Research

Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Chair in Organisational Behaviour; Professor of Organisational Behaviour

Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship

Dana Kanze, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing gender inequalities worldwide, disproportionately affecting women in terms of labour market outcomes. According to the MGI, women accounted for 54% of global job losses associated with the crisis: despite representing 39% of the labour force; if counter-actions are not undertaken to promote gender parity, global GDP growth is estimated to be $1 trillion lower by 2030 (McKinsey Global Institute 2020). Caretaking imbalance has emerged as a contributing risk factor, with research conducted by the IMF on the first nine months of the crisis identifying women (versus men) with children under the age of 12 as being significantly less likely to remain employed (International Monetary Fund 2021). Researchers have also speculated that women may be disproportionately disadvantaged by the lack of rapport-building and feedback-getting opportunities inherent in virtual and hybrid work arrangements. Taken together, our two-pronged research goals are to (1) document any gendered career consequences of COVID 19 across leadership levels of managers in varying caretaker capacities and working arrangements and (2) investigate the organisational practices and conditions that may moderate any adverse effects we uncover.

Julia Langdon, PhD candidate, Organisational Behaviour 

Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour

Individuals who are disabled account for a significant proportion of employable adults. Yet their representation at all levels of employment remains low. We argue that some organizations might be inadvertently undermining inclusion for disabled potential employees by inadvertently communicating identity-threatening signals. Specifically, we explore the psychological experience that different messages – either emphasizing disabled employees’ rights versus organizational values – can have on disabled employees. We aim to provide practical, actionable takeaways for leaders and organizations so that they can effectively improve their appeal to talented, disabled candidates. This research has the potential to provide insights to improve the leadership pipeline of disabled individuals.

Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour

Representation matters because it is a signal that people use to understand whether ‘people like them’ can ascend to the highest levels of leadership. However, the vast majority of organizations lack representation at the top levels of women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and of people who represent the intersections of those identities. While it is of course necessary for organizations to do more to promote individuals from these backgrounds in their leadership pipelines, what happens to the many talented individuals from underrepresented backgrounds who, today, lack role models? In this research, I propose a mindset intervention that might bridge the gap between role models from majority or well represented backgrounds and individuals lower down in the organization from minority or underrepresented backgrounds. If effective, this intervention could help foster meaningful social connections across the identity divide, diversifying the leadership pipeline and senior leaders’ social networks.

Ezgi Ozgumus, PhD candidate, Organisational Behaviour Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour

As women have entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, the social roles they are expected to (and they expect themselves to) embody have expanded asymmetrically relative to those of men (Croft, Schmader, & Block, 2015; England, 2010). We argue that this asymmetric shift in women’s social role demands have psychological implications for how women and men conceptualize their self-systems. This research examines whether women’s expanded repertoire of role responsibilities are associated with women’s (versus men’s) increased perceptions that they have to contribute more of their best to female-typed social roles (e.g., caregiver) to feel good about themselves. As a result, we expect women’s subjective role demands to shape their intentions to pursue formal leadership roles. The ultimate goal of this project is to highlight the role of social role self-demands experienced uniquely by women as limiting their leadership aspirations.

Soo Yun Baik, previously PhD candidate, Organisational Behaviour

This research intends to contribute to the gender leadership literature by investigating culture, specifically, cultural tightness, and follower gender as important situational characteristics influencing female versus male leaders’ leadership behaviour. Extensive scholarship has elucidated how gender affects leadership styles according to existing gender stereotypes; however, there have not been comparable theoretical and empirical developments regarding an equally important determinant of social expectations: culture.

Garrett Brady, previously PhD candidate, Organisational Behaviour

The research is examining the impact on socio-economic status (SES), on the emergence of leadership status. The project will helps us understand a fundamental leadership question – ‘what role does social class play in sculpting our strategies towards obtaining and maintaining positions of leadership?’ By building on evolutionary theories of leadership our work contributes to research and offers theoretical advancement to the role social class and developmental period (i.e., age) has in imprinting the approach individuals develop in their quest to obtain and maintain influence over others.

Herminia Ibarra, Professor, Organisational Behaviour
Raina Brands, Assistant Professor, Organisational Behaviour
Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor, Organisational Behaviour

Women make up 60% of the global workforce in the financial services industry, yet they hold only 19% of senior leadership roles, and even fewer board seats and c-suite positions. Structural solutions aimed at addressing the attrition of women from the leadership track and reducing the bias women leaders face have been proposed, but little consideration has been given to the informal realms of organizational life.

