School of Human Resources and Labor Relations College of Social Science

HRLR Speaker Series

2024-2025 Schedule

Most seminars will be available in a hybrid format. Where noted, the in-person portion of the seminars will be held in room S133 South Kedzie Hall. All seminars will also be available via Zoom.

Please contact Jasmine Shi at shihuiji@msu.edu for Zoom meeting information.

Friday, January 31, 2025

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

J. Mijin Cha
Assistant Professor
Department of Environmental Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz

J. Mijin Cha's research and teaching interests are in the areas of climate justice, environmental justice, labor movements, and the intersection of labor and climate justice. Dr. Cha is a fellow at Cornell University's Worker Institute, where she works on the Labor Leading on Climate initiative. Her recent research is on "just transition," how to transition workers and communities equitably into a low-carbon future. Dr. Cha is on the board of the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment and a member of the California Bar.

Friday, February 7, 2025

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Tingting Zhang
Assistant Professor
School of Labor and Employment Relations
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Dr. Zhang’s research within industrial relations focuses on the role of information communication technology (ICT), such as social media, in labor movements and union renewal. In employment relations, she studies various training and skill development mechanisms both within and outside organizations, examining how occupational regulation and the emergence of nondegree credentials influence the career outcomes of marginalized groups, including women and immigrants. Her work has been published in several scholarly journals, including British Journal of Industrial Relations, Industrial Relations Journal, International Migration Review, and International Journal of Training and Development.

Keywords: unions as organizations, social media communication and union renewal, occupational licensing.

Friday, March 14, 2025

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Sofia Bapna
Associate Professor and Lawrence fellow
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota

Dr. Bapna's research interests lie in the areas of digital platforms, entrepreneurship, and gender gaps. They stem from her experience as a female information technology professional as well as her experience as an entrepreneur in the digital economy. This background has resulted in two research streams. The first focuses on women’s under representation in STEM fields such as IT. Her work in this stream increases our understanding of the reasons underlying women’s under representation, identifies interventions to reduce gender gaps in representation, and identifies the effectiveness of legislation aimed at increasing women’s participation in the workforce. The second stream focuses on entrepreneurship in the digital economy. Her research in this stream increases our understanding of how entrepreneurs can be successful raising capital through crowdfunding and how they can grow their online brand communities. It also sheds light on the democratization of access to capital through crowdfunding by helping us understand how women and non-traditional user-entrepreneurs fare when raising capital through equity crowdfunding.

Friday, April 4, 2025

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Elizabeth McClean

Elizabeth McClean
Associate Professor
SC Johnson Graduate School of Management
Cornell University

Friday, April 25, 2025

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Mabel Abraham
Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business
Columbia Business School
Columbia University

Mabel Abraham is the Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. She teaches the MBA elective course on Power, Influence, and Networks and PhD seminars on Organizational Theory. She earned her PhD and MS in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to academia, Professor Abraham worked in defined benefits consulting and risk management at Fidelity Investments.

Her research examines how organizational and network processes contribute to gender differences in economic outcomes. In one recent project, Professor Abraham compares the relative benefits received by male and female entrepreneurs through strategic social networks aimed at generating new clients. In other published and ongoing research, she examines what drives men and women to apply to jobs at different employers; how peer evaluation processes disadvantage women; and how educational status shapes gender pay inequality. Professor Abraham’s research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science, and has been cited in several media outlets, including ABC, Bloomberg, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Abraham has also been recognized by leading scholarly associations for her research, including the American Sociological Association’s Best Published Paper Award, Wharton People Analytics Research Paper Competition, the Academy of Management’s Pondy Best Dissertation Paper Award, the INFORMS Dissertation Proposal Competition, the American Association of University Women American Fellowship, and the Kauffman Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.

Coming Soon

Lindred Greer
Professor for Management & Organizations & Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow
Stephen M. Ross School of Business
University of Michigan

Lindred (Lindy) Greer is a Professor for Management & Organizations at Ross and the Faculty Director of the Sanger Leadership Center. Her research focuses on how to design and lead high-performing teams.

