Costello Research Evaluating Performance

Accounting Faculty Research

When CEOs are haunted by memories of past recessions

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:43:41 +0000

When CEOs are haunted by memories of past recessions Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 11/12/2024 - 14:43

In This Story

David S. Koo

The economy, we’re often reminded, is cyclical. But we all hope our careers won’t be. That means those of us who make it to the very top—CEOs, for instance—may be unduly influenced by memories of prior economic go-rounds. David Koo, assistant professor of accounting in the Donald G. Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, has found that memories of past recessions, triggered by recent ones, can weigh on chief executives’ decisions, literally for years.

Koo’s paper, co-authored by Isabel Wang of Michigan State University and Shuting Wu of Cal State Fullerton, is forthcoming in Management Science.

David Koo

The paper was inspired by trends in research outside the accounting field. “In the economics area, they have started looking at how executives’ memories of recessions can affect important decision-making right now,” Koo says. “We are trying to connect these emerging trends to the accounting area by focusing on pessimistic bias in their outlook of the company’s performance.”

The researchers adopted the 2008 financial crisis as a key moment for triggering veteran CEOs’ memories of prior financial downturns. They analyzed annual management earnings forecasts for U.S. public companies for the period 2002-2018, alongside the characteristics and career histories of the CEOs who issued them. “We used the first forecast of the year for each year, because on average these are more optimistic,” Koo explains. “Usually, nobody wants to say anything negative at the beginning of a year.” The final data-set comprised 3,678 earnings forecasts from 466 CEOs.

Koo and his co-authors discovered that CEOs who had previously led companies through at least one past recession issued significantly more pessimistic forecasts post-2008 than they had before the crisis. As a general rule, the more recessions a CEO had undergone in their tenure at the top, the more pessimistic their post-crisis forecasts tended to be.

The same pessimistic pattern was not evident for CEOs who had not experienced a recession before 2008. Translating their findings into economic terms, the researchers concluded that one standard deviation of the memory-triggered pessimism effect was equivalent to 0.23-0.29 percent of share price.

Further, the post-crisis pessimism did not make the forecasts more accurate. It’s safe to say, then, that the memory-triggered CEOs were, knowingly or not, displaying excessive caution and conservatism in their earnings forecasts. To be sure, anyone’s outlook can darken with age, independent of their real-world experience. So the researchers performed subsequent checks to determine whether the increased pessimism was more closely related to growing older, or to specific memories of past recessions.

“Our takeaway is, if we have two same-age CEOs, one who has experience navigating recessions as a CEO and one who does not, the first one will become more pessimistic after the crisis,” Koo says.

The more highly skilled CEOs (as measured by a widely accepted scale for managerial ability) exhibited less memory-induced pessimism, while CEOs who led more complex firms with a lot of moving parts were more prone to pessimism. “We expected that the manager-specific effect would be more significant when managers were under more demanding pressure or had more discretion,” Koo explains.

As the 2008 financial crisis itself faded into memory, seasoned CEOs gradually let go of their pessimistic bias. But it took three years, on average, for their forecasts to fully recover. We normally think of past experience as an aid to learning, but here it seems that the opposite was the case: Memories of past experiences with recessions slowed down CEOs’ post-crisis learning process.

“Prior research has found that past experiences can help people more rationally and then more wisely handle an ongoing crisis,” Koo says. “But at the same time, executives are also human beings. They may be scarred by their experiences and that can induce them to be excessively negative or pessimistic when they go through a financial crisis.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the veteran CEOs were less effective at guiding their firms through post-crisis recovery. Koo emphasizes that his findings do not capture whether, and how quickly, companies bounced back from the 2008 recession.

“Memory may not be the most dominant factor in our decision-making, but it still can influence executives even in their managerial decision-making,” Koo advises.

The lesson, then, is one for investors and other market players to store in their own memories for the next economic downturn: Take CEOs’ post-crisis predictions with at least a grain of salt.

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Accounting - Costello

Strategy - Costello

Costello Research Strategic Management

Costello Research Risk Management

Costello Research Corporate Finance

Costello Research Financial Crises

Costello Research Health & Well-being at Work

Accounting Faculty Research

Future of Work & Leadership - Costello

Scared to negotiate job offers? Do it anyway. Here’s why.

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 14:17:48 +0000

Scared to negotiate job offers? Do it anyway. Here’s why. Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 07/16/2024 - 10:17

Getting a job offer can be a joyful experience. Often, however, the elation quickly gives way to a state of anxiety, as candidates agonize over whether to accept the terms on the table, or negotiate for better ones. After all, it’s commonly believed that job candidates who negotiate, risk losing the opportunity.

Einav Hart

Einav Hart, assistant professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, challenges that assumption in a recent research paper for Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Her findings suggest that the expected worst-case scenario—having a job offer rescinded—may be a much more remote possibility than most job candidates believe.

