OS Seminar

Dan Wang - Columbia Business School

How Immigration Status Shapes Entrepreneurial Strategy and Ambition

How does entrepreneurial strategy vary by a founder's immigration status?  Immigrants are often touted as more entrepreneurial than their non-immigrant peers, but heterogeneity in immigrant status creates variation in access to resources and networks that can factor into venture success.  Immigration status is also a reflection of one’s social position in a host society, permitting some immigrants access to more lucrative economic opportunities and better social services while excluding other immigrants.  With a sample of 1,000 immigrant founders, 65% of whom are undocumented, DACA recipients, or awaiting immigrant status adjustment, I analyze applications they each submitted to a California state-administered program that distributes grants to support the growth of their ventures.  Findings reveal that undocumented immigrants — who represent the group with the most vulnerable immigration status — are most likely to plan for the expansion of their businesses, with a higher proportion of their projected spending devoted to capital expenses (CapEx) relative to operating expenses (OpEx).  Furthermore, from a natural experiment, wherein some applicants received a higher grant amount than they expected, undocumented immigrants were more likely to invest the unanticipated surplus into CapEx (versus OpEx) than immigrants with other status.  These results chart a novel theorization that reveals how immigration status shapes an immigrant founders' critical agency, which in turn, manifests in their decisions about entrepreneurial strategy.

Nathanael Fast - USC Marshall School of Business

Purpose-Driven AI: Why it Matters and How Psychology Can Help

This talk will examine a) how a purpose-driven approach to designing and deploying AI differs from the current industry approach, b) why a clear focus on purpose is critical for realizing long-term productivity gains from AI, and c) how psychological research can offer needed guidance to stakeholders seeking to advance a purpose-driven approach. I will share recent adoption data from a longitudinal representative study in the U.S. as well as experimental studies examining psychological factors – including identity, perceptions of fairness, and changes in perceived status – that influence employee adoption of AI-driven HR algorithms and algorithmic management in the workplace.

Jessica Reif - Fuqua School of Business

Space and structure: The interplay between proximity, unit boundaries, and supervision in shaping workplace interactions

Organizations commonly co-locate employees in the same office to foster collaboration, yet spatial interventions often fail to deliver their intended benefits. Conflicting evidence in the proximity and office design literatures highlights the need for a better understanding of when and how physical space shapes workplace interactions, particularly across organizational units. Drawing on theories of attention, we theorize that spatial arrangements and organizational structures intersect to influence employees’ bottom-up and top-down attentional processes. We predict that (1) proximity effects on work-related interactions are stronger for same-unit dyads than cross-unit dyads because organizational relationships determine who is most likely to “stand out” in a busy office environment, and (2) proximity to supervisors reduces cross-unit interactions as employees focus on demonstrating unit-focused productivity to nearby authority figures. This paper reports the results of a field study in which employees were quasi-randomly assigned to desks following a headquarters relocation, creating exogenous variation in proximity between employees from different units and between employees and their supervisors. Results support both hypotheses: proximity had stronger effects on interactions within units than across units, and supervisor proximity constrained cross-unit interactions. This research contributes to the literatures on boundary spanning, physical space, and organizational attention by demonstrating that office design’s impact on collaboration depends critically on the organizational relationships among the employees within the space.

Clem Aeppli - Harvard University

Presented in partnership with the IWER seminar.

Workplace segregation and the structure of American racial earnings inequality

In the last forty years, one's earnings and wellbeing have increasingly come to depend on where one works. How has this reshaped racial and ethnic earnings disparities? I draw on American economic microdata to trace the history of Black and Hispanic workers' concentration in marginal establishments from the 1970s to the present. First, Black and Hispanic workers have become increasingly siloed into especially low paying, low revenue firms. Second, about half of this trend has been driven by the movement of blue-collar and service occupations to low-paying establishments; this is consistent with descriptions of workplace fissuring and narrowing. Third, this de facto segregation exacerbates the black-white and Hispanic-white pay gaps by 13% and 27%, respectively, in recent years. These results establish that concentration in marginal establishments -- though already identified in the 1980s -- has become much more significant in an era of widening between-firm inequalities. Workplace segregation is a key motor of racial and ethnic gaps today.