The purpose of this research is to examine how informal interactions that take place in the workplace affect the representation of women in leadership in finance. Specifically, this research seeks to examine the co-evolution of social networks and leadership, to examine how informal relationships differentially affect men’s and women’s (1) leadership aspirations and (2) leadership reputations

Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor, Organisational Behaviour

How do leaders address sizeable public failures on diversity? The UK government has offered diversity scholars an unprecedented opportunity to investigate this question. By April 2018, every organization in the UK that has 250 employees or more must submit a report summarizing its gender pay gap – approximately 8,000 reports (which will include one from LBS).

How will organizations address pay disparities? Will they make changes to achieve greater gender equality? Who speaks to address these concerns? An initial review of already submitted reports indicates that some of these reports include messages from organizational leaders (CEOs, Board members, heads of HR) but some do not, some include details on how the organization will rectify the gender pay gap but some do not, some go beyond gender to address other dimensions of diversity such as race and sexual orientation and some do not. In other words, there will soon be written reports addressing the same diversity failure (the presence of a gender pay gap) with a myriad of responses to it across a large sample of organization types and industries.

My goal is to construct a database that summarizes the numerical data and codes these reports in order to facilitate investigations of meaningful research questions that arise from the data held therein. By doing so, I will be able to identify who speaks on issues of diversity, how organizations say they will address their gender pay gaps, whether this has consequences for the organization (in terms of stock price immediately after the report’s release), and by tracking the organizations and pay gap reports over time I will be able to assess whether companies follow through on their initial 2018 promises. This data will also be a fruitful source of ideas for empirical research. As the evidence emerges for how organizations claim they will address their gender pay gaps,

I will supplement this coding with experiments that assess whether prospective employees view the most commonly used claims as genuine and effective in addressing the issue. This additional data will offer key insights to practitioners, on what works best when it comes to recovering after a public diversity failure.

Oriane Georgeac, PhD Candidate, Organisational Behaviour

Organisations increasingly face the challenge of demonstrating their commitment to diversity. Doing so often requires organisations to argue in favour of diversity in a diversity statement. The most popular argument – or business case - for diversity argues that diversity matters because it is instrumental to business performance.

But when diversity fails to deliver, how does the business case for diversity influence leader commitment? Study 1 shows that an instrumental approach to diversity increases leader performance expectations for diverse teams.

Study 2 draws a casual link between exposure to business case arguments and decreased support for diversity when a diverse team underperforms.

Study 3 investigates whether alternative cases stressing the fairness value of diversity can better sustain support for diversity when diversity fails to deliver.

The research offers new insights to how organisations can generate consistent support for diversity in the face of performance contingencies.

Raina Brands

Individuals who aspire to top leadership roles rely on a network of informal mentors to guide their development, shaping them to fit the mould for leadership at their organization. But mentors may find it more difficult to guide women than men because ideal leaders are usually defined in masculine terms. This is especially true in organizations where there are few women in leadership, and thus where neither mentors nor women aspiring to leadership roles have a shared prototype for women in leadership.

This research examines the extent to which a lack of a shared prototype for women-in-leadership affects women's progression to leadership roles, via the informal socialization process. The goal of this work is to design and test an intervention to improve the informal socialization of aspiring women leaders, with discernible effects on women's progression.

Raina Brands

Although women make up 60% of the global workforce in the financial services industry, they hold only 19% of senior leadership roles, and even fewer board seats and c-suite positions. Structural solutions aimed at addressing the attrition of women from the leadership track and reducing the bias women leaders face have been proposed, but little consideration has been given to the informal realms of organizational life. The purpose of this research is to examine how informal interactions that take place in the workplace affect the representation of women in leadership in finance. Specifically, this research seeks to examine the co-evolution of social networks and leadership, to examine how informal relationships differentially affect men’s and women’s (1) leadership aspirations and (2) leadership reputations.

Randall S Peterson, Aneeta Rattan, Oriane Georgeac

Why should organizations care about diversity? This is a question that business leaders are tasked with answering, both for their constituents within the organization and for public audiences. What do they say, and how effective are their answers for actually fostering welcoming environments for members of underrepresented groups?

