A talk of interest to COR community…

ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT COLLOQUIUM

Host: Assistant Professor Maritza Salazar

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

PAINTING A CLEAR PICTURE WHILE SEEING THE BIG PICTURE: HOW LEADERS RECONCILE THE TRADEOFF BETWEEN CONCRETENESS AND SCALE

SPEAKER:                Andrew Carton
Associate Professor of Management

UNIVERSITY:             University of Pennsylvania
Wharton School of Business

TIME:           1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

WHERE:          SB1 5100
Corporate Partners Executive Boardroom

Abstract: One of the most effective ways leaders can promote change is by communicating visions with image-based rhetoric (“make children smile”). By conveying visual snapshots of the future, leaders paint a portrait of what their organizations can one day achieve. It would thus stand to reason that leaders who naturally think and communicate in terms of picture-like detail (a concrete orientation) would promote more change than those who are inclined to think and communicate abstractly (an abstract orientation). Yet research has established that people with a concrete orientation focus on short-term, narrow details rather than long-term, organization-wide strategy (e.g., a leader who focuses on one small feature of a single product rather than long-term strategy requiring the coordinated effort of all employees). We integrate theory on construal, roles, and motivation to predict that if a team’s highest-ranking leader has a concrete orientation, he/she will focus on large-scale change if there is a “second-in-command” whose role is to oversee the implementation of operational details (an operations specialist). We predict that the presence of an operations specialist will have no effect on abstract thinkers. We find general support for these predictions in two archival studies and two experiments).