November 2009

Losing Touch
Why are some managers seemingly incapable of understanding their subordinates’ points of view? Adam Galinsky finds that high-power individuals anchor too heavily on their own perspectives and demonstrate a diminished ability to correctly perceive the perspective of others.

Adam D. Galinsky

Joe C Magee

M. Ena Inesi

Deborah Gruenfeld

October 2009

Don’t Stand by Me
When business leaders leave organizations following poor decisions, constituents often find comfort in replacing them with insiders — others familiar with the problem and original choices.

Brian C. Gunia

Niro Sivanathan

Adam D. Galinsky

October 2009

Pyramidal Blind Spots
Foreign companies often enter joint venture partnerships unaware of the dominating corporate governance practices in developing countries. Susan Perkins outlines the potential costs of not recognizing and accounting for these dynamics in the design of a joint venture.

Susan E Perkins

Randall Morck

Bernard Yeung

October 2009

Reading the Org Chart
A firm’s organizational chart can reveal important insights into the inner workings of a firm. David Besanko suggests that the firm’s structure can also reveal much about its competencies and competitive advantages.

David A. Besanko

Pierre Régibeau

Katharine E Rockett

August 2009

Beware the Siren’s Song
Most people overestimate their capacity to control their impulses. According to Loran Nordgren, they miscalculate the amount of temptation they can really handle, which in turn leads to a greater likelihood of indulging impulsive or addictive behavior.

Loran Nordgren

Joop van der Pligt

Frenk van Harreveld

July 2009

The Price of a Billable Hour
Does the price of legal services change based on personal ties with clients, corporate board membership, and firm status? Brian Uzzi looks at how these social features might influence fees firms charge for their services.

Brian Uzzi

Ryon Lancaster

May 2009

Too Conscious to Decide?
For centuries, humans have been thinking about thinking. In the early 1600s, Rene Descartes famously asserted cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” In the late seventeenth century, John Locke was among the first to write about consciousness.

Ap Dijksterhuis

Maarten Bos

Loran Nordgren

Rick van Baaren

May 2009

The Teddy Bear Effect
Diapers in the boardroom—though surely the topic of a few off-color attempts at office humor—are not hallmarks of corporate excellence. But a cherub-cheeked babyface in the executive office? Depending on its hue, that face may be a naturally-endowed but subtle tool of an accomplished leader atop a seemingly impenetrable hierarchy.

Robert W. Livingston

Nicholas Pearce

April 2009

Living Outside the Box
Living in another country can be a cherished experience, but new research suggests it might also help expand minds. This research, published by the American Psychological Association, is the first of its kind to look at the link between living abroad and creativity.

William Maddux

Adam D. Galinsky

April 2009

Growing Socially Responsible Markets
There is an assumption that companies start producing environmentally friendly or “green” products when consumers demand them. As gas prices soar, truck and sport utility vehicle plants close down, and fuel-efficient vehicles become the rage in today’s markets, the reality of this truth is hard to dispute.

Klaus Weber

Kathryn Heinze

Michaela De Soucey

April 2009

Why Boycotts Succeed – and Fail
What factors determine whether a boycott will succeed in changing the behavior of its corporate target? And how can activists attack the weak points of their adversaries most effectively?

Brayden King

January 2009

When Does One Good Deed Deserve Another?
Rationality suggests that trust should build slowly and that people should proceed cautiously when building a relationship. But what if you only have one chance to decide whether to trust someone?

Madan M. Pillutla

Deepak Malhotra

J. Keith Murnighan

January 2009

Golf Lessons
When confronted by a Tiger Woods or a Michael Phelps, do challengers step up their game or throw in the towel? Managers often use internal competition to motivate employees, but new research suggests that adding a superstar to the mix might actually hurt productivity rather than help it.

Jennifer Brown

November 2008

Transparent Barriers
In the last days of 2001 a Midwestern university hired an African American coach for its college football team. He was the first African American coach hired for any sport in the university. This decision led to numerous talks and rumors on campus and in the press about the race of the coach and how it may affect the team’s reputation.

Ashleigh Shelby Rosette

Geoffrey J. Leonardelli

Katherine W. Phillips

October 2008

Science as Team Sport
The Large Hadron Collider, accelerating subatomic particles to light speed before crashing them together in spectacular fashion 100 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border, unites thousands of physicists and engineers from dozens of nations and hundreds of universities in one of the world’s largest scientific collaborations. But calculus, a cornerstone of mathematics that is wielded en masse in the collider’s humming tunnels and glowing control rooms, was developed by just two men, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton, each of whom worked independently in the latter half of the 17th century.

