effect becomes relatively more pronounced, the more fine-grained the market classification used to assess the market overlap. Our study unpacks the heterogeneity of spillover effects across blameless firms and enhances understanding of the interplay of contagion and competition following misconduct by industry peers.

MARTIN KILDUFF   (Professor from  UCL)

Tuesday, May 7th 2019  at ESSEC  in  room LE CLUB at 10:00 am 

"When the Personality of Others Matters: Self-Monitoring, Homophily, and the Origins of Network Structure"

We investigate whether and how the personality of the coworkers with whom an individual interacts helps explain the extent to which the individual comes to occupy advantageous positions in social networks. We suggest that differences in self-monitoring personality affect social structure beyond the reach of the individual. We test this prediction in two studies. In Study 1, we use cross-sectional data on advice relations in an organization to show that self-monitoring is associated with network popularity and homophily: high self-monitors attract advice requests mainly from highs, and low self-monitors from lows, although high self-monitors receive more advice requests overall. In Study 2, we use longitudinal data on advice relations within a cohort of young-professionals in a post-graduate program, to show that high self-monitors come to occupy network brokerage roles to the extent that they are sought for advice by other high self-monitors. This happens, we suggest, because their high self-monitoring contacts tend to remain unconnected from each other. At the same time, the extent to which high self-monitors are sought for advice by low self-monitors tends to explain the likelihood of the highs to remain embedded in closed networks. This happens, we suggest, because their low self-monitoring contacts are more likely to interact with each other. 

Daniel BLAKE  (Professor from  IE Madrid)

Tuesday, February 19th 2019  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am

"Additive vs adaptive nonmarket strategies: How business associations affect firms' willingness to outsource" 

Firms can pursue different forms of nonmarket strategies in response to institutional challenges. On the one hand firms can employ adaptive strategies by selecting governance modes that avoid the market. On the other, they can pursue additive strategies and develop institutional supplements or substitutes. In this study we investigate whether or not the pursuit of an additive nonmarket strategy dampens the need for an adaptive strategy and thereby enables firms to transact more easily in the market.  We argue that when firms do participate in the additive nonmarket strategy of participating in a business association, they will be more willing to consent to market governance and outsource a part of their operations. Through quantitative analysis of firm survey data from the World Bank, we find that firms that are members of a business association are more likely to outsource operations and that this relationship is strongest in contexts where judicial institutions provide weak enforcement of market agreements.

Roxanna BARBULESCU (Professor from HEC Paris)

Tuesday, January 22nd 2019  at ESSEC   in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am

"Outrunning the past? Prior employer status and job matching in the MBA labor market" 

How external candidates are matched to jobs has important implications for job segregation and income inequality. Existing studies have found the status of prior affiliations to stratify opportunities in the labor market, meaning that individuals with past high status affiliations fare better in subsequent career outcomes. However, possibly because existing studies are limited to one industry, we currently ignore if alternative attainment routes may be open to job seekers who lack such high status affiliations. In this paper we seek to fill this gap by taking a view of job matching as a two-sided process comprised of sequential decisions by applicants and employers. While future employers may use candidates' prior employer affiliations to evaluate candidates, candidates will also anticipate employers' behaviors and consider their prior affiliations when evaluating their chances of success in different jobs. We test our hypotheses in the context of job searches of MBA students from a large international business school. Using longitudinal survey and archival data on three cohorts (836 individuals) and Fortune and Vault industry rankings of their prior employers (2586 distinct firms), we investigate the relative probabilities of individuals coming from higher- vs. lower-ranked backgrounds to apply to, get offer from, and accept offers in the main job domains in this setting. The results suggest the existence of alternative routes for attainment, such that lower-ranked job seekers recover some of their initial difference in income relative to the higher-ranked job seekers in their post-MBA jobs. Furthermore, we find that this stems from a final allocation of jobs across higher- vs. lower-ranked candidates that is driven primarily by the job seekers' application decisions and only secondarily by employers'  offers decisions. Lower-ranked job seekers tend to move more across domains, such that they are disproportionately more likely to apply to – and sometimes even to receive offers in – positions in job domains different than their prior background, albeit with some important limitations. Our findings have implications for research on status and attainment, distribution of human capital resources among firms, and the conceptualization of relative status hierarchies in labor markets.

