Open Access Publications

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Open access publications by faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in the Department of Business Administration.

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Why Some Job Seekers Avoid Family Firms
(FamilyBusiness.org, 2025-03-20) Phillips, Duygu; Madison, Kristen; Wolf, Sandra; Hack, Andreas; Kellermanns, Franz
Family firm branding can make a company appear authentic, but it's also important to convey innovativeness, prestige, and a fair shot at getting ahead. While approximately 75% of new jobs worldwide are in family firms (Shanker & Astrachan, 1996; Wittmer et al., 2022), these firms often struggle to recruit new employees. “When looking for an employer, many [job seekers] initially look to the well-known names of the large corporations and only rarely focus their career planning on family businesses,” notes Stefan Klemm, Founder and Owner of the Entrepreneurs Club in Munich. (Karrieretag Familienunternehmen, n.d.). Why do job seekers rarely consider family firms as potential employers? Our recent study explored why many family firms experience difficulties in recruiting, and we assumed it had to do with how job seekers stereotype family firms. So, we set out to understand these stereotypes and whether they made family businesses less attractive to job seekers. We believed that answering these questions would help family businesses develop more effective strategies to attract the best candidates for jobs.
The Conditional-Promotion Paradox: When and Why Conditional Promotions Decrease Total Sales of the Promoted Product
(Journal of Marketing Research, 2024-12-11) Cheng, Andong; Stadler Blank, Ashley
Conditional promotions are price promotions that require consumers to meet a precondition to qualify for a discount. While research shows that conditional promotions can increase sales of the promoted product compared with no promotion (i.e., sales at the regular price), this article identifies the conditions under which conditional promotions can decrease sales of the promoted product compared with no promotion. Across five studies, the authors find that conditional promotions with a high precondition cost and high discount are the most likely to decrease total sales of the promoted product. The authors theorize that this decrease occurs because the high precondition cost deters consumers from purchasing the promoted product under the promotion, while the high discount and corresponding decrease in transaction utility deter consumers from purchasing the promoted product at the regular price. These findings contribute to the promotions literature by identifying when and why conditional promotions help or hurt total sales of the promoted product.
Encouraging student engagement, interaction, and learning via online discussion boards: Reflections on using Yellowdig in the COVID-19 era
(Journal of Education for Business, 2023-09-28) Alfoldi, Eva A.
In the COVID-19 era, Yellowdig (an online discussion board with social media-like features) has increasingly risen to prominence in higher education. Reflecting on a multi-year experiment involving 14 international business and marketing courses, I argue that Yellowdig remains a valuable tool for learning even after returning to face-to-face classes. Nonetheless, my experience also highlights its limitations. While Yellowdig is not a panacea for social learning, it can provide a versatile platform for student interaction and engagement, provided that instructors maintain a clear purpose and realistic expectations. I present key considerations to help instructors optimize their use of Yellowdig.
Yellowdig discussion boards as communities of inquiry: The impact of instructor participation on online student discourse
(Journal of Education for Business, 2024-12-14) Alfoldi, Eva A.
The community of inquiry framework examines the interplay between four kinds of presence (teaching, cognitive, social, and learner) to promote effective learning in online education. This paper investigates the impact of instructor participation (IP), a key component of teaching presence, on student discourse in discussion boards with automated grading. A content analysis of 1146 contributions on the Yellowdig discussion platform suggests that high IP enhances cognitive, social, and learner presence, but remains insufficient to deter the use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT. Overall, high IP adds considerable value by modeling desirable behaviors, encouraging effort, and promoting more thoughtful online student discourse.
Does Financial Derivative Hedging Reduce Firms’ Financial Constraints?
(Journal of Accounting and Finance, 2024-05-27) Patil, Bharat
This study examines the relationship between the firms’ derivative risk management and its financial constraints. Firms face a wedge between their internal and external financing for their investments. I test whether this wedge reduces firms’ financial constraints when they hedge using interest rate, foreign currency, and commodity derivatives. Using an event study and a difference-in-differences framework around implementing Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123R, this study shows a strong causal relationship between derivative hedging and financial constraints. I find that net debt increases for the derivative hedging firms, on the other hand, cash holdings and net equity issuance decreases. When managers of non-financial corporations believe that their firm will face a liquidity shortage, they save more cash out of cash flow as a precautionary measure. Both cash flow-cash sensitivity and investment-cash flow sensitivity decrease. The analysis also shows that both the loan spread and the probability of covenant violation decrease after firms start derivative hedging. The main implication of the analysis is that risk management influences the asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers: the increase in risk management, the less the asymmetry.
Taking a tiny step back: The impact of planning on a bumpy goal pursuit
(Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 2024-09-26) Bayuk, Julia; Basoglu, K. Asli
Across varied domains, prior research has examined the impact of setbacks and goal-inconsistent behaviors on goal pursuit. A large setback, whether a result of an external hurdle or an internally-driven goal-inconsistent behavior, may suggest that the goal is not really feasible and goal disengagement is ideal. Yet, a minor setback or a goal-deviation may just be a bump in the road that can, and often should, be overcome, especially for important, long-term goals. So, not all setbacks signal that failure is inevitable and goal pursuit should be put on hold. Forming a goal-directed plan shifts individuals from a deliberative to an implemental mindset and is commonly recommended by both academics and practitioners to help individuals pursue important goals and disengage from unachievable goals. But are plans beneficial when small, goal-related setbacks occur? Specifically, this article examines the impact of minor bumps in the road (experiencing small setbacks, engaging in minor goal-inconsistent behaviors) on continued goal pursuit. In three studies, field and lab, and across two different domains (eating healthy and saving money), we (1) show that small, seemingly acceptable setbacks can negatively influence goal pursuit when one has formed a plan, and (2) empirically demonstrate that when small setbacks occur, having a plan may increase feeling of action crisis and ultimately decrease interest in continued goal pursuit.
The Value of Small Samples to Groups and Teams Research: Accumulating Knowledge across Philosophies of Science
(Group and Organization Management, 2024-09-14) Kane, Aimée A.; Emich, Kyle J.
The large increase in the average sample size of team studies published in premier management journals over the past decade is concerning. A strict focus on large samples suppresses the study of many teams, particularly less prominent ones; for example, teams in small or medium-sized enterprises, teams in unique contexts, teams containing underrepresented minorities, and teams adopting new technologies. It also impedes our collective understanding of teams by devaluing work relying on philosophies of science that do not prioritize large samples. Large samples allow positivists to establish relationships between constructs. Yet, contextualized, rich data from as few as just one team can help constructivists uncover lived experiences or could be studied by critical realists to identify mechanisms underlying social systems of active agents. In this paper, we review how these three philosophies of science view sample size, addressing how and when small samples are beneficial. Importantly, research from all three traditions is necessary to build an in-depth, practical understanding of teams. We also describe five specific ways small sample research can contribute to team science and lay out four general recommendations for assessing the value of sample size in team research. Throughout, we maintain that scientific progress is collective and pluralistic. A sole reliance on large samples threatens this goal.
Does macroeconomic uncertainty (really) influence managers’ earnings management?
(Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance, 2024-05-28) Cho, Kang Ho; Patil, Bharat
We revisit the literature on using the economic policy uncertainty index (EPU) to estimate macroeconomic uncertainty1. The extant literature has shown mixed evidence on whether macroeconomic uncertainty affects accounting quality. The EPU reflects unrepresentative political risks and thus is expected to substantially mismeasure economic uncertainty. This study investigates the association between macro uncertainty and earnings management by utilizing a novel and more unbiased measure of macro uncertainty, the gross domestic product (GDP) dispersion, and the volatility index (VIX). We find that firms engage more in earnings management when macroeconomic uncertainty is high, consistent with the notion that investors’ attention is limited due to information asymmetry providing earnings management opportunities. We also document that managers’ earnings management not only involves discretionary accruals but also real earnings management. The results are robust to controlling for firm characteristics, to an alternative measure of macroeconomic uncertainty, and to the endogeneity concern.
Reflections on deep academic–practitioner partnering for generative societal impact
(Strategic Organization, 2024-08-09) Slawinski, Natalie; Brito, Bruna; Brenton, Jennifer; Smith, Wendy
While academics increasingly point to the value of engaged scholarship, we describe a more extreme form which we label as “deep partnering”—a long-term, holistic, and dynamic collaboration between academics and practitioners to achieve shared goals. Deep partnering involves interdependent and evolving interactions between academics and practitioners over an extended time period. While such relationships enable generative impact on important issues, these relationships remain challenging as academics spend time in the practitioners’ complex worlds, surfacing paradoxes due to the partners’ conflicting roles, time horizons, and goals, as well as uncertainty in the partnership’s evolution. In this essay, we reflect on our experiences working closely with practitioners on a program of research over more than a decade in order to expand on a deep partnering approach, including the paradoxes and emotional discomfort it surfaces, and we identify practices to navigate these paradoxes.
Director compensation as an inducement for director capital
(Corporate Ownership and Control, 2024-07-22) Bragaw, Nathan A.; Misangyi, Vilmos F.; Bednar, Michael K.
In the current study, we examine whether the compensation that directors receive to serve on corporate boards has an inducing effect on the market for directors. More specifically, we examine whether director compensation is related to the human and social capital that directors bring to their boards. As part of our examination, we focus on the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), which serves as a type of natural experiment, to show that boards increasingly use compensation as a way to attract director capital. We, therefore, tested our hypotheses on a cross-sectional panel sample of 1,704 S&P 1500 firms over the period of 1998 to 2006 (8,332 firm-year observations) using generalized least squares (GLS) regression correcting for first-order auto-regression. Our findings suggest that inducing effects operate in the market for directors and lend particular support to the importance of the resource provision function of boards.
Leveraging the Dominant Pole: How Champions of an Industry-Wide Environmental Alliance Navigate Coopetition Paradoxes
(Journal of Management, 2024-05-29) Slawinski, Natalie; Smith, Wendy K.; Van der Byl, Connie A.
Companies increasingly collaborate with competitors to innovate, minimize risks, and address sustainability crises. However, these alliances often falter or fail due to challenges arising from coopetition paradoxes—contradictory yet interdependent tensions between competition and cooperation. Extant research predominantly focuses on addressing these paradoxes through seeking a stable balance between competition and cooperation; however, we lack in-depth processual understandings of how to navigate these paradoxes as they shift over time. To address this gap in the literature, we analyze longitudinal data over the 3 years it took to establish Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), the unlikely alliance across 13 competitive Canadian oil sands companies to improve their industry’s environmental performance. We noted the role of competition, which we label as the dominant pole—the more powerful of two paradoxical poles—and identify leveraging the dominant pole as a core mechanism for navigating intensifying coopetition paradoxes. Rather than diminishing the dominant competition pole, alliance champions leveraged competition to enable cooperation aided by a paradox mindset. These findings reorient coopetition scholarship away from seeking stability between the two forces, toward a processual understanding of how to navigate the shifting coopetition paradoxes in alliances over time.
Working at the Top of Their Capabilities: How Teamwork Support Attenuates Leader Role Conflict
(Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2024-01-11) Carter, Kameron M.; Astrove, Stacy L.; Firth, Brady M.; Stewart, Greg L.; Solimeo, Samantha L.
Objective: To understand whether team member support reduces team leader stress. Method: In Phase 1, we used hierarchical linear modeling with survey data and administrative records from 45 Veterans Health Administration teams (73 providers and 228 associated members) to investigate how teamwork support mitigates leader stress. In Phase 2, we adopted a parallel/simultaneous mixed methods design, utilizing open- and close-ended responses from 267 additional Veterans Health Administration providers. With the mixed methods design, we first analyzed open-ended responses using directed content analysis and hypothesis coding. Next, we transformed our codes into counts and compared them with closed-ended responses to understand whether teamwork support allows leaders to engage in work aligned with their qualifications. Results: As predicted, providers’ role conflict corresponded with decreased performance under low teamwork support, but this negative relationship was attenuated with high teamwork support as such support allows leaders to focus on tasks they are uniquely qualified to perform. Conclusions: These findings emphasize the facilitative nature of teams in supporting leaders: Followers provide teamwork support that helps leaders navigate role conflict by allowing leaders to work on tasks consistent with their qualifications. Highlights and Implications: - Team leaders experience greater role conflict compared to team members during team-based empowerment initiatives. - Teamwork support from team members attenuates the negative effect of leader role conflict on performance. - Although leaders might drive team performance, team member contributions should also be acknowledged as an important aspect of the leader–team relationship. - Drawing from a real organizational issue, we found that having a high-functioning team allows leaders to work on tasks that align with their capabilities.