The most prevalent case for diversity in organizations within the research literature is the business case. The typical “business case” for diversity in the workplace argues that f should promote diversity because of the economic value it yields, including higher financial performance (Credit Suisse Research Institute, 2012; Joy, Carter, Wagner, & Narayanan, 2007; Erhardt, Werbel, & Shrader, 2003), increased group effectiveness as a result of greater informational diversity (Eagly, in press; Galbreath, 2011), competitive advantage thanks to stronger links with the customer base, etc. (Brammer, Millington, & Pavelin, 2009; Eagly, in press). As a real-world illustration, the Global Director of Diversity of Facebook argues on the company’s website that diversity is “good for our products and for our businesses”.

Eliot Sherman

It is a truth universally acknowledged that leadership remains a predominately male domain, despite the widespread gender integration of the workforce. For example, in 2015, 25% of senior-level managers and just 4% of CEOs in the S&P 500 were female (Catalyst 2015). While numerous papers have examined the causes of this leadership gap, one explanation remains relatively understudied despite its ubiquity: Informal expectations regarding face time, or the extent to which an employee is physically present in the workplace.

Employees who put in more face time are perceived to be superior candidates for promotion, potentially irrespective of their actual productivity (Elsbach, Cable, and Sherman 2010). This may be problematic, however, insofar as women in dual-earner couples perform a disproportionate amount of child care and household labour (Coltrane 2000). These responsibilities restrict the amount of time that women can be physically present in the workplace, as compared to similarly situated men, and may therefore impede their advancement into leadership positions even if they are able to remain as productive, or more productive, than their male counterparts by completing some of their work remotely.

Accordingly, the goal of this research is to design and implement an experiment within an organization to test whether a genuine reduction in the need for face time is positively associated with female advancement into leadership positions.

Aneeta Rattan

Research has documented meaningful bottom line benefits for organizations that have socially diverse leadership. For example, companies that have gender-diverse boards outperform those that have all-male boards in stock market performance (Credit Suisse Research Institute, 2012; Joy, Carter, Wagner, & Narayanan, 2007). Racial diversity in corporate leadership is similarly associated with better firm financial performance (Erhardt, Werbel, & Shrader, 2003).

This body of research has largely examined how diverse leadership affects organizations’ financial performance. The present research proposal seeks to investigate how diverse organizational leadership may affect employees’ social attitudes in the workplace.

Margaret Ormiston

Practitioners and the business media are regularly noting the difficult experiences of female leaders in high-level positions (e.g., Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In); for example, an article by CNN (November 14, 2013) discusses employees’ continued preference for male bosses. However, there is little empirical research examining the experience and impact of women in top leadership roles, such as chief executive officers (CEOs) of Fortune 1000 companies. One reason is because historically there are few female CEOs in Fortune 1000 companies.

Another reason is because top leaders are notoriously difficult to study. Indeed, strategic leadership researchers note the difficulty of conducting this research because top leaders generally do not submit themselves to psychological assessments (Cannella & Monroe, 1997; Hambrick, 2007). However, understanding the experience and impact of these female leaders is important; not only for obvious practical reasons but also to understand whether the decades of strategic leadership research on top (male) leaders generalizes to top female leaders.

Judy Qiu, PhD Candidate, Organisational Behaviour

Selin Kesebir, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour

The quality of relationships between employees and their supervisors plays a vital role in organizational functioning. Since employees’ relationship quality with their supervisor is linked to their commitment, success, and advancement in an organization, employees may engage in social comparisons to assess the quality of their relationships with their supervisors relative to other employees’. We find that compared to men, women tend to believe that their supervisor relationships are worse than those of their co-workers. Importantly, female subordinates’ perception of having relatively lower quality relationships may be inaccurate, and appears inconsistent with the objective quality of leader-subordinate relationships. Our research demonstrates a novel gender difference in how subordinates view their relationships with supervisors and examines the antecedents and consequences of these differences. Lastly, we aim to develop interventions to minimize these perceptual inaccuracies and maximize the individual and organizational benefits of effective leader-employee relationships.

Eva Lin, PhD candidate, Organisational Behaviour
Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour

When someone wants to enact a change, their perception of the possible alternative options is key to shaping whether they will take action towards the desired goal. When it comes to challenging career decisions for individuals, or change problems for organizations, why do some people see more options, while others, in essentially the same position, see few? In this research, I examine whether people’s beliefs about the malleability of human characteristics shape their perception of options.