Felipe CSASZAR (Professorfrom UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN)

Tuesday, November 13th 2018  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am

"Organizing for Disruptive Innovation: Untangling the Cognitive and Structural Antecedents of Adoption and Implementation"

ies how cognitive and structural antecedents affect adaptation to disruptive innovations.  We do so by analyzing how video game firms adapted to the introduction of the "free-to-play" business model around the period of disruption (2012-2015).  Our dataset (which contains 461 firms, collectively employing 83,157 individuals) allows us to characterize each firm's organizational structure and each employee's experience profile; it also captures the performance of firms along both S-curves (that is, firms that do and do not adopt the innovation).  We show that cognitive and structural antecedents affect adoption, implementation under the existing S-curve, and implementation under the new S-curve in different and often opposite ways.  We also point out conditions under which cognitive and structural antecedents can compensate for each other.  Overall, our study contributes to a better understanding of how firms should organize to face disruptive innovations. 

Sameer SRIVASTAVA  (Professor from UC BERKELEY)

Monday, October 29th 2018  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am

"Dampening the Echo: Receptiveness to Opposing Views, Majority-Minority Distance, and Network Homogeneity" 

Social worlds often splinter into echo chambers as people preferentially form ties to others who hold similar political views and avoid affiliating with those who disagree with them. Group composition often contributes to this dynamic, with those in the ideological majority being less likely than those in the minority to form relationships with ideological opponents. This article examines how an individual difference—receptiveness to opposing views—can counteract these tendencies and thereby dampen the echo in some chambers. We develop a theoretical account of how micro-level differences in receptiveness can give rise to macro-level patterns of network heterogeneity. In particular, we theorize that prospective interaction partners who are more mutually receptive will be less prone to forming ties on the basis of political homophily or triadic closure. In groups with majority and minority factions, we further propose that mutual receptiveness will increase the propensity of group members in the political majority to form ties with minority group members. We evaluate and find support for these ideas using field data from three sites that vary in political orientation, analyzing tens of thousands of dyads composed of 599 participants. We discuss implications for research on individual differences and networks, attitude polarization, and group composition. 

Sarah KAPLAN  (from  University of Toronto)

Tuesday, October 23rd 2018  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am

"ACCELERATION AS MITIGATION: WHETHER AND WHEN PROCESS SOLUTIONS CAN ADDRESS GENDER BIAS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP"

Increasing attention – both in the scholarly literature and in the world of policy makers and practitioners – is being paid to the challenges facing female entrepreneurs. What was once assumed to be a merit-based system for encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurs is now understood to operate in gendered ways that in many cases disadvantage female founders. These effects occur across the entire pipeline, beginning with the dearth of women seeking to start high growth companies, to the lack of funding opportunities and mentorship. There are substantial differences in the number of startups led by women, their levels of relevant experience and the amount of funding – both debt and equity – they seek and receive. Some have argued that women tend to found lower potential startups. Yet, even controlling for quality, we see many implicit biases in how female founders are treated. One important approach to redressing inequalities might be through the use of accelerators. Entrepreneurship accelerators are proliferating in both developed and developing economies as different cities, regions and sectors seek to increase economic growth and employment. Accelerators are designed to give a boost to startups by providing in a concentrated way the mentor ship, networks, training and financing required to be successful. The presence of accelerators could have the potential to solve some of the challenges female entrepreneurs face, however preliminary evidence suggests that they, for the most part, seem to be perpetuating the gendered dynamics that exist in the entrepreneurial system. On the other hand, there is no systematic research on how accelerators do or might address the gendered dynamics of entrepreneurship. Because accelerators are seen as such an important policy tool for increasing entrepreneurial success, it is imperative that we develop and analyze systematic data on accelerators and their effects, particularly on female founders. In this study, we will draw on what is known to date on female entrepreneurs and more broadly on the research on gender in organizations and the economy to understand the dynamics of acceleration in entrepreneurship. Using a longitudinal database of over 3,000 ventures in nearly 50 accelerators, we trace the effects of selection into the accelerator and the acceleration process on outcomes for women-only, women-led, and male-only venture teams. We couple survey data with interviews of accelerators to understand whether and when acceleration can be a tool for mitigating gender bias in female entrepreneurship.

