SHRLR Speaker Series
All sessions of the SHRLR Speaker Series will be held via Zoom.
Please check back closer to the posted dates for Zoom link details.
Friday, March 26, 2021
12:00pm-1:00pm | via Zoom
Eva Ranehill
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
University of Gothenburg
Eva Ranehill is a behavioral economist whose research employs laboratory and field experiments and empirical studies with archival register data. A large part of her research has focused on behavioral gender gaps—specifically on the robustness of behavioral differences between men and women, what causes such differences, and their economic implications. Her current research focuses more on the drivers of gender gaps in the labor market. In this work she studies, for example, gender discrimination in the academic hiring process, whether, and if so how, male majority environments discourage female entry and female leadership, and whether women may be less effective leaders because they receive less support from followers. She also works on topics in health and environmental economics.
Presentation
TBA
Past Presentations
Friday, October 4, 2020
12:00pm - 1:00pm | via Zoom
Aaron Sojourner
Associate Professor
Carlson School of Management
Department of Work & Organization
University of Minnesota
Sojourner is a labor economist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. His research focuses on (1) effects of labor-market institutions, (2) policies to promote efficient and equitable development of human capital with a focus on early childhood and K-12 education systems, and (3) behavioral economic approaches to consumer financial decisions. The Economic Journal, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Public Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review (ILRR), Industrial Relations and other journals have published his work and he serves on the ILRR international editorial board. In 2016, he received the John T. Dunlop Scholar Award from the U.S. Labor and Employment Relations Association, which recognizes emerging scholars for outstanding research contributions to issues of national significance.
Presentation
What's the Inside Scoop? Challenges in the Supply and Demand for Information about Job Attributes
Workers struggle to understand prospective jobs and employers. Glassdoor is an online platform that offers jobseekers information about prospective employers from other workers’ volunteered reviews. Analyzing Glassdoor data reveals how jobseekers share and use this information. Jobseekers rate reviews of employers more helpful if they contain more-negative information, but such information is relatively scarce. Volunteers supplying negative information are more likely to conceal aspects of their identity, degrading the supplied information’s value. Concealment is more likely in reviews for smaller firms and from current employees, where retaliation risk is higher. While workers demand information about some workplace attributes more than others, supply and demand for such information is imbalanced. Across firms, not all hard-to-observe yet desirable attributes improve with easier-to-observe pay, providing rationale for why jobseekers value firm-specific information. Reputation institutions provide valuable but partial solutions to workers’ information problems.
Friday, October 23, 2020
12:00pm - 1:00pm | via Zoom
Jason Huang
Associate Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University
Professor Huang's research examines individuals' adaptation to their work experience, with specific focus areas in (a) personality's influence on adaptive performance at work; (b) transfer of trained knowledge and skills to the workplace; and (c) cultural influence on individual adaptation at work. He also conducts methodological research on response effort and insufficient effort responding.
Presentation
Family Demands Diversity and Team Effort: A Moderated Mediation Model
Most research on family demands has been conducted at the individual level, showing that they can negatively influence employees’ ability to manage the work-family interface. In the present study, we challenge the assumption that family demands are uniformly problematic by arguing that family demands diversity within a team can promote team resource exchange and enable the team as a whole to better manage the work-family interface. Drawing on resource exchange as our theoretical framework, we argue that family demands diversity is indirectly and positively related to team effort through team backup behavior and team work-to-family conflict, and these effects are stronger when team family identity is lower and perceived supervisor family support is higher. Using a sample of 108 work teams and their team leaders, we found support for our model. Implications of our findings for diversity, work-family, and backup behavior research and practice are discussed.
Friday, November 20, 2020
12:00pm-1:00pm | via Zoom
Hye Jin Rho
Assistant Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University
Professor Rho researches on labor and employment relations. Her primary focus areas are changing nature of work and organization, alternative work arrangements, and employment processes and outcomes of future of work. She employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods at the intersection of labor relations, sociology, and applied labor economics.
Presentation
The Effects of Meso- and Macro-level Employment Characteristics on COVID-19 Risk Perceptions: A Cross-National Survey Comparison of Danish and American Workers
This paper uses original survey data collected in Denmark and across two U.S. states (Illinois and Michigan) to examine the effects of variations in workforce characteristics on COVID-19 risk perceptions. We focus on contextual differences such as, industry (i.e., face-to-face, essential low and high-wage, and nonessential), employment status, union involvement, and political environment and estimate their relationship to COVID-19 risk perceptions (i.e., health risk and economic insecurity) at the individual-level. A cross- state and national comparison allows us to understand the effects of the individual’s workplace characteristics as well as the political economy as significant contributors to people's risk perceptions and working lives during COVID-19. Our research contributes to the scholarship on generalized psychological predictors of risk perceptions during points of crisis. And importantly, the extent to which variations in meso- and macro-level factors also contribute to individual-level risk perceptions (and, by extension, expected public behaviors).
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2019-2020 Speaker Series
Friday, October 4, 2019
12:00pm - 1:30pm | 133 South Kedzie Hall
B. Parker Ellen
Assistant Professor
D'Amore-McKim School of Business
Northeastern UniversityProfessor Ellen researches organizational behavior topics related to social influence in organizations. His primary focus areas are leadership and organizational politics, with related interests in accountability and teams. He has taught courses on both organizational behavior and leadership in organizations.