Lindy has published in management and psychology research outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She has received awards for her research from the Academy of Management and American Psychological Association. She is Deputy Editor at Organization Science, has served as an Associate/Senior Editor at the Academy of Management Journal and Organization Science, on the boards of six of the top management and psychology journals, and on the boards of professional associations such as the International Association of Conflict Management and the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management.

Within her work with Michigan Ross Executive Education, she designs and runs c-suite and senior leadership development programs for some of the world's most influential companies. Dr. Greer has received numerous awards for her teaching and real-world impact on companies, including the Michigan Ross Executive Education Impact Award, Top 40 under 40 Business School Professors from Poets & Quants, and Top 30 Management Thinkers to Watch from Thinkers50 Radar. Example companies she has supported include Amazon, Carhartt, Ernst & Young, Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Google, KPMG, Life Time Fitness, the National Football League, Oracle, Sequoia Capital, United States Office of National Intelligence, Toyota, and Wabash.

Archive

2024-2025 Speaker Series

Friday, October 4, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Dorian Boncoeur
Assistant Professor
Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame

Dr. Dorian Boncoeur is an assistant professor of Management & Organizations at the Mendoza College of Business. His research examines human sustainability in the workplace; how employees can contribute to their organizations without subverting their own well-being. His research has appeared in peer-reviewed outlets such as Personnel Psychology, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Business Research. To carry out this research, he runs experience-sampling field studies, analyzes archival data, and conducts interviews as well as online and laboratory experiments.

Presentation

From Invisible to Visible: Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Consequences of Appraisals of Workplace Loneliness

Workplace loneliness is a pervasive experience for employees. Estimates suggest that roughly half of adults feel lonely at work, such that it has been described as an “invisible and quiet pandemic.” While nascent literature has started to shed light on the risk factors and deleterious consequences of loneliness in organizations, more limited research has considered how loneliness manifests itself in workplace interactions and how to alleviate its detrimental effects. To better understand workplace loneliness, we integrate two theories—the evolutionary theory of loneliness and the transactional theory of stress—to develop a model of how employees appraise and cope with workplace loneliness. We also suggest that a climate of authenticity—a work environment where employees can display emotions authentically toward coworkers—may help attenuate the deleterious effects of workplace loneliness and amplify more desirable ones. A pre-registered recall experiment and a pre-registered experience sampling field study largely support our model, highlighting employees’ appraisals of loneliness, their subsequent emotion regulation, and both relational and behavioral outcomes.

Friday, October 11, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Shannon Potter
Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources
University of Toronto

Shannon is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources. After earning her MA in Economics at UBC's Vancouver School of Economics, she gained hands-on experience in the labour movement both as an active rank-and-file member and in various leadership roles. This spurred her research interests in the internal structure of the Canadian labour movement, especially in the areas of internal democracy and the role of cross-union coalition building. Her dissertation research focuses on the role of inter-union competition and on the cross-union dynamics of strike activity. In a separate research agenda, Shannon is also interested in the tension women face between pursuing a career and having a family, which she explores via studies on the gender earnings gap and the drop in earnings women experience after the birth of a child (i.e. the "motherhood penalty").

Presentation

It's the Kids: The Gender Pay Gap in Emergency Medicine

Nobel Prize winning work by Claudia Goldin proposed that the "last chapter" in closing the gender pay gap lies in the design of jobs and compensation systems. Specifically, she argues that flexible, "non-greedy" work -compensation that does not disproportionately reward those who work long or specific hours-is key to eliminating the gender gap. In this case study, we explore the drivers of a gender earnings gap among emergency medical physicians at a large Canadian hospital. This setting, characterized by flexible, non-greedy work and equitable compensation practices, provides an ideal context to explore which factors still contribute to the gender pay gap even when best practices are adopted. We link longitudinal administrative data on men's and women's actual earnings, wages, and hours to data on children, caregiving responsibilities, and work preferences. We find that even in this highly egalitarian organization, a substantial gender earnings gap persists, but that it is driven entirely by women working fewer hours after childbirth. These findings suggest that even when best practices are in place, gendered childcare responsibilities can still lead to an earnings gap. Our findings thus suggest a modification to Goldin's argument: there is an "epilogue" in the grand gender convergence story, and its setting is within the home.

