Research

My research focuses on exploring the role of businesses in addressing societal issues. I acknowledge the presence of win-win solutions that benefit both business and society, while also recognizing the persistent tensions many organizations face between economic and social objectives.

One stream of my research seeks to understand how professionals oriented towards social impact within firms manage tensions between economic and social objectives. For example, I have interviewed corporate philanthropy professionals about how they manage the paradoxical demands of business impact and social impact when their leaders do not integrate prosocial demands into the core of the corporate strategy. In an ongoing project, I am interviewing Chief Diversity Officers about their work given the social unrest of 2020-2021 that brought their roles from the periphery towards the core of the firm. 

A second stream of my research considers how employees respond to firms’ prosocial claims and actions. These include studies about: 1) the value of authentically stating corporate values, 2) the retention benefits of offering corporate employees the chance to engage in social impact work, and 3) how employee productivity varies based on which philanthropic causes firms support.

My primary research themes are complemented by another area of study—social networks, specifically social support networks. My training and background in this research area provides me a strong lens for understanding social dynamics, enriching the foundation of my primary work.

I primarily identify as a qualitative researcher, and I also adopt multi-method approaches in my investigations. For example, my work has leveraged large archival datasets, in-depth qualitative interviews, and experiments. You can find more details in my CV here.

How do professionals manage tensions between economic and social objectives?

The unanticipated effects of attention to social issues: Chief diversity officers pre- and post- George Floyd
(working paper, with Katina Sawyer). How does increased attention to social issues after mega-threats impact professionals whose core work involves issue selling? We conduct a before-and-after exploration of Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs), interviewing them once in late 2019 before the increased national awareness of racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd, and again in 2021. Scholarship in issue-selling suggests increasing attention to social issues should lead to more substantive firm action and leave issue-sellers feeling more supported. Instead, our analyses suggest that increasing attention led CDOs to feel burnt out and unsure about progress. We reveal how issue sellers themselves experience a reckoning around their work, leading them to reinterpret their position on social issues vis-à-vis the organization and experience self estrangement.

Paradox peers: A relational approach to navigating a business–society paradox (Academy of Management Journal, 2022). How do professionals work through business-society tensions when senior leaders discount the importance of social objectives for the overall firm strategy? While the corporate philanthropy professionals in this study lacked top management engagement, my inductive analysis revealed their continued reliance on their “paradox peers,” or ongoing, cooperative connections to individuals who are external to one’s organization but facing similar paradoxical challenges. I advance a relational perspective for understanding how professionals navigate persistent tensions between business and social impact, pointing to the important role of social support. (Available at AMJ)

How does firm engagement with social objects affect employees?

The (bounded) role of stated-lived value congruence and authenticity in employee evaluations of organizations. (joint with Rachel Ruttan, Organization Science 2023). More than ever, organizations are publicly proclaiming their values in hopes of appealing to employees. Using data from employees on Glassdoor.com and experimental studies, we show that stated values only enhance authenticity when the values are also lived at the workplace. Organizations who proclaim values but do not live them up risk negative evaluations from employees. Moreover, we establish a boundary condition around authentically stating values such that authentic values are not rewarded by employees unless the employees have an underlying preference for those specific values. Thus, while it is important for organizations to live out their values, there is a limit to the rewards employees provide to authentic organizations. (Open Access PDF at Org Science)

Is labor productivity more sensitive toward sudden welfare shocks or chronic issues? (joint with Luis Ballesteros) Do increases in labor productivity that follow from corporate philanthropy vary based on the societal causes to which firms donate? We introduce a categorization of philanthropy that differentiates between welfare-shocks philanthropy, aimed at restoring welfare for victims of disruptions (e.g., natural disasters), and chronic-conditions philanthropy, aimed at improving welfare for victims of longstanding problems (e.g., poverty). Our experimental evidence reveals that exposure to welfare-shocks philanthropy improves workers’ production, accuracy, and efficiency. Conversely, labor performance decreases with chronic-conditions philanthropy and remains unchanged without philanthropy. These results broadly generalize in matched difference-in-difference estimates spanning 12 years of philanthropy by the largest 500 U.S. corporations. The findings suggest that the targets of philanthropic donations are important for the ways in which corporate giving acts as a non-pecuniary incentive. (Available at SSRN)

The indirect retention benefit of participatory CSR (joint with Christiane Bode and Michelle Rogan) Firms increasingly offer the chance for employees to directly participate in CSR, yet economic demands means that firms cannot offer the opportunity to all employees. Are employees more likely to stay at for-profit firms if their colleagues engage in social impact work but they do not participate themselves? Using longitudinal data from a global management consultancy and an experiment, we find that being connected to former participants increases the retention of nonparticipating employees. The experiment indicates this is driven by perceived organizational CSR authenticity.

Characters of people and their social network illustration

Social Networks

How Stable is the Core Discussion Network? (with Mario Small and Peter McMahan, Social Networks 2015). Our findings counter expectations that social support networks are stable; instead showing they are flexible and adaptive. (Access PDF here)

Words vs. Actions in Network Behavior. (with Mario Small, Cayce Hughes, and Jeffrey Parker, book chapter). We resolve a contradiction in the literature by explaining why people in poor neighborhoods are both distrustful of others while also heavily reliant on them. We argue they have institutionally-mediated relationships that carry expectations and increase trust, even among people who do not know each other well.