Research

My research centers on the role of business as an actor for addressing societal issues. My scholarship recognizes that win-win solutions that benefit business and society exist, yet my work also deals with the reality that many organizational actors face persistent tensions 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 seeks to add nuance to our understanding of when firm prosocial behavior yields strategic human capital outcomes. This work 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) the philanthropic causes that yield strongest labor productivity benefits.

My other research focused on how inequality and organizational settings shape how people build and use their social networks. I take a multi-method and multi-level approach in addressing these topics, using large archival data sets, in-depth qualitative interviews, and experiments. View my CV here.

How Professionals Manage Tensions Between Economic and Social Objectives

Authentically Managing Diversity & Inclusion (drafting, with Katina Sawyer). Drawing on the experiences of Chief Diversity Officers at major companies, this study explores the potential tensions involved with presenting prosocial initiatives using a business-dominant frame, including feeling inauthentic to oneself, and the identity strategies professionals use to cope with moral tensions. We collected one round of interviews pre-covid (2019) and are currently conducting a second round of interviews to understand changes in the profession that occurred 2020-2022. 

Paradox peers: A relational approach to navigating a business–society paradox (Academy of Management Journal, 2022). I explore how corporate philanthropists remain committed to working through a business-society paradox when it is salient in their role, but senior leaders do not consider tensions core to the organizational strategy. Through analyzing interview data from philanthropy professionals alongside observations of their group meetings, I induce a peer-based model of navigating paradox. The findings reveal the important role of relationships with “paradox peers” –ongoing, cooperative connections to individuals who are external to one’s organization but facing similar paradoxical challenges– in supporting individuals. I detail three primary relational mechanisms that together facilitate a sustained commitment to working through paradox in their home organizations. My work advances a relational perspective for understanding how individuals navigate persistent paradoxes between business and social impact, pointing to the important role of social support for actors who work in corporate occupations that have social impact goals.

When Firm Prosocial Behavior Yields Strategic Human Capital Outcomes

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. Yet, authentically living out values that employees do not prefer brings little added rewards for organizations. 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 here)

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.

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.