The paper was co-authored by Julia Bear of Stony Brook University and Zhiying (Bella) Ren of University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers conducted seven studies involving more than 3,000 participants. To start with, they surveyed job candidates, hiring managers, and experienced professionals. These surveys showed that job candidates thought it highly likely that negotiating would lose them the job offer, while managers took a more flexible view. The hiring managers reported extending an average of 26.9 job offers during their careers, only 1.73 of which were withdrawn after a candidate negotiated.

In subsequent studies using in-person and online negotiations, Hart and her co-authors found that even taking on an imaginary role changes how one views the negotiation and its risks. They randomly assigned participants to play either a “job candidate” or a “hiring manager,” with real money at stake based on any agreed-upon job offer.

The researchers found that two psychological mechanisms were particularly relevant to explain job candidates’ exaggerated risk estimation: zero-sum perceptions, or the idea that parties in a negotiation are fighting over a fixed and finite resource, and power perceptions, i.e., how much candidates felt they had the ability to influence the hiring manager. Moreover, because of their concern about losing the deal, nearly half the candidates chose to accept the offer as is and not to negotiate.

All else being equal, candidates tended to take a much more competitive (i.e., zero-sum) view of negotiations and a less optimistic view of their power than did the “managers.” This may help explain why so many of us shy away from bargaining for better job offers, to our own detriment.

Hart says that “negotiating is not just zero-sum. Besides negotiating salary, maybe you care more about teleworking than a small signing bonus. The hiring manager might really appreciate the savings and be flexible about how often you come into the office. Thus, this negotiation (and many others) can have a win-win, mutually beneficial solution.”

Indeed, candidates primed to consider negotiation as a potential win-win interaction (as opposed to zero-sum) were less likely to fear losing the deal entirely, and by extension to forgo negotiations. Likewise, candidates primed to have higher power perception were less concerned about jeopardizing a deal and less likely to forgo negotiation. However, even with low zero-sum or power perceptions, candidates still overestimated their risk of losing the deal.

“Besides negotiating salary, maybe you care more about teleworking than a small signing bonus. The hiring manager might really appreciate the savings and be flexible about how often you come into the office. Thus, this negotiation (and many others) can have a win-win, mutually beneficial solution.” —Einav Hart

At the same time, Hart’s prior work suggests that negotiation is a decision that should be made carefully by each party. A previous paper introduced the concept of “Economic Relevance of Relational Outcomes” (ERRO), which points to the fact that there is often a long-term financial advantage in preserving strong relationships, over and above incremental gains to be won in any one negotiation.

Hart says, “Consider negotiating for a babysitter’s rate. What use is negotiating for a great deal on the rate if the babysitter feels bullied in the negotiation and is not excited to take care of your kids?”

Negotiating a job offer is tough and there is a legitimate risk that negotiating can jeopardize the deal. However, Hart’s research suggests that job candidates overestimate this risk and can often obtain better outcomes through negotiating a job offer—at least if they preserve a good relationship.

Looking for more advice? Check out Career Services!

In This Story

Einav Hart

Topics

Costello Research Careers

Costello Research Recruiting

Future of Work & Leadership - Costello

Women’s empowerment in the workplace starts with smarter networking

Colleen Rich — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:13:51 +0000

Women’s empowerment in the workplace starts with smarter networking Colleen Rich Mon, 03/11/2024 - 13:13

Women’s History Month offers a chance to examine the gender leadership gap. According to a 2022 World Economic Forum report, just 31% of global leadership roles are held by women.

Sarah Wittman. Photo provided

Networking is one effective way to bridge the gap, but research shows that women are at an unfair disadvantage in this area. Sarah Wittman, an assistant professor of management at Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, unpacks this complex problem and proposes some potential research-based solutions.

Why is it important for women to network as much—and as strategically—as men?

To rise to the top, you have to be known and known of. You have to have social capital—and a social network that makes a difference. Of course, nobody likes to be thought of as “that person”: the person who uses other people for their own advancement. Yet research suggests that in professional networks women are less likely than men to network instrumentally, accumulate instrumental ties and, thus, less likely to have within their networks the powerful people who can help them advance and get things done. Over time, women’s network deficits accumulate: especially in an age of online social media including LinkedIn, if you didn’t connect with colleagues in your last job, you likely aren’t connecting this job. And those people are the ones who know you and could help you land your next job.

What, then, can women do to build useful career networks?

One piece of advice is, of course, to change your mentality—so that networking becomes relationship-building not just contact-accumulation. That fits better with what is expected of women and is less likely to receive backlash. Where networking is “just” relationship-building, it becomes less intimidating and, quite frankly, less grossly utilitarian. Especially when you’re not needing anything now, you can creatively focus on what you might give. Rather than thinking about the resources you might need, think about what resources you might represent for others. The universe repays, and having established contacts when you do need to leverage them is invaluable.