Danqing WANG  (from  University of Hong Kong)

Tuesday, October 16th 2018   Level 3 board room at 4:00 pm in Singapore 10:00 a.m in Cergy Room N231

"Political Leaders, Career Concerns and FDI Inflows" 

Host governments' role in influencing companies' location choice for foreign direct investment (FDI) has been studied much more than the impact of individual leaders in these governments. Extending agency theory to an authoritarian government, we study how career concerns motivate local leaders to drive FDI inflows as one of the goals delegated by their superiors. We theorize that certain conditions may enhance the motivating effect of career concerns: individual and regional characteristics that increase leaders' tendency to take risks and the alignment of leaders' and their superiors' interests. We test this framework by examining Chinese city leaders and FDI inflows into their cities from 2000–2010. In China, political leaders' careers largely depend on local economic growth. Because newly appointed leaders have better prospects for promotion, they should have stronger incentives than incumbent leaders to work toward their supervisors' interests. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that newly appointed leaders attract more FDI inflows to their cities than incumbent leaders. This effect of political incentives is stronger for newly appointed leaders who are younger and have political connections with their direct superiors, and also for cities with weaker previous economic performance. We contribute to location studies by highlighting the role of political incentives and political leaders' characteristics in shaping intra-national differences of FDI inflows. We also discuss theoretical implications for agency and institutional theories. 

Anne-Laure FAYARD  (Professor from  NYU'S TANDON ENGINEERING SCHOOL)

Thursday, October 11th 2018  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am  (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

"Organizing for Open Social Innovation: The Case of OpenIDEO" 

With increasing large-scale complex social issues such as poverty, aging, and education facing our world, cross-sector collaborations, in particular those involving the general public, have been recognized as crucial to the generation of innovative solutions. Yet, the success of such collaborations is elusive. Drawing on a 40-month ethnographic study of OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform for social innovation, I examine how an organization created a diverse global community and invited its members through sponsored challenges – to collaboratively generate ideas for tackling complex social issues. Through inductive analysis, I identify three practices by which the OpenIDEO team developed a participatory platform for open social innovation: constructing a collaborative community, temporally structuring interactions, and providing a space for collaborative idea generation. I show how these organizing practices are crucial to successfully engage individuals from multiple backgrounds across the globe to collaboratively problem-solve complex social issues. My findings suggest that open social innovation might be a productive form of collaborative organizing for organizations aiming to experiment with new forms of organizational responses to grand challenges. This work has implications for our understanding of open social innovation, collaborative spaces for idea generation and the practices supporting the engagement of diverse communities in tackling complex social issues. 

Gina DOKKO (Professor from UC DAVIS)

Thursday, September 20th 2018  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am  (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

"You can't go home again: Boomerang employees and bi-lateral relational assistance" 

Understanding the portability of performance is critical in a world of boundaryless careers and unstable employment. Researchers have focused on human capital and social capital as key factors in determining how well performance translates across firm boundaries; less attention has been directed toward identity-based or cognitive frameworks that individuals carry when they move between employers. We study boomerangs, i.e. individuals who return to a former employer after working elsewhere, to focus on how identity impacts the behavior of both returnees and incumbent co-workers. We find that boomerangs are more likely to assist their former co-workers than other co-workers, and that this effect is mitigated when the boomerangs re-enter the firm as part of a co-mobility event. By contrast, former co-workers are less likely to assist the boomerang, and the negative effect is exacerbated when the boomerang is coming back as a star performer. 

