SPEAKER: Elaine Wong, Associate Professor of Management, UCR School of Business, University of California, Riverside

DATE AND TIME: Friday, March 17, 2023 at 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT

HOST: Patrick Bergemann, Assistant Professor

LOCATION: SB1 5100 (Corporate Partners Executive Boardroom); Zoom link available on request

TITLE: “Preventing positive returns? How investors respond to executives’ regulatory-focus-related communication”

TALK ABSTRACT: Recent research has demonstrated that executives’ motivational orientations, as reflected in organizational communication (e.g., letters to shareholders), are strong predictors of important firm outcomes. Specifically, firms whose executives communicate a focus on growth and achievement (a promotion focus) pursue distinctly different strategies compared to firms whose executives communicate a focus on security and the avoidance of failure (a prevention focus). In this paper, we explore whether external stakeholders are sensitive to executives’ promotion focus and prevention focus communication and the degree to which these foci match the situation by examining investors’ reactions to communication during quarterly earnings calls. We find that external stakeholders appear responsive to executive communication such that stock market returns are higher when executives communicate a promotion focus. This relationship is stronger when past performance is positive. Additionally, we find evidence that prevention focus communication can ameliorate negative investor reactions following poor past financial performance. Our study has several theoretical implications for the study of regulatory focus and executive communication.

SPEAKER’S BIO: Professor Elaine Wong’s research interests are in the area of organizational behavior, specifically leadership and groups and teams. The central theme of her research is the examination of how leaders motivate and encourage others to achieve superior performance. Professor Wong’s current research projects focus on the relationships among leaders’ observable and demographic characteristics (e.g., physical features, educational background), leadership team decision making dynamics (e.g., decentralized versus centralized decision making structures) and firm outcomes including firm financial performance and corporate social performance. Her research has been published in numerous journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Professor Wong received her Ph.D. in business administration from the University of California at Berkeley and she was a faculty member at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before joining UCR School of Business.

2023-03-17 ANNOUNCEMENT Professor Elaine Wong

This talk is sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Center for Organizational Research, and the UC Student Loan Law Initiative. Please RSVP HERE as space is limited.

Speaker: Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California, Merced.

Date and Time: Friday, March 17, 2023 at 12:00pm – 1:15pm

Location: SBSG 1321

Title: Reimagining (Higher Education) Finance from Below

Talk Abstract: Contemporary financiers extract unprecedented wealth from a diversity of non-elites. When a broad range of these non-elites forge coalitions, they develop more innovative political strategies for just financial alternatives. Public universities and student debt offer powerful shared identities to mobilize such coalitions. In California, coalitions of student, community, and labor organizations have developed successful bargaining-with-bankers strategies to increase taxes on the rich for higher education affordability and equity. National coalitions of student debtors, racial justice organizations, and legal aid groups have crafted effective parallel strategies that seek a big bang of student loan cancellation, while also bargaining for more incremental debt relief. This talk compares the strengths and limitations of the two strategies for establishing tax and finance justice throughout the broader economy.

Speaker Bio: Charlie Eaton is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced, where he co-founded the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab. His book Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in U.S. Higher Education was published by University of Chicago Press in 2022. He is broadly interested in the role of race and organizations in struggles for power and economic resources between elites and non-elites. He earned a PhD in Sociology in 2016 from UC Berkeley.

SPEAKER: Oliver Hahl, Associate Professor of Organization Theory, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University

DATE AND TIME: Friday, February 17, 2023 at 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST

LOCATION: SB1 5200 (Lyman Porter Colloquia Room); Zoom link available on request

TITLE: “Learning Like A Pro: Evidence of Differential Learning from Industry Accidents by Individuals Within Organizations”

TALK ABSTRACT: Research on learning from failure has found that industry accidents can inspire organizations to learn, or improve performance, vicariously from other firms’ failures, but also that they soon forget what they have learned, regressing back to old patterns. This research, at the organizational level, obscures the fact that individuals inside of organizations might approach these opportunities to learn differently. We argue that an important difference between individual workers that can affect learning patterns is their level of professionalism, or the extent to which one is trained and/or identifies with one’s profession. This distinction allows us to explain why those more threatened by an accident caused by negligence (those with less professionalism) react more strongly to the accident, driving the observed organizational patterns. What is more, we argue that the patterns that look like learning at the organizational level are not actual learning because these less-professional workers a) cannot sustain the change in behaviors after the accident and b) tend to engage in more superficial learning behaviors induced by institutional pressures reacting to the large-scale accident. As a result when institutional pressures wane, the positive change in behavior drops, explaining the forgetting patterns found at the organizational level. Through analyses of behavior in the context of a large-scale accident in the maritime industry, we find support for this argument and highlight the value of understanding learning patterns at the microfoundational level. By extending theory to the individual level we can explain organizational level patterns in more detail and highlight how professionalism shapes learning behaviors for individuals within firms ultimately shaping organizational performance.

 

SPEAKER BIO: Oliver Hahl is an Associate Professor of Organization Theory, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. His work seeks to understand the microfoundations and sociological underpinnings of organizational phenomena at the interfirm, intrafirm, and market levels. His research interests revolve primarily around organizational and individual identities in markets and the potential benefits and constraints of success, authenticity, and status.