Second, make network-building easy on yourself. Just do it. LinkedIn particularly and other similar online social media are amazing tools because they are both personal and surprisingly impersonal. These days, people link with people they don’t even actually know—but perceive as working in the same industry, or in a relevant function. Linking with those possibly relevant others will not only be low risk (the “no,” if there is one, doesn’t come face-to-face), but where you engage with the platform, the professional content that you produce will allow you and your resources to become known, and known of, across your contacts’ feeds.

It’s easier to start with networks that you legitimately belong to alumni of – your high school, university, or sorority, and people who share some element of your professional past or present (ex- or present colleagues). You never know who is doing what, and how that might be related to your own career.

Unbeknownst to you, you may already have valuable social capital at your fingertips, in so-called “multiplex” ties—ones that can serve multiple ends. Do you know what your neighbors do for work? What about your children’s friends’ parents? Or your spouse’s co-workers’ spouses (or children)? But, again, the more of a decent human being you are in these relationships, the more likely they might be willing to provide professional value as well.

So the networking gap boils down to women being “too nice,” not aggressive enough to put themselves out there?

No! Scholars have written extensively on the so-called “double-bind” for women, especially those in leadership positions. Research shows that—regardless of what they do—they will be judged negatively based on warmth versus competence. Too nice? Not smart, and disrespected. Too strategic? Cold and conniving, and disliked. This goes for networking, too. Women who “reach for the top” in their networking are not seen as team players (violating feminine norms of communalism) and may suffer a status penalty versus women who have less instrumental networks. But women who don’t have those instrumental ties aren’t able to advance.

“Fixing women” is not the answer. In the C-suite, empowering words for women must be matched by action. Senior leaders must be ready to appoint capable and deserving women to positions of organizational relevance.

Closer to home, men who love women and have seen women’s challenges firsthand tend to be some of our biggest allies. CEOs with daughters, for example, are more likely to have women join their boards. Men: Understand that the women whose advancement you empower today will—en masse—be the role models that pave the way for the advancement of your own daughters, nieces, and granddaughters.

Topics

Costello Research Careers

Costello College of Business

Women's History Month

networking

A.I. & Innovation - Costello

Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position

Marianne Klinker — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:49:21 +0000

Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position Marianne Klinker Wed, 09/27/2023 - 10:49

Online technology has made real-time performance feedback a workplace reality. But a pair of �鶹��Ƶ professors have found out about a major bias in the system.

Online technology is fundamentally reshaping employee evaluations. In the last decade or so, companies such as IBM, Amazon, and General Electric have adopted performance feedback apps that allow employees to "review" one another in real time. These apps take the 360-degree paradigm to its logical extreme by removing temporal, hierarchical, and geographical barriers to feedback.

According to Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM) at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, “People are trying to tap into new sources of employee engagement across all management and employment tiers. For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way. So when we merge these trends of social connectedness, instant communication, and use of technology, we come up with this wonderful application.”

As with any breakthrough technology, though, appropriate use of real-time performance feedback depends upon understanding its inherent limitations. After all, increasing the scale and speed of feedback is not guaranteed to erase deep-seated biases based upon gender, race, hierarchical position, etc. In a recent paper for Information Systems Research, Petryk and her ISOM colleague Siddharth Bhattacharya, concentrate on a relatively neglected—but, as it turns out, subtly powerful—category of bias related to how individuals are embedded within the informal (i.e. social) network of the organization.

Mariia Petryk (left) and Siddharth Bhattacharya

Their co-authors were Michael Rivera and Subodha Kumar of Temple University, and Liangfei Qiu of University of Florida.

Working from a unique data-set from technology provider DevelapMe, comprising nearly 4,000 instances of real-time performance feedback spanning five organizations, the researchers mapped the informal networks of each organization. They then compared reviews submitted by employees who were positionally embedded—i.e. those who moved in influential circles, though they may not themselves have been high-ranking—to ones by those who were structurally embedded, meaning they had larger clusters of weak ties.

For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way.

For example, both a C-level executive and their assistant could be considered positionally embedded. A middle manager whose work touches multiple teams would be structurally embedded.

The professors found that positionally embedded employees tended to give higher scores to colleagues, while structurally embedded employees skewed negative in their ratings.

Bhattacharya says, “Informal network bias could be explained as a matter of perspective. From atop the hierarchy, it’s difficult to see how projects came together and who made what happen. Positionally embedded people have a coarse rather than a granular view. Therefore, they may give highly visible individuals more credit than they deserve for collaborative work—for example, they may wrongly assume that a team member chosen to present a project to them was primarily responsible for said project.

By contrast, structurally embedded employees have wider and more diverse networks and thus a much broader base of comparison. This makes them prone to detect and emphasize the flaws of co-workers.”

Organizations using feedback apps such as DevelapMe can usually set limits on the number of anonymous reviews they allow, although the identities of anonymous raters are always visible to HR and senior leadership. The researchers found that anonymity magnified informal network bias for both structurally embedded and positionally embedded employees.