Tiziana CASCIARO  (Professor fom  University of Toronto)

Tuesday, June 26th 2018  at ESSEC in room N231 at 10:00 am  (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

"How do people perceive organizational networks? Toward a theory of Gestalt versus elemental network perception"

How people perceive organizational networks influences individual and organizational outcomes above and beyond the effects of the network structure underlying those perceptions. In investigating these effects, research on network perception has been dominated by an elemental view of social cognition, which assumes that people encode and recall each tie in the network, and construct their view of the network as a whole based on the sum of these ties. This dominant view has marginalized a Gestalt, holistic view of network perception, whereby people perceptions of an actor's network position (i.e., central vs peripheral, high status vs. low status, liked vs. disliked) are created through a top-down, category-driven process that hinges heavily on their organized prior knowledge, as opposed to relying primarily on bottom-up, data-driven processes. I argue and document empirically that recognizing the distinction between elemental and Gestalt forms of network perception allows a greater understanding of the descriptive (how people do perceive networks) and prescriptive (how people should perceive networks) implications of network perception for organizational behavior. I then set the conceptual foundations for a theory that encourages a distinction between thin structure and deep structure as boundary conditions for the relevance of elemental and Gestalt network perceptions. Elemental network cognition, I propose, is necessary to capture the effects of deep structural features of the network—the complex topology of network edges. Gestalt network perceptions may suffice instead when a phenomenon can be understood in terms of its thin structural features—higher-level aggregates and trends of social connections. Working toward such a theory can direct future studies toward a fuller account of the way people form network perceptions, the boundary conditions for the impact of those perceptions on organizational phenomena, and the methodological options that such descriptive and prescriptive theorizing opens up for research on organizational networks. 

Stefano TASSELLI  (from  Rotterdam School of Management)

Tuesday, May 22nd 2018  at ESSEC in  room N231 at 10:00 am  (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

"IN GOOD COMPANY": AN ALTER-CENTRIC INTERPRETATION OF NETWORK CENTRALITY IN ORGANIZATIONS." 

Tracking social network dynamics among professionals in a hospital department, we investigate the role of alters' motivation in explaining change in ego's network position over time. Motivational orientations affect the kind of co-workers with whom people preferentially interact in the workplace, such that people high in communal motives prefer to establish ties with co-workers occupying central positions in organizational social networks. This effect driven by motivation results in a systematic network centrality bias: the personal network of central individuals (individuals with many incoming ties from colleagues) contains more supportive and altruistic people than the personal network of individuals who are less central (individuals with fewer incoming ties). Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the alter-centric psychological foundations of an individual's network centrality and call for further empirical research on how alters' motives affect the development of an individual's social networks in organizations. 

Bart CLARYSSE (Professorfrom  ETH ZURICH)

Tuesday, April 10th 2018  at ESSEC in room N231 at 10:00 am  (5.00 p.m in Singapore)

"Sowing the Seed of Failure: Organizational Identity Dynamics in New Venture Evolution" 

New ventures in nascent markets often morph from one organizational  form  to another, while still developing their organizational identity. We study how the organizational identity of a new venture co-evolves with such a process of continuous morphing. To shed light on this process, we conduct an in-depth longitudinal field study of a new venture developing a technology to transform Internet websites for mobile devices. The venture morphs from one organizational form to another successfully once, but fails in its second attempt to pivot. Comparing the successful and the unsuccessful change, we find that the successful morphing relies on the ability to crystallize the role identities of organizational members in line with organizational identity. However, as an unintended consequence, the role identities rigidify and inhibit further adaptation. The explanation lies in the surprisingly strong influence of one stakeholder: the venture capitalist that provides resources to the firm. Through involvement in co-development of the business model, recruitment, and the implementation of routines, the committed venture capitalist accelerates the crystallization of role identities, yet that also leads to an inflexible organizational identity, which inhibits subsequent change.