Priyam Saraf - Stanford Graduate School of Business

Searching for a Confidant: How Do Family Firms Hire a Professional CEO in Emerging Markets

Scholars have long puzzled over what appears to be the “inefficient” professionalization of developing economy firms. Family firm owners resist relying on professional, non-family CEOs, leaving much productivity unclaimed. I revisit this puzzle by collecting new data on owners’ subjective evaluations and theorizing the unexamined role of weak legal institutions in shaping their search for non-family CEOs. Drawing on a 20-month field study of Bangladeshi garment exporters—including interviews, ethnographic observations of hiring debriefs, and archival data—I find that the search for a non-family CEO is more than just a process of seeking competence; it is crucially also a process of seeking comfort. Owners recognize external pressures to hire non-family CEOs but fear employee deviance amidst weak contract enforceability. Since a comforting confidant like the outgoing family CEO is hard to find, they seek controllability—a lower likelihood of deviance and greater ease of sanctioning—which mitigates discomfort. Owners see competence as important but delegable to consultants and subordinates (much like their approach with family CEOs), and in many cases, concerns about controllability outweigh concerns about technical and cognitive competence. In the absence of strong legal institutions, I show how owners rely on heuristics—salaryman motivations, structural isolation, and emotional neutrality—to locate controllability in the social category of strangers, whom they hire as non-family CEOs, over sufficiently competent and known locals. I discuss implications for research on professionalization, economic development and entrepreneurship, and hiring. 

Alan Yan - University of California, Berkeley

The partisanship of labor union officers

Labor unions and the Democratic Party have long been allies, yet the share of rank-and-file union members who are Democrats has steadily declined over the past fifty years. Have labor leaders followed suit? I assemble several novel administrative datasets linking over 200,000 unique union officers to voter records from 2014–2023. I find that labor leaders are becoming less Democratic, though Republicans remain underrepresented relative to member partisanship. Local union officers more closely align with members' political affiliations than higher-level officers. Using California teacher and police employment data, I further show that local officers generally mirror their members’ partisanship. I suggest a potential institutional explanation for these trends. Specifically, local union officers are more likely to reflect members’ political views than higher-level officers because federal law only requires local unions to hold direct elections. These findings suggest that union leaders may become less dependable Democratic coalition partners as union members become less Democratic.

Elena Ayala-Hurtado - Princeton

Not as Expected: How Struggling College Graduates Navigate Insecurity

In this talk, I will be discussing my book project (in progress), which builds on my paper, “Qualities and Configurations of Insecurity in the United States and Spain.” I will present an extension of this analysis and further examine the cross-national consequences of young college graduates’ insecurity. In recent decades, insecurity—that is, employment precarity and economic instability—has become widespread. How do people interpret the conditions of insecurity within their own contexts? Drawing on 164 cross-national interviews with young college graduates in the U.S. and Spain, most of whom were facing insecurity (e.g. unemployment, non-standard employment, low pay, high levels of debt), I analyze how respondents make sense of insecurity. I find that respondents in each national context perceive insecurity as having starkly different qualities. While Spanish respondents perceive their insecurity as narrow, unambiguous, and transitory, American respondents perceive theirs as broad, ambiguous, and recurrent. I develop a framework that illuminates, first, how these perceived qualities of insecurity are underpinned by people’s understandings of the structural conditions of insecurity in each context— or “configurations of insecurity”— and second, the consequences of these perceptions for plans and decision-making. This study examines the meanings ascribed to structural conditions of insecurity, reveals the multidimensionality of perceived insecurity, and develops a framework that elucidates the sources and consequences of those perceptions. 

