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As you have seen in the “From the Editor” that Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) published in June 2017, the editors of ASQ strongly encourage that authors show the data in their manuscripts, by using graphical approaches to give an indication of the most important features of the data and their theoretical explanation before estimating models. Preferably this should be done as early as the introduction in order to spur the reader’s interest and give an indication of why the paper is valuable. Such use of graphical methods is rare in organizational theory and management research more generally, so we will gradually introduce methods of graphical analysis that can be used by researchers.
Graphical methods for showing the data are integrated into Stata, the most common software used by management researchers, and the Stata commands offer a good blend of simplicity and flexibility. Nevertheless, they need some training, especially because statistical training is model-focused in many schools, and highly variable in how well graphical methods are taught. Here are some resources that can be useful: Here is a simple example do-file and data. The data are from published work (Greve and Song, 2016), but is only a small sample of the data in use. Here are the graphs produced by the do-file and the data. Data source: Greve, Henrich R., and Seo Yeon Song. 2017. "Amazon Warrior: How a Platform Can Restructure Industry Power and Ecology." Advances in Strategic Management 37:299-335. Here is a simple introduction to some important methods, including scatterplots, lineplots, bar graphs, box plots, and kernel (full distribution) plots. Here is an example of more advanced programming, which is needed because stata does not (yet) have a simple way of showing a grouped bar graph with error bars, which is an important graph for taking a first look at group differences. Displaying statistics on a map can be very helpful for any kind of research involving spatial relations. Here is an introduction to spmap, which is an add-on procedure for producing mapped data displays. Earlier such mapping required changing to different software and exporting data, which is both time consuming and a potential source of errors. Here is an introduction to the coefplot function, which is a graphical display of coefficient magnitudes, and a very informative way of giving a comparative view of a full regression model, or parts of it, in a compact graph. The Greve and Song file above gives an example, but this function has an advanced set of options. An important issue in using it is that it is usually better to standardize the covariates (to a standard deviation of unity) for easy comparison of effect size. This was not done in Greve and Song because their covariates were counts, so unit changes were meaningful and comparable.  Here is an interesting contradiction: Some politicians say that relying less on foreign workers will make their nation more competitive, but in fact it makes the workers’ home country more competitive. Notice that I said contradiction, not paradox, because it is not a paradox at all. It is logical, and it is supported by recent research.
Here is how it works, as explained in an article by Dan Wang in Administrative Science Quarterly. Foreign workers are often used by highly advanced and competitive firms, because those firms are best positioned to take advantage of a worker’s skill wherever it is found, and to transfer it to wherever it is needed. They also have excellent production processes, advanced technologies, and knowledge on how to best operate these. Sometimes their foreign workers go back to their home countries (usually voluntarily). What happens then? The start is quite simple. These workers may be holding knowledge of great value to firms in their home countries, so the key is whether they can make a knowledge transfer back home. The firms that hire them, or the new firms they form if they become entrepreneurs, will benefit from their knowledge. But the full story is not as simple as the start. These workers differ in how well connected they are to others, in the companies they worked with abroad, and in the companies they work with after returning. Their personal networks differ in how many people they know and how well they know them. It turns out that knowledge transfer depends greatly on these connections, because the greatest transfers happen when a worker is highly connected both abroad and after returning home. The conclusion is clear. Playing the competitiveness card may be a good way to cater to xenophobia among voters, because those who prefer fewer foreigners around like to hear reasons for their dislike. (Even if the excuse isn’t true, it is nice to have an excuse.) But competitiveness is not a valid reason to send foreign workers home. Wang’s research had one more important conclusion: it was not just personal networks that made knowledge transfers effective, but also an absence of xenophobia in the home country. Now the contradiction becomes even more interesting. Xenophobic policies of sending people home may be phrased as helping competitiveness, but they usually hurt it — except when the workers come from a country with xenophobic people, because then the knowledge they have won’t transfer back. Xenophobia is a lose–lose proposition. Wang, D. 2015 "Activating Cross-border Brokerage: Interorganizational Knowledge Transfer through Skilled Return Migration." Administrative Science Quarterly, 60: 133-176.  Managers are often given advice that combines research-based buzzwords with fundamental misunderstandings. Empowerment is a good example. The word contains “power,” and advice is usually given to those who feel a need to improve, so it was perhaps inevitable that empowerment should be associated with ideas of individuals becoming or feeling empowered through some action of their own, such as attending a course or a coaching session on how to become empowered. That’s not what empowerment means or how it works: people are empowered when someone else gives them power and authority to make their own decisions.
The distinction is important because if empowerment improves organizations, then we should start by looking at the person who empowers others. That’s exactly what was done in research published in Administrative Science Quarterly by Amy Ou and collaborators. They looked at how a CEO’s humility could empower others in the firm. Their central insight is simple and powerful: a CEO’s humility makes it easier for the top management team to work together, because each feels empowered and comfortable, and that effect on the top management team cascades down the organization. They found that the humble CEO is the opposite of the showy CEO in two key ways. First, the humble CEO does not dominate but instead is understated and makes it easier for the closest executives to stand up and perform. For example, the humble CEO does not make public performances and speeches to the whole organization but instead lets the empowerment of the closest executives cascade down. Second, humble CEOs encourage communication to give shared understanding, which in turn lets subordinates feel motivated and confident about their decisions and helps their managers trust their judgment and commitment. This cascading down of shared understanding and trust can bring whole organizations together more effectively than inspirational speeches by showy CEOs. There is much about that research that appeals to us, because most of us share the suspicion that showy, self-promoting, narcissist CEOs must be flawed in some way. Yet such CEOs are very common, and part of the reason is that it is easier to imagine people who make a big impression also having big effects on the firms they lead. Humility is such a low-key behavior and such (what else can I say?) humble thinking that it is hard to imagine it having a big effect. But it does. How? The keyword is empowerment. Humble CEOs empower their top management teams. Empowered top management teams create an organizational climate that empowers workers all the way down. A top management team that has been empowered and in turn empowers others creates norms that are so strong that it is hard to be an authoritarian manager. That’s how humility has big effects on organizations: it creates an expanding circle of empowerment. Ou, Amy Y., Anne S. Tsui, Angelo J. Kinicki, David A. Waldman, Xiao Zhixing, and Lynda Jiwen Song. 2014. "Humble Chief Executive Officers' Connections to Top Management Team Integration and Middle Managers' Responses." Administrative Science Quarterly 59(1):34-72.  Five years ago, I posted a blog on award-winning research showing that firms pay more and get less when hiring from the external labor market. The reason is that managers know more about their current employees, and they overestimate the value of external hires because they focus on their formal qualifications. When it comes to filling jobs internally in the organization, a manager still has to choose between placing a known worker into a job or posting the job and assessing applicants, who may or may not be familiar to the manager. With internal hiring, do managers still undervalue the workers they know?