Further, since reviews included both numerical score and explanatory text, the researchers analyzed how informal network bias influenced the wording of reviews. They saw that positionally embedded raters, though more generous with their numerical rating, were relatively neutral and formal in their written feedback. Structurally embedded reviews exhibited the opposite pattern: Comparatively strict in their scoring, but positive and encouraging in their written content. The researchers speculate this points to contrasting motives—constructive vs. motivational—the two groups had for delivering feedback.

Easy ways to counter informal network bias, then, would be for organizations to carefully consider the amount of anonymity to permit, and for them to recommend or even require that each instance of feedback be accompanied by text.

Beyond that, Bhattacharya and Petryk suggest that companies employ a combination of training and technological refinements to help address informal network bias. For example, positionally embedded managers should be reminded to temper their reviews with a bit more objectivity—perhaps peering outside their bubble to get a more complete picture of an employee’s work. Tech providers and consultants could use tools such as social network mapping to help organizations better account for informal network bias in their employee performance data.

Petryk says, “Our data and findings show the mechanisms of how people—not necessarily high-ranking people—can have power over rewards, because at the end of the day the ratings will be factored into a formal evaluation. And bonuses will be distributed on the basis of the evaluation. How that decision is being made can be greatly impacted by the data that we analyze, and that we obtain from this network.”

Topics

Costello Research Digital Platforms

Costello Research ICT

ISOM Faculty Research

A.I. & Innovation - Costello

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When managing creatives, what you say is often what you get

Marianne Klinker — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 11:15:50 +0000

When managing creatives, what you say is often what you get Marianne Klinker Fri, 06/30/2023 - 07:15

A new �鶹��Ƶ study explores the complex connections between managerial feedback and creative outcomes.

The growing popularity of crowdsourcing and other forms of open innovation reflects the pressing need that companies have for creative ideas that go beyond the organizational same-old, same-old.

But once you have imaginative outsiders ready to lend you their time and attention, how do you elicit novel and useful contributions from them? It turns out to be as much about strategic communication as it is about the quality of your talent pool.

In recently published research, Pallab Sanyal, professor and area chair of information systems and operations management (ISOM) at �鶹��Ƶ's School of Business, and Shun Ye, associate professor and assistant area chair of ISOM, focused on two types of feedback crowdsourcing participants commonly receive. Outcome feedback rates the perceived quality of the submission, with no underlying explanation (“This design is not good.”). Process feedback reveals or hints at what contest organizers are looking for (“I prefer a green background”).

Pallab Sanyal (left) and Shun Ye (right)

Sanyal and Ye analyzed data from a crowdsourcing platform covering close to 12,000 graphic-design contests over the period from 2009 to 2014. The data-set included the contest parameters, time-stamped submissions and feedback, winning designs, etc. It also allowed the researchers to track the activity of repeat entrants from contest to contest across the sample.

This put them in a good position to measure how choosing one feedback type over the other affected contest outcomes—but not in terms of “quality” as it is traditionally defined by researchers.

“The moral of the story is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whoever is the contest holder or client, whatever they think is best for their business objective, that is the highest quality.” —Pallab Sanyal

“I gave a talk at a university where I showed 25 different submissions from a crowdsourcing contest and asked people to choose which one was the highest quality," says Sanyal. "And everyone in that room picked a different one. Not only that, the one that eventually won the contest was not picked by anyone.”

“The moral of the story is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whoever is the contest holder or client, whatever they think is best for their business objective, that is the highest quality.”

With this working definition in mind, Sanyal and Ye developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for scoring all submissions by visual similarity to the eventual winning submission.

“We use the algorithm to calculate the distance between these images and the highest-quality image, to give it a score, a quality score, between zero and one,” Sanyal explains.

They found that process feedback tended to increase the affinity of the designs, i.e., they were more similar to the winning design chosen by the client on average. By contrast, outcome feedback increased the diversity of the designs.

Sanyal and Ye theorize that precise guidance in the form of process feedback can lower ambiguity and assist competitors to narrow the search space, while outcome feedback expands the search space because it leaves plenty of room for interpretation.

Very late in the contest, though, the positive relationship between process feedback and submission affinity disappeared, and may have even flipped to the negative; the professors speculate this may be due to a demotivating, “now-you-tell-me” effect.

Shifting gears from quality to quantity, Sanyal and Ye discovered that both process and outcome feedback encouraged more submissions on the whole. However, they did so in different ways.

Process feedback lured new contributors to the contest; outcome feedback spurred more submissions per contributor. But, again, both of these effects were weakened when feedback was offered late in the game. Interestingly, this contradicts previous studies, which suggest early feedback discourages new contributors from joining. Shun and Ye point out that those studies used only numeric feedback. “We show that when it comes to textual feedback, it should be provided early in the game,” Ye says.