First, I investigate whether people’s mindsets shape the possible career options available to them when considering a career change. Second, I expand my research to the organizational level where I study how organizational leaders’ mindsets shape the options they perceive in navigating organizational challenges related to diversity. Finally, I explore how the perception of options, as shaped by mindsets, influence behavioral change at both the individual and organizational levels. The proposed research contributes novel insights into how people’s beliefs can shape the possibilities they perceive and pave the path to achieve meaningful change.

Sayan Sarkar, PhD candidate, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

The purpose of this study is to advance understanding of how entrepreneurs can influence venture performance through communicating themselves and their actions through linguistic devices to external stakeholders. I plan to examine conditions under which communication strategies traditionally labelled as labelled as impression management complement, rather than substitute, objectively-determinable venture performance in raising capital from investors. In particular, my focus in on the use of metaphorical expressions to convey the role of the entrepreneur and their entrepreneurial strategies. Using a mixed empirical design – combining large-sample data from crowdfunding platforms and field experiments – I examine two central questions. First, do metaphorical expressions in entrepreneurial communication substitute, or complement, the objectively-determinable growth potential of a venture in investor persuasion? Second, what is the nature of interaction among different categories of metaphors? Do they enhance or substitute each other’s effect on investor behaviour and, by extension, capital-raising outcomes?

The study has the potential to inform extant discourse on leadership, especially in an entrepreneurship context, from both organizational behaviour and strategy standpoints. To OB, it adds insights about a novel route through which leadership communication can effect firm performance: namely through investor persuasion, a mechanism external to the organization. To strategy, it challenges existing totems about impression management in its effort to examine how figurative language might improve, rather than impede, outcomes for the venture and the entrepreneur.

Kira Choi, PhD candidate, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

The purpose is to generate one or more research papers on the topic of hiring, which would help us better understand the process through which firms can successfully recruit leaders from the external labor market. In the past, leaders were mostly nurtured within the firms, progressing through multiple chains of the corporate ladder and landing in managerial positions. However, we now live in a world where employee mobility is becoming so common that when the time comes to name a new leader, more and more firms look outside their boundaries. External hires often come with the right kind of experience, fresh perspective and cutting-edge approach to the relevant job, benefiting the firm in the long term.

Freek Vermeulen, Professor, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

One of the key tasks of the leadership of any company is to set the overall strategic direction of the firm. However, subsequently, this strategic direction needs to be communicated to employees and other stakeholders, such as investors and the wider financial community. Perhaps the most prevalent form in which this happens in practice is through presentations by the company’s CEO. Frequently, these presentations contain some form of visuals (e.g., Powerpoint, Kaplan 2011). However, we have surprisingly little research on the role and influence of such CEO presentations. With this project,

I intend to study the use and influence of strategy frameworks in a company’s communication to the financial market. I want to study this in the context of acquisition announcements. Public companies, shortly after an acquisition announcement, often engage in a conference call with analysts in which the CEO (and sometimes a few other members of the top management team) explain the nature and objectives of the acquisition in a presentation. These calls with analysts, tied to a particular acquisition, will be my unit of analysis. I intend to distinguish between calls with and without a visual presentation in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.

Xi Zou

It has been long established that the self-concept is a dynamic structure. A wealth of psychological theories and empirical evidence has shown that different aspects of self-concepts are often expressed across various social interactions. In this project, we seek to explore whether effective leaders are those who can fluently express different aspects of the self across various relationships and social interactions. We seek to establish a new conception of the self: Self-concept Fluidity.

This construct captures the extent to which a person can flexibly and fluently express various aspects of self across social environments and over time. In this project, we will take a multi-method approach to establish this new construct and examine its power in predicting leadership effectiveness.

Randall S Peterson

This research is part of an ongoing project comparing how team leadership practices vary around the world. We generate three important insights for the understanding of cross-cultural team leadership.

First, we demonstrate a significant misunderstanding in the literature, primarily driven by Western-centric research practices, about how team leaders operate in the Gulf region and in Asia. Second, we document culturally-based similarities and differences in leadership practices, and in expectations of effective leaders, by comparing Face (e.g., China), Honor (e.g., Qatar, the South of the USA), and Dignity (the North of the USA) cultures.

Finally, by comparing leaders embedded in different cultural and ideological histories, we have been able to generate important insights into how team leaders yield and share authority in their teams.

