Claudia Wenzel, The social dilemma of personal data: Understanding people’s inconsistency in sharing data for social versus personal good and how to overcome it, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2023. (Dissertation)
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Jennifer Sparr, David Waldman, Eric Kearney, Paradoxes in agentic and communal leadership, In: The SAGE Handbook of Leadership, SAGE Publications, London, p. 472 - 483, 2023. (Book Chapter)
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Lauren Howe, Karina Schumann, Gregory M Walton, “Am I not human?”: Reasserting humanness in response to group-based dehumanization, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, Vol. 25 (8), 2022. (Journal Article)
Research on group dehumanization has focused largely on the perpetrators of dehumanization or on its negative emotional and cognitive effects on targets. We theorized that people would also reassert their humanness in response to dehumanizing portrayals of their group. Experiment 1 showed that Black individuals responded to a dehumanizing representation of their racial group by emphasizing their experience of more complex, uniquely human emotions versus emotions more associated with other animals. Experiment 2 and a supplemental experiment showed that Black, but not White, individuals responded to group-based dehumanization by depicting more complex self-portrayals. Taken together, these studies begin to illustrate that targets of group-based dehumanization are not simply passive victims but respond actively, resisting negative representations of their group by reasserting their humanness. |
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Pascal Flurin Meier, Raphael Flepp, Egon Franck, Are Expectations Misled by Chance? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Financial Analysts, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 396, 2022. (Working Paper)
We examine whether finance professionals deviate from Bayes’ theorem on the processing of nondiagnostic information when forecasting quarterly earnings. Using field data from sell-side financial analysts and employing a regression discontinuity design, we find that analysts whose forecasts have barely been met become increasingly optimistic relative to when their forecasts have barely been missed. This result is consistent with an update of analysts’ expectations after observing uninformative performance signals. Our results also suggest that this behavior leads to significantly worse forecasting accuracy in the subsequent quarter. We contribute to the literature by providing important field evidence of expectation formation under uninformative signals. |
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Benjamin Grossmann-Hensel, The shifting environmental constellation of public administration: Towards an updated typology of organizational boundary management, In: International Conference on Organizational Sociology. 2022. (Conference Presentation)
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Nora Varesco Kager, Jennifer Sparr, Gudela Grote, Looking for Guidance? Five Principles for Leveraging Tensions in Corporate–Startup Collaboration, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 58 (4), 2022. (Journal Article)
Corporate–startup collaboration (CSC) allows the co-development of innovations for pressing societal needs. Paradoxically, CSC is both fueled and challenged by diverging interests and approaches of the unequal actors. We apply a paradox lens to better understand the complex collaborative demands of CSC from the perspective of the corporate actors involved. Over the course of three years, we conducted 52 contextualized semi-structured interviews in a corporate-sponsored accelerator pursuing sustainability improvements. We identify five CSC paradoxes, which we translate into guiding principles for managing such paradoxes with a both/and mindset. Further, we show how these guiding principles help to address interdependencies between the CSC paradoxes. By disentangling the inherently paradoxical nature of the collaborative demands, we contribute to a fuller theoretical understanding of how organizational actors can manage these demands. We encourage companies engaging in CSC to use the guiding principles for empowering organizational actors’ understanding and approaches to CSC paradoxes. |
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Christa Dürscheid, Pascal Lippuner, Der Hash im Hashtag: Zur Geschichte eines multifunktionalen Zeichens, Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik, Vol. 50 (3), 2022. (Journal Article)
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Mario Seifert, Analyse und Entwicklung von Management Control Systemen am Beispiel der Sitewerk AG, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Bachelor's Thesis)
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Dejan Zlatanovski, The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Switzerland's professional football, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)
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Charlotte Clara Becker, Eldad Davidov, Jan Cieciuch, René Algesheimer, Martin Kindschi, Values and Attitudes Toward Immigrants Among School Children in Switzerland and Poland, Race and Social Problems, Vol. 14 (4), 2022. (Journal Article)
Research on key determinants of negative attitudes toward immigration has often suggested that values held by individuals systematically explain such sentiments. Universalists appear to have more positive and conservatives more negative attitudes. So far, however, these insights are based on studies using adult samples. In our study, we analyze these relations among children and adolescents. For the analysis, we utilized a Swiss-Polish panel dataset (2015–2017, N = 5,332) with three time points collected among school children aged 8–19 years. We employed autoregressive cross-lagged models. The results indicated that while universalism decreased negative attitudes toward immigrants, the expected effect for conformity-tradition was not found. |
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Miriam Koomen, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Occupational tasks and wage inequality in West Germany: A decomposition analysis, Labour Economics, Vol. 79, 2022. (Journal Article)
We study the role of occupational tasks as drivers of West German wage inequality. We match administrative wage data with longitudinal task data, which allow us to account for within-occupation changes in task content over time. We run RIF regression-based decompositions to quantify the contribution of changes in the returns to tasks to overall changes in the wage distribution from 1978 to 2006. We find that changes in the returns to tasks explain up to half of the increase in wage inequality since the 1990s, both at the top and the bottom of the wage distribution. Specifically, abstract tasks drive the upper wage gap, while interactive and routine tasks drive the lower wage gap. Importantly, we find low-wage occupations to have the highest routine task intensity. The association between occupational tasks and West German wage inequality is thus both stronger and different than prior research has found. |
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Anja Schulze, Stefano Brusoni, How dynamic capabilities change ordinary capabilities: Reconnecting attention control and problem‐solving, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 43 (12), 2022. (Journal Article)
Research Summary
Building on the attention-based view of the firm, we elaborate the concept of dynamic capabilities and identify two constitutive elements: attention control and problem-solving. We show empirically that the control element of dynamic capabilities regulates how organizations (dis-)engage attention on operational versus change-oriented tasks. On this basis, we develop a process model of how control and problem-solving interact to reconfigure resources and thus modify ordinary capabilities. We study the adoption of lean management in the R&D unit of a large U.S. corporation. Our longitudinal case study identifies obstacles that organizations have to overcome to establish effective dynamic capabilities that enable their adaptation to changing environmental circumstances.