Presentation
Employee see, employee do: Understanding the contagious nature of political behavior
Despite decades of research on organizational politics, theoretical and empirical explanations for the contagious nature of political behavior and the dynamic within-person processes that trigger such political behavior are lacking. Although workplace politics are a ubiquitous aspect of work life, there is little clarity around why and how politics spread from employee to employee in organizations. Drawing from regulatory focus theory and research, we develop and test a theoretical framework that explains how employees’ observation of political behavior motivates their subsequent enactment of political behavior through dual mediational paths of individual identity and anxiety. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of seventy-three employees who provided daily data over a two-week period (N = 405). Results supported both hypothesized mediated paths. Further, consistent with our theory, we found that (a) promotion focus strengthened the gains-oriented relationship between individual identity and enacted political behavior, and (b) prevention focus strengthened the loss- oriented relationship between anxiety and enacted political behavior. Overall, our results provide several key theoretical and practical implications for the organizational politics and behavior literatures.
Friday, November 1, 2019
12:00pm - 1:30pm | 133 South Kedzie Hall
James H. Dulebohn
Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State UniversityAreas of expertise: decision-making, organizational justice, organizational neuroscience, leadership, e-HR, compensation and benefits, and social influence in organizations
Presentation
Neuroscience Insights into Fairness Evaluations and Bias in Decision-Making
Functional neuroscience methods can provide insight into localizing psychological functions to brain regions and in identifying brain-behavior correlations. The use of neuroscience methods such as fMRI enables the examination of overlapping and non-overlapping patterns of brain activation that are valuable in building up a view of shared and distinct processes among psychological tasks. Further, fMRI provides a distinct advantage over other research methods by measuring evaluative responses instantaneously rather than retrospectively, as is the case in much of the clinical and applied psychology research. A key objective in the use of fMRI to inform organizational behavior and applied psychology is to establish a link between neural activation and behavioral responses.
This presentation will describe three fMRI studies and their results as examples of the insight neuroscience can provide. The first study examined the distinct neural processes involved in evaluating fairness. The second, examined gender differences in fairness evaluations. The third examined the neural correlates and processes involved when individuals engage in discrimination or bias toward obese persons. The presentation will discuss practical implications of the findings, along with limitations. Following this presentation, participants should be able to describe how fMRI assesses brain activity, the process involved in developing paradigms to study particular phenomena, and limitations in the use of fMRI.
Friday, December 6, 2019
1:30pm - 3:00pm | 133 South Kedzie Hall
Corinne Low
Assistant Professor
The Wharton School
The University of Pennsylvania(Joint with MSU Dept. of Economics)
Corinne Low is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, specializing in family economics and economic development. Her research brings together applied microeconomic theory with lab and field experiments to understand the determinants of who gets how much across gender and age lines. Current ongoing projects focus on the tradeoff women make between career and family in the US, the impact of teaching girls negotiation skills in Zambia, and how expanded access to in vitro fertilization affects women in Israel.
Presentation
Incentivized Resume Rating: Eliciting Employer Preferences without Deception | Download Publication (699KB, PDF)
We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called incentivized resume rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies. We deploy IRR with employers recruiting college seniors from a prestigious school, randomizing human capital characteristics and demographics of hypothetical candidates. We measure both employer preferences for candidates and employer beliefs about the likelihood that candidates will accept job offers, avoiding a typical confound in audit studies. We discuss the costs, benefits, and future applications of this new methodology.
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
2:30pm - 4:00pm | 434 South Kedzie Hall
Mevan Jayasinghe
Associate Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State UniversityProfessor Jayasinghe's research focuses on socially-responsible human resource strategies and systems, and the associated consequences for employers (e.g. operational and financial performance) and employees (e.g. job quality, employment discrimination) across countries.
Presentation
Voluntary Labor Codes and Job Quality in Global Supply Chains
Although codes of conduct have widespread use as a private regulatory mechanism to enforce labor standards in global supply chains, prior research suggests that these codes have limited effectiveness. We differentiate between the traditional retailer-enforced codes of conduct on labor standards and ‘voluntary labor codes’ adopted by suppliers as a discretionary commitment to improving job quality. Using fieldwork and longitudinal data on Sri Lankan apparel suppliers, we find that suppliers’ discretionary adoption of a voluntary labor code is associated with better job quality, including higher wages and less work-related accidents/injuries. We also find that the effectiveness of suppliers' voluntary labor code adoption is constrained when these suppliers are simultaneously subject to compliance with traditional retailer-enforced codes of conduct. This research offers important theoretical and practical insights on expanding and improving private regulatory initiatives for labor standards compliance in global supply chains by carefully considering suppliers’ voluntary commitments to provide better working conditions.
Friday, March 20, 2020
12:00pm - 1:30pm | 133 South Kedzie Hall
Sean Rogers
Associate Professor, Spachman Professor of Human Resources & Labor Relations
College of Business
University of Rhode IslandSean Rogers has research interests in (1) employment discrimination and workplace diversity and inclusion, (2) labor unions and collective bargaining, especially in the airline industry and among graduate student employees, and (3) volunteer management and HRM in nonprofit organizations.
Canceled due to COVID-19
Friday, April 3, 2020
12:00pm - 1:30pm | 133 South Kedzie Hall
Kathleen Thelen
Ford Professor of Political Science
MIT Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDr. Thelen studies the origins, development, and effects of institutional arrangements that define distinctive "varieties of capitalism" across the rich democracies. Her work uses cross-national comparison and over-time analysis to identify the political-coalitional foundations on which different models of capitalism are founded, and to explain divergent trajectories of institutional development. She is also a prominent contributor to the literature on institutions and institutional change.
Canceled due to COVID-19
Friday, April 17, 2020
12:00pm - 1:30pm | 133 South Kedzie Hall
Jason Huang
Associate Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State UniversityProfessor Huang's research examines individuals' adaptation to their work experience, with specific focus areas in (a) personality's influence on adaptive performance at work; (b) transfer of trained knowledge and skills to the workplace; and (c) cultural influence on individual adaptation at work. He also conducts methodological research on response effort and insufficient effort responding.
Postponed due to COVID-19