Olivier CHATAIN  (Professor from HEC Paris)

Tuesday, March 27th 2018  at ESSEC in room N231 at 10:00 am  (5.00 p.m in Singapore)

"Demand-side attributes and resource reconfiguration in human-capital-intensive-firms" 

We investigate how demand-side attributes influence the reconfiguration of micro-level resources—human assets—by human-asset-intensive-firms when staffing incoming client projects. Using fine-grained data on M&A legal mandates outsourced by clients to M&A law firms (suppliers), we find that suppliers are less likely to reconfigure their human assets on incoming client projects when the supplier has provided prior services to the focal client, but are more likely to reconfigure their human assets when the scope of the client relationship across different service lines is broader. In addition, suppliers reconfigure less for high status clients, but are more likely to reconfigure when a client has a greater proclivity to switch business between multiple suppliers. Finally, we show that the size of a supplier's client portfolio, which relates to resource management complexity, lowers reconfiguration. Overall, our paper contributes to the literatures on resource reconfiguration, human capital and the micro-foundations of resource-based theory." Keywords: Resource reconfiguration; Demand-side strategy; Microfoundations of resource-based theory; Strategic human capital; Buyer-supplier relationships.

Hila LIFSHITZ-ASSAF (Professor from  NYU) 

Tuesday, March 13th 2018  at ESSEC in room N231 at 10:00 am  (5.00 p.m in Singapore)

"Navigating Through the Fog of Self-Organizing for Accelerated Innovation: A Study of Makeathons' Product Development Process"

The literature is extensive on "the innovation journey" of new product development processes in traditional forms of organizing that span months or years. Recently, hackathons and makeathons suggest accelerating the innovation process, the "journey," into a "sprint" of only a few days. Moreover, this accelerated process is self-organized, absent of structure or guidance. The existing innovation literature would expect these ambiguity-enhancing conditions to result in failure to produce new working products. Yet this process often leads to working, innovative products. To investigate this puzzle, we closely study the product development process of 13 projects across two assistive technology makeathons. We find divergent reactions to these conditions that play a critical role in enabling successful development of working products for individuals with disabilities under this extremely limited time frame or not. Some projects navigated through the fog of self-organizing for innovation by "setting a course," reducing ambiguity, while other projects were "tacking" through the fog, sustaining the self-organizing process and ambiguity. From a temporal perspective, the same time frame was interpreted very differently: the course setting projects compressed time whereas the tacking projects deepened time, perceiving this time frame to be discontinuous to their past and future ones. Only tacking projects were able to produce functioning new products by the end of the makeathon. This study contributes to theories on innovation processes, self-organizing, and temporality.

Birgit SCHYNS  (Professor from  NEOMA) 

Tuesday, February 13th 2018  at ESSEC in  room N517 at 10:00 am  (5:00 p.m in Singapore)

"Is it me or you? – How reactions to abusive supervision are shaped by leader behavior and follower perceptions"

There is a growing interest in understanding the perceptual and attributional processes involved in reactions towards abusive leadership. Our research examines the influence of different leadership (constructive, laissez faire, low and high abusive) behaviors on follower reactions in two experimental studies. We also conducted a field study to validate our results further. Specifically, we focus on the role of perception of abusive supervision as a mediator (in the experimental studies) between leader abusive behavior and reactions as well as attribution as a moderator in the relationship between perception of abusive supervision and reactions. After conducting a pre-study, data from several samples were collected using first, a two point experimental design with vignettes (Study 1 and 2) and, second, a cross-sectional field study (Study 3). Regression analyses using bootstrapping as well as moderated regressions were used to test the hypotheses. Experimental variation of leadership behavior results in systematic differences in perceptions and reactions towards behaviors. Perception partly mediates the relationship between leadership behavior and reactions (Study 1 and 2). We also found that attribution moderates the relationship between the perception of abusive supervision and reactions in both Study 2 and 3. The differences in results between the studies reflect that in Study 1 and 2 abusive behavior was manipulated and in Study 3 actual leader behavior was assessed. The research presented here adds to our understanding of the processes involved in how abusive leadership influences reactions and the role that followers' perceptions and attributions play in this relationship. Our research can help leaders to better understand their own role and the followers' role for the perception of abusive supervision and reactions towards those behaviors. Our results highlight that the avoidance of abusive supervision should be taken seriously and followers' perception and suffering is not only due to subjective judgment but reflects actual differences in behavior. However, in practice, abusive behaviors might sometimes be ambiguous. 

