Organizational Behaviour Seminars

The study of motivation in and of teams has flourished and expanded over the past few decades. We now have a better understanding of core motivational processes at the individual and team levels of analysis, along with cross-level processes through which individuals and teams influence each other. However, societal, cultural, economic, and technological changes have led to new forms of team-based designs and teaming strategies in work organizations. In this seminar, I will review five major changes to the nature of teams and teaming and identify fruitful avenues for future research that can generate new and important knowledge about the motivation of individuals in teams as well as the motivation of team systems as wholes. I will also summarize recent research projects that illustrate some of the new directions noted.

In this paper, we discuss a formal model of idea flows and project / idea combination in companies and how hierarchies might influence those combinations (cf., Seshadri and Shapira  2003). We then use the results of the model to generate hypotheses about the importance and variance of importance of ideas. Then we test the hypotheses based on a analysis of patents for 544 firms surveyed by a compensation consultant, in which the hierarchical depth of the firm was also available. We find that indeed, even after controllin for size, span of control, and other important variables, firms with deeper hierarchies tended to have a more “important” patent based on its citations . We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of these results for organization theory and innovation.

The world is becoming more and more automatized. Organizations and governments are using algorithms to improve decision-making for hiring, finance, marketing, and medical treatments. The use of algorithms holds promise. It can increase efficiency and overcome human biases. Unfortunately, as with humans, some of these algorithms make persistently biased decisions, functionally discriminating against people based on characteristics such as race and gender. In my talk, I will discuss two consequences of algorithm discrimination.

The first is moral outrage. Media coverage suggests that people are morally outraged by algorithmic discrimination, but an open question is whether people are less outraged by algorithmic discrimination than by human discrimination. In eight controlled experiments, I find that people are less morally outraged by algorithmic discrimination and that this algorithmic outrage asymmetry is driven by the reduced attribution of prejudicial motivation to machines.

The second is stereotype strengthening. People can interpret discrimination as either based on prejudice or reflecting data. Because people see algorithms as less motivated by prejudice than humans, they might infer that the discrimination is based on data. This will lead them to believe that stereotype is accurate, strengthening the stereotype. I will present initial data addressing this hypothesis.

shape the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial performance (CFP). Of particular interest is how firms adjust key features of their competitive repertoires to enhance the impact of CSR on CFP. We find that firms with high CSR investments can enhance short-term CFP by reducing the intensity of their competitive activity and enjoy gains in long-term CFP by increasing their competitive complexity. These interaction effects are robust across industry contexts with different levels of competitive pressure. Overall, our results demonstrate that firms may fail to benefit from CSR investments when they intensify and simplify their competitive action repertoires, thus directly confronting rivals. Instead, firms can enhance CFP by avoiding head-to-head rivalry and leveraging their CSR investments to compete differently with a novel types of competitive actions. In addition, we believe our findings can help inform, for example, the complex debate about the use of ESG as an investment criterion and whether public policy should have a role in shaping a company’s purpose-driven strategy.