Stéphane Côté - Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Trust and Trust Funds: Behavior and Expectations Based on Others’ Childhood and Current Social Class Context

Trust is vital for success in all kinds of social interactions. But how do people decide whether an individual can be trusted? One factor people may consider is that individual’s social class. We hypothesize that people trust others from lower social class contexts more than others from higher class contexts; we also consider nuances between current and childhood class context, and between trust as a behavior and trust as an expectation. Five pre-registered studies and eleven pre-registered replications consistently found that people behaviorally trusted targets who experienced lower (compared to higher) social class contexts, either in childhood or currently. But, only childhood (not current) social class context had a parallel influence on trust expectations, and perceived morality only mediated the effect of childhood (not current) social class on trust. Exploratory analyses tentatively suggested that the higher trust in currently lower-class others is driven by altruistic motives. These effects emerged in samples drawn from different populations, across varying manipulations of social class, in actual and hypothetical decisions, and with imaginary targets and real acquaintances. We consider the practical implications for understanding social interactions and relationships in organizations.

Edward Chang - Harvard Business School. 

Diversity Incentives Can Increase Women’s Aspirations to Lead

To boost diversity, organizations are increasingly using “diversity incentives,” or payouts for managers or executives dependent on progress towards a specific diversity goal. Diversity incentives can affect both actors—managers incentivized to meet the goal—and targets—marginalized group members who are the focus of the incentivized goal. Whereas the effects of incentives on actors are well-documented, it is unclear how targets will be affected. We examine how gender diversity incentives affect women’s aspirations to lead. On one hand, diversity incentives may generate identity threat and concerns about backlash among women; on the other, they may be viewed as costly signals of organizational support for women’s leadership aspirations. A preregistered field experiment (n=2,035) shows that communicating the existence of organizational diversity incentives increases women’s aspirations to lead by 11.3% relative to sharing a goal-free diversity statement and by 11.7% relative to communicating diversity goals alone. We replicate these findings across three preregistered experiments (total n=2,495) and provide evidence that diversity incentives increase women’s expectations of receiving sponsorship from their managers, thereby increasing their willingness to state leadership aspirations. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the drivers of female leadership aspirations.

Held jointly with IWER

Michel Anteby - Boston University Questrom School of Business

Why What Resists is Often Revealing

A researcher enters your world and starts asking questions you would prefer not to answer. What do you do? Mostly, when an interloper appears, communities find ways to resist; they obstruct investigations and hide evidence, shelve complaints, silence dissent, and even forget about their own past. Such resistance—that is, the mechanisms deployed by social groups to maintain the status quo—is the bane of field researchers, for it often seems to slam the door in our face. How can we learn about a community when it resists so very strongly? The answer is that, sometimes, the resistance is itself the key. By closing ranks and creating obstacles, community members can disclose more than they mean. This talk will discuss how such resistance manifests itself and what it reveals about a given field and a particular researcher. Insights will be drawn from resistance in diverse field settings to help analyze resistance. I will argue that field resistance contains way more analytical possibilities than we imagine. Overall, resistance needs to be understood as a routine product (not by-product) of the field.

Held jointly with IWER

Jane Risen - Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Debate vs Dialogue: Exploring Different Approaches to Disagreement

Engaging with those with whom we disagree is necessary in almost all aspects of life, yet the manner in which people approach disagreement can have a marked effect on how it goes. In the current research, we focus on two approaches to disagreement: debate and dialogue. In debate, the goal is to persuade the other person that your perspective is correct. In dialogue, the goal is to understand the other person’s perspective and have them understand yours. The current talk explores features that lead people to spontaneously approach disagreement as either a debate or dialogue. Across hypothetical scenarios, recalled differences of opinion, and real conversation, we find people are more likely to engage in debate when there is more disagreement, when people are more certain about their opinion, and when the topic is important, personally relevant, and moral in nature. In contrast, people are more likely to engage in dialogue when there is less disagreement, they feel less certain, they believe the other person has the goal to learn, they care about the impression they make on the other person, and they share group membership. Furthermore, we find that the features that promote dialogue do so, at least in part, because people perceive themselves as sharing goals and values with the other person when those features are present. By identifying antecedent causes for engaging in debate versus dialogue, we can better predict when and why each approach will be employed and consider interventions for encouraging the alternative approach when deemed useful.