Andrew Likierman

Why study judgement?

Organisations have a lot riding on whether a leader has good judgement. The difference between good and poor judgement has often been the difference between prosperity and failure. In the case of military leaders, the stakes are as high as the difference between life and death. Judgement has been a subject in philosophy for thousands of years, with ideas that are still quoted from Aristotle, Socrates and Sophocles in the classical Greek tradition, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius among Romans through the Enlightenment with Descartes, Kant, Locke and Voltaire.

Bearing in mind the importance attached to judgement today (“judgement” is used in this proposal as the shorthand for “good judgement”) and its important role over the centuries, there appears to be puzzlingly little in the current management literature about how to assess whether a leader (or indeed anyone else) has judgement.

Hemant Kakkar, previously PhD candidate
Niro Sivanathan, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour

We are interested in examining why dominant-authoritarian leaders attract support despite the presence of other admired-respected leaders. Although evolutionary psychology supports dominance and prestige as viable routes for attaining influential leadership positions, extant research lacks theoretical clarity for when such dominant leaders are preferred. Across multiple large-scale studies within organisations, spanning different cultures, we aim to provide robust evidence for how situational uncertainty (economic and competitive), affect individuals’ psychological feelings of lack-of-control, resulting in greater preference for dominant leaders. This research offers important theoretical advancements for the situational shifts in preference for and resulting emergence of dominant leaders within organizations.

Richard Jolly, Randall S Peterson, Shruti Bhutada

Some 2/3rd of those who are identified as having significant management talent at one point in their career, fail significantly over the subsequent 5 years. The research on the causes of executive derailment start in the 1970s and have seen many changes as some causes of derailment remain consistent (e.g., arrogance/overconfidence) and others rise and fall (e.g., overreliance on a single mentor was big in the 1970s and has faded almost entirely by the 1990s). Our proposal is to investigate the causes of derailment at different levels of seniority (first supervisory level; middle management; and senior executives) in today’s organisations.

As organisations increasingly rely on social capital (the ability to get things done through other people), rather than human capital (knowledge and expertise) in an ever more complex internal and external environment, my hypothesis is that derailment is increasingly going to be a risk for executives that are ineffective at building relationships and coping with ambiguity. This is only likely to accelerate as the ‘Millennial’ generation steps up into management positions.

Anna Steinhage

This project investigates the role of emotions in determining when and why employees use creativity versus unethical behaviours to win internal competitions. We propose that when competition elicits anxiety, employees are more likely to engage in unethical behaviours, but when competition elicits excitement, people are more likely to strive for creative means to win. We test these hypotheses in two field studies with financial services managers. In Study 1, anxiety and excitement – triggered by employment policies – were related to employees’ choices between unethical versus creative behaviours in order to gain a competitive advantage.

Using an experimental design, Study 2 showed that highlighting positive opportunities versus negative threats resulted in feelings of excitement versus anxiety about the competition. These emotions, in turn, were related to managers’ attraction to unethical or innovative behaviours to outperform their competitors.

Naufel Vilcassim
Stephen Anderson-Macdonaldv Christy Lazicky

In this research, we aim to increase our understanding of the leadership qualities of micro and small firm owners in emerging markets. Specifically, we will use a novel “Leadership Potential Index” (LPI) screening tool, in combination with qualitative and quantitative survey approaches, to understand the heterogeneity that exists among leaders of these small firms, including individual differences in motivation, ability, decision making styles, business acumen, professional background and personal history.

Thus, through this research we hope to contribute new insights on how to identify small business owners with greater leadership characteristics and potential to grow their businesses. Investing in the capabilities of promising business leaders could be a cost-effective way of stimulating firm productivity, economic development and market stability – important not only for governments, but also for multinationals seeking to expand their footprint in emerging markets.

Further, this work builds on existing field studies that we are conducting in Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana, hence allowing us to address some of the major challenges in conducting research on business leaders across emerging markets.

Xi Zou

For a long time, founders of new ventures are commonly assumed to be risk-takers, full of creative ideas, and strike to be different. They might be particularly high on the need to be unique, which drives them to choose the path of becoming an entrepreneur over the typical career ladders.

However, in the process of building up the new ventures, founders have to deal with a variety of pressures and constraints, which demand them to manage relationships among their followers, as well as with other key stakeholders of the firm. The willingness and the effectiveness in managing a complex web of relationships is equally, if not more important for new venture success than the original ideas.

Margaret Ormiston

Research on CEO succession indicates that CEO characteristics that signal competence are valued during the CEO selection process. However, less is known about the role of perceptions of trustworthiness when selecting a successor CEO. We investigate a situation in which CEO successor trustworthiness may be critically important to the firm—when the firm has been shown to have engaged in financial misconduct in the past. Drawing on prior research, we argue that perceptions of trustworthiness are influenced by facial appearance, which, in turn, affects CEO selection and reactions to CEO announcements. In an archival study of firms that have announced financial restatements, we find that trustworthy-looking individuals are more likely to be selected as successors and be more favourably perceived by external observers.

Ena Inesi

Psychologists, organisational behaviourists and economists alike have noted the role of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in improving organisational outcomes such as learning and persistence (e.g., Benabou & Tirole, 2003; Lepper & Greene, 1975). The focus of much of this research has been on the results associated with how a person is motivated.

Our research looks at motivation from a new perspective: That is, we are interested in how a person’s level in the organization – leader vs. peer vs. subordinate - affects the degree to which he or she would support a colleague that is intrinsically vs. extrinsically motivated. Said another way: given the benefits associated with intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, are leaders in organizations sensitive to the underlying motivation of those they evaluate? We hypothesize, while peers and subordinates would offer less support if the underlying motivation were extrinsic (e.g., financial motivation) compared to intrinsic (e.g., loves the work), leaders would provide support for a high-performing employee, regardless of the underlying motivation. We believe that this occurs because power-holders focus more narrowly on immediate utility (i.e. performance) and discount other factors such as underlying motivation.

Rajesh Chandy

Roughly a third of all CEOs of publicly listed US firms have backgrounds in the marketing function. In this research, we compare the mindsets, actions, and performance of CEOs with marketing backgrounds (or Marketing CEOs for short) to those of CEOs with other functional backgrounds (Finance, HR, R&D, Operations, etc.). Specifically, we examine a number of novel questions about Marketing CEOs that have not yet been addressed in empirical research:

• Which industries are the most likely to feature Marketing CEOs, relative to CEOs with other functional backgrounds? Which industries are least likely to do so?
• How are the career paths of Marketing CEOs different from those with other functional backgrounds?
• How are the actions and mindsets of Marketing CEOs different, relative to CEOs with other backgrounds?
• Are Marketing CEOs better or worse than other CEOs in driving their companies’ performance? How does the performance impact of Marketing CEOs vary by firm, industry, and macro-economic context?

Rohin Borpujari, PhD candidate, Organisational Behaviour
Raina Brands, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour

The benefits of organizational learning are well-recognized by leaders and managers worldwide. COVID-19, however, has amplified the importance of organizational learning along at least two dimensions. First, the required rate of learning to maintain an effective organization has increased as the world has grown increasingly uncertain and complex. Second, the working (and hence, learning) environment within organizations has changed to comprise distributed teams working remotely. In light of this changing world, how can leaders foster a learning organization?

We seek to answer this question by conducting an inductive study at an AI-services company in the U.K. Over multiple interview rounds and detailed participant observation sessions, we seek to understand:

• How do teams learn, and institute changes, in an AI organization that generates plentiful data?
• How have the cognitive, behavioral, and organizational aspects of knowledge creation-transfer-retention within the organization changed during COVID-19?

Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, Adecco Associate Professor, Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Matthew Bidwell, Associate Professor of Management, The Wharton School
Martine Haas, Associate Professor of Management, The Wharton School


The growth of global careers represents an important by-product of the globalisation of business.

Organisations increasingly seek to hire people from across national boundaries to learn from leading markets, to infuse fresh perspectives into their business and to broaden the potential pool of recruits, ensuring that they are hiring the best talent, wherever it comes from.

Some organisations also seek to increase internal mobility, moving people from one country to another to accelerate cross unit learning, build a common culture, and develop their leadership bench.

To access the required multinational talent, though, those international moves must also work for the people involved by bringing immediate benefits or else by advancing their careers.

