Creating a More Inclusive and Sustainable Future
Building credible commitments via board ties: Evidence from the supply chain
November 2025
Using a novel dataset that provides a comprehensive coverage of U.S. firms' industrial supply chain relationships, we find that firms with innovation specific to a buyer are more likely to share a common director with that buyer. This association is stronger when the buyer has a larger number of alternative suppliers. We further find that when a supplier–buyer pair shares a common director, the supplier's R&D investment is more sensitive to the investment opportunities of its buyer. Moreover, such pairs tend to have longer supply chain relationships. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that board ties serve as a credible commitment mechanism to support exchange along the supply chain and safeguard suppliers' buyer-specific investments.
Rebecca Hann, University of Maryland-College Park; Musa Subasi, University of Maryland-College Park; Yue Zheng, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Status-Amplified Deterrence: Paul Manafort’s Prosecution Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
Organization Science, September 2025
Social control agents often struggle to deter organizational deviance. We propose a theory of “status-amplified deterrence” wherein enforcement’s deterrent effects are amplified when carried out against high-status organizational actors. First, this enforcement is interpreted as willingness and ability for far-reaching enforcement. Next, amplified deterrence occurs as these episodes become widely known through (1) extensive media coverage and (2) the marketing efforts of third-party compliance advisors. We examine this theory in the context of the U.S. Department of Justice’s enforcement against Paul Manafort for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Using a difference-in-differences design, we demonstrate that enforcement against Manafort caused a widespread, sustained, and economically significant reduction in FARA noncompliance. We show supplementary evidence consistent with the idea that deterrence was amplified in significant part by media attention and by law firms referencing the episode while successfully marketing FARA advisory services. We contribute to literature illuminating how organizations, in conjunction with third-party compliance advisors, adjust deviant activities in response to shifting regulatory environments.
Reuben Hurst, Jin Hyung Kim (George Washington University) and Jordan Siegel (University of Michigan)
Breaking ceilings: Debate training promotes leadership emergence by increasing assertiveness.
Journal of Applied Psychology
To date, little is known about what interventions can help individuals attain leadership roles in organizations. To address this knowledge gap, we integrate insights from the communication and leadership literatures to test debate training as a novel intervention for leadership emergence. We propose that debate training can increase individuals’ leadership emergence by fostering assertiveness—“an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly, while maintaining respect for others” (American Psychological Association, n.d.)—a valued leadership characteristic in U.S. organizations. Experiment 1 was a three-wave longitudinal field experiment at a Fortune 100 U.S. company. Individuals (N = 471) were randomly assigned to either receive a 9-week debate training or not. Eighteen months later, the treatment-group participants were more likely to have advanced in leadership level than the control-group participants, an effect mediated by assertiveness increase. In a sample twice as large (N = 975), Experiment 2 found that individuals who were randomly assigned to receive debate training (vs. nondebate training or no training) acted more assertively and had higher leadership emergence in a subsequent group activity. Results were consistent across self-rated, group-member-rated, and coder-rated assertiveness. Moderation analyses suggest that the effects of debate training were not significantly different for (a) U.S.- and foreign-born individuals, (b) men and women, or (c) different ethnic groups. Overall, our experiments suggest that debate training can help individuals attain leadership roles by developing their assertiveness.
Jackson Lu (MIT), Michelle Zhao (Washington University in St. Louis), Hui Liao (University of Maryland, Long Jiang Endowed Chair in Business), and Lu Zhang (MIT)