Benjamin F. Jones

Stefan Wuchty

Brian Uzzi

October 2008

Seeing Is Believing, Unless It Isn’t
Adam Galinsky (Management and Organizations) and former Kellogg doctoral student Jennifer Whitson (University of Texas, Austin) report in the journal Science how even the most normal among us strive, intensely but unconsciously, to find and impose order in our unruly world. This quest for structure can sometimes be so all consuming that we trick ourselves into seeing and believing things that simply do not exist.

Jennifer A. Whitson

Adam D. Galinsky

October 2008

Stacking the Deck Against Racism
America prefers to envision itself as a land of equality, where people coexist in a melting pot or a rainbow of colors and cultures. As a society, we value freedom and fairness for all, and we work to fight prejudice and discrimination in our government, our neighborhoods, and wherever else it may hide.

Robert W. Livingston

Brian B. Drwecki

July 2008

Cultural Intelligence in Global Teams
Modern organizations operate in a thoroughly global environment. Not only do they buy and sell goods and services in several national markets, but they also hire individuals from a variety of cultures. As a result, culturally heterogeneous teams frequently determine strategy, undertake planning, carry out research, and perform other complex tasks for organizations.

Maddy Janssens

Jeanne M. Brett

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May 2008

Lobbyists Speak in Numbers
Although the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has come to be known as SOX, it has nothing to do with baseball teams or fancy foot coverings. Like sports teams, however, the law spurs heated debates because it addresses a hot-button topic: corporate accountability. Since SOX was passed in 2002, people have argued whether or not it will indeed improve operations, decrease corporate mismanagement, and thus benefit shareholders. Some insist it will prove detrimental because of high compliance costs and be ineffective in preventing corporate misconduct, and that it will drive companies to list on foreign exchanges.

Yael Hochberg

Paola Sapienza

Annette Vissing-Jørgensen

April 2008

Ingratiating Behavior Provides Alternative Path to the Boardroom
Corporate managers who express opinions that differ from those of their CEO may spoil their chances of being appointed to outside boards, according to recently published research. Ithai Stern (Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management) and Kellogg graduate James Westphal (Professor of Business Administration and Strategy at the University of Michigan) have found that managers who engage in ingratiating behavior when interacting with their CEO are most likely to be recommended for seats on outside boards on which the CEO serves.

James D. Westphal

Ithai Stern

March 2008

Coupling within the Firm
For today’s multi-business firms—from IBM to General Electric to Kraft—developing strategies and deploying human and financial resources is extremely complex given their highly-diversified operations and globally far-flung offices. How, then, do executives in such corporations optimize these activities? According to William Ocasio, Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School, and John Joseph, lecturer and doctoral candidate in the same department, the answer lies largely in the degree of governance channel "coupling" in a given firm.

William Ocasio

John Joseph

February 2008

When Should a Firm Decentralize?
Ask a nanoscientist how an amazing new molecule was built and you're liable to hear, "It assembled itself." Observations of such self-organizing systems are increasingly common in the natural sciences, as complex structures and astounding properties emerge without any influence from external sources. In the corporate arena, however, a boardroom decision to let a company "assemble itself" would probably lead to panic on the trading floor. When it comes to corporate structuring, it is far more normal for the players to engage in some intelligent design, to co-opt the phrase. In this vein, Kellogg School of Management Professor Artur Raviv (Finance) and longtime collaborator Milton Harris (formerly of Kellogg, now at the University of Chicago) write in Management Science about how various features of corporations can determine the structures by which the company should be organized.

Milton Harris

Artur Raviv

January 2008

(When and How) Do Markets Learn?
Can ideology influence stock price? Research conducted by Edward Zajac (Kellogg School of Management) and James Westphal (University of Michigan) suggests that sociological influences, such as dominant ideologies regarding what constitutes good corporate practices, can determine how investors view corporate policies — and thus how the market reacts to such policies. Specifically, Zajac and Westphal's study shows that investor reaction to announcements of stock repurchase plans shifted from negative to positive during the mid-1980s, coinciding with a shift in what they describe as institutional logics, or shared beliefs. In fact, they show how strong shared beliefs can become by providing additional evidence that the generally positive reaction to stock buyback announcements persisted despite growing evidence that a substantial number of firms did not implement the repurchase plans. In light of these findings, Zajac and Westphal suggest that the traditional "market learning" view of investor decision-making should be expanded to include an analysis of these and other sociological influences.

Edward J. Zajac

James D. Westphal

November 2007

Place Your Bids
The traditional belief is that a high first offer results in a high selling price. This belief is rooted in a psychological principle known as anchoring, such that the size of an opening bid is a testament to the item’s value. The numerical value of an anchor sets the tone of more or less prestige of the product up for auction. Furthermore, a high opening bid can spark the rose-colored glasses effect, leading bidders to focus on the more positive features of an item. The researchers show that low rather than high opening bids—for a variety of products from shirts to fancy rugs in online auctions—generate high selling prices, demonstrating a reversal of the anchoring effect.

