OS Seminar

Professor 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.

Professor 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

Professor 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

Professor 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.

Peter Kim, US Marshall 

When Transparency Confronts its Limits:  The Implications of Situated Cognition and the Struggle for Interpretive Dominance  

Organizational transparency is generally portrayed as a phenomenon that can be controlled by altering the quantity and quality of information available. The present inquiry challenges that view with a field study of organizational stakeholders who sought to become as transparent as possible. Their efforts to promote transparency far exceeded those reported in any other setting. Yet despite those efforts, the perceived level of transparency among those stakeholders remained surprisingly low. This revealed that i creasing transparency may not be as straightforward as the literature suggests and prompted the development of a grounded theory to explain why such efforts can fail. This analysis details how increasing transparency can require overcoming four distinct challenges that can be far more elusive than the literature has presumed. It suggests that we view transparency, not as an objective state based on the information conveyed, but rather as a situated perception based on the sense that one's  ,interpretive goals have been fulfilled. And it considers how efforts to increase transparency may themselves become a basis for conflict as each stakeholder' s own interpretive goals interfere with the interpretive goals of others.  

Cindy P. Muir (Zapata), Mendoza College of Business – University of Notre Dame  

Musings on Displays of Humility 

Although humility is often considered a virtue, perhaps even a “meta-virtue” - essential to other virtues such as courage or wisdom (Grenberg, 2005: 133; see also McCullough, 2000), and scholarly work focusing on the outcomes of humility is associated with various demonstrable benefits for others (Chandler et al., 2023; Morris et al., 2005; Ou et al., 2017; Ou, Waldman, & Peterson, 2018; Owens et al., 2013) - outcomes for the humble person themselves seem less unequivocally beneficial (Exline & Geyer, 2004; Owens & Hekman, 2012; Zapata & Hayes-Jones; 2019). What explains why a meta-virtue would be associated with anything less than overwhelmingly positive consequences for the virtuous individual? Our work aims to develop theory to explain the disconnect between work that seems to exalt humble leaders with empirical evidence demonstrating mixed views on how humble leaders tend to be evaluated by others. We posit that this disconnect is partly attributable to the humility literature’s focus and conceptualization of expressed humility. We rely on both archival (from www.ratemyprofessor.com) and experimental data to test our predictions.    

Crystal Farh, Foster School of Business - University of Washington 

The Gendered Costs of Voice (Un)Enacted: Differential Implications for Belonging in Traditionally Male-Dominated Contexts  

Despite their potential to enhance team functioning, employees’ suggestions and concerns are often ignored or rejected. This is especially the case for women in traditionally male-dominated contexts, who are not only less likely to have their voice acted upon but also suffer lower belonging than their counterparts who are men. In this paper, we draw a novel link between these two phenomena. Integrating self-in-role (Kahn, 1990) and social belonging theories (Walton & Cohen, 2007), we argue that because voice employs and displays the self, voicers look to collective reactions to their voice—expressed through voice enactment—to inform whether the self fits in, is accepted, and is valued. We further argue that the effect of voice enactment on belonging is strengthened for women in traditionally male-dominated contexts due to their heightened experience of social identity threat, which makes them particularly attuned to voice enactment as a cue for belonging. Data from active-duty marines (Study 1) and student engineering project teams (Study 2) showed that low voice enactment indeed reduced belonging more strongly for women compared to men. Data from a randomized controlled experiment (Study 3) further showed that the strengthened relationship between voice enactment and belonging for women in majority-men settings was indeed mediated through social identity threat. Altogether, our work highlights the asymmetrical cost of low voice enactment – as well as the importance of high voice enactment for equalizing belonging – for women in traditionally male-dominated contexts. 

Judith Clair, Boston College 

Holding Oneself Accountable for a History of Cultural Harms: A Visual Ethnography of U.S. Museums and the Catalyzing Impact of George Floyd's Murder 

Pressure on museums to become more inclusive of diverse voices and narratives, to set the story straight on cultures that have been misconstrued or misrepresented, to repatriate cultural treasures, and to engage audiences around related critical conversations, has reached a sort of tipping point. As with other organizations, the #MeToo movement and George Floyd killing and protests sparked a wake-up call for many museums that they had not been doing enough. Museums have traditionally been conceived of as repositories of the past and as a place where one learns of history, enjoys art, and can be inspired by beauty. Is a museum also a site in which social justice is forged? A site for building gender, racial and cultural inclusion? In this context, I present a qualitative study exploring how general and natural history museums are grappling with inherent tensions regarding identity and structure amidst the ongoing 'culture wars' surrounding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Of particular interest is how these museums are endeavoring to "turn the page," leaving behind a problematic past and responding to calls for greater inclusion, despite their strong ties to history and culture rooted in a less equitable, diverse, and inclusive era, and given that their physical structures shapes what is possible to do and to achieve. 

Jennifer Petriglieri, INSEAD 

Storying Loneliness:  The Psychodynamic Social Construction and Deconstruction of Persistent Loneliness 

Through an inductive study, we examine how executives get trapped in experiences of persistent loneliness and how they can break free from them. We reveal the key roles of relational contexts and relational scripts - intrapsychic blueprints that encode how people believe they should behave in a specific context to elicit a desired response from others - in these processes. We find that competitive work contexts that value success activate a relational script that guides executives to be self-reliant and distance themselves from others, behaviors that led to persistent loneliness. These scripts were forged in early relational contexts that taught people to associate self-reliance with success. This association anchored executives’ stories of the pain, price, and payoff of loneliness and became the central theme of their self-narratives at work. Some executives were able to overcome persistent loneliness through a developmental crisis which led them to update the relational script they enacted in success-valuing contexts, and their self-narrative which it anchored. Building on these findings, we develop a psychodynamic theory of the social construction and deconstruction of persistent loneliness that shows how social contexts that value success can unwittingly encourage people to psychologically invest in loneliness at work.

Professor Noshir Contractor

Leveraging Computational Social Science to address Grand Societal Challenges

The increased access to big data about social phenomena, machine learning, and generative AI enables social scientists to understand traditional research questions better and probe new questions about our increasingly algorithmically infused society. However, these exciting opportunities must be accompanied by careful reflection on how big data can motivate new theories and methods. Using examples of his network research, Contractor will illustrate how these developments offer social scientists and social network scholars an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating, and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges.