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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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.
Well, I feel differently: The importance of considering affective patterns in groups
(Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2020-02-26) Emich, Kyle J.
While it is widely recognized that groups represent strong contexts that influence the affective states of their members, this convergent framing has resulted in the neglect of the systematic study of what occurs when group members' affective states differ. This is an unfortunate oversight. The study of how group members' qualitatively different affective states influence their mindsets and behaviors and interact to drive collective group processes and has the potential to greatly inform broader theory on affective and social influence in groups. To address group affective divergence in the context of established convergence processes, I reframe the consideration of group affect around group affective patterns. Then, I draw on the broader group's literature to set a research agenda for the study of group affective patterns. This agenda allows for the more nuanced examination of how multiple discrete affective states influence each other and align with other group member attributes (e.g., personality, attitudes) to impact group processes and outcomes.
Mapping 50 Years of Small Group Research Through Small Group Research
(Small Group Research, 2020-07-13) Emich, Kyle J.; Kumar, Satish; Lu, Li; Norder, Kurt; Pandey, Nitesh
At its 50-year milestone, we assess the Small Group Research (SGR) corpus to reflect on the development of group research over the past half century. To do this, we examine the evolution of the corpus’s context and content. We examine its context by assessing its impact, which journals it communicates with, and the internationality of its authors. We examine its content—the topics discussed in its articles—using keyword clustering and co-occurrence network analysis. We identify 10 research communities and track their relationships over the four editorial periods associated with the SGR corpus (lagged 2 years for influence): 1970–1981, 1982–1991, 1992–2010, and 2011–2019. Our analyses indicate that the global and local study of group dynamics has fluctuated over time and that phenomenologically based topics connect theoretical topics and stimulate theoretical development. We also provide three criteria to identify communities and topics of group research most likely to benefit from future integration.
A comprehensive analysis of the integration of team research between sport psychology and management
(Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2020-06-13) Emich, Kyle J.; Norder, Kurt; Lu, Li; Sawhney, Aman
Both sports and organizations rely on teams. As such, the sport psychology and management literatures have contributed greatly to our understanding of team functioning. Despite this, previous reviews based on subsets of articles in these literatures indicate a lack of communication between them. In this article, we assess the state of integration between the entirety of the sport psychology and management literatures on teams by considering the full set of interconnected team articles in the SCOPUS database (6974 articles over 69 years). We use this data to conduct a combination of citation network analysis and content analysis via topic modeling to evaluate conceptual integration. The data show that interdisciplinary discussion between these two fields is lacking, particularly regarding the integration of sport psychology into management research. Whereas 7% of references to team articles in sport psychology come from management journals, only 0.6% of team references in management journals come from sport psychology. Despite this, longitudinal analysis indicates that in the last 10 years the rate of integration between these fields is increasing. We identify specific topics that have accounted for this integration and suggest topics ripe for future integration.
Setting the programmatic agenda: A comprehensive bibliometric overview of team mechanism research
(Journal of Business Research, 2022-10-29) Lu, Li; Norder, Kurt A.; Sawhney, Aman; Emich, Kyle J.
Team mediating mechanisms are vital to team functioning as they explain how member attributes transform into collective outcomes. Yet, the field exploring them has grown vast and fragmented. This disunity indicates a lack of intellectual structure, preventing the development of general knowledge. We suggest that two aspects of this literature may contribute to this issue: its content division into affective, behavioral, cognitive, motivational, and perceptual categories, and its division into distinct scholarly communities. Using the 10,220 connected teams articles in the Scopus database, from 1952 to 2021, we present the first objective architectural map of this literature. We find that it does a good job concurrently examining different categories of mediating mechanisms, with only a few limitations. Chiefly, more research on affective team mechanisms is needed, especially considering their relationship to cognitive team mechanisms, and the top management team and sport team communities need to further integrate with other communities.
Team Composition Revisited: Expanding the Team Member Attribute Alignment Approach to Consider Patterns of More Than Two Attributes
(Organizational Research Methods, 2023-05-03) Emich, Kyle J.; McCourt, Michael; Lu, Li; Ferguson, Amanda; Peterson, Randall
The attribute alignment approach to team composition allows researchers to assess variation in team member attributes, which occurs simultaneously within and across individual team members. This approach facilitates the development of theory testing the proposition that individual members are themselves complex systems comprised of multiple attributes and that the configuration of those attributes affects team-level processes and outcomes. Here, we expand this approach, originally developed for two attributes, by describing three ways researchers may capture the alignment of three or more team member attributes: (a) a geometric approach, (b) a physical approach accentuating ideal alignment, and (c) an algebraic approach accentuating the direction (as opposed to magnitude) of alignment. We also provide examples of the research questions each could answer and compare the methods empirically using a synthetic dataset assessing 100 teams of three to seven members across four attributes. Then, we provide a practical guide to selecting an appropriate method when considering team-member attribute patterns by answering several common questions regarding applying attribute alignment. Finally, we provide code (https://github.com/kjem514/Attribute-Alignment-Code) and apply this approach to a field data set in our appendices.
Team Composition Revisited: A Team Member Attribute Alignment Approach
(Organizational Research Methods, 2021-10-18) Emich, Kyle J.; Lu, Li; Ferguson, Amanda; Peterson, Randall S.; McCourt, Michael
Research methods for studying team composition tend to employ either a variable-centered or person-centered approach. The variable-centered approach allows scholars to consider how patterns of attributes between team members influence teams, while the person-centered approach allows scholars to consider how variation in multiple attributes within team members influences subgroup formation and its effects. Team composition theory, however, is becoming increasingly sophisticated, assuming variation on multiple attributes both within and between team members—for example, in predicting how a team functions differently when its most assertive members are also optimistic rather than pessimistic. To support this new theory, we propose an attribute alignment approach, which complements the variable-centered and person-centered approaches by modeling teams as matrices of their members and their members’ attributes. We first demonstrate how to calculate attribute alignment by determining the vector norm and vector angle between team members’ attributes. Then, we demonstrate how the alignment of team member personality attributes (neuroticism and agreeableness) affects team relationship conflict. Finally, we discuss the potential of using the attribute alignment approach to enrich broader team research.
Better Together: Member Proactivity Is Better for Team Performance When Aligned with Conscientiousness
(Academy of Management Discoveries, 2023-05-09) Emich, Kyle; Lu, Li; Ferguson, Amanda J.; Peterson, Randall; McCourt, Michael; Martin, Sean; McClean, Elizabeth; Woodruff, Col. Todd
Proactivity, the tendency to create change in the work environment, typically improves team performance. This relationship is far from perfect, however. We explore inconsistencies in the team proactivity literature to shed light on an important question – when is member proactivity beneficial or dysfunctional for teams? First, we consider the composition of member proactivity at the team level and whether a simple ‘more is better’ heuristic neglects a more complex relationship linking member proactivity to team coordination and performance. Second, we explore whether proactivity is better when aligned with another individual difference focused on the propensity to plan and coordinate with others (i.e., conscientiousness). In two studies, we compare traditional additive and configurational compositional approaches to these two attributes with a new attribute alignment approach, allowing us to examine the co-occurrence of proactivity and conscientiousness within some team members relative to others. First, we find that team member proactivity-conscientiousness alignment (P-C alignment) predicts the performance of MBA consulting teams better than the other team composition models we considered. Then, we replicate this finding in a laboratory simulation, finding that it occurs because P-C alignment improves team coordination. Our results demonstrate that member proactivity is most effective for the team when it aligns with conscientiousness.
From microbe to metaphor: virus-like problems in organizations
(Frontiers in Psychology, 2023-07-20) Sleesman, Dustin J.; Cronin, Cory E.
Despite the important role of problem-solving in organizations, our understanding of the fundamental nature of problems is limited. To generate insights and discussion on this topic, we introduce the metaphor of a “virus-like” problem, which is a special kind of problem that often escapes the awareness of organizational leaders. Virus-like problems differ from other problems in organizations because, just like actual viruses, they are hidden, their source is difficult to identify, and they can quickly spread to others. Integrating the public health and organizational psychology fields, we draw lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and how it was (mis) managed by public officials to offer a new perspective on problems in organizations and offer practical ideas for how leaders can address virus-like problems of their own.
When Majority Men Respect Minority Women, Groups Communicate Better: A Neurological Exploration
(Small Group Research, 2023-05-24) Amey, Rachel; Emich, Kyle J.; Forbes, Chad E.
Groups must leverage their members’ diverse knowledge to make optimal decisions. However, the gender composition of a group may affect this ability, particularly because solo status female members (one female grouped with males) are generally allocated lower status than their male counterparts, so their knowledge is more likely to be ignored. Whereas most previous work suggests ways solo status women can increase their status; instead, we propose that groups communicate better when men give their female teammate appropriate respect. We examine this in mixed-gender groups working on a hidden profile task while wearing wireless EEGs to measure live neural activity. We find that groups who solve the problem correctly are more likely to contain majority male members with more approach-oriented mindsets, operationalized as neural alpha asymmetry, as they respect their female teammate more. Thus, we provide evidence that neural activity is partially responsible for whether mixed-gender groups make optimal decisions.
Today's Most Critical Leadership Skill: Navigating Paradoxes
(Leader to Leader, 2022-12-07) Lewis, Marianne W.; Smith, Wendy K.
The authors, well-known for their research into the concept of paradox, explain that “It is one thing to label challenges as paradoxical and another to know what to do about them. In our own research, we have explored that question in depth over the last 25 years. We bring that research together into an integrated model.” Within Figure 1, “The Language of Tensions,” they make the following observations: ‘‘Tensions include all types of situations where alternative expectations and demands are in opposition… Dilemmas present opposing alternatives, each option offering a logical solution on its own. Leadership problems and challenges often show up for us as a dilemma, where we feel pressure to choose between alternative options… Paradoxes are interdependent, persistent contradictions that lurk within our presenting dilemmas. They note that in their research, they “identify four organizational challenges associated with underlying paradoxes. We describe them as obligation (performing paradoxes), innovation (learning paradoxes), globalization (belonging paradoxes) and coordination (organizing paradoxes).” They also describe ‘‘The Paradox System. These integrated sets of tools enable both/and thinking. As memory aid, think ABCD: tools that shift how we think (assumptions) and how we feel (comfort), as we build static structures (boundaries), while enabling adaptive practices (dynamics).
Tiered discounts as multiple reference points for spending
(Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2022-12-13) Cheng, Andong; Ross, Gretchen R.
Tiered discounts offer larger discounts as consumers meet higher spending thresholds (e.g., spend $100+, receive 10% off; spend $200+, receive 20% off). This research investigates how consumers treat these multiple dollar thresholds as reference points for spending. We find that tiered discounts with smaller increments between thresholds encourage higher spending compared to those with larger increments. This effect occurs because consumers treat thresholds as motivational spending goals when the distance to higher thresholds is smaller (vs. larger). Consistent with this reasoning, signaling goal progress (i.e., displaying cart amount while shopping) attenuates the spending difference smaller versus larger increment sizes yield. Additionally, the effect of tier increment size on spending is more prominent for maximizers. From a theoretical perspective, this work contributes to our understanding of how individuals process multiple reference points within a single promotion and identifies that spending thresholds in price promotions may be treated as spending goals. From a managerial perspective, this work investigates the relationship between tiered discount design and consumer spending.

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