Friday, October 25, 2024 - Canceled

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Uriel Saldivar
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Friday, November 8, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Ahleah Miles
Dean's Research Associate
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University
2023-2024 Speaker Series

Friday, October 13, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Dasom Jang
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Friday, October 20, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Darlène Dubuisson
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Darlène Dubuisson received her PhD from Columbia University in 2020. Her research interests and teaching span political and legal anthropology, activist and engaged anthropology, Black feminist anthropology, Black intellectual histories, migration and transnational studies, and speculative fiction and visual culture.

Presentation

Labor of Love: Connection and Kinship among Haitian and Other Black Transit and Labor Migrants in Tapachula, Mexico

Throughout the Americas, antiblackness and crisis rhetoric have converged to create an antiblack immigration governmentality that produces a permanently temporary low-wage Black immigrant labor force. Taking the case of Haitian and other Black transit and labor migrants in Tapachula, Chiapas, a city along Mexico’s southern border, this talk proposes love as an agentive entity that enabled Black futurity against this context of indeterminacy. Tapachula has been labeled an "open-air prison" because migrants must stay in the city until their asylum cases are processed. Black migrants trapped in Tapachula endured daily racial profiling, policing, and surveillance. These migrants, nevertheless, engaged in acts of love to anticipate futures. Specifically, I maintain that love, animated through the kinship networks and connections of Haitian and other Black transit and labor migrants, allowed them to anticipate futures amid antiblack immigration governmentality in Tapachula. I put into play bell hook’s notion of love, which she defines as an intention and an action: it is "the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth." I begin with the study’s conceptual framework. I then interweave ethnography and politico-historical analysis to forward my central claim. I conclude with a call for centering love in research on Black transit and labor migration.

Friday, October 27, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Chenwei Liao
Associate Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Dr. Chenwei Liao is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University’s School of Human Resources and Labor Relations. His research is focused on phenomena regarding leaders and followers within organizations (e.g., servant leadership, leader-member exchange, idiosyncratic deals).

Friday, November 3, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Mauren Wolff
Research Associate
Department of Psychology and Sport Science
Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nurnberg

Friday, November 17, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Peter Norlander
Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Faculty Affairs; Director, MSHR Program; Associate Professor
Quinlan School of Business
Loyola University Chicago

Dr. Peter Norlander’s research examines the balance of power in employment relationships, employment discrimination, gig work, and globalization. His expertise is on managing and motivating in the workplace, employment relations, negotiation and conflict management, and global and comparative employment relations.

Presentation

New Evidence on Employee Non-compete, No Poach, and No Hire Agreements in the Franchise Sector

This paper presents new evidence on anti-competitive practices in the franchise sector. Drawing from a corpus of Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs) filed by 3,516 franchise brands in years 2011- 2023 (partial), I report new information on franchise brands’ use of inter-firm non-solicitation (“no poach”) clauses barring recruitment between firms, no hire clauses barring employment, and franchisor requirements that franchisees use employee non-compete clauses barring workers from joining competitors. Regulatory actions that restricted the enforceability of anti-competitive clauses began to appear in FDDs in 2018. While non-solicitation and no hire clauses have declined in use, the use of non-competes remained stable over time. While prior evidence on anti-competitive practices largely draws from individual complaints, survey data, and limited hand-coded samples, this paper spotlights new methods for finding barriers to worker mobility in large, unstructured text corpora.

Friday, December 1, 2023 - CANCELLED

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Alexandra Spitz-Oener
Professor
School of Business and Economics
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Dr. Alexandra Spitz-Oener’s research interests are in Applied Microeconomics, in particular Labor Economics. Dr. Spitz-Oener’s research focuses on understanding the challenges for workers brought about by technological change, trade, and immigration.

