Key Areas of Research
From Hypothesis Testing Towards Inference to Best Explanation: A PEEBI Testimonial Structure for Abductive Studies in Strategy
Strategic Management Journal
Though scholars employ abduction, there is no agreed-upon structure to reporting their findings. Moreover, the traditional hypo-deductive reasoning structure does not align with the epistemology of abduction. We propose an abductive testimonial structure, termed PEEBI, which consists of five sections in which the authors take prior knowledge and theories, establish the context and observations that are worthy of interest, identify and evaluate candidate explanations for the observed patterns, determine the best explanation and their reasoning for accepting it, and abstract the best explanation to a more generalizable theoretical contribution. Consistent with abductive epistemology, PEEBI advances knowledge in a modest, stepwise fashion. PEEBI foregrounds transparency and communication of the author's judgment and elevates the role of the readers by giving them information to better make judgments.
Sandeep Devanatha Pillai (Tulane), Brent Goldfarb, David A. Kirsch, Evan Starr, and Seojin Kim (Drexel)
An Unattainable Emotional Advantage? Supervisors' Perceptual Biases in the Relationship Between Emotional Understanding Ability and Performance Ratings for Female Employees
Journal of Organizational Behavior, July 2027
Empathy is increasingly valued at workplaces as it facilitates interpersonal relationships, collaboration, and team functioning. Accordingly, organizations increasingly observe and recognize employees' emotional understanding (EU) ability—a key foundation of empathy—as an important dimension of individual merit in performance evaluations. We note that, however, supervisors' gender stereotypes may constrain whether EU ability is recognized properly, particularly for female employees. Drawing on dual-process models of social cognition, we theorized that the female empathy stereotype—the belief that women are inherently more empathetic than men—leads supervisors to attribute female employees' EU ability to gender-typical traits rather than to individual merit. As a result, the supervisors' female empathy stereotype weakens the link between observed emotional intelligence (EI) ability and job performance ratings. Across a video vignette experiment (Study 1) and a field study (Study 2), we found that the relationship between supervisors' perceptions of EU ability and their ratings of job performance was consistently weaker for female than for male employees. We conducted another vignette experiment (Study 3) to test three-way interactions with two moderators (i.e., employee gender and raters' female empathy stereotype) and found that supervisors' female empathy stereotype attenuated the relationship for female employees but not for males. Our findings extend research on gender stereotypes, empathy, and EI by demonstrating how a widely shared gender stereotype can discount female employees' valuable emotional abilities.
Hanbo Shim (TU Arlington) | Myeong-Gu Seo (UMD) | Joo Hun Han (KAIST) | Sirkwoo Jin (Merrick College)
The Relative Effects of Design Thinking Versus After-Action Review on Team Performance: An Experiential/Episodic Team Learning Perspective
Journal of Applied Psychology, October 2025
Learning is key to teamwork success. In a field experiment, a design thinking intervention was shown to promote effective team learning, leading to greater team performance and financial savings. Adopting a learning orientation -- emphasizing hypothesis development and testing foir improving work efficiency - was shown to be is key to teamwork success.
Jingqiu Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Dana Vashdi (University of Haifa), Qingyue Fan (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Peter Bamberger (Tel Aviv University), and Gilad Chen (University of Maryland)
Abortion Restriction Laws and Mobility of Scientists
Strategic Management Journal
We track the enactment of targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws in the U.S. and analyze 4.98 million person-year mobility records for 535,568 biomedical scientists from 1990 to 2018. Our estimations reveal a 0.8-1.6 percentage-point increase in scientists’ relocation probability after states enacted abortion-restrictive laws, with substantially stronger effects among junior scientists (1.6-3.9 percentage points). Anti-abortion states also became less likely to be chosen as relocation destinations, particularly by higher-quality scientists. These responses appear driven by ideological misalignment and research-related concerns in fields affected by abortion-related regulation. We further find that states that have adopted TRAP laws experienced declines in scientific research quality, federal research funding, and patenting in relevant technological fields and among local firms.
Beril Yalcinkaya, postdoc, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Waverly W. Ding, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland;
If We Build It, We Will Come: Strategies for Developing Academic Institutions and the Evolution of Career Choices by Top Talent During Japan’s Industrialization
CJEB Columbia University Working paper series
Modern day economies rely on academia—with its focus on generating new knowledge and training future work forces—as a critical complement to industry in contributing to endogenous growth. How well academia performs this role, however, depends on its ability to recruit and retain talented faculty who have lucrative alternative options in industry; moreover, such allocation of talent in academia vs. industry is conditioned by path-dependencies in the evolution of these sectors. We complement existing literature that has focused on factors in mature scientific labor markets by examining the endogenous evolution of academic institutions concurrent with industrialization in Japan during the turn of the 20th century. Our study combines historical methods with estimation of a dynamic occupational choice model and utilizes unique data on the census of university-educated engineers from the first 40 cohorts since the inception of higher technical education in Japan. The historical analysis reveals systematic shaping strategies to build institutions that catered to both monetary and non-monetary preferences, and the quantitative estimations highlight that the latter were particularly important in academia disproportionately attracting top talent in later cohorts, despite an increasing pay gap with industry.
