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Study: Left-handed CEOs are more innovative

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 02:32:28 +0000

Study: Left-handed CEOs are more innovative Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 04/29/2025 - 22:32

In This Story

Long Chen

June Woo Park

Q: What do Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have in common (besides the obvious)?
A: All three belong to a community comprising about 10% of the population—the community of the left-handed.

And they’re far from the only business luminaries who are members. Steve Forbes, Oprah Winfrey and Lou Gerstner (of IBM fame) are left-handed, as were John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Ratan Tata.

Of course, this could be a mere coincidence—but perhaps not. The popular belief that left-handers think more creatively—and hence may enjoy an innovative edge in business—has been supported by cognitive neuroscience research, which shows that the left hand is controlled by the brain’s right hemisphere, a region closely associated with creative thinking. However, conflicting findings and limited research evidence prevent broad conclusions about the correlation between creativity and handedness, let alone its potential implications for business leadership.

A forthcoming research publication by Long Chen and June Woo Park, two accounting professors at the Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, constitutes the first rigorous scholarly investigation into whether—and how—handedness plays a role in business innovation.

June Woo Park and Long Chen

The paper was co-authored by Albert Tsang of Southern University of Science and Technology and Xiaofang Xu of Beijing Technology and Business University.

The researchers searched Google for photos and videos of S&P 500 CEOs engaged in activities like writing, throwing, drawing, and eating to determine their dominant hand, if wasn’t already disclosed in published sources. “We looked at pictures of them on the golf course to see how they held their clubs,” Park explains. “We also noted which wrist they wore their watch on; left-handed people often wear it on the right.” When in doubt, they followed up with calls or emails to the respective companies. All in all, they were able to identify the handedness of 1,008 CEOs across 472 companies: 91.4 percent were right-handed, 7.9 percent left-handed, and 0.7 percent mixed.

The researchers then looked at the numbers of patents and citations received by the firms from 1992 to 2015. They controlled for firm and industry characteristics, as well as other personal traits known to affect CEO innovativeness (such as age, education, risk preference shaped by experience, birth order, and founder status).

In addition, they performed several follow-up tests, including one focused on a narrow subset of firms that unexpectedly switched from a right-handed CEO to a left-handed one due to unforeseeable circumstances such as death or illness.

Every variation of the study produced essentially the same result: Firms led by left-handed CEOs demonstrate significantly higher innovative output. The differences were qualitative as well as quantitative. Patents under left-handed leadership were more likely to represent something new under the sun, rather than a spin-off from established technology.

The researchers hypothesized that the left-handers’ creative orientation would impact the way they ran their firms, including hiring decisions. Indeed, they found that companies applied for more H-1B and STEM visas when left-handers were at the helm. This emphasis on talent acquisition was not only a key indicator of innovation commitment, but may have also contributed to the firms’ creative advantage.

“We find that left-handed CEOs are more likely to hire immigrant inventors in STEM fields, and are also more likely to be inventors themselves,” Chen says. “These findings strengthen our argument by highlighting specific ways in which left-handed CEOs may directly enhance firm innovation.”

Still, piling up patents doesn’t automatically produce outcomes that will make customers and shareholders happy. Ultimately, firm performance is what matters in evaluating business success. As additional analyses in the study suggest, firms led by left-handers had higher return on assets and stronger buy-and-hold returns than peers with a right-handed leader.

“They outperformed their counterparts,” Park summarizes. “Investors are drawn to innovative firms, and left-handedness is one of the factors investors could use in their stock-picking.”

Yet innovative success is complex and multifaceted. Left-handedness is only one potentially meaningful trait among many—a lot more are yet to be explored.

“Our results are based on a large sample. But investors should not assume a CEO that is not left-handed lacks innovative potential,” Chen says.

For their ongoing and future research projects, Chen and Park are looking beyond left-handedness to explore other deeply personal CEO traits that may have business implications.

“We find it fascinating to draw on insights from disciplines outside accounting and finance,” Chen says. “CEO decisions may be shaped by factors like family experiences, genetics, academic background, career paths, and more—really, the full range of experiences that makes them who they are. Understanding that can help market participants better interpret and predict CEOs’ decision-making.”

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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!