Presentation

Workplace Connections, Firm Quality, and Migration

Social network contacts are an important source of information and help people to "move to opportunity." There is, however, a lack of understanding about why and in which circumstances network contacts are relevant. We provide a new focus on the importance of social connections in migration decisions and analyze heterogeneity in network effects in two novel dimensions: First, we assess how the strength of network effects depends on the quality of the experience that initial migrants make at the destination. Second, we assess how the strength of network effects depends on an individual's spatial, economic, and cultural proximity to the potential destination. We analyze these questions in the context of the German reunification. Using a new data set that links administrative data from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to German social security records, we identify the causal effects of GDR work contacts on East–West migration in Germany. Our findings indicate that social network contacts are an important trigger for migration decisions. However, only if they had positive experiences and only if the information falls on fertile ground, that is, if the receiver is susceptible to the information due to prior proximity to the West.

Co-sponsored with MSU Department of Economics

Friday, January 26, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Phil DeOrtentiis
Assistant Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Internal and external hires: Deciphering the 'hire'-archy of status threats

This study investigates if the employment origin of employees (internal vs. external hires) influences the perceived status threat among supervisors and its subsequent impact on job-related outcomes. We integrate internal labor markets theory and social comparison theory to posit that employment origin (i.e., internal hire or external hire) relates to perceived status threat felt by supervisors towards their subordinates. Using data collected across three time periods on 424 supervisor-subordinate employee pairs, we employ path analysis to examine if employment origin match between supervisor-subordinate pairs results in less perceived status threat and if perceived status threat mediates the effects of employment origin match on various job-related outcomes (i.e., task performance, contextual performance, and voice solicitation). Last, through quantile regression, we examine if the relationship between employment origin match and status threat differs for supervisors who experience more status threat than those who experienced less.

Friday, February 2, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Jasmine Shi
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Cultural Changes as Seen in Chinese Urban TV Series

China has undergone substantial transformations since the Economic Reform in 1978, as echoed by cultural changes in many facets of life. Previous research has examined cultural changes in China by focusing on books and other cultural products, albeit with a limited scope across various life domains. In the current study, we aim to explore a more comprehensive range of realms encompassing diverse aspects of Chinese life. To achieve this, we utilize an informative yet underexamined cultural product: TV dramas. Successful TV dramas appeal to the audience’s preferences and needs and reflect cultural characteristics at the time. We collected information on top-rated Chinese urban TV dramas between 1980 and 2019 and coded them into 17 common themes reflecting various aspects of life. We then examined the trajectory of each theme over time from 1980 to 2019. Overall, the following themes became more prevalent in TV dramas over time: affair, divorce, family, romantic love, wedding, the pursuit of wealth, dinner party, house rental, house purchase, shopping, and death. The early 1990s marks a pivotal period. Specifically, the depiction of career pursuit in TV dramas switched from decreasing to increasing in the early 1990s. Around the same period, the depiction of survival stopped increasing and started to go down. Consistent with past literature, we found rising trends for themes indicating both traditional (e.g., family) and modern values (e.g., divorce), suggesting the coexistence of modernity and traditionality in China.

Friday, February 16, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | Virtually via Zoom

Renee M. Shelby
Visiting Fellow
The Justice and Technoscience (JusTech) lab
Australian National University
and Researcher at Google

Renee is a researcher and writer on technology, inequality, and power. Currently, Renee is a Visiting Fellow at the Justice and Technoscience (JusTech) lab at Australian National University and a researcher at Google, where Renee studies the social impacts of technology. As a researcher, Renee has worked with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation, and youthSpark among others. Renee has held fellowships with the Carnegie Mellon/ACLS Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the LGBTQ Institute, and the Georgetown Center for Juvenile Justice Reform; and was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Renee’s writing has been published in academic outlets, and featured in popular venues like The Conversation, Kotaku, Vice, and Stuff Mom Never Told You.