Takuya Hiraiwa, Serguey Braguinsky, Rajshree Agarwal, University of Maryland Smith School
Technology (Non-) Emergence: The Role of (Mis-)Alignment of Uncertainty Dimensions In Alternative Solar Technology Trajectories
Organization Science
We examine industry and technology (non-) emergence by integrating actor-centric and systems perspective literature streams. We use historical methods to analyze rich data tracking investments by actors spanning private, public and academic sectors in the solar PV context. The industry took several decades after commercialization to emerge; moreover silicon and thin film technologies experienced divergent fates despite firm takeoff. By uncovering critical interdependencies across activities by different actors, we show that while attention by all actors to developing various elements of technological systems is necessary for emergence, it may not be sufficient. The industry emerged after activities by technology producers, industry associations and government agencies ensured stable institutional support that stimulated latent demand (by utilities and end consumers) and created reinforcing loops among activities by technology producers and research institutes for solar technologies to become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Moreover, silicon experienced additional reinforcing loops in demand side and supply-side ecosystems, wherein technology producers and equipment manufacturers leveraged adjacent mature supply chains to meet demand-side scale and reliability requirements in fast growing markets. In contrast, thin film experienced balancing loops wherein nascent, firm-specific supply side alliances could not address these demand side needs. These findings showcase how dominant designs may emerge even when there is no ex-ante competitive dynamics among technology producers: while silicon may have benefited from first mover advantage at the technology level, our study highlights that ecosystem first mover advantages of silicon relative to thin film were particularly salient in their divergent fates.
Guerra, M. (Bayes Business School) & Agarwal, R. (Maryland Smith)
Flying High or Crashing Down: Pre-Entry Knowledge and the Distribution of Startup Performance
Strategic Management Journal
We examine variation in high-technology startups’ performance based on founders’ pre-entry experiences by developing a formal model and using confidential employee-employer linked microdata from the United States to examine the empirical consistency of the model propositions. The model posits that relative to insiders, a lack of industry-specific experience creates greater epistemic uncertainty regarding optimal business models at time of entry for outsiders and thus, higher post-entry adjustment costs associated with necessary pivots. Consequently, outsiders have a higher selection threshold for the value creation potential of the underlying technical ideas. Together, these mechanisms yield propositions that relative to insiders, outsiders have lower odds of survival on average, but higher growth and probability of being acquired. The empirical results indicate strong and robust support for these propositions.
Agarwal R. (Maryland Smith) Carnahan, S., (Wash. U. at St. Louis) Campbell, B. (Ohio State University), and Choi, J. (Federal Reserve
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)
Advisor-Advisee Research Overlap and Its Implications for Scientists’ Early-Career Performance in the U.S.
Organization Science
A genealogical training process, in which senior (advisor) scientists engage in cross-generational transfer of skills and knowledge to junior (advisee) scientists is one of the core organizational features of modern science. In this paper, we examine the consequences of the tension faced by all junior scientists: to build upon an advisor’s skills or to strike out on one’s own? We study the implications of advisor-advisee research overlap for emerging scientists’ performance by constructing a novel, bibliometric-record-based dataset on 15,271 U.S. biomedical scientists (advisees) who were trained in 7,924 PI advisors’ labs between 1972 and 2009. We assessed the junior scientists’ performance in the first ten years of their careers as independent PIs. Tests across multiple research-overlap measures and model specifications reveal a consistently positive relationship between maintaining a higher degree of proximity to advisor’s research areas and the junior scientist’s early-career funding and publication performance. However, evidence is weak regarding scientific impact and non-existent regarding research disruptiveness. We further test how advisor status moderates the research overlap-performance relationship using both a large-sample analysis comparing the performance of academic siblings, and a more stringent difference-in-difference analysis leveraging the exogenous timing of the status elevation events experienced by the advisor scientists when they receive major scientific awards. Both tests yield consistent evidence that the positive relationship between advisor-advisee research overlap and advisee’s early-career performance is reduced as the advisor’s status increases. Taken together, these findings provide a more complete understanding of how advisor-advisee relationships shape new scientists’ performance during early careers.
Waverly W. Ding
Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
R.H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland
Christopher C. Liu*
Associate Professor
Lundquist College of Business
University of Oregon
Andy (Seungho) Back*
University of Hong Kong
Beril Yalcinkaya
Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
The referral penalty: Decreased perceptions of merit undermine helping behavior towards referred employees
Journal of Applied Psychology
Employee referrals are commonly used by organizations due to their numerous benefits. However, it remains unclear how organizational incumbents, who are uninvolved in the hiring process, perceive and react to referral beneficiaries. Although traditional views suggest that the presence of a referral signals merit, incumbents’ perceptions may differ. We theorize that incumbents are more likely to perceive referral beneficiaries as less merited than non-referred employees, due to perceived legitimacy concerns stemming from a simplified view that reliance on network contacts de facto compensates for lower qualifications. Drawing on equity theory, we then theorize that low merit perceptions lead to less positive and more negative behaviors towards referral beneficiaries, as an attempt to restore the equilibrium between beneficiaries’ perceived inputs (e.g., driven by perceived lower merit) and outputs (e.g., being on payroll). Sampling employees from industries in which referrals are normative (Study 1a) and from a cultural context that is positively predisposed toward referrals (Study 1b) confirmed our theorizing. In a subsequent study, aiming to enhance the generalizability of our findings, we found supporting evidence for perceived equity violations, leading incumbents to engage in corrective behaviors toward referral beneficiaries (Study 2). Finally, testing our hypotheses more conservatively, we found that negative attributions toward referral beneficiaries persisted even when the referred employees had demonstrated high performance, thereby underscoring the robustness of our findings (Study 3). This paper elucidates important unintended consequences of one of the most popular hiring methods - employee referrals - and draws implications for both theory and practice.
Tomova Shakur, Teodora, Texas Christian University and Derfler-Rozin, Rellie, University of Maryland