Harder Than You Think: Misconceptions about Logging Food with Photos versus Text
(Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2022-07-26) Silverman, Jackie; Barasch, Alixandra; Diehl, Kristin; Zauberman, Gal
Consumers lose more weight when they log their food consumption more consistently, yet they face challenges in doing so. We investigate how the modality of food logging—whether people record what they eat by taking photos versus writing text—affects their anticipated and actual logging experience and behavior. We find that consumers are more likely to adopt and anticipate better experiences with photo-based food logging tools over text-based tools. However, in a weeklong field study, these expectations reveal themselves to be inaccurate; once participants start logging, they find taking photos (vs. writing text) to be more difficult, log less of what they eat, and are less likely to continue using the logging tool. These findings contribute to existing research on how people track goal progress, as well as persistence with and dis-adoption of products. Moreover, our findings provide insights into what might increase the use of products that encourage healthy eating.
Doing good for (maybe) nothing: How reward uncertainty shapes observer responses to prosocial behavior
(Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022-01-06) Silver, Ike; Silverman, Jackie
When firms or individuals stand to benefit from doing good, observers often question their motivations and discount their good deeds. We propose that this attribution process is sensitive not only to the presence of extrinsic incentives, but also to their prior likelihoods. Across eleven studies, observers treat uncertain rewards (vs. equally valuable certain rewards) as weaker signals of extrinsic motivation. Consequently, observers judge actors who do good when facing uncertain incentives as more purely motivated, benevolent, and likable, and they prefer products from brands that incur profit uncertainty when launching CSR initiatives. Even actors who are handsomely rewarded for doing good are judged favorably if rewards were uncertain at the outset. These effects may stem from more general processes of counterfactual attribution: Actors who do good knowing they might not be rewarded for it may seem more like they would have been willing to act without any incentive at all.
Hot streak! Inferences and predictions about goal adherence
(Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2023-10-03) Silverman, Jackie; Barasch, Alixandra P.; Small, Deborah A.
When do people make optimistic forecasts about goal adherence? Nine preregistered studies find that a recent streak of goal-consistent behavior increases the predicted likelihood that the individual will persist, compared to various other patterns holding the rate of goal adherence constant. This effect is due to perceiving a higher level of commitment following a streak. Accordingly, the effect is larger when the behavior requires commitment to stick with it, compared to when the same behavior is enjoyable in its own right. Furthermore, the effect is weaker in the presence of another diagnostic cue of commitment: when the individual has a high historic rate of goal adherence. People also behave strategically in ways consistent with these inferences (e.g., are less likely to adopt costly goal support tools following a streak, choose partners with recent streaks for joint goal pursuit). Together, these results demonstrate the significance of streaky behavior for forecasting goal adherence.
On or Off Track: How (Broken) Streaks Affect Consumer Decisions
(Journal of Consumer Research, 2022-06-30) Silverman, Jackie; Barasch, Alixandra
New technologies increasingly enable consumers to track their behaviors over time, making them more aware of their “streaks”—behaviors performed consecutively three or more times—than ever before. Our research explores how these logged streaks affect consumers’ decisions to engage in the same behavior subsequently. In seven studies, we find that intact streaks highlighted via behavioral logs increase consumers’ subsequent engagement in that behavior, relative to when broken streaks are highlighted. Importantly, this effect is independent of actual past behavior and depends solely on how that behavior is represented within the log. This is because consumers consider maintaining a logged streak to be a meaningful goal in and of itself. In line with this theory, the effect of intact (vs. broken) logged streaks is amplified when consumers attribute a break in the streak to themselves rather than to external factors, and attenuated when consumers can “repair” a broken streak. Our research provides actionable insights for companies seeking to benefit from highlighting consumers’ streaks in various consequential domains (e.g., fitness, learning) without incurring a cost (e.g., reduced engagement or abandonment) when those streaks are broken.