Presentation

How Knowledge Workers Think Generative AI will (not) Transform Their Industries

Generative AI is expected to have transformative effects in multiple knowledge industries. To better understand how knowledge workers expect generative AI may affect their industries in the future, we conducted participatory research workshops for seven different industries, with a total of 54 participants across three US cities. We describe participants' expectations of generative AI's impact, including a dominant narrative that cut across the groups' discourse: participants largely envision generative AI as a tool to perform menial work, under human review. Participants do not generally anticipate the disruptive changes to knowledge industries currently projected in common media and academic narratives. Participants do however envision generative AI may amplify four social forces currently shaping their industries: deskilling, dehumanization, disconnection, and disinformation. We describe these forces, and then we provide additional detail regarding attitudes in specific knowledge industries. We conclude with a discussion of implications and research challenges for the HCI community.

Co-sponsored with the Future of Work Consortium

Friday, February 23, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET NEW TIME 10:00am - 11:20am ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Carla Aranzaes
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Disseminating collective action frames. The importance of ties within social media

Unions create and design collective action frames that reach multiple actors among which potential members and the general public are part of. The current evolution of social media has created an additional route through which unions can disseminate these frames. Similar to face-to-face interactions, unions can establish relationships or ties with members of the public in these virtual spaces, consequently forming social networks. However, these ties may differentiate by their strength. Analyzing Twitter data from the first representation process of Amazon workers at a facility in Bessemer, Alabama, I examine how members of the general public interact with a union in social media throughout the multiple stages of the process, while also identifying those ties that are key in the transmission of a union’s collective action frames within these social networks. A better understanding of the social structures between a union and members of the public can inform unions’ strategies to communicate and distribute their frames more effectively, thereby gaining more supporters who can be a crucial balancing force between employers and workers.

Friday, March 15, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Uriel Saldivar
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

To Help or to Fire Me? Mixed Signals from Performance Improvement Plans and the Moderating Roles of I-deals

Performance Improvement Plans (PIP) are a formal human resource practice initiated by employers to help struggling workers improve work deficiencies. While empirical research on PIPs remains scarce, growing discussion among HR giants suggests they are designed to help workers, but have come to be seen by workers as a sign of impending termination. In the current study, I use signal theory as lens to examine how PIPs transmit signals of either perceived organizational support (POS) or job insecurity. I examine whether PIPs that signal POS evoke performance improvement (OCB) and enhance organizational commitment, and whether PIPs signaling job insecurity encourage workers to reduce performance (CWB) and turnover intention. I also assess the role of i-deals as a resource that boosts the signal of a PIP as a form of POS and reduces the signal of job insecurity. This study helps shed light on how PIPs can work as intended by HR and how employers can reduce instances where workers do not give a PIP a chance due to fears of impending termination.

Friday, March 22, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Jennifer Wessel
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Maryland

Dr. Jennifer L. Wessel (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland in College Park. Her research examines the experiences of and reactions to individuals with stigmatized identities in the workplace and other evaluative contexts, with a focus on the identity management strategies individuals use in regard to their identities. Dr. Wessel has also recently begun examining the role of authenticity at work and its connections to diverse identities.

Presentation

In our own backyard: Psychology-based interventions to promote inclusion in the academy

Organizations are often critiqued for having inauthentic or performative commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion-related (DEI) principles, and universities are no exception. This presentation will cover three studies examining the utility of interventions that are rooted in psychological theory in creating a more inclusive academy, leveraging work on choice architecture, scripting, and signaling. First, I will discuss the role of small formatting and process changes that can impact the extent to which faculty efforts to promote inclusion within their departments and field is noticed and valued. This experimental study is currently funded by the National Science Foundation and includes data from over 1,400 faculty in two STEM fields. Next, I will discuss preliminary findings from an ongoing classroom intervention study examining the impact of a scripting exercise on undergraduate student comfort and confidence in discussing DEI-related topics. Lastly, I will discuss preliminary findings from an ongoing qualitative study of autistic student experiences in research labs, focusing on small but important changes to lab culture and processes aimed at promoting greater inclusion of neurodiverse students.

