At the Office
The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers
Longqi Yang et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many information workers. Viewing this shift as a natural experiment in which some workers were already working remotely before the pandemic enables us to separate the effects of firm-wide remote work from other pandemic-related confounding factors. Here, we use rich data on the emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and workweek hours of 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020 to estimate the causal effects of firm-wide remote work on collaboration and communication. Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.
Pay, Productivity and Management
Nicholas Bloom et al.
NBER Working Paper, October 2021
Abstract:
Using confidential Census matched employer-employee earnings data we find that employees at more productive firms, and firms with more structured management practices, have substantially higher pay, both on average and across every percentile of the pay distribution. This pay-performance relationship is particularly strong amongst higher paid employees, with a doubling of firm productivity associated with 11% more pay for the highest-paid employee (likely the CEO) compared to 4.7% for the median worker. This pay-performance link holds in public and private firms, although it is almost twice as strong in public firms for the highest-paid employees. Top pay volatility is also strongly related to productivity and structured management, suggesting this performance-pay relationship arises from more aggressive monitoring and incentive practices for top earners.
Inclusive Managers
Wei Cai, Ethan Rouen & Yuan Zou
Harvard Working Paper, October 2021
Abstract:
Many organizations acknowledge that inclusiveness, or the practice of directly engaging colleagues in activities, is becoming increasingly important as businesses become more complex. However, inclusive managers remain significantly understudied in large-sample archival research, largely because inclusiveness is difficult to measure. We overcome this barrier and develop a measure of managers' inclusiveness by observing the interactions among corporate managers during conference calls, the only circumstance where interactions among managers can be regularly observed. We examine inclusive managers' characteristics, individual career outcomes, leadership team outcomes and firm outcomes. We find that inclusive managers are more likely to be female and older. They are twice as likely as the average manager to be promoted to CEO, and appointing an inclusive CEO increases the inclusiveness of the executive team. Teams composed of inclusive managers also have greater retention. Lastly, firms where inclusive managers are promoted to CEO experience more positive stock market reactions to the promotion announcements.
Misconduct Synergies
Heather Tookes & Emmanuel Yimfor
Yale Working Paper, October 2021
Abstract:
Do corporate control transactions discipline the labor force? We use the investment advisory industry as a laboratory to test for evidence of improvements in employee misconduct following M&A events ("misconduct synergies"). Consistent with synergies, we find that new disclosures of employee misconduct in the combined firm drop by between 25 and 34 percent following mergers. However, contrary to the idea that better-performing firms tend to purchase poor-performing ones, we find that both targets and acquirers have better misconduct records than the industry's average firm. Moreover, we find evidence of assortative matching on misconduct, where low (high) misconduct acquirers tend to purchase low (high) misconduct targets. This suggests complementarities, where target and acquirer mechanisms for monitoring and disciplining employees are more effective when used together, consistent with Rhodes-Kropf and Robinson (2008). Indeed, target and acquiring firm employees have similar pre-merger misconduct records on average, but the sensitivity of employment separation to misconduct increases post-merger, suggesting improved disciplinary mechanisms.
Is Political Skill Always Beneficial? Why and When Politically Skilled Employees Become Targets of Coworker Social Undermining
Shuhua Sun
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The benefits of political skill at work have been extensively documented and highlighted. Existing research also reports unexpectedly equivocal and even positive relationships between employee political skill and coworker social undermining, suggesting that politically skilled employees can become targets of coworker social undermining. However, there is a lack of research explaining why and when employee political skill can lead to coworker social undermining. This research, drawing from social rank theory and the theory of rivalry, offers a novel lens to answer these questions. Specifically, I theorize that employee political skill evokes coworker social undermining by affecting coworker perception of status threat, particularly when the coworker views the focal politically skilled employee as a personal rival. Findings from four studies - one correlational two-wave study and three experiments - provide support for these predictions. Further, nonrival competition and interpersonal disliking as alternative potential explanations to the hypothesized moderating effects of rivalry were ruled out. This study provides a theory-driven explanation of an unintended consequence of employee political skill and offers a more balanced understanding of the effects of political skill at work. Theoretical and future research implications are discussed.
Raw Ideas in the Fuzzy Front End: Verbosity Increases Perceived Creativity
Laura Kornish & Sharaya Jones
Marketing Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
At the "fuzzy front end" of an innovation process, organizations typically consider dozens, or even hundreds, of raw ideas. Selecting the best ones is a double challenge: evaluating so many ideas is a large undertaking, and the ideas in their raw form permit only noisy evaluations. In this paper, we demonstrate a further challenge to that large-scale evaluation of raw ideas. We show that verbosity raises the evaluation of ideas, that is, ideas expressed in more words are rated higher. This relationship is especially pronounced for ratings of creativity. Theory tells us that the effect of length on creativity is compounded because length cues both components of creativity - novelty and usefulness. We demonstrate how effort in reading (disfluency) and perceptions of complexity work together to explain the relationship between length and creativity. Our findings provide simple but important new directives for improving the use of crowdsourcing in the practice and study of innovation: either standardize the length of the ideas or control for length in their evaluation. Overall, we urge care with using measures of novelty or creativity when the idea descriptions vary in length.
Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers
Lu Liu et al.
Nature Communications, September 2021
Abstract:
Across a range of creative domains, individual careers are characterized by hot streaks, which are bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. Yet it remains unclear if there are any regularities underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we analyze career histories of artists, film directors, and scientists, and develop deep learning and network science methods to build high-dimensional representations of their creative outputs. We find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused after the hot streak begins. Crucially, hot streaks appear to be associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak. Overall, these results may have implications for identifying and nurturing talents across a wide range of creative domains.
The Crowd Classification Problem: Social Dynamics of Binary-Choice Accuracy
Joshua Aaron Becker, Douglas Guilbeault & Edward Bishop Smith
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision making. However, we show that improving the accuracy of numeric estimates does not necessarily improve the accuracy of decisions. For binary-choice judgments, also known as classification tasks - for example, yes/no or build/buy decisions - social influence is most likely to grow the majority vote share, regardless of the accuracy of that opinion. As a result, initially, inaccurate groups become increasingly inaccurate after information exchange, even as they signal stronger support. We term this dynamic the "crowd classification problem." Using both a novel data set and a reanalysis of three previous data sets, we study this process in two types of information exchange: (1) when people share votes only, and (2) when people form and exchange numeric estimates prior to voting. Surprisingly, when people exchange numeric estimates prior to voting, the binary-choice vote can become less accurate, even as the average numeric estimate becomes more accurate. Our findings recommend against voting as a form of decision making when groups are optimizing for accuracy. For those cases where voting is required, we discuss strategies for managing communication to avoid the crowd classification problem. We close with a discussion of how our results contribute to a broader contingency theory of collective intelligence.
Young stars and red giants: The moderating effect of age diversity on the relationship between the proportion of high performers and team performance
Balazs Szatmari
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to investigate the conditions under which high performers increase team performance. It is hypothesized that the proportion of high performers in a team increases team performance but only up to a certain point, after which the marginal benefit decreases. Moreover, this study also draws on recent research on the interplay between different types of status hierarchies to hypothesize that the negative effects on team performance of having too high a proportion of high performers are weaker in teams where there is greater age diversity among the high performers and stronger in those where there is less age diversity. These hypotheses are tested by analyzing panel data on National Basketball Association (NBA) teams and the analyses provide support for both hypotheses. The study's most important contribution is that it sheds light on how the interplay between multiple status hierarchies may facilitate collaboration between high performers in teams and organizations, allowing them to exhibit very high performance.