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Einav Hart

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In Silicon Valley, human capital trumps intellectual capital

Marianne Klinker — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 16:23:12 +0000

In Silicon Valley, human capital trumps intellectual capital Marianne Klinker Mon, 01/22/2024 - 11:23

To stay competitive in the war for talent, tech companies must weigh secrecy against specificity when crafting job ads. Are they disclosing too much?

Job postings are a key tool for attracting qualified tech workers. However, companies face a dilemma: on the one hand, they want to provide enough information to attract the right candidates; on the other hand, they want to keep the information about their product development and planning private. Sometimes it is just hard to get both.

Yi Cao

In a recent paper for Contemporary Accounting Research, accounting professor Yi Cao of the Donald G. Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ argues that highly competitive companies are more likely to post specific job requirements in order to find qualified workers even at the cost of potentially leaking proprietary trade secrets. (The paper was co-authored by Shijun Cheng of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Jenny Wu Tucker of the University of Florida, and Chi Wan of the University of Massachusetts Boston.)

Generally, companies reveal less information during fierce competition to avoid giving their competitors an advantage. However, Cao finds that “when the technological competition is more fierce, companies provide more information into the labor market because they have to do this in order to attract talents, which is the essential driving force of innovation. They're balancing the trade-off between not leaking secrets but not hiring the matching candidates, versus leaking some of the trade secrets while more likely to hire matching employees. So between these two trade-offs, obviously, we find that companies choose to bear the risk of leaking information in order to acquire talents.”

The benefits of quickly attracting desired tech talent outweigh the potential costs of revealing proprietary information.

To examine the relationship between technological competition and skill specificity in job postings for tech positions, the researchers used a novel job posting database provided by Burning Glass Technologies (BGT). They calculated the skill-specificity scores of the job ads based on the level of information disclosed in the skill-requirements of the job postings and the taxonomy of skills, and then aggregated it annually by firm. Cao’s paper is the first to propose a taxonomy theory-based measure of term specificity in the business field. This provides companies with a handy tool for measuring the specificity of textual documents and precisely determining how much information to disclose.

Cao uses the example of a company looking for workers with AI experience to demonstrate how the measure works. The company could post a job listing that simply says, "We are looking for someone to build machine learning tools." This is a relatively vague job posting that would not provide job seekers with detailed information about the specific skills that the company is looking for. The company could also reword the post more specifically, e.g. "We are looking for someone to use Python and decision tree algorithms for credit card risk." Alternatively, they could be even more specific with language like, "We are looking for someone who have experience with random forest algorithms to specifically apply a portfolio level of prediction of credit card defaults." This description provides job seekers with detailed information about the specific tasks and skills that the company is looking for, while at the same time revealing information about existing technology.

Cao found that on average, firms disclose an additional 27 specific skills in their job ads when facing intense technological competition. The results reveal that the benefits of quickly attracting desired tech talent outweigh the potential costs of revealing proprietary information.

The findings did not apply to job advertisements for lower-level non-tech positions, such as food preparation and cleaning staff. However, they were observable for senior non-tech positions, e.g. directors of marketing or finance. These nuances suggest that both tech and managerial talent were valuable enough to motivate a higher degree of disclosure from employers.

Additionally, the effect on disclosure was much stronger for incremental innovators—firms whose patents tended to build on past knowledge, rather than strike out in new technological directions. The researchers speculate that breakthrough innovators would have too much to lose if they were to signal their plans through job postings.

While more detailed job postings can be helpful for finding qualified workers, they also could reveal proprietary information about the company's products and strategies. Cao emphasizes, “[Companies are] basically telling the world what [they’re] trying to create. With higher level of detail you’re trying to describe, you're disclosing more information to potentially everyone. And that information is beneficial in terms of labor demand because it attracts the right employee. But it's a concern in terms of competition because you basically show cards to your opponents.”

As an accounting scholar, Cao is intrigued by the possibilities inherent in the discovery that labor-market pressures can force employers to divulge potentially compromising information. “In financial reporting, we don’t capitalize human capital; we consider it an expense,” he says. “But that’s not necessarily the case when the labor market is tight and when the labor is essential in productivity. Our paper shows how the labor market, product market, and capital market are not segregated, but connected.”

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