Nevena   RADOYNOVSKA  (from  KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT)

Thursday, December 7th 2017  at ESSEC, Cergy, in room N517 at 10:00 am (5.00 p.m in Singapore)

"Entrepreneuring Your Life" or Entrepreneurship for Growth: Means Versus Ends-Based Theories of Social Impact Through Entrepreneurship" 

How do organizational actors in local entrepreneurial ecosystems understand their role in tackling "grand challenges" and effecting social change? National governments and supranational institutions increasingly promote entrepreneurship as a solution to socio-economic disparities across individuals, communities and regions. Yet, despite impressive growth in public and scholarly attention to the latter, we know surprisingly little about how, and to what extent, such initiatives succeed or fail in achieving social impact. This paper argues that a primary reason for the inconclusive evidence is that, although scholarship has recognized the multifaceted nature of the input (different forms of entrepreneurship), it assumes a much narrower conceptualization of the outcome (social impact), without adequately examining how organizations construe their role in effecting social change. This paper builds on recent theoretical frameworks for understanding the role of private organizations in positive social change by studying an initiative to promote entrepreneurship in disadvantaged communities in France (colloquially known as banlieues). I take a grounded-theory approach, relying on 46 interviews with entrepreneurs and organizations that support entrepreneurs(hip) in the banlieues, as well as archival and observational data. I theorize that what appears to be a broad policy towards reducing community inequalities through entrepreneurship is translated locally by organizations as two distinct approaches: a means- versus an ends-based approach. Notably, the latter constitute divergent organizational theories of social impact, based on different (1) targets of impact, (2) measures of impact, and (3) identified barriers to achieving impact, across multiple levels (individual, community, societal). Ultimately, means- versus ends-based theories carry distinct implications for evaluating organizations' social impact. The paper contributes to a cross-level perspective on the relationship between organizations, entrepreneurship, and positive social change.

Nishani BOURMAULT  (professor from  NEOMA)

Tuesday, November 14th 2017  at ESSEC in room N231 at 10:00 am (5.00 p.m in Singapore)

"When Stepping Up Also Means Stepping Down: Managerial Role Transitions for Members of High Reliability Occupations" 

In past literature on work transitions into managerial roles, a key challenge for newcomers is assumed to be the increase in responsibility that the new job entails. However, little attention has been paid to individuals' occupational backgrounds before transitioning. To better understand managerial transitions, this study compares the shifting responsibilities of supervisors coming from a high-reliability occupation, where small errors can lead to serious consequences, versus a low-reliability occupation, where such concerns do not exist. Drawing mainly on interviews with former Paris subway drivers (high-reliability) and station agents (low-reliability) now promoted to supervisors, we analyze the change in "responsibility" experienced during such a transition. We find that this responsibility has multiple facets, some of which actually lessen as one moves up. For subway drivers, stepping up into a managerial role entails lower task significance, lower temporal immediacy, and lower task independence; creating a certain loss of what we label "personal" responsibility. By contrast, former station agents reported no such loss. Building on the imprinting literature, we suggest that workers coming from high-reliability occupations might experience a similar "managerial blues." Overall, our findings shed light on how specific occupational backgrounds shape the experience of responsibility when moving up the hierarchy. 