He also comments, “What we find here can very well apply to a traditional context where, say, in an organizational setting, a manager wants a creative solution, or holds a brainstorming session.

“If managers feel that the submissions are converging very quickly, but they want more innovative solutions, they can provide outcome feedback. Or they may observe, ‘Wow, the submissions are all over the place. Doesn’t look like it’s close to what I have in mind.’ Then it’s best to start to provide some process feedback.”

Whichever feedback type they choose, managers should offer it promptly so as to maximize the impact. At the same time, they should be careful to avoid turning their preferences into self-fulfilling prophecies through strongly worded process feedback.

Sanyal uses an illustrative example from his own life: “Many times, if my kids are stuck with something, I hear them and I say, ‘You are on the right track. I won’t tell you the solution, I will only tell you that you’re on the right track.’ So give some overall ideas, but don’t constrain the solution space too much.”

Their work was published in Information Systems Research.

Topics

Costello Research Innovation Strategy

ISOM Faculty Research

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Are there upsides to “overboarding”?
July 14, 2025
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Pallab Sanyal

Shun Ye

Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 14:00:58 +0000

Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 11/02/2022 - 10:00

In This Story

Brett Josephson

Brett Josephson, associate dean for executive development at �鶹��Ƶ, shares his insight on the challenges of leading a hybrid workforce.

It’s 9 am. Do you know where your team members are?

Before Covid, the answer was simple: They were – or were expected to be – in the office. The pandemic erased that certainty and accelerated the pace toward work-place flexibility. As we move forward in our post-covid work environment, employees are strongly indicating their preference for flexibility and self-determination regarding their working environment. A portion of the workforce will desire to stay at home with high flexibility, whereas others will return to the office by choice.

In my role as Associate Dean of Executive Development at �鶹��Ƶ, I’m constantly talking to business leaders about their leadership and workforce struggles, concerns, as well as wins. Since Covid, a central theme of those discussions has been the complexity of managing hybrid teams. Fortunately, as we’ve all grown accustomed to the new normal, more and more managers are discovering that hybridity offers at least as many opportunities as challenges.

In my interactions with managers, I’ve seen that successful adaptation to the new normal requires managers to be intentional, purposeful, and transparent in their actions. Here are two areas managers need to consider as they continue to lead a hybrid workforce.

How to effectively monitor outcomes rather than activity. With hybrid, it is easy for managers to feel cut off from the day-to-day activities of their teams. Back when everyone was in the office, they could easily see what employees were working on. But the activity of remote workers is beyond such moment-to-moment oversight.

To recapture a sense of control, some companies have resorted to surveillance tools that use webcams, keystroke trackers, etc. to closely monitor employee activity. Like any other kind of micromanagement, though, these technologies send a discouraging signal to employees that their organization does not trust them. In some individual cases, that mistrust may be justified, but it shouldn’t be assumed for all employees.

Instead, managers need to experiment with a range of techniques to ensure not only that productivity remains high, but also that employees have the support they need to work effectively. The ideal solution will vary from team to team but could involve a mixture of interactive online tools (e.g., Slack, Teams, Google Docs), regular Zoom check-ins and one-on-one virtual meetings, even some in-person engagements and activities. It may take some time to get the recipe right – but once you do, the result will likely be maximised transparency and trust. A win-win for managers and employees alike.

Addressing power and politics. “Presentism” – the idea that leadership potential can be measured by the length of time one spends in the office – is still alive and well. Before the pandemic, employees who worked late also were more likely to receive personal attention from higher-ups who kept similar work habits, further increasing their opportunities for advancement. By the same token, it could be that employees who return to the office will enjoy an automatic political advantage over their remote-working colleagues.

The above-mentioned monitoring solutions would partly address this problem as well. Managers need a reliable way of measuring performance that doesn’t depend upon physical proximity. Beyond that, organizations should devise and implement proactive strategies for virtual mentoring, so that high potentials do not feel they have to choose between their career prospects and the flexibility of hybrid working. To be sure, any form of mentoring is time-consuming. But so is a preoccupation with office politics – a pre-pandemic obligation that could be lessened by virtual career development.

The politics of hybrid working can go in a different direction when all hands are urged to return to the office. Those with enough power may pull rank and refuse, creating an obvious hierarchical split– frontline staff commuting like it’s 2019, and higher-ups stubbornly staying at home. The perceived double standard could end up being a serious drain on morale. Yet another reason to embrace the new normal, rather than trying to force employees back to the office.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Business Voice.

Topics

Costello Research Managing Change

Future of Work & Leadership - Costello

Marketing - Costello

Marketing Faculty Research

Welcome to the Socially Awkward Workforce

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 19:43:15 +0000

Welcome to the Socially Awkward Workforce Marianne Klinker Mon, 02/14/2022 - 14:43

In This Story

Heather Vough

If you feel your social skills have atrophied, you’re not alone. After nearly two years of working from home, and much less social activity outside of work, we’re likely to commit more unintentional lapses in etiquette, or social gaffes. This is true whether your organization is trickling back to the office, or still mostly remote.

