Research

My research focuses on exploring the role of businesses in addressing societal issues. You can find my CV here. A few papers from each theme are profiled below.

Theme 1: In my first research track, I explore the question: how do organizations and those within them manage tensions between economic and social objectives? More than ever, for-profit firms face external and internal pressures to behave in more socially responsible ways. As a result, firms continue to increase their social engagement, primarily through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) platforms. In reality, however, many firms have not embraced these tensions at the core of their organization, but rather have hired professionals to deal with tensions from within their roles. My projects emphasize different sub-questions that help us gain a more complete understanding of how organizational actors manage business-society tensions. My research in this stream challenges and extends existing perspectives in organization theory. Importantly, my findings in this area run counter to the idea that it is desirable to prioritize economic objectives when addressing societal issues within firms, highlighting the unintentional negative outcomes of considering social initiatives in terms of economic goals. Instead, my work suggests that it requires continual balance to remain committed to social and economic objectives.
 
Theme 2: A second stream of my research seeks to understand the consequences of businesses’ engagement with societal issues. Firms take different actions around CSR and these differences can bring important downstream effects on external and internal stakeholders. My research focuses on employees as a key internal stakeholder group and examines consequences like employee evaluations of their workplace (e.g., on Glassdoor), employee retention, and productivity. A key theme of exploration in this stream is the extent to which employees perceive their firm to be authentic in how they communicate about organizational values, CSR, and diversity initiatives. Papers in this stream are largely quantitative in nature, using both archival data sets and experimental designs and very often a combination of both. This research stream recognizes the idea that win-win solutions that benefit business and society exist and seeks to identify under what conditions engaging in CSR yields such benefits.

How do organizational actors manage tensions between economic and social objectives?

Paradox peers: A relational approach to navigating a business–society paradox (solo, Academy of Management Journal, 2022). How do professionals work through business-society tensions (paradoxes) when senior leaders discount the importance of social objectives for the overall firm strategy? While the corporate philanthropy professionals in this study lacked senior leaders’ engagement, my inductive analysis with 40 grantmakers revealed a deep level of support from their “paradox peers,” or ongoing, cooperative connections to individuals who are external to one’s organization but facing similar paradoxical challenges (here, balancing social and economic impact). Peers connected with others to relieve tension, collectively protect the paradox, and collaboratively brainstorm responses. Importantly, this held when peers’ organizations were competitors at the strategic level. Whereas existing literature in paradox studies focused on individual cognition and individual practices, 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)

Rapid attention and issue selling: Chief Diversity Officers' professional reckoning post-George Floyd
(working paper, with Katina Sawyer). How does rapid attention to social issues impact professionals whose core work involves issue selling? Scholarship in issue-selling suggests that increasing attention to social issues should lead to more substantive firm action and leave issue-sellers feeling more supported. Instead, our analyses of 50 chief diversity officer (CDO) interviews both pre- and post- George Floyd’s murder suggest that increasing attention led CDOs to feel burnt out and leave their jobs and the field (notably, before the current anti-DEI wave). We reveal that the shock of George Floyd’s murder precipitated a professional reckoning among CDOs, prompting them to reassess their work and experience a renewed desire for meaning and social change. Reinterpreting their organization’s position through this lens, they began to experience disappointed hopes for progress on DEI. Ultimately, despite increased DEI efforts at the organization, CDOs experienced self-alienation and greater burnout. This manuscript develops a more actor-centric stream of issue selling research that considers the well-being of issue sellers and how they experience and cope with tensions and sustain their well-being over time.

Overcoming normative constraints to embrace paradox: leveraging paradox reflexivity and normative edgework
(R&R, Organization Science, with Camille Pradies, Vanessa Pothier, and Patrick Le).how do organizations remain committed to a joint profession-business strategy when economic objectives are seen as normatively questionable by an organization’s broader field? A 13-year, real-time qualitative study of a veterinarian network showcases how professionals confront normative constraints and engage in what we call “normative edgework” in order to further engage economic objectives. That is, we show how actors tether to contextual norms while also pushing against the normative edges or boundaries of context. We reveal the complex practices leaders adopt to sustain their commitment to both normative and instrumental demands. This allows us to reorient paradox scholarship from the technical practices or strategies that people implement in the face of tensions to how people come to see a strategy that engages competing tensions as desirable in the first place.

What are the consequences of firms engaging with social issues?

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? (R&R, Strategic Management Journal, 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.