Simona GIORGI  (Professor from Boston College)

Thursday, October 19th 2017   at Essec, Cergy, in room N517  10:00 am  (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

"WHAT'S IN A FRAME? AN IN-DEPTH EXPLORATION OF THE ROLE OF FRAMING IN FOSTERING COLLABORATION IN THE CONTEXT OF TWO 

ENVIRONMENTAL NON-PROFITS."

This study examines the role of framing in fostering a collaborative agreement between two environmental non-profits in the U.S. that aimed at saving a particular type of natural ecosystems, wetlands. Building on 87 interviews, 17 months of participant observation, and extensive archival data, I show that framing can be a double-edged sword that can promote, but also hinder collaboration between seemingly compatible organizations. Unlike previous work that focused on instances of success and portrayed framing as a strategic tool for persuading others, my analysis documents how framing initially resonated with what the intended recipient valued, but over time revealed a deeper-seated cultural difference in how such value was constructed. More specifically, differences in orders of worth, or principles used to construct the value of nature – either as something worthy per se or for the exchange and use value of its services – prevented collaboration between the two organizations. These findings shed light on the underpinnings of framing resonance, highlighting the complex cultural basis of inter-organizational collaboration. 

Leslie DE CHURCH  (Professor from   NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY) 

Tuesday, October 17th 2017  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am  (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

"Social Media and their Affordances for Effective Teamwork" 

Teams are changing, technologies are changing, and both of these shifts are outpacing the theoretical advances needed to understand and enable teams. Over the past 25 years, the rapid advancement of information communication technologies has facilitated new forms of collaboration and communication among individuals that have fundamentally shifted the ways in which people team up. Most recently, social media are increasingly being implemented in work organizations as tools facilitating communication and collaboration among employees that are enabling individuals to team up in new ways. Yet the rapid uptake of social media has outpaced theoretical research on how these technologies are fundamentally altering organizational processes at the team and inter-team level. In this talk, I will present a conceptual framework advancing an affordance lens to understand the relationship between social media use and team processes. This conceptual framework is then used to explain how social media both affords and constrains team processes. 

Joshua SKEWES  (Professor from  AARHUS NIVERSITY)

Tuesday, September 26th 2017  at ESSEC in room LE CLUB at 10:00 am (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

"Informational Openness Enhances Collaborative Decision-Making in Groups of Autonomous Agents: A Cognitive Agent-Based Study"

Collaborative decision making is central to the organization of society. Juries decide cases; boards and executive teams make strategic decisions; and voters elect government officials. It is common to think of such groups as decision making entities. We say that juries deliberate; that boards rule; and that electorates decide. But this language is imprecise. Real decision processes do not occur within any group as an abstract entity. Collaborative decision making always happens within and between individual group members. There is a rich body of research focused on how individuals decide together in groups. Most of this research assumes that individuals are already committed to the group they are in. This leaves open the question of how individuals decide to join decision making groups in the first place. We present an agent-based model of collaborative decision making designed to address this question. We develop this model in the context of existing research on task learning and intra-group communication. We demonstrate that collaborative decision making is done best when it is done by groups that are informationally, as well as structurally, open 

Mona MENSMANN  (Professor from  LEUPHANA UNIVERSITY)

Tuesday, January 16th 2017  at ESSEC in  room N231 at 9:30 am  (4.30 p.m in Singapore)

"Teaching personal initiative beats traditional training in boosting small business in West Africa"

Standard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries by teaching basic financial and marketing practices, yet the impacts of such programs are mixed. We tested whether a psychology-based personal initiative training approach, which teaches a proactive mindset and focuses on entrepreneurial behaviors, could have more success. A randomized controlled trial in Togo assigned microenterprise owners to a control group (n = 500), a leading business training program (n = 500), or a personal initiative training program (n = 500). Four follow-up surveys tracked outcomes for firms over 2 years and showed that personal initiative training increased firm profits by 30%, compared with a statistically insignificant 11%for traditional training. The training is cost-effective, paying for itself within 1 year.