Gaffes don’t make people feel good. That’s probably not news to you. But recent research from Heather Vough, associate professor of management at �鶹��Ƶ, argues that gaffes have potential negative consequences that go far beyond an awkward or uncomfortable moment.

Some gaffes are truly wince-inducing, such as asking a woman who isn’t pregnant when she’s due. Most, however, fall toward the less egregious end of the spectrum, like accidentally omitting a name from the invite list for a Zoom call. Citing a concept originated by her �鶹��Ƶ colleague Kevin Rockmann, Vough says that even minor misunderstandings between colleagues can be “anchoring events,” or turning points in a workplace relationship. In the end, this could badly impact team cohesion—assuming no remedial post-gaffe action is taken.

Vough’s article in Journal of Organizational Behavior (co-authored by Harshad Puranik of University of Illinois at Chicago and Chandra Shekhar Pathki of Nazarbayev University) uses pre-existing research on emotions to trace the possible ripple effects of social gaffes. The article shows just how complicated it can be to predict the aftermath of a gaffe. In addition to the perceptions of the gaffe-perpetrator and their ensuing attempts to save face, one must consider the victim’s response— starting with whether they even realize a gaffe occurred.

These theories and frameworks can help employees and managers repair the damage gaffes may have caused. They also indicate how, in some cases, taking the correct post-gaffe course of action can make relationships even stronger.

According to the research, once we realize we’ve committed a gaffe, we can react with embarrassment, shame, or guilt. Shame is probably the least helpful, because it leaves us no recourse. It interprets the gaffe as an extension of some flaw in ourselves, rather than an understandable misstep. Too much shame leads to psychological disengagement and eventual withdrawal from our colleagues and the organization.

An embarrassment-based reaction shrinks from the unflattering light that a gaffe casts upon our self-image. Our preferred opinion of ourselves as self-aware and socially adept is hard to maintain after we’ve goofed up in front of our colleagues. Embarrassment tends to inspire damage-control efforts that are more about saving face than making amends. For example, we may try to show off our intelligence, sensitivity, or whatever quality we feel was thrown into doubt by the recent gaffe. If the others around us don’t recognize what’s occurring, or didn’t notice the gaffe in the first place, they will think we’re merely self-involved.

Guilt-based reactions are rooted in an awareness that our gaffe may have hurt someone else. The natural next step is to try to right the wrong, either by addressing the gaffe directly or by showing emotional support to the victim, e.g. offering to pick up a shift or extending a lunch invitation. Since recipients of such gestures will almost always appreciate them, it doesn’t really matter whether the gaffe was noticed. Relationships are rarely destroyed, and often bolstered, by random acts of kindness.

When it comes to human emotions, there is no clear-cut instruction manual. However, Vough suggests some general takeaways for dealing with social gaffes, derived from her research:

If you commit a gaffe, don’t ignore it. To be sure, there’s a strong possibility that a minor gaffe will go unnoticed, but it may also loom large in the mind of a victim. At the very least, it’s worth carefully considering your next move.
At the same time, don’t be ashamed. In these times especially, we all owe each other some forgiveness and understanding for the gaffes we’re almost certain to commit. And we should apply these to ourselves as well.
Next, ask yourself whether the gaffe had the potential to hurt someone else, or if it only wounded your ego. People who take self-interested steps to repair their reputation after a gaffe may end up confusing or repelling the very person they’re most trying to impress. Your best bet is to let it go. Have faith that those who know you and your abilities will overlook the error. Sometimes a gaffe can be both hurtful to others and reflect badly on you—for example, when you mistakenly undersell someone’s contribution to a group project in a Zoom meeting and they have to correct you. The point in this case would be to forget about the ego-wounding aspects of the gaffe and focus on those that could affect the other person.
For more straightforward gaffes like the Zoom one just described, the most direct approach is usually best. A simple apology delivered as soon as possible (“I’m really sorry—of course, I knew you prepared that report but I misspoke”) should at least go a long way toward clarifying your intent and establishing goodwill.
But there are other gaffes that can’t be so easily addressed, e.g. the pregnancy mistake mentioned above. Calling the woman into a special Zoom meeting to explain that you thought her weight gain meant she was pregnant may only exacerbate the awkwardness. In these cases, there are still things you can do as far as general emotional support that may get the point across.
Remember that there is a difference between relatively innocuous gaffes and more serious incidents of disrespect or incivility. When in doubt, the victim’s experience should be centered.