Research in Administrative Science Quarterly by JR Keller answers that question. He looked at the difference in job performance and pay between jobs that were filled through posting and applying, and jobs that were filled through the manager picking someone (slotting). Managers could choose which way to fill each job, and naturally they used slotting when they knew someone who fit and posting when they were not so sure. This is the same as choosing between internal job mobility and the external job market, because managers pick internal candidates when they know someone who fits the job and hire externally when they are not so sure. They also have more candidates when posting, and they know less about the applicants because they are usually from other parts of the organization. In every way you can imagine, the choice between posting and slotting is similar to the choice between external and internal hiring. So how wrong is it to fill an internal hire through posting instead of slotting? Here is the surprise: It is not worse to fill by posting, but better. Posting means higher job performance, both absolute and compared with others. It means lower chance of leaving the job, except for leaving for a promotion, which is more likely when filling through posting. Oh, and it also means higher pay for the employee filling the job. So, for the employee this looks like a good thing; more pay and better chance of a promotion. For the firm, it looks like paying more to get more, so the net effect depends on how much more the firm is getting. In this case the answer is easy because the lower turnover from the job alone shows that the firm benefits from using posting. The better job performance is icing on the cake. But this raises the question of why markets work better inside an organization than outside it. What is it that the manager can see better when posting internally? The answer is, nearly everything. Organizations know a lot about their employees, and this knowledge is readily available when filling jobs through posting. Not only that, the posting process forces the hiring manager to think carefully about what information to use and how to weight it in the decision, giving a more systematic and higher quality choice. All the information is there, and posting gives more choices and a better choice process. There is an important lesson in this that goes beyond filling positions. We often have beliefs about the benefit of markets relative to social arrangements like networks. We forget that there are many kinds of markets and many kinds of social arrangements, and ultimately decision making comes down to what to choose from and how to make the choice. Keller, JR. 2017 Posting and Slotting: How Hiring Processes Shape the Quality of Hire and Compensation in Internal Labor Markets. Administrative Science Quarterly: forthcoming.  We live long lives with many new experiences, yet popular culture tells us to be the same. Be true to yourself, they say. Managers have long careers with many roles, yet researchers and self-helpers tell them to be the same. Be the authentic you, they say. It is said so many times that it must be true. Except that things said too many times by too many people need to be researched, because they might be wrong and in consequential ways.
A new article in Administrative Science Quarterly by Brianna Barker Caza, Sherry Moss, and Heather Vough looks at the connection between being authentic and being the same, and it finds that what everyone says is not quite true. They asked whether consistency (being the same) is the same as authenticity (being one’s true self) and found that the answer is no. The problem with saying that authenticity demands consistency is that one’s true self is not a unified whole. We can think multiple thoughts, have multiple beliefs, and take on multiple roles, and each of these can be fully ours even though they are not consistent with each other. People are smart enough that they don’t have to be only one thing, and they are flexible enough that they don’t force themselves to be only one. To do the research, the authors followed the careers of people who had multiple jobs at once and in some cases also changed these jobs over time. This is a strict test of authenticity because we understand and accept that people can be different at work and privately – like the quiet student who is a very outgoing and improvisational musician. Not surprisingly, the demands of authenticity were a burden for these people with plural careers. They knew that they were asked to be authentic, and that this implied being the same always, but they also felt these demands to be unnatural. Being authentic according to others was the same as being inauthentic according to themselves. So who wins this battle? There can be no winner, but the subjects of this study usually found a truce that worked well for them. On the one hand, they had to draw lines between who they were and who they presented themselves as, but these lines did not involve acting – they involved presenting the part of themselves that belonged to the specific job they were doing at the time. Sometimes they could even present the more complete self, but they were careful about when. On the other hand, they incorporated the multiple roles and identities that belonged to them as part of themselves, and they saw this incorporation as authentic and valuable. “There can be only one” was a demand they did not have to follow because they could shape their careers and benefit (and let others benefit) from the learning and flexibility that these multiple identities gave them. Think about the people around you. Some may seem unusual because they simply do too many things, or too different things, and we sometimes suspect that some of it is inauthentic – they act for some benefit. But you could easily be wrong, and you could underestimate their commitment to each activity and the value they add to it. Caza, Brianna Barker, Sherry Moss, and Heather Vough 2017 "From Synchronizing to Harmonizing: The Process of Authenticating Multiple Work Identities." Administrative Science Quarterly: forthcoming. |
Blog's objectiveThis blog is devoted to discussions of how events in the news illustrate organizational research and can be explained by organizational theory. It is only updated when I have time to spare. Archives
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