Published works

Organizational Constraint or Source of Competitive Advantage (or Both)? The Strategic Use of Authenticity by Way of Tradition

Forthcoming Advances In Strategic Management

with Cameron Verhaal

Some suggest that committing to tradition can constrain firms because it undermines success, growth, and progress.  To those firms who can credibly wield it, however, tradition also holds the promise of projecting authenticity to an intended audience. In this essay, we seek to present authenticity as a useful conceptual tool for strategy scholars. In particular, we suggest that theoretical insights related to organizational authenticity can be applied to foundational ideas in strategy research. Moreover, to the extent that authenticity attributions can be driven by engaging with tradition (and its associated constraints), it can be a means for organizations to communicate costly commitments to stakeholders and competitors. After establishing authenticity’s relationship to strategic commitments, and how tradition can be authentically employed, we discuss the conditions under which authentically engaging with tradition can form the basis of a sustained competitive advantage and help firms deal with thorny strategic issues from employee engagement to governance. In doing so, we propose areas of research that could benefit from utilizing authenticity as a conceptual tool to make sense of how some firms outperform others, and the constraints some firms face when they employ strategies highlighting their authenticity.

When Truth Trumps Facts: Five Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics

Forthcoming American Journal of Sociology

with Minjae Kim, Ethan Poskanzer, AND Ezra Zuckerman Sivan

This paper presents results from five online surveys, conducted among American voters over the final two and a half years of the (President Donald) Trump administration, that show how voters (both Democratic and Republican) provide explicit moral justification for politicians who flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, which attributes positive response to misinformation solely to “factual flexibility,” whereby voters (due to either laziness or bias) subconsciously mistake misinformation for fact. Yet while the five studies provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility, they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby demagogic fact-flouting is justified by casting the fiction as proclaiming a deep political “truth.” A key implication is that since voters sometimes prefer fiction to fact, political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.

Authenticity-Based Connections as Organizational Constraints and the Paradox of Authenticity in the Market for Cuban Cigars

organization science

with Cameron Verhaal and Kevin Fandl
(Read Copy Here)

We explore the organizational consequences that different authenticity claims carry for products and the firms that produce them. To do so, we build on the notion of an authenticity paradox—the idea that seeking to capture demand that is created by perceived authenticity can undermine the very authenticity that generated the demand in the first place. Using an experimental approach, we argue and show that provenance-based claims of authenticity (e.g., location of origin) constrain a firm spaciotemporally, limiting their ability to expand production in ways that might be economically rational but would undermine this authenticity claim. We further show there is no penalty (or there is a reduced penalty) when the claim is not explicitly spaciotemporal, and is instead based on an association to an iconic individual broadly connected to that place. We show how these types of connections help firms respond to the authenticity paradox by allowing them more freedom to expand production to meet the increased demand without undermining the original claims to authenticity. As a result, this paper’s key contribution is in moving beyond explaining how perceived authenticity benefits organizations and instead, explores how different claims to authenticity can constrain a firm’s ability to capture the value that it has created from authenticity.

The Mechanisms and Components of Knowledge Transfer: The Virtual Special Issue on Knowledge Transfer Within Organizations

organization science

with Linda Argote, jerry guo, and Sae-Seul Park
(Read Copy Here)

Knowledge transfer within organizations has important implications for organizational performance and competitive advantage. In this virtual special issue, we review articles on this topic published in Organization Science between 2014 and 2020 and identify 53 articles for their theoretical and empirical contributions. These articles examine knowledge transfer through five transfer mechanisms: social networks, routines, personnel mobility, organizational design, and search. We consider the intersection of each transfer mechanism with important components of knowledge transfer (characteristics of sources/recipients, characteristics of knowledge, and characteristics of contexts). We present 15 exemplar articles, each of which reflects the intersection of a mechanism and a component of knowledge transfer. We also present an overview of the methodological approaches and empirical contexts that are utilized. We conclude our article with a discussion of future research opportunities. The articles published in Organization Science have advanced understanding of both the mechanisms through which knowledge transfer occurs and the conditions under which it is most likely.

