Center for Organizational Research (COR)

A talk of interest to COR community…

REPORTING WRONGDOING IN THE WORKPLACE: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL CONTEXT

Professor Patrick Bergemann

Assistant Professor of Organizations and Strategy
University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

DATE: Friday, November 22, 2019
TIME: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
WHERE: SB1 5200, Lyman Porter Colloquia Room and Executive Terrace

ABSTRACT:
The proper functioning of an organization requires that misconduct be detected and reported to the relevant authorities. Managers seek to know when employees are not behaving appropriately, yet individuals may face social pressures not to report knowledge of wrongdoing. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for the social conditions under which individuals report (and do not report) the misconduct of their peers. We argue that responses to wrongdoing observed within a workgroup versus outside of a workgroup represent distinct processes, and that cohesion can promote or suppress the reporting of wrongdoing depending on where the wrongdoing takes place. Using unique data from 42,020 organizational members that span 24 government agencies, we provide support for this theory, showing how competing explanations of whistleblowing can be integrated by situating them within particular social contexts. Together, this helps to reveal trade-offs in the detection of misconduct and explains why wrongdoing in organizations may be so difficult to eradicate.

A talk of interest to COR community…

DISCIPLINING AUDIENCES: THE DEMAND FOR DISINTERESTEDNESS IN THE MARKET FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

SPEAKER: James Riley
PhD Candidate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management

DATE: Monday, November 18
TIME: 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
WHERE: SB1 5200

ABSTRACT:
Art worlds have strong norms that enjoin artists to avoid the naked pursuit of profit and instead affect an air of “disinterestedness” (Bourdieu 1993). But why might art dealers and collectors similarly face such norms? This paper draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork to examine the puzzle of why galleries discipline collectors –who provide much-needed financial capital – for appearing too motivated by profit. The fieldwork also suggests a paradoxical resolution. Galleries enforce conformity to the norm of disinterestedness among collectors as part of an array of tactics they deploy to “protect” their artists from price volatility that could depress demand for the artist’s work. Although galleries framed such discipline as a moral imperative, a key implication of this study is that enforcing a norm that disavows extrinsic rewards such as fortune and fame ultimately supports a profitable business and investment strategy.

A talk of interest to COR community…

Thursday, November 14, 2019

PRIDE WITHOUT PREJUDICE: THE UNBEARABLE BURDEN OF UNDER-RECOGNITION

Brittany Bond, PhD Candidate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management

TIME: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
WHERE: SB1 5100

Corporate Partners Executive Boardroom

ABSTRACT:
Public recognition is a powerful motivator. High status recognition derives its desirability from scarcity. Thus public recognition inevitably invites social comparisons. Since status recognition commonly corresponds with performance and accompanies tangible rewards, it is challenging to isolate pure social comparison costs. Leveraging a natural experiment in a large multinational organization, I provide novel evidence that employees are distinctly sensitive to status recognition beyond any material, career, or reputation concerns. Rather, the preservation of self-image motivates seemingly self-damaging reactions to nominal status under-recognition. When denied status recognition, employees are much more likely to exit the organization, despite receiving higher monetary rewards as recompense for nominal under-recognition. This study demonstrates the serious productivity risks of using status recognition as an employee performance motivator. The analysis, more broadly, holds implications for understanding how status conferral affects motivation and how organizations should manage reward systems.

A talk of interest to COR community…

“Cultural Code Switching in a Post-Merger Organization”

Friday, November 8, 2019

SPEAKER: Anjali Bhatt
PhD Candidate
UNIVERSITY: Stanford University
Graduate School of Business
TIME: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
WHERE: SB1 5100

ABSTRACT:
What explains differences in how individual employees culturally adapt following an organizational merger? While prior research on post-merger integration has largely focused on organizational characteristics that foreshadow post-merger cultural dynamics and performance, this paper explores individual-level variation in cultural adaptation following mergers. I propose that individuals’ post-merger cultural adaptation— specifically, the tendency to switch cultural codes—can be explained by the combination of their pre-merger conformity, which reflects their dexterity with perceiving and enacting multiple cultural codes, and their social status, which determines the rewards to code switching. I test these ideas by applying the tools of computational linguistics to a unique dataset of 1.5 million employee emails and personnel records from an organizational merger of two U.S. regional banks. I develop a novel approach to measuring cultural code switching by exploiting a machine learning classifier to categorize the linguistic styles of messages as either breaching or conforming to existing cultural codes. Consistent with predictions, across five theoretically distinct sources of status, I find that lower status individuals are more likely to culturally code switch than higher status individuals. Moreover, greater pre-merger conformity is associated with higher rates of cultural code switching for low status individuals, but lower rates of code switching for high status individuals. I discuss implications for status-based theories of cultural boundary work, socialization processes in polycultural contexts, and post-merger cultural dynamics.