Source: Harshad Puranik, Heather C. Vough, Chandra Shekhar Pathki (2021). “Oops, I did it (again)! The emotional experience, personal responses and relational consequences of social gaffes in the workplace,” Journal of Organizational Behavior

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Police Body Cams Are Making NYC Safer

Marianne Klinker — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 16:29:36 +0000

Police Body Cams Are Making NYC Safer Marianne Klinker Tue, 12/07/2021 - 11:29

In This Story

Brad Greenwood

In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s use of “Terry stops” – otherwise known as “stop-and-frisk” – violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. For years leading up to the decision, civil rights advocates pointed to the disproportionate number of stops to which African-Americans and Latinos in the city were subject as evidence of unfair targeting.

As per the judge’s orders, the NYPD underwent a one-year pilot program in which officers representing five precincts volunteered to wear body-worn cameras (BWC). This paved the way for a phased department-wide BWC rollout involving all 35,000 NYPD officers, starting in 2018.

BWC has been a controversial element within the broader debate about police violence in the U.S. The idea is to increase accountability and strict adherence to the law, for both the police and the public, by creating an objective record of every interaction. However, some argue that BWC recordings can be misleading. What the camera sees is not always the same as what the officer does. Theoretically, police who anticipate BWC footage may be deceptively used against them may reduce their interactions with the public when possible. If so, their reticence might put people at risk.

Making matters murkier, the research on BWC has mostly delivered mixed results. Some studies have shown arrests declining after BWC adoption; others have noted arrest increases; still others have found no change. The inconsistencies may be due to the specialized contexts and short duration of these studies – most dealt with small-scale trials in out-of-the-way places like Rialto, CA and Mesa, AZ.

Brad Greenwood

For Brad Greenwood, a professor of information systems and operations management at the �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, the NYPD – one of the world’s largest urban police forces – mandating BWC across the board on an indefinite basis was a research godsend. His forthcoming paper in Journal of Law, Economics & Organization (co-written by Mitchell E. Zamoff of University of Minnesota and Gordon Burtch of Boston University) is by far the most extensive analysis of BWC’s impact in a major American city.

The researchers combed through publicly available datasets detailing all NYPD stops, as well as arrest records and civilian complaint databases for the period January 2017-December 2019. The BWC rollout was complete by the end of 2018, so the three years covered by the study enabled the researchers to draw before-and-after comparisons for all 77 New York City police precincts.

The results of the study showed three clear patterns. First, fears that BWC would deter police from doing their job appeared unfounded. In fact, the number of investigative stops increased by nearly 17% after police were equipped with BWC.

Second, citizen complaints against police decreased by roughly 20% post-BWC, after accounting for the increase in stops. The category of complaint that saw the biggest decline was so-called “abuse of authority” – allegations of mistreatment or intimidation that may include improperly stopping, threatening, or seizing property from citizens. Of all the types of complaints investigated by NYC’s Citizen Complaint Review Board, abuse of authority is the most common.

Third, after adoption of BWC, the likelihood that a stop resulted in arrest went down by 16%.

Taken together, the findings indicate that, far from inhibiting police work, BWC emboldened police to undertake more investigative activity than they had before, without crossing the line into abuses of authority. Knowing they were being recorded also gave civilians an additional reason to be on their best behavior when stopped by the police – as perhaps reflected in the decline in arrests.

It isn’t clear from the data whether the change in outcomes was coming more from the officers’ side, from civilians, or a fairly even split. That is a question for future studies to resolve. Whatever the exact cause or causes, the study establishes that BWC had the intended beneficial effect in New York City.

That’s not to say that the program worked miracles, however. Citizen complaints alleging improper use of force, for example, did not decline but remained flat after accounting for the rise in stops.

Another caveat has to do with costs. By now, most large police departments in the U.S. have already adopted BWC. Smaller police departments with more modest budgets may have difficulty paying for cameras, training officers to use them properly and preserving vast archives of video evidence. They will have to decide whether the advantages of BWC outweigh the considerable costs for their town or city. By quantifying the positive effects of BWC, this study could enrich such cost-benefit analyses.

That’s the kind of contribution Greenwood intends to make with his research. He strives for data-driven insights that sidestep the ideological polarization that bogs down so many pertinent societal debates in the U.S. nowadays. “Objective and verifiable facts allow us to make decisions that are informed by data and improve outcomes for everyone”, Greenwood says. His research agenda is also evident in a study from earlier this year finding that black infant mortality rates were 50% lower when the doctor looking after the new-born was also black. Its data tells a sobering story about healthcare inequality that cries out for action without making ideologically loaded claims.

More broadly, Greenwood believes his NYPD findings also play into the hot-button issue of IT-enabled workplace surveillance. Here, too, there are complex trade-offs. Companies must weigh the prospect of pushback from employees who feel too closely watched against concerns about the bottom line and workforce accountability. The NYPD example may help organizations identify cases that may call for more monitoring rather than less – namely, where workers exercise a good deal of individual discretion, can push back against controls and may put themselves and/or others at risk in the course of their work.

