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- February 2024
- Background Note
Frederick Herzberg on Motivating Employees
By: Willy C. Shih
This background note summarizes Frederick Herzberg's development of his motivation-hygiene theory, his theory regarding job enrichment, and how the theory has evolved. This is at the core of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Corporate Culture Homogeneity and Top Executive Incentive Design: Evidence from CEO Compensation Contracts
By: Dennis Campbell, Ruidi Shang and Zhifang Zhang
We examine how corporate cultures characterized by high degrees of homogeneity in the underlying values and beliefs of organizational members are related to the design of CEO incentive compensation contracts. We argue that culture homogeneity within firms lowers... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Diversification as an Adaptive Learning Process: An Empirical Study of General-Purpose and Market-Specific Technological Know-How in New Market Entry
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
An enduring trait of modern corporations is their propensity to diversify into multiple lines of business. Penrosian theories conceptualize diversification as a strategy to exploit a firm’s fungible, yet “untradeable”, resources and point to redeployment of... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Pricing Power in Advertising Markets: Theory and Evidence
By: Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, Frank Yang and Ali Yurukoglu
Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize, extend, and test this prediction. We find that television outlets whose viewers watch more... View Details
- January–February 2024
- Article
The Challenge of Maintaining Passion for Work over Time: A Daily Perspective on Passion and Emotional Exhaustion
By: Joy Bredehorst, Kai Krautter, Jirs Meuris and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Passion for work is highly coveted, but many employees report struggling to maintain their passion over time. In the current research, we explain the challenge of pursuing passion by conceptualizing passion as an attribute with temporal variation. Viewed through a... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Discerning Saints: Moralization of Intrinsic Motivation and Selective Prosociality at Work
By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Intermediary Balance Sheets and the Treasury Yield Curve
By: Wenxin Du, Benjamin Hebert and Wenhao Li
We document a regime change in the Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC): dealers switched from net short to net long Treasury bonds. We construct “net-long” and “net-short” curves that account for balance sheet and financing costs, and show that actual... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
A Quantity-Driven Theory of Term Premia and Exchange Rates
We develop a model in which specialized bond investors must absorb shocks to the supply and demand for long-term bonds in two currencies. Since long-term bonds and foreign exchange are both exposed to unexpected movements in short-term interest rates, a shift in the... View Details
- November–December 2023
- Article
Network Centralization and Collective Adaptability to a Shifting Environment
By: Ethan S. Bernstein, Jesse C. Shore and Alice J. Jang
We study the connection between communication network structure and an organization’s collective adaptability to a shifting environment. Research has shown that network centralization—the degree to which communication flows disproportionately through one or more... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Deglobalization and Entrepreneurial Investment: The Natural Experiment of Brexit
By: Elisa Alvarez-Garrido and Juan Alcácer
We seek to gain insight into the consequences of deglobalization on entrepreneurial investment by
analyzing an instance of economic disintegration: the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.
Brexit is not only a unique empirical opportunity, a natural... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Trusting Talent: Cross-Country Differences in Hiring
By: Letian Zhang and Shinan Wang
This article argues that a society’s social trust influences employers’ hiring strategies. In selecting workers, employers could either focus on applicants’ potential and select on foundational skills (e.g., social skills, math skills) or focus on their readiness and... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
A Pull versus Push Framework for Reputation
Reputation is a powerful driver of human behavior. Reputation systems incentivize 'actors' to take reputation-enhancing actions, and 'evaluators' to reward actors with positive reputations by preferentially cooperating with them. This article proposes a reputation... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
The Dynamics of Team Learning: Harmony and Rhythm in Teamwork Arrangements for Innovation
By: Jean-François Harvey, Johnathan R. Cromwell, Kevin J. Johnson and Amy C. Edmondson
Innovation teams must navigate inherent tensions between different learning activities to produce high levels of performance. Yet, we know little about how teams combine these activities—notably reflexive, experimental, vicarious, and contextual learning—most... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Channeled Attention and Stable Errors
By: Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein
We develop a framework for assessing when somebody will eventually notice that she has
a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that she neglects information that
she deems—through the lens of her misconceptions—to be irrelevant. In doing so, we... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Was That a Microaggression: A Multilevel Theory of Microaggression Sensemaking
By: Summer R. Jackson and Basima Tewfik
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Complexity of Economic Decisions
By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber
We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Second- versus Third-party Audit Quality: Evidence from Global Supply Chain Monitoring
By: Maria R. Ibanez, Ashley Palmarozzo, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Capitalizing on the superior credibility and flexibility and potential lower cost of external assessments, many global buyers are relying less on their own employee (“second-party”) auditors and more on third-party auditors to monitor and prevent environmental and... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjectivity in allocating tournament-based rewards and punishments. We use data from a company where reward and punishment decisions are based on a combination of objective metrics and subjective performance assessments. Rankings... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
Learning Down to Train Up: Mentors Are More Effective When They Value Insights from Below
By: Ting Zhang, Dan Wang and Adam D. Galinsky
Although mentorship is vital for individual success, potential mentors often view it as a costly burden. To understand what motivates mentors to overcome this barrier and more fully engage with their mentees, we introduce a new construct, learning direction, which... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Organizational Responses to Product Cycles
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham, Jorge Tamayo and Nicolas Torres
Product cycles entail the mass production of new—and often increasingly complex—products on a regular basis. How do firms manage these changes? We use granular daily data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new... View Details