Knowledge that Transforms

Workplace conversations are essential for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and relationship building. While much of the literature has focused on work-related discussions, recent shifts toward the blurring of professional and personal boundaries suggest that employees may increasingly converse about aspects of their nonwork lives. One such topic of conversation—parenting—presents a unique and understudied type of workplace exchange given the central role of the parental identity for working parents and the opportunity for them to highlight this important identity through dialogue. In the current set of studies, we introduce workplace parenting conversations as dialogical, in-depth exchanges about parenting-related topics between coworkers who are parents. Drawing from identity management and boundary management theories, we propose that these conversations offer instrumental, affective, and relational benefits that positively impact behaviors across work and parenting role domains. Using a mixed-methods triangulation approach, we first explore the content and processes of workplace parenting conversations through qualitative interviews (Study 1A), followed by an experience sampling study testing our model, complete with behavioral outcomes at work and home (Study 1B). We then explore the underlying micro-mechanisms connecting workplace parenting conversations to the mechanisms in our model through additional interviews (Study 2A) and a field experiment (Study 2B). Our findings contribute to the literature on workplace conversations by identifying an overlooked yet impactful form of workplace dialogue, exploring its primarily positive effects on employees’ behaviors in both work and home contexts, and uncovering unique micro-mechanisms associated with this specific type of conversation.

CEO activism – CEOs’ personal and public expression of a stance on a sociopolitical debate, aimed at influencing opinions in the espoused direction – is often understood as stemming primarily from CEOs’ political ideology and studied through its effects on distinct audiences such as employees, consumers, and investors. Building on CEO activism research and integrating insights from upper echelons theory, institutional theory, nonmarket strategy, social movements, psychology, and social evaluations, this dissertation unpacks what remains less clear on both sides of this definition. On the “personal expression” side, it introduces CEO narcissism as a complementary explanation, given its prevalence among CEOs, link to attention-seeking, and relevance to a visible act like CEO activism. On the “public influence” side, it examines consequences beyond isolated audience reactions: whether public stances are followed by firm sustainability-related initiatives, and how CEO activism travels through several actors whose interactions can generate social momentum and raise issue salience for policymakers. Across three essays, issue characteristics emerge as central to understanding why CEOs choose particular topics and what follows once they do. The issues CEOs choose shape the attention a CEO’s stance attracts, the conditions for firm follow-through, and the likelihood that a stance travels into public and political debate. Taken together, the essays show that issues most likely to draw attention to CEOs may be least likely to generate firm follow-through, yet still matter for public and political debate.

People in organizations often face demands in excess of their resources. Psychological theories of resources reflect this scarcity, emphasizing how people conserve or balance resources. While they acknowledge that interventions like mindfulness training can create resources, these theories struggle to explain how, as they assume that resources are necessarily scarce. In this study, we introduce a theory of mindful resourcing. Rather than reducing mindfulness to a scarce psychological resource that a person has, it reveals mindfulness to be a skillful practice that a person does to enhance their agency to create resources. Mindful resourcing theory shows how mindfulness skills form a foundation for resourcing—the ability to create and enact resources—and how resourcing reciprocally enhances mindfulness skills, such that the practices of mindfulness and resourcing intertwine as mutually sustaining and supporting practices. We develop this theory across a three-phase research design that (1) introduces a conceptual model which sequences how these practices intertwine and (2) uses this sequencing to surface the otherwise implicit design structure of mindfulness trainings, before (3) abductively building theory on how people enact and develop competence in mindful resourcing from longitudinal qualitative data of 98 non-profit employees undergoing training. Our theory-building discovers the critical role of resourcing spirals—showing how employees create and enact resources by skillfully assembling spirals and recursively expanding those spirals into longer and more impactful sequences as they gain competence. Taken together, our study illuminates the understudied human activities by which people not only create and enact resources but learn to do so more mindfully.