He’s Overqualified, She’s Highly Committed: Qualification Signals and Gendered Assumptions About Job Candidate Commitment

organization science

with Elizabeth Campbell
(Read Copy Here)

Evidence suggests that possessing more qualifications than is necessary for a job (i.e., overqualification) negatively impacts job candidates’ outcomes. However, unfair discounting of women’s qualifications and negative assumptions about women’s career commitment imply that female candidates must be overqualified to achieve the same outcomes as male candidates. Across two studies, experimental and qualitative data provide converging evidence in support of this assertion, showing that gender differences in how overqualification impacts hiring outcomes are due to the type of commitment—firm or career—that is most salient during evaluations. Overqualified men are perceived to be less committed to the prospective firm, and less likely to be hired as a result, than sufficiently qualified men. But overqualified women are perceived to be more committed to their careers than qualified women because overqualification helps overcome negative assumptions that are made about women’s career commitment. Overqualification also does not decrease perceptions of women’s firm commitment like it does for men: supplemental qualitative and experimental evidence reveals that hiring managers rationalize women’s overqualification in a way they cannot for men by relying on gender stereotypes about communality and assumptions about candidates’ experiences with gender discrimination at prior firms. These findings suggest that female candidates must demonstrate their commitment along two dimensions (firm and career), but male candidates need only demonstrate their commitment along one dimension (firm). Taken together, differences in how overqualification impacts male versus female candidates’ outcomes are evidence of gender inequality in hiring processes, operating through gendered assumptions about commitment.

Committed Diversification: Why Authenticity Insulates Against Penalties for Diversification

January 2020 organization science

with Jae Kyung Ha
(Read Copy Here)

Work in organization theory has highlighted that diversification triggers concerns over the newly diversified firm’s capability or commitment to serve its audience. Although this work has shown that perceived lack of commitment may be an important problem for diversifying firms, it has not been established what might resolve these commitment concerns and reduce demand-side penalties for diversifying to serve new customers. We argue that a firm’s ability to signal authenticity will increase perceptions of commitment and resolve ambiguities about commitment generated by diversification. We use a multimethod approach including qualitative evidence from a case in the behavioral health industry and experimental methods to isolate these observed effects. In a qualitative study, we examine a case in which two firms saw divergent outcomes when they tried to engage in the exact same diversification activity and show that when a firm signals that they are highly authentic (i.e., when stakeholders perceive the firm to be willing to fulfill commitments even while sacrificing short-term rewards), diversification does not threaten perceived commitment. However, those who cannot signal authenticity are less likely to be selected in the market because diversification is seen as a threat to perceived commitment. We then test these findings in two experiments using the primary customer audience, addiction recovery therapists, as participants. In a final experiment, we test some key boundary conditions of our argument, finding support in the context of markets for car mechanics, which suggests that our argument may be applicable more broadly than healthcare into markets for various types of credence goods.

Too Good to Hire? Capability and Commitment Inference in Labor Markets

Administrative science quarterly
(read Copy Here)

with Roman Galperin, Jerry Guo, and Adina Sterling

A key and often unquestioned assumption in labor markets research is that employers hire the highest quality candidate at a given wage. In this paper, we theorize an aspect of screening that leads higher quality job candidates to experience lower chances of advancing in the screening process to receive job offers. We argue screeners perceive high-quality candidates to have lower commitment to the organization relative to lower quality candidates. To test our arguments, we conduct three experimental studies that use hiring managers as subjects. In Study 1, our findings indicate screeners have concerns about a high-quality candidate’s commitment to an employer, and that under the conditions we specify, high-quality candidates are more likely to be screened out of the hiring process than are lower quality candidates. In Study 2, we find that commitment concerns remain even when screeners have assurances that high-quality candidates will accept job offers. Finally, in Study 3, we test ways in which high-quality candidates can provide credible signals of commitment to reduce the quality penalty. We conclude with a discussion of the contributions of our study to theories of quality inference in labor markets.

The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy

February 2018 American Sociological Review
(read Copy Here)

with Minjae Kim and Ezra W. Zuckerman

We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate “authentically appealing” (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a “lying demagogue” (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) “common-knowledge” lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a “crisis of legitimacy” (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.