Managerial Summary
“The vast majority of all change initiatives fail”: We hear this statement a lot in our interactions with practitioners. In this article, we suggest an explanation of why achieving persistent, behavioral change is hard: attention to change processes is difficult to maintain over an extended period of time. Initiatives start, then fade away. By studying the interplay of control mechanisms (that keep organizational attention on the long-term goals) and problem-solving tools (that identify what and how to change in the short term), we provide a framework that can generate actionable implications for executives. In particular, we focus on the decisive and yet underestimated role played by key performance indicators in sustaining attention on change initiatives. |
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Jennifer Sparr, Ella Miron-Spektor, Marianne W Lewis, Wendy K Smith, From a label to a meta-theory of paradox: If we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change, Academy of Management Collections, Vol. 1 (2), 2022. (Journal Article)
Over the last 30 years, mounting insights into paradox have enabled a paradigm shift in organizational theory from linear, static, and rational toward more holistic, dynamic, and dualistic thinking. To gain insight into the nature and development of this scholarship, we curated articles from Academy of Management journals. We identified four approaches to paradox—as a label, a lens, a theory, and a metatheory. Pioneering and prototypical articles have illustrated how each approach expands our understanding of paradox, elucidating unresolved issues in and between established literatures. The collection displays both the progression of abstraction and complexity in paradox scholarship over time, and the recursive process accentuating the value of each approach and their interplay, thus offering three contributions. First, our delineation of these approaches demonstrates the development of paradox scholarship, helping scholars situate their own work in this expanding canon, while inviting new scholars to find their entry point to engage with paradox. Second, by tracking the journey from label to metatheory, we offer a model that may inform similar paths for other literatures. Third, the collection suggests that insights into paradox are fostering a paradigm shift from linear and binary toward dynamic and holistic ontologies in the organizational sciences. |
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Giulia Crestini, Andrea Giuffredi-Kähr, Radu Petru Tanase, Martin Natter, Does Pricing Transparency Benefit or Harm the Retailer-Customer Relationship?, In: Annual Conference of the Decision Sciences Institute. 2022. (Conference Presentation)
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Tobias Schlegel, Curdin Pfister, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Tertiary education expansion and regional firm development, Regional Studies, Vol. 56 (11), 2022. (Journal Article)
This study investigates the impact of a tertiary education expansion on regional firm development, as measured by average profits per firm. We exploit the quasi-random establishment of universities of applied sciences (UASs) – bachelor’s degree-granting three-year colleges teaching and conducting applied research – to construct treatment and control groups and to apply both a difference-in-differences model and an event study design. We find that after the establishment of new UASs in Switzerland, average profits per firm in the treated municipalities increase by 19.6% more than in the control group. This increase corresponds roughly to an additional annual growth in average profits per firm in the treatment group of 0.7%. The effects start shortly after the establishment of UASs but also persist over a period of up to 10 years. |
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Lauren Howe, Jochen Menges, Remote work mindsets predict emotions and productivity in home office: A longitudinal study of knowledge workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, Human - Computer Interaction, Vol. 37 (6), 2022. (Journal Article)
Millions of employees across the globe, including a large proportion of knowledge workers, transitioned to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. As remote work continues to characterize work post-crisis, it is imperative to understand how employees adjust to remote work. The current research explores the extent to which knowledge workers hold a fixed mindset about remote work (e.g., that a person either is or is not suited to remote work and this cannot be changed) and tested how this mindset shaped well-being during coronavirus-related lockdown. In a longitudinal five-week study of 113 knowledge workers transitioning to remote work, we find that knowledge workers who endorsed a more fixed mindset about remote work experienced more negative and less positive emotion during remote work. The increased negative emotion prompted by fixed mindsets was associated with lesser perceived productivity among these knowledge workers in subsequent weeks. We conclude that understanding how fundamental beliefs (e.g., beliefs about the learnability of remote work) affect employee experiences can help create a brighter future as technology further enables remote work. Encouraging employees to view remote work as a skill that can be learned and developed could help people thrive in the new world of work. |
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Vanessa Ulmann, Vertical and lateral interactions in a top-down strategy implementation process: A case study, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)
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Sarah Keist, Communicative Risks on Social Media Platforms and Resulting Responsibilities of Their Providers, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Bachelor's Thesis)
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Helmut Max Dietl, Tina Nobis, Carlos Gomez Gonzalez, Cornel Nesseler, (Not) being granted the right to belong—Amateur football clubs in Germany, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 57 (7), 2022. (Journal Article)
Empirical studies show that first- and second-generation immigrants are less likely to be members of sports clubs than their non-immigrant peers. Common explanations are cultural differences and socioeconomic disadvantages. However, lower participation rates in amateur sport could be at least partly due to ethnic discrimination. Are minority ethnic groups granted the same right to belong as their non-immigrant peers? To answer this question, this paper uses publicly available data from a field experiment in which mock applications were sent out to over 1,600 football clubs in Germany. Having a foreign-sounding name significantly reduces the likelihood of being invited to participate. The paper concludes that amateur football clubs are not as permeable as they are often perceived to be. It claims that traditional explanations for lower participation rates of immigrants need to be revisited. |
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Maddalena Davoli, A, B, or C? Question format and the gender gap in financial literacy, In: INVALSI data: a tool for teaching and scientific research. 2022. (Conference Presentation)
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