OS Seminar

Professor 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.

Professor 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.

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.