Why elites love authentic lowbrow culture: overcoming high-status denigration with outsider art

August 2017 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
(READ COPY HERE)

with Ezra Zuckerman and Minjae Kim 

Going beyond the distinction-seeking explanation for why “cultural omnivorousness” (the tendency for Western elites to consume a wide range of genres) extends to lowbrow genres, we develop and test the idea that demonstrating appreciation of authentic lowbrow culture affords authenticity-insecure elites an effective way of shoring up their authenticity. This argument, which builds on recent sociological research on the “search for authenticity” (e.g., Grazian 2005), on Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of artistic “disinterestedness,” and on Hahl and Zuckerman’s (2014) theory of “high-status denigration,” is validated through experiments with American subjects in the context of “outsider” art (Fine 2004).  The first study demonstrates that preference for lowbrow culture is higher when individuals feel insecure in their authenticity—i.e., when their social category attained status in a manner whereby extrinsic motives are salient.  The second study demonstrates that audiences perceive the members of erstwhile denigrated social categories to be more authentic if they consume lowbrow culture but only if the cultural producer is perceived as authentic. We conclude by noting how this “authenticity-by-appreciation” effect might be complementary with distinction-seeking as a motivation for elite cultural omnivorousness and we draw broader implications for when and why particular forms of culture are in demand.

TURNING BACK THE CLOCK IN BASEBALL: THE INCREASED PROMINENCE OF EXTRINSIC REWARDS AND DEMAND FOR AUTHENTICITY

AUGUST 2016 ORGANIZATION science
(READ COPY HERE)

This paper addresses why customers at times prefer traditional practices deemed more authentic to a domain, particularly where these practices had previously been discarded as inferior. I argue that customer demand for authenticity can be triggered when extrinsic rewards (i.e., fame or money) increase in prominence in a market, causing audiences to doubt the motives of the market’s producers. I examine this dynamic in the context of Major League Baseball, where appreciation for traditional stadium features seemingly arose after the advent of free agency heightened awareness and coverage of the economic rewards in the sport. Experimental analysis validates the proposed mechanism, whereby increased fan exposure to extrinsic rewards increases concern about player inauthenticity, which increases preference for traditional stadium features. Difference in Difference analysis of attendance patterns (home-away) provides external validation for these experimental findings by showing that authenticity was more highly preferred, in the form of higher relative attendance in traditional-style ballparks, by those fans more affected by free agency. Conclusions are drawn about the role that perceptions about motives play in market perceptions of authenticity and valuation of authentic cultural objects. 

KNOWLEDGE ASYMMETRY AND STRUCTURAL HOLES: LINKING NETWORK PERCEPTION TO POSITION IN STRUCTURAL HOLES

MAY 2016 STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION
(READ COPY HERE)

with Olenka Kacperczyk and Jason Davis

Although brokers who span structural holes have been shown to occupy a valuable position in organizations, emerging research suggests that the returns to these brokers can vary depending on whether alters can credibly threaten to disintermediate the broker and close the structural hole. Yet the factors that shape the likelihood of disintermediation have not been extensively explored.  In this paper, we argue that local network perception influences both 1) alters’ ability to disintermediate, and 2) the likelihood that individuals occupy high-performing brokerage positions in intra-organizational networks. Drawing on prior research about cognitive social structures, we argue that individuals are most likely to be in a structural hole under the condition of knowledge asymmetry—that is, when brokers know about the structural hole, but alters do not—which reduces the likelihood of disintermediation by alters and benefits to brokers. Using advice network data from a high-tech organization, we find evidence of knowledge asymmetry in existing structural holes, and moderation of this relationship by two factors also related to disintermediation: (1) broker’s reputation and (2) alter’s position in the resource flow. We also show that knowledge asymmetry is related to higher returns for brokers. The broader theoretical contribution is a better understanding of how network perceptions are related to positions across structural holes, an important structure from which power is derived in organizations and markets.

BUY TERM AND INVEST THE DIFFERENCE REVISITED

MAY 2015 JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL SERVICE PROFESSIONALS
(READ COPY HERE)

with David F. Babbel

The decision whether to buy term or permanent life insurance, or some combination of both, is among the most challenging elements of the purchasing process for many people. This study demonstrates that financial analyses which purport to show that the Buy Term and Invest the Difference (BTID) concept dominates the combination of permanent life insurance supplemented with term life are deficient in many ways and incapable of establishing this dominance. It also shows that the assumed financial discipline necessary to successfully implement the BTID approach is an unrealistic expectation for many consumers. Accordingly, it should not be claimed that one approach necessarily dominates the other for all consumers.