The Prediction Order Effect: People Are More Likely to Choose Improbable Outcomes in Later Predictions
(Management Science, 2024-03-01) Silverman, Jackie; Barnea, Uri
People often need to predict the outcomes of future events. We investigate the influence of order on such forecasts. Six preregistered studies (n = 7,955) show that people are more likely to forecast improbable outcomes (e.g., that an “underdog” will win a game) for predictions they make later versus earlier within a sequence of multiple predictions. This effect generalizes across several contexts and persists when participants are able to revise their predictions as well as when they are incentivized to make correct predictions. We propose that this effect is driven by people’s assumption that improbable outcomes are bound to occur at some point within small sets of independent events (i.e., “belief in the law of small numbers”). Accordingly, we find that the effect is attenuated when the statistical independence of events is made salient to forecasters both through the nature of the predictions themselves (i.e., when the events are from distinct domains) and through directly informing them about statistical independence. These findings have notable practical implications, as policy makers and businesses have the ability to control the order in which people evaluate and predict future events.
‘I’m Scared to Death to Try It on My Own’: I-Poems and the complexities of religious housing support for people on the US sex offender registry
(Anti-Trafficking Review, 2023-04-26) Leon, Chrysanthi S.; Buckridge, Maggie; Herdoíza, Michaela
In the US, street-based sex workers and people convicted of sex offences are both ‘special populations’, often with additional conditions of community supervision. People convicted of sex offences experience a complicated mix of assistance and surveillance as they re-enter society post-conviction, including numerous restrictions on housing and employment. As a result, they are especially likely to experience homelessness upon release. This article uses I-Poems drawn from interviews with volunteers and professionals who navigate the obstacles to re-entry that govern people on the sex offender registry. We focus on people with religious affiliations (n=38) who provide urgent support during the re-entry process. I-poems are a feminist technique for analysing qualitative data that forefronts the voices of people not often heard and distils complex experiences into accessible narratives. While few in our study overtly exploited re-entering persons on the registry, most support was problematic in subtler ways: we found that re-entering registrants are asked to accept constrained choices involving labour, religious participation, and romantic and other personal relationships in order to receive assistance. Given the secondary stigma attached to work with people convicted of sex offences, and the obscurity within in which many of these religiously-affiliated programmes operate, I-Poems both humanise and reveal the complexities of coercion, religious calling, and supportive housing.
When do I ponder? The role of elaboration in counterfactual thinking
(Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 2023-07-13) Sivaraman, Anuradha; Ford, Weixing; Sundaram, Suresh
The counterfactual thought such as “If only I had…” has a powerful impact on people's subsequent behavioral intentions. The literature has documented what may happen with CFT. But little has been done to investigate how CFT produces these effects. In this research, three studies provided evidence to show that elaboration rather than priming is the mechanism for CFT to have an effect on behavioral intentions; and the factors such as argument strength, outcome severity, and goal valence may interfere with such counterfactual effects. These theoretical contributions to the CFT literature offer important managerial implications and help marketers determine optimal persuasion strategies to influence consumers' information processing style.
Shifting focus: The influence of affective diversity on team creativity
(Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2019-11-03) Emich, Kyle J.; Vincent, Lynne C.
We propose and test a theory of how diversity in a team’s initial affective composition impacts its creativity by examining how team members’ qualitatively different affective states converge to influence their team’s creative process and outcomes. Three studies involving 1625 participants on 427 teams support an activation-regulatory focus explanation. Team members experiencing activated promotion-focused affect – whether positive (e.g. happiness) or negative (e.g. anger) – tend to focus their teams on idea generation, resulting in the selection of more novel ideas. Alternatively, team members experiencing activated prevention-focused affect (e.g. tension, fear) shift their teams toward idea selection, resulting in reduced idea novelty. When multiple affective states exist within the same team, more activated states dominate the creative process. Prevention-focused states also tend to dominate promotion-focused states with a few exceptions. We discuss our findings in terms of their implications for the study of team creativity and affective convergence and divergence in teams.

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