Managing to Get There
Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Prithwiraj Choudhury et al.
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work -- the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from office -- affects employee attitudes and performance. Workers who spent around two days in the office each week on average self-reported greater work-life balance, more job satisfaction, and lower isolation from colleagues compared to workers who spent more or fewer days in the office. Employees in the intermediate hybrid condition received no different performance ratings compared to peers who spent more or fewer days in the office.
Competitive Familiarity: Learning to Coordinate by Competing
Kenny Ching, Enrico Forti & Evan Rawley
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper develops and tests a theory of organizational learning, proposing that prior competitive interaction improves coordination among teammates. We test the theory using millions of experiments in the formation of eSports teams. The results show that exogenously assigned teams of former competitors are highly effective -- the marginal returns to prior competitive interaction are even larger than the returns to prior collaborative interaction. The evidence suggests that teammates learn to coordinate by competing, a finding with implications for organizational design and the management of human capital.
Self-control signals and affords power
Shuang Wu, Rachel Smallman & Pamela Smith
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Whom do we perceive as more powerful and prefer to give power to: Those who have self-control or those who lack it? Past theory and research provide divergent predictions. Low self-control can be seen as a form of disinhibition, and disinhibition has been associated with greater power. However, high self-control can be seen as a form of agency, which is associated with greater power. Across seven studies, we found that individuals who exhibited high self-control were seen as more powerful, and given more power, than individuals who exhibited low self-control. This result held when the low or high self-control behavior was chosen either quickly or slowly (Studies 3 and 4), and when exhibiting low versus high self-control entailed the same action but different goals (Studies 5 and 6). Study 6 demonstrated important implications of our findings for goal setting: People were perceived as more powerful and given more power when they had a modest goal but exceeded it than when they had an ambitious goal but failed to meet it, even though in both cases they performed the same action. A meta-analysis of our mediation results showed that people perceived individuals higher in self-control as more assertive and competent, which was associated with greater power perception and then with greater power conferral. Perceived competence also directly mediated the effect of self-control on power conferral. The current research addresses a theoretical debate in the power literature and contributes to a better understanding of how power is perceived and accrued.
Competitive Job Seekers: When Sharing Less Leaves Firms at a Loss
Gaurav Chiplunkar, Erin Kelley & Gregory Lane
NBER Working Paper, February 2024
Abstract:
We study how job-seekers share information about jobs within their social network, and its implications for firms. We randomly increase the amount of competition for a job and find that job-seekers are: (i) less likely to share information about the job with their peers; and (ii) choose to selectively share it with fewer higher ability peers. This lowers the quality of applicants received by firms, subsequent hires made, and performance on the job -- suggesting that firms who rely on social networks to disseminate job information may see lower quality applicants than expected for their most competitive positions. While randomly offering higher wages attracts better talent, it is not able to fully overcome these strategic disincentives in information sharing.
Organizational Hiring Practices and Employee Innovation
Letian Zhang & Simeng Wang
Harvard Working Paper, January 2024
Abstract:
This paper argues that organizations' use of internal versus external hiring could influence its employees' productivity. The more (less) an organization uses internal (external) hiring, the more employees would perceive internal advancement opportunities and become more productive. We collected LinkedIn profiles of 247,086 US inventors and tracked their performance from 2000 to 2020. Using strict fixed effects on inventor-employer-title-location dyads, we find that the same inventor performs significantly better when her firm has higher rates of internal promotion, although this pattern largely disappears for inventors near the end of their career. This study underscores an important process by which firms' hiring strategies influence performance.
Interdependent behavior only benefits employees from working-class backgrounds when it is both enacted and valued
Andrea Dittmann, Nicole Stephens & Sarah Townsend
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, March 2024, Pages 720-741
Abstract:
Social class disparities are pervasive in American society. In higher education, one critical driver of these disparities is the cultural mismatch between the interdependent norms of people from working-class backgrounds and the independent norms that pervade higher education. However, after graduating from college and entering white-collar workplaces, people from working-class backgrounds have frequent opportunities to collaborate in teams-that is, to enact interdependent behavior. Do these opportunities reduce cultural mismatch for people from working-class backgrounds? Across two survey studies and two experiments with college-educated U.S. employees (total N = 2,566), we find that they do not. We theorize and document that this is because there is often a decoupling between enacting interdependent behavior and whether such behavior is valued as part of being a "good" employee. We find that employees from working-class backgrounds only experience a cultural match and its benefits (e.g., sense of fit, high retention intentions) when interdependent behaviors are both enacted and valued. In contrast, when interdependent behaviors are enacted but not valued, employees from working-class backgrounds experience a cultural mismatch. Furthermore, we find that this pattern is unique to employees from working-class backgrounds: Employees from middle-class backgrounds report similar fit and retention regardless of whether there is a coupling of enacted and valued interdependent behavior. Taken together, our results suggest that it is critical to examine multiple elements of culture simultaneously (e.g., both enacted and valued behavior) to fully understand and predict the consequences of cultural (mis)match.
New entrants, incumbents, and the search for knowledge: The role of job title ambiguity in the US information and communication technology industry, 2004-2014
Diego Zunino et al.
Industrial and Corporate Change, February 2024, Pages 172-193
Abstract:
New entrants and incumbent firms rely on new knowledge to innovate and compete in the market. One way to acquire new knowledge is through the recruitment of new employees from competitors, a phenomenon popularly known as "poaching." Digital labor platforms are widely used by firms for this aim. We argue that job titles represent the first and most visible public source of information about knowledge workers and thus play a key role in navigating the vast spectrum of competencies available in digital platforms. Our analyses of the career trajectories of 11,644 knowledge workers in the United States between 2004 and 2014 suggest that increases in the ambiguity of a job title claimed by an employee are negatively associated with the likelihood of the employee being hired by a new employer. This finding appears stronger in the case of transitions to incumbent firms rather than new entrants. In the concluding section of the paper, we take stock of the various analyses presented and reflect on the potential role of job titles in the strategic management of human capital.
Big Fish in Small Ponds: Human Capital Migration and the Rise of Boutique Banks
Janet Gao, Wenyu Wang & Xiaoyun Yu
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the comparative advantage of firms with focused and multidivisional organizational forms at attracting valuable human capital. Using the merger and acquisition (M&A) advisory industry as a laboratory, we show that high-performing individuals are more likely to migrate to boutique (focused) banks, especially those who are still on the upward trajectory of their career. Such migration is amplified by the cross-subsidization inside bulge bracket (multidivisional) firms, proxied by poor performance of their non-M&A departments. The transition of skilled labor improves the performance of the boutique sector, potentially contributing to the rise of boutiques over the past two decades. Moreover, M&A deal outcomes differ when having boutique advisors. Our findings suggest that corporate organizational structure and labor migration can jointly shape industry dynamics.