THE DENIGRATION OF HEROES? HOW THE STATUS ATTAINMENT PROCESS SHAPES ATTRIBUTIONS OF CONSIDERATENESS AND AUTHENTICITY

SEPTEMBER 2014 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 
(READ COPY HERE)

with Ezra Zuckerman

We develop theory and report on experiments that address the tendency for high-status actors to be deemed—even by high-status actors themselves—less considerate and more inauthentic than low-status actors.   We argue that this tendency, which potentially contradicts the fact that status is accorded on the basis of an actor’s capability and commitment, stems from two paradoxical features of typical status attainment processes: (a) The benefits of a high-status position typically carry an incentive to feign capability and commitment, thereby leading to suspicions of inauthenticity; and (b) Status is typically achieved through interaction patterns in which the high-status actor asserts its superiority and another’s inferiority, thereby leading to suspicions of inconsiderateness.  Three experimental studies are designed to validate this theory and help rule out an alternative hypothesis, whereby the negative correlation between status and morality derives from a psychological need for viewing the world as just or fair–leading evaluators to compensate those who lack status with higher attributions of morality.  Our studies, based on the “minimal group” paradigm, ask subjects to evaluate two arbitrary social categories based on members’ performance in a joint cognitive task.  Implications are drawn regarding high-status insecurity and the sources of instability in status hierarchies.

WORk in Process

How Individual Regulators Contribute to the (Under)Performance of Regulatory Firms

with Sae-Seul Park and Sunkee Lee

What drives regulatory firms to underperform by being lenient in enforcing regulatory standards? Past research on regulatory failures has focused on the strategic pursuit of leniency, focusing on firm-level interactions. We take a microfoundational approach to uncover sources of leniency at the individual regulator level. Our analysis of data from the maritime sector reveals that regulatory agents consistently exhibit leniency towards clients perceived to be part of their nationality-based ingroup and that this effect is attenuated by the agent’s professionalization. These findings validate the idea that ingroup favoritism can serve as an individual-level mechanism that affects performance for regulatory firms and suggest that human capital development through professionalization can help mitigate regulatory failures driven by mechanisms that are not conventionally exploited by firms.

Learning like a pro: evidence of differential learning patterns by individual professionalization

with Sae-Seul Park

Research on learning from failure has pointed out that industrial accidents can be an impetus for individuals inside organizations to learn vicariously from others’ failures. This research tends to observe this increased learning at the organizational level, obscuring the fact that individuals inside organizations might approach these opportunities to learn differently. We argue that an important difference between individual workers that can affect learning patterns is professionalization, or the extent to which one is trained and identifies with one’s profession. We demonstrate the importance of looking at the individual level by arguing, that contrary to priors about learning from accidents established at the organizational level, those more engaged with their profession will learn less than non-professionals from large-scale industrial accidents. Through analyses of behavior in the context of a large-scale accident in the maritime industry, we show that less professionalized workers learn more from industry accidents because these events serve as a wake-up call to the importance of performance improvement in ways that are more professionalized workers have already internalized through professional norms. The crux of our argument is that because professionalized workers engage in continuous learning, they have less need—and consequently, less motivation—to improve performance after an accident caused by negligence. We conclude with a discussion on the value of understanding different learning patterns among individual workers and the importance of understanding how professional training shapes learning behaviors for individuals within firms.

Corporate Purpose Claims, Perceptions of Firm Capacity, and Job Applicant Behavior

with Trevor Young-Hyman, Leon Valdez, CB Battacharya, and Evan Gilbertson

Organizational scholars have long recognized the importance of corporate purpose, defined as a goal beyond profit maximization, meant to galvanize workers in the firm. Increasingly, however, companies are making claims about corporate purpose to external audiences, and we have little understanding how these claims may be perceived. A key question is credibility; under what conditions are these claims believed by audiences? We argue that purpose claims can attract external stakeholders and that the ambition and future orientation of these claims makes firm capacity a key source of credibility. We examine these issues in the labor market context, where employers make claims of corporate purpose in recruitment efforts. In our first study, with job posting and application data from an online job board, we develop a novel measure of purpose claim language and examine its effect on application likelihood. We then examine the moderating effect of firm size, as a proxy for capacity. We find that high-purpose job posts receive approximately 52% more applications than low-purpose job posts when the firm has more than 1,000 employees, but only receive a 13% increase when the firm has fewer than 50 employees. In a second study, we use an online experiment to test whether differences in firm size are interpreted as differing degrees of capacity to realize purpose claims and whether these different perceptions of capacity impact application likelihood. Our results confirm that perceptions of capacity help to explain the relationship between corporate purpose claims, firm size, and job attraction.