Source: Mitchel E. Zamoff, Brad Greenwood, Gordon Burtch (2020). “Who Watches the Watchmen: Evidence of the Effect of Body-Worn Cameras on New York City Policing”

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The Strange Effects of Sexist Humor

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 20:43:16 +0000

The Strange Effects of Sexist Humor Marianne Klinker Mon, 12/06/2021 - 15:43

In This Story

Olivia (Mandy) O'Neill

What would a perfectly gender-equal workplace be like? Certainly, it would be free of gender bias in hiring, promotion, and salary. On an emotional level, it would have to be a place where no one feels excluded because of their gender. Some organizations have a longer way to go than others toward building such emotionally inclusive cultures.

Mandy O'Neill

Silicon Valley’s infamous “bro culture”, for example, comes out of tech’s long history as a male-dominated industry. It also discourages women from pursuing tech careers, helping keep the status quo in place.

As it stands, women who join tech companies must find a way to navigate a toxic workplace. Some adopt a “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude, responding in kind to a work place rife with teasing, belittling sexist banter. Mandy O’Neill, a management professor at the �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, has found that women who do so are rewarded by their peers with a status bump. Surprisingly, their male peers who engage in the same behavior take a step down in status as a result.

O’Neill’s forthcoming paper in Organization Science, written with Natalya M. Alonso of Haskayne School of Business, documents the “sexist culture of joviality” among trainees at a Latin American site run by a major U.S. tech company that will remain anonymous (let’s call it Tech.com). Past research suggests that joviality is a key characteristic of highly masculine cultures, allowing men to bond and blow off steam without violating gender norms such as strength, impassivity and invulnerability. Laughter, horseplay and joking around can also become a release valve for the discomfort and awkwardness some men feel when forced to work alongside women.

A main theme – if not the main theme – of the trainees’ non-work-related conversations was what they themselves called “Guerra de los sexos” (war of the sexes). The cohort of trainees that O’Neill and Alonso studied was fairly gender-balanced, but the program leadership was almost entirely male – in keeping with the wider gender dynamic in the tech industry. Jokes expressing a dim view of the opposite sex were routinely told in mixed company. Several women trainees showed they could dish it out as well as take it. Indeed, women who took part in the sexist banter reaped social rewards. Their peers hailed them as “bromistas”, or comedians. The bromistas seemed generally well-respected by both women and men. After one of the researchers momentarily turned bromista, relaying an overheard sexist joke to a mixed-gender group of trainees, she was praised for “learning the culture” and invited to socialize with trainees after work.

Later, the researchers statistically verified the “bromista effect” with a social network and demographics survey. The trainees were asked to nominate peers with whom they shared various kinds of relationships. Taken together, their survey responses formed a kind of map of social ties within the Tech.com training program. Bromistas were more likely to hold central positions in this web of social relationships. Put another way, they enjoyed higher esteem or status than non-bromistas as a rule. For the male trainees, however, an opposite effect was evident: The more they participated in sexist banter, the lower their status on the whole.

A follow-up survey sent to a separate set of participants in the United States, produced similar results. Respondents were each shown a description of an imaginary co-worker and asked to rate the hypothetical person’s status and social skills. There were four versions of the description, with the gender of the co-worker and their participation (or not) in sexist banter being the only differences. Again, women who participated were rated higher on both counts, while men were penalized for participation.

The second study suggests that the “sexist culture of joviality” and its implications for social status are not specific to Tech.com or the Latin American cultural context.

For O’Neill and Alonso, social sophistication helps explain these unexpected findings. Bromistas are rewarded for fitting into a culture where sexist humor is a common pastime. But men who enthusiastically promote this culture are seen as lacking tact – like a boy still behaving according to the rules of the “no girls allowed” clubhouse after his friends have all discovered dating. Therefore, it seems that even as men and women go along with the culture of bros and bromistas, they may secretly resent it and view it as out of date.

While this study appears to show that women can thrive within masculine cultures over a fairly short period, there are long-term consequences to keep in mind. O’Neill’s 2010 paper in Journal of Organizational Behavior found that MBAs who preferred an “aggressive”, masculine working culture – regardless of their sex -- earned more money four years after graduation, with women benefiting even more than men from this preference. Eight years post-degree, however, the men in the sample had pulled ahead, while the women had begun to disengage from their careers. In a world that still has pronounced gender disparities, the old cultural values won’t get us to equality.

O’Neill’s past work has shown that workplace joviality can be channeled in directions that are emotionally healthier for both men and women. Her 2017 Academy of Management Journal article explored the emotional culture of another male-dominated world – that of U.S. firefighters. Firehouses where goofing around took place within an atmosphere of companionate (caring and compassionate) love had fewer problems with self-destructive behavior and health issues, O’Neill found. Despite being a small minority in this extremely masculine setting, women firefighters were very much included in the playful, supportive environment. Tech start-ups, take note.

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