Aneesh Rai Directory Page
Aneesh Rai
Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Aneesh Rai is an Assistant Professor of Management & Organization at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD in Operations, Information, and Decisions from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
His research is primarily focused on using insights from the judgment and decision-making literature to better understand what drives decisions to diversify organizations. Within this space, he examines how people’s perceptions of group diversity affect personnel selection decisions and influence how diverse organizations become. He also explores how the salience of diversity influences people’s decisions and leverages this knowledge to design interventions for organizations to increase their gender and racial diversity. Finally, his secondary research interest is using large-scale field experiments to test interventions to promote positive behavior change in organizations.
News
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Research
Academic Publications
“Group Size and Its Impact on Diversity-Related Perceptions and Hiring Decisions in Homogeneous Groups,” published in Organization Science
Can the size of a homogeneous group matter for how it’s perceived and whether it’s diversified? Across experiments and analyses of S&P 1500 corporate boards over time, our research suggests that decision-makers neglect homogeneity in smaller groups while investing extra effort towards diversifying larger homogeneous groups, likely due to increased concerns about lack of diversity, fairness, and potential social sanctions. Our theory can help explain distortions we document in the distribution of the size of homogeneous groups in some of the world’s most powerful organizational groups: S&P 1500 corporate boards. Specifically, for each fewer member on a homogeneous board, boards were 1-2 percentage points less likely to diversify by adding at least one underrepresented member in the year ahead. As corporate board size decreased, we found that all-male and all-White boards became increasingly overrepresented relative to expectations, suggesting greater strategic avoidance of homogeneity in larger groups, but not smaller groups.
Authors: Aneesh Rai (assistant professor, Smith School), Edward H. Chang (assistant professor, Harvard University), Erika L. Kirgios (assistant professor, University of Chicago), Katherine L. Milkman (professor, University of Pennsylvania)
Setting Higher Referral Targets Increases the Number of Women Recommended: Evidence From the Field and Lab
Journal of Applied Psychology
Women continue to be underrepresented in numerous occupations and in the highest echelons of many organizations. This may be due, in part, to disadvantages they face in referral-based hiring and promotion processes. We propose a low-cost and easily scalable intervention to boost referrals of women in male-dominated contexts: requesting a greater target number of referrals (e.g., at least four instead of at least two referrals). Across six experiments (including two field experiments embedded in an organization’s referrals process), requesting double the number of referrals increased the number of women referred by 17%-88%. Our intervention provides a versatile, low-cost, and low-risk option for managers and leaders looking to recruit from the full range of talent available to them.
Aneesh Rai (Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park); Erika Kirgios (Assistant Professor, University of Chicago); Brian Lucas (Associate Professor, Cornell University); Katherine Milkman (Professor, University of Pennsylvania)