Seeking Only the Best: How Hometown Pressures Influence (East-)Asian Americans’ Status Aspirations

with Jenny Oh and Trevor Young-Hyman

Research has shown that Asian Americans tend to pursue membership in higher-status organizations at higher rates than do Americans of other ethnic heritage. However, most of this research has focused on differences across those with different ethnicities, leaving unanswered the mechanisms that create differences in status aspirations among Asian Americans. We argue that the population density of an individual’s hometown will have an inverted U-shaped relationship with status pursuit as initial increases in population density will increase social comparison and norm conformity within the group, until the group is large enough for subgroups to emerge and norm enforcement to decrease. We show this effect for those Americans of East Asian descent but not South Asian descent in the context of post-undergraduate job application patterns among Asian Americans at an elite university in the United States. While some previous work has treated status aspirations as a trait or monolithic feature of all Asian Americans, this paper shows that status aspirations can differ by different subgroups of Asian Americans and by the amount of social identification and group size of the community of Asian Americans within which an individual is raised.

anomie and Authenticity: Overcoming the dark side of success in Music

with Pete Younkin

We suggest that the commercial-artist tension can create a challenge to one’s identity that could create anomic tensions and help explain why musicians are more likely to die than non-musician counterparts. The inauthenticity charges that follow upon commercial success can generate identity crises: if I perceive myself as an artist, but am now perceived as a charlatan, the basis of my character is now in question.  Such a challenge can precipitate a sense of being outside of or unintegrated with society—if my community does not see me as I see myself, then perhaps I am in the wrong community?  At a minimum, this disorientation can negatively affect productivity or a sense of belonging in the group, resulting in disbanding or dissolving the group’s venture. At an extreme, this begets a dangerous form of anomie that Durkheim (1951) identifies as a cause of egoistic suicide, where a sense of belonging functions to constrain such behavior: “For they cling to life more resolutely when belonging to a group they love, so as not to betray interests they put before their own.” (Durkheim 1951:209–10) The sudden revocation of this experience can provoke the opposite sentiment.  We test this theory through archival quantitative analyses and experimental methods. This work speaks to the tensions inherent in artistic careers and the relationship between perceived authenticity, felt authenticity, and organizational and individual outcomes related to success and identity.

WOrking papers

May I Deviate, Please? Status Effects on Anticipatory Impression Management

Copy available here

with Renee Richardson Gosline 

How can firms effectively reduce penalties for categorical deviance? Past research on organizational impression management indicates that firms can minimize penalty for deviance by pre-emptively using verbal accounts, or language that presents deviant behavior in a way that makes it acceptable to an audience. However, this work has yet to explore the role that organizational status plays, a factor that has also been shown to affect how audiences interpret a firm’s activities. This paper builds a bridge between these perspectives by showing how organizational status influences the effectiveness of anticipatory impression management tools like pre-emptive verbal accounts. We propose that high-status firms, unlike middle-status counterparts, are more effective at avoiding penalty for deviance when they employ the use of assertive verbal accounts that convey confidence. We design a series of experiments to test this argument in the context of the food industry. Specifically, we show that high-status firms are better off when they do not appear deferential, or overly apologetic, in anticipatory impression management signaling – while the opposite is true for middle-status firms. Mediation analysis shows that the same type of framing differently affects perceptions of skill and confidence depending on the status of the firm, but that too much perceived effort in framing the deviance will lead to negative results. Our findings support the claim that an organization’s attempts to manage audience impressions with verbal accounts must be aligned with the perceived status of the firm, such that status positively interacts with confident styles of anticipatory impression management and negatively interacts with more deferential styles.