Lobbying is one of the primary nonmarket strategies firms use to shape regulatory outcomes, yet it is often treated as either an informational input that helps regulators make better decisions or a distortionary influence that undermines bureaucratic judgment. We develop a reputation-based theory of how regulators interpret lobbying under uncertainty. Because agencies are evaluated for both acting too quickly and acting too slowly, regulators use discretion over decision time to manage reputational risk. From this perspective, lobbying matters less as persuasion and more as sustained engagement that affects regulators’ confidence that foreseeable risks have been identified and addressed. We argue that the effects of lobbying depend on firm-level reputational cues that influence how regulators interpret lobbying activity, ultimately affecting the speed at which agencies grant regulatory approval. Using a novel dataset of FDA medical device approvals from 2002 to 2021, we find that lobbying is associated with faster approval on average. However, following product recalls this effect can reverse, suggesting that regulators treat interaction as misplaced confidence and increase scrutiny to reduce exposure to decisions that may become reputationally costly. By contrast, innovation reputation signals strengthen the approval-accelerating effect of lobbying by making timely approval more defensible to external audiences. Our theory suggests that the success of lobbying depends on how regulators interpret it in light of firm reputational cues, providing a reputation-based explanation for prior mixed findings on lobbying effectiveness.

Existing research on psychological safety suggests that remote work might make it more challenging for workers to engage in the sorts of interactions that promote psychological safety. This raises the question: How is psychological safety bolstered when groups work remotely? Drawing on data from a 7-year longitudinal qualitative study—including 275 interviews and approximately 330 hours of observations—of a professional services organization that shifted from an in-person to a remote work environment, I present a process model of how psychological safety can be strengthened among workers interacting virtually. I find that remote work supports interactional patterns that facilitate self-disclosure among group members. Learning more about one another, workers become mutually humanized, and psychological safety is bolstered. This psychological safety is accompanied by a set of associated practices that help people coordinate on work tasks while also sustaining flexibility in where and when they work. Reflecting improved psychological safety and associated practices, group members attend to and accomplish both work tasks and nonwork activities. This study contributes to the psychological safety literature by identifying a distinct process through which psychological safety can be promoted in remote work environments: mutual humanization via self-disclosure, which is supported through interactional patterns facilitated by remote work. Importantly, this distinct group-initiated process expands theorization beyond its current focus on leader-initiated social learning. This study also identifies how psychological safety supports role management, integrating theories of psychological safety and work-nonwork roles to expand understanding of psychological safety’s positive consequences.

Most prior research on teams’ responses to failure treats teams as closed systems. However, after failures, teams may seek to improve performance by bringing in new members. Adopting a teams-as-open-systems perspective, we test which teams are more willing to add high-status members following failures and whether doing so improves team performance. Drawing on status hierarchy research, we posit that after a team failure, members will feel uncertain about their own status (particularly those with high status). More importantly, we predict that the impact of this status uncertainty on members’ willingness to add high-status new members depends on teams’ pre-existing status differentiation. Specifically, status uncertainty leads members in low-status-differentiation teams to perceive adding a high-status new member as a potential benefit to collective performance, whereas it leads members in high-status-differentiation teams to perceive the addition as a potential threat to their own status. We theorize that these individual perceptions shape teams’ collective decisions through an emergent process. Taken together, we predict that, at the team level, failure will increase the willingness to add high-status members in teams with low, but not high, status differentiation, and such addition improves subsequent team performance. Using longitudinal archival data on product development teams (Study 1, N = 4,811 teams) and two pre-registered experiments at the individual (Study 2, N = 783 participants) and team levels (Study 3, N = 222 teams), we found support for these predictions. This research advances the literature on team failure and illuminates dynamics between membership change and social hierarchy.

Drawing on a multi-year, qualitative study of a promising venture in a nascent industry, we develop a process model tracing how future-oriented narratives can transform into deception. In the venture we studied, the founder’s future-oriented narratives were initially viewed as evidence of his visionary foresight. As these narratives traveled downward through the organization, employees responsible for operations translated the founder’s broad vision into specific targets and metrics. Some details described an attainable future; others reached so far beyond the attainable that they became liminal, occupying a grey zone between right and wrong. Over time, growing internal and external demands for tangible progress created an expectations-reality gap, prompting employees to engage in temporal reorientation, shifting statements from “we will” to “we have.” Their statements crossed from liminal to deceptive, now asserting as fact something that did not exist. Once formalized in presentations, websites, and other artefacts, the claims became dominant deceptions: codified, specific, past- or present-tense deceptions deliberately reproduced across the organization. In this codified form, the deceptions became misconduct that, if detected, could have been acted on by social control agents. We propose that three enabling conditions sustained this transformation: visionary attribution (belief in the founder’s unique foresight), interpretive flexibility (the ambiguity of new technologies that allows multiple plausible meanings), and moral justification (the framing of deception as serving a higher mission). Because the process unfolded diffusely and incrementally, the transformation could only be observed retrospectively, in the accumulation of actions across individuals, artefacts, and time. By tracing this process, we extend research in narratives and in organizational misconduct.