Anecdotal work highlights some of the challenges posed by international moves, including the difficulties of becoming effective within a different culture and the frequent challenges that expatriates face with finding a job when they return to their home country. In this study, we try to analyse systematic, quantitative data on cross-border careers to understand:

• Who moves overseas as part of their careers? What role does family play in shaping mobility?)
• What role those moves play within their careers. For example, are they typically one-off moves, or do the same people move multiple times?
• Whether those moves lead to positive or negative outcomes in terms of pay, responsibilities and career satisfaction

Understanding the answers to these questions should help firms to better nurture the careers of their employees and develop global leaders.

Isabel Fernandez-Mateo

We know that students graduating from London Business School enter a wide variety of different jobs, from finance, to consulting, to general management, to entrepreneurship and many other fields. Yet those first jobs are only the beginning of a long journey. Over subsequent years, our students will move jobs through promotions and lateral moves, will change employers, and often move across industries and functions. The resulting careers shape whether and how alumni are able to move into the most rewarding positions in the labour market. Studying those careers also lends particular insight into who enters leadership positions within organisations and how they get there. Our goal is to implement a survey of LBS alumni, in order to examine their trajectories in detail and hence inform research on the development of executive careers. We hope that this work will also help the school to better serve its students and alumni.

Dónal Crilly, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Cédric Gutierrez Moreno, Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University

Keun Woo Jeong, PhD Candidate, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship can be described as a process from a problematic social state of the present towards a superior social state in the future via economically profitable opportunities. However, the social issues raised by social entrepreneurs — such as poverty reduction and efforts to address climate change — appear psychologically distant to investors in terms of space and time. Thus, a particular challenge for social entrepreneurs is to signal the urgency of a focal social issue, and thus augment the salience of the social enterprise. Furthermore, the pursuit of economic profit and social impact may be at odds, meaning that the emphasis on the economic profit may undercut the social meaning of the venture while emphasizing the social meaning of the venture may make the economic feasibility questionable. To examine how social entrepreneurs manage such dilemmas, we explore a unique rhetorical technique -presencing- which refers to the framing of the narrative in ways that bring the social cause closer to the present in temporal, spatial, and epistemic terms. In this proposal, we i) explore how the social entrepreneurs embed the social and economic aspects of their venture in their communication with the investors through the use of presencing and ii) assess the performance outcome of such techniques. We utilize a unique dataset on over 1,500 social entrepreneurial pitches collected from a major crowdfunding website and conduct a text analysis on the corpus of pitch texts to investigate these patterns.

Yoonjin Choi, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour

Organizational leaders are often advised to define and articulate their company’s “purpose” beyond profit-maximization. However, not much has been explored on whether/how emphasizing a corporate purpose can create value for the organization. In this research, I propose that by emphasizing a corporate purpose (rather than financial goal or profitability), leaders can positively affect stakeholders’ evaluation of their organization. More specifically, this research aims to answer the following questions:

• Are organizations evaluated more positively by prospective/actual employees when they emphasize their corporate purpose?
• Are organizations evaluated more positively by investors when they emphasize their corporate purpose?

Wiley Wakeman

When employees violate norms there is often leeway in determining the extent and type of punishment. However, there are a number of reasons which help determine exactly why leaders or fellow co-workers may choose to enact or forgo punishment. Drawing on evolutionary theories of group selection, I propose that leaders and group members differentially punish deviants when such deviants are perceived to add to the fitness, or survivability, of the group.

I argue that this sort of differential punishment represents an adaptive processes whereby groups, including leaders, allow norm violations if doing so increases the likelihood of group survival (success).

Daniel A. Effron, Assistant Professor, Organisational Behaviour, LBS

The leadership literature has emphasized that a misalignment between words and actions can undermine leaders’ credibility and demotivate employees. The research on which this conclusion is based, however, has been conducted almost entirely in Western cultures.

Drawing on theories from cultural psychology, we propose that failing to “walk the talk” is viewed as less problematic in Asian cultures. In support, our field and lab studies find that inconsistencies between words and deeds are condemned in the US and the UK more severely than in India, Japan, or Indonesia.

Further research would allow us to conduct a crucial field study testing how this cultural difference can predict workplace conflict, performance, and citizenship behaviour.

Gabrielle Adams

Following a corporate transgression, organizations often take remedial actions in an effort to restore confidence in their organization. A particularly costly signal of repentance is to replace the individual at the helm of the organization—the CEO (Fragale, Rosen, Xu, & Merideth, 2009; Pozner, 2008; Pozner, Mohliver, & Moore, 2015). Organizational transgressions are a leading cause of these turnovers; for example, almost half of CEOs of 427 misreporting firms between 1993–2007 lost their jobs within the space of one year after public discovery.