Gillian Ku

Adam D. Galinsky

J. Keith Murnighan

October 2007

Collaboration and Creativity
“What a small world!” is a common response to discovering that a new acquaintance knows someone you do. The small world phenomenon is so common, in fact, that scholars and researchers who specialize in network analysis study what they call “small world networks” to explain the dynamics of various social systems, including friendships, corporate alliances, scientific collaborations, the Internet, and business production teams.

Brian Uzzi

Jarrett Spiro

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July 2007

How to Map and Compare Culture Across Firms
Klaus Weber explores how to analyze systematically the language used by companies to communicate with diverse audiences. Comparing the "cultural toolkits" of U.S. and German pharmaceutical companies, he finds that since the 1980s, companies from both countries diverge more in terms of their position in the industry and less on the basis of their country of origin.

Klaus Weber

June 2007

Do Leaders Matter?
The degree to which leaders matter is an old and unsettled question. Despite centuries of thought and study, this issue remains divisive. What none can doubt, however, is this: leaders die. And when they do, national economies can change in major, unexpected ways, according to research by Benjamin Jones, assistant professor of management and strategy at Kellogg, and his colleague Benjamin Olken (Harvard Society of Fellows). Their report in The Quarterly Journal of Economics provides clear evidence that unpredictable changes in a country’s leadership, due to the executive’s death by accident or illness, can trigger changes in gross domestic product (GDP) growth. In this new light, the grip of massive political institutions on economies appears much less commanding than was previously thought.

Benjamin F. Jones

Benjamin A. Olken

May 2007

When What You Know Is Not Enough
Is expertise, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? Recent work by Professor Katherine Phillips (Kellogg School of Management) and Melissa Thomas-Hunt (Cornell University) explores the role of gender dynamics in the expression of expertise. In particular, Phillips and Thomas-Hunt find that gender expectations interfere with the expression, perception, and use of expertise, harming both the experts and the groups that depend upon them. This research explores the possibility that the possession of expertise lies in the eye of the beholder.

Melissa Thomas-Hunt

Katherine W. Phillips

May 2007

The Rhetoric of Restructuring
How does the language of business describe the ways inherent organizational problems are addressed? Is the decrease in a firm’s workforce size from “restructuring” really an opportunity for those remaining? Or does this language of increased opportunity just sugarcoat the idea of people losing their jobs?

Paul Hirsch

Michaela De Soucey

April 2007

Uncertainty and Independence
Motel chain affiliation is more common than independent ownership when there is greater uncertainty about the prospects for an individual outlet’s success. Factors that contribute to uncertainty for a given motel location include proximity to an interstate highway, room capacity, competition, resident income, traffic volume, and the industry’s economic fluctuation. Under conditions of uncertainty, chain affiliation is beneficial because it helps to stabilize demand for an individual outlet. This research is extendable to the retail sector and service industries, as well as managers analyzing business partnerships and negotiating with suppliers.

Michael J. Mazzeo

April 2007

A Choreographer's Cues
On the cross-cultural negotiations stage, the players are similarly challenged to converge despite strong differences in behavior and communication style. In "The Negotiation Dance: Time, Culture, and Behavioral Sequences in Negotiation," Kellogg School Professor Jeanne Brett (with Professor Wendi Adair of Cornell University) presents the intricate patterns of international negotiation, providing insights designed to encourage sure-footedness. "Negotiating cross culturally presents many challenges," says the DeWitt W. Buchanan Jr. Professor of Dispute Resolution, who joined Kellogg in 1976, "but one of the most important is how people communicate information about their preferences and priorities."

Wendi L. Adair

Jeanne M. Brett

April 2007

Teamwork Takes Center Stage
Manhattan is home to Broadway and Wall Street. While geographically close, the worlds of premier theatrical productions and high-flying financial transactions couldn't, on the surface, seem farther apart. But art, science and business converge in Brian Uzzi's latest research on creative enterprises and the collaborative networks that form in fields such as social psychology, economics, astronomy and professional musical theater.

Roger Guimerá

Brian Uzzi

Luís A. Nunes Amaral

Jarrett Spiro

April 2007

Tough Calls Under Pressure
To achieve big success, you often have to take a big risk. Unfortunately, that's where many people tend to clench up. They base their decisions on fears, outside pressures or uninformed "gut" instincts. Or they make no decision at all -- a choice which in itself can be disastrous.

J. Keith Murnighan

John C. Mowen