The extant literature on task motivation has generally demonstrated its beneficial effects on workplace outcomes. Although some evidence has raised concerns about the potential link between task motivation and maladaptive behaviors, this line of work has been grounded in an intrapersonal perspective that focuses on employees’ internal regulation. Guided by motivated information processing theory, we adopt an interpersonal perspective to examine how task motivation may, under certain conditions, lead to interaction avoidance, a maladaptive workplace behavior with downstream implications for job performance. We theorize that, when perceiving a lower level of task interdependence, employees with higher task motivation are more likely to engage in interaction avoidance. This avoidance, in turn, is negatively related to job performance. Across an online experiment with a U.S. sample, a field experiment with a Chinese sample, and a survey with a Chinese sample, our hypotheses are supported. This research builds a more balanced understanding of how task motivation influences employee behavior and performance. In practice, managers should actively channel the effort of highly task-motivated employees to ensure their motivation translates into effectiveness rather than counterproductive avoidance.

I theorize that candidate filters, a core technology in digital labor markets considered central to cost-effective matching, redistributes costs from the search-and-screening stage to the job-offer stage of hiring. Filters cause employers to focus on applicants who display common preferred characteristics. At the search-and-screening stage, filters reduce the number of applicants interviewed and alter the composition of the interviewed pool by removing both lower- and higher-quality candidates. At the job-offer stage, filters lead employers to make job offers to candidates with easily observable signals of quality and higher wage demands. Additionally, I theorize that if many firms target the same signals of quality, they may all pursue similar candidates. This increases bargaining power for those applicants, leading to more rejected job offers and higher wage demands. A randomized field experiment in a large online labor market confirms that filters redistribute hiring costs. The experiment shows that employers with access to filters interview 3.4% fewer applicants. Using a machine learning algorithm to proxy for unobservable-to-the-employer applicant quality, I show that filters cause employers to interview 28.9% fewer lower-quality applicants and 36.9% fewer high-quality applicants per job. Among employers who actively used filters, I find suggestive evidence of worse job-offer outcomes: offers are 8.9% more likely to be rejected, and contracted wages are 2.5% higher. I discuss the implications of this cost redistribution for organizations, labor markets, and strategy research.

Female entrepreneurs consistently earn less than their male counterparts, a disparity that is particularly acute among microentrepreneurs in developing economies. Researchers often attribute this gap to structural constraints, but pay less attention to how social interactions shape earnings. This oversight is especially relevant in microentrepreneurship, where sales are contingent on customers approaching and interacting with sellers in the marketplace. Using an interactionist lens, we draw on social exchange theory and research on gender stereotypes to guide expectations. We anticipate that customers will more often approach female sellers, expecting warmer interactions, and that this higher volume will translate into higher earnings when business characteristics and selling behavior are held constant. Existing research hints at this dynamic, but methodological constraints have obscured it. To overcome these constraints and test our theory, we conducted a field experiment in two face-to-face markets in India. We trained confederate sellers to run identical, de novo microenterprises and follow standard protocols for customer engagement, thus isolating customer approach in response to sellers’ gender. Female sellers attracted 41% more customers, resulting in significantly higher sales than men, all else equal, in our experiment. Consistent with our theory, customers were more likely to talk with women about topics unrelated to the sale and attempt to bargain with women. This study advances research on gender dynamics in entrepreneurship, negotiation, and customer-facing work by identifying customer approach as a novel mechanism that can generate economic advantages for female microentrepreneurs and may shape gendered opportunities in other markets and organizations.