Such decisions by the Board to replace the face of their organisation signals sweeping organisational changes that may restore justice and assuage concerns about future unethical behavior, but not all transgressing CEOs are actually fired (or resign – voluntarily or by request). This research comes from the desire to understand when CEOs of transgressing organizations are fired, and when they are not.

In a global world that is increasingly diverse and complex, how do leaders drive social cohesion while valuing differences among individuals with different backgrounds? We propose that one way to foster social cohesion in organizations and the society is through social network brokers – individuals who connect people and groups who are otherwise disconnected. Past work has focused on the career benefits that accrue to individuals who occupy brokerage positions. In contrast, in this new program of research, we intend to explore the effects of brokerage 1) on the individuals whom brokers connect and 2) the social dynamics of the network as a whole (i.e., cohesion, diversity and inclusion climate). This research, if funded, would contribute novel insights into the impact of brokerage and in particular, how brokers can act to foster greater social inclusion in the modern workplace.

Improving women’s inclusion in social and economic life remains a pressing and difficult challenge, especially in less economically developed parts of the world. This research explores a business and marketing solution to this challenge. We seek to causally address the following question: “What is the impact of (marketing) employment on women’s social inclusion and empowerment?” Controlling for income, we compare the impact of different forms of employment and hypothesize that sales employment improves women’s social inclusion, and empowerment.

We leverage a three-armed randomized controlled trial (RCT) that we set-up in rural India in 2019. From a sample of 1,048 women, we randomly assigned women to a “sales” treatment, a “market research” placebo, or a “no employment” control group. In August 2023, we plan to collect extensive data on the impact of (marketing) employment on key inclusion and empowerment indicators.

When employees struggle to solve a problem at work, seeking help from their leaders can solve the problem, facilitate skill development, and improve their performance. However, help-seeking may be professionally costly if it signals a lack of competence. The current research proposes a complex pattern of gender differences in help-seeking: Among new employees, women are more concerned than men that asking for help will negatively reflect on their competence. In contrast, men are more reluctant to seek help from leaders as they become more experienced employees. These findings add crucial insight to the common perception that women ask for help more than men. We discuss how leaders may use these insights to better manage their followers’ help-seeking aversion to foster inclusive, psychologically safe environments for all employees. 

This proposal aims to investigate the interplay of leadership, social inclusion, and social liberalization policies, particularly their impact on talent management within the cultural industry. This sector, frequently criticized for its exclusivity and discriminatory tendencies, presents an ideal context for studying how leadership and top management teams can foster a more inclusive environment for marginalized communities. In particular, I aim to explore the types of leaders and top management teams that adapt their talent management strategies in response to social liberalization policies, such as those supporting same-sex civil unions, domestic partnerships, and abortion rights. The music industry is crucial in this context due to its significant reliance on human talent and its potential as a microcosm of broader societal norms and attitudes.

Homophily, the tendency for individuals to interact with others who are similar to them on salient dimensions, such as gender, increases the likelihood that male employees interact with other male employees than male employees interacting with female employees. Given that men tend to have greater power and information in organizations, a tendency for homophilous interactions can reinforce gender inequality by men channeling valuable resources, such as information, social support, advice, and mentorship, towards other men (i.e., a “boys’ club”) over women. In this research, we aim to explore how remote work will influence the strength of gender homophily in workplace social networks. By examining gender homophily in virtual interactions and in-person interactions, we aim to provide practical solutions that can be applied in hybrid and remote workplaces to reduce gender inequality.

The participation of diverse individuals is critical for the creation of entrepreneurial ecosystems, regions, and economies. However, previous research has shown that the path to entrepreneurship is not equitable for all, with women and Non-Whites, among other minority groups, being less likely to be involved in entrepreneurship (Canning et al., 2012; Gatewood et al., 2003; Brush et al., 2014; Coleman and Robb, 2009; 2016). While existing studies have mainly focused on disparities among founders, participation in entrepreneurial activities may also take a form of working for a startup firm. Yet little research has systematically examined the mechanisms underlying the potential under-representation of minorities in startup employment. This project aims to (a) document whether startups are more or less likely to hire minorities, and (b) identify interventions that can increase the representation of minorities in the startup workforce.