Co-sponsored with MSU Department of Psychology (Organizational Psychology)

Friday, April 5, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

John W. Budd
Professor
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota

Dr. John W. Budd (he/him) is a Professor of Work and Organizations in the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, where he holds the Industrial Relations Land Grant Chair. He is a graduate of Colgate University and earned a Ph.D. degree in economics from Princeton University.

Presentation

Organizational Ownership and Trade-Offs Between Pay and Subjective Employee Well-Being: A Comparative Analysis
(joint with J. Ryan Lamare, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

The incompleteness of labor contracts is expected to cause uncertainty among forward-looking employees as to whether implicit contracts with greater intrinsic rewards in lieu of pay will be breached by employers, thus reducing employee well-being. Marsden (2021) theorized that an organization’s ownership type can serve as a stable, easy-to-observe signal of the likelihood of a breach, and thus employees across ownership types will exhibit different extrinsic-intrinsic trade-offs. Using the European Working Conditions Survey, we test the generalizability of Marsden’s theory across 35 European countries and 8 ownership categories. We also extend Marsden’s theorizing into the comparative domain, and analyze patterns of subjective well-being, compensatory pay, and organizational ownership across types of national economic and electoral systems.

Friday, April 12, 2024

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Ines Wagner
Research Professor
Institute for Social Research

Dr. Ines Wagner is a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo, Norway. Dr. Wagner is part of the Equality, Integration and Migration research group and has research interests that include gender & work, labor mobility in the European labor market and the impact of technological change on employment relations.

Presentation

Robotization, Women and Equality

The increased integration of industrial robots in production has prompted an interest in their impact on labor markets. While previous studies have highlighted diverse effects on employment, skills, and wages depending on institutional contexts, less attention has been paid to how gender dynamics influence robot adoption outcomes. Women, now more present in manufacturing, tend to be directed towards less physically demanding tasks and occupy fewer higher-paying skilled positions. Consequently, the replacement of physical tasks with robots, coupled with an emphasis on programming and operation, could potentially create more job opportunities for women. However, European research suggests that industrial robot adoption may widen the gender pay gap by disproportionately benefiting men in medium and high-skilled occupations. This paper conducts a case study at a Norwegian auto supplier manufacturing plant to explore the gendered effects of robotization. The study examines how robots are integrated into male- and female-dominated roles and who benefits from this integration. Findings suggest that the introduction of robots in this workplace had gendered effects, with male workers predominantly operating robots, while female workers remained in manual assembly line roles. The study highlights how technological advancements contribute to the gendering of work and underscores the need to understand the underlying mechanisms driving these dynamics.
2022-2023 Speaker Series

Friday, September 9, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Mike Kofoed
Associate Professor
United States Military Academy in West Point

Dr. Michael Kofoed is an Associate Professor of Economics at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. His research focuses on the economics of education including the effects of financial aid on student and institution decision making and the influence of peers and mentors on college students. Topics include for-profit universities, the Pell Grant and FAFSA, the Post 9-11 GI Bill, and the Affordable Care Act. His papers have been published in Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Health Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, and Research in Higher Education. In the popular press, Dr. Kofoed's research was cited in the Wall Street Journal, Inside Higher Education, Money Magazine, CNBC, Yahoo! Finance, Vox's The Weeds Podcast, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Dr. Kofoed holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Georgia, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Weber State University.

Presentation

Zooming to Class?: Experimental Evidence on College Students’ Online Learning during COVID-19

Michael S. Kofoed, Lucas Gebhart, Dallas Gilmore, and Ryan Moschitto

COVID-19 shifted schools and colleges to online instruction with little causal evidence of outcomes. In the fall of 2020, we randomized 551 West Point students in a required introductory economics course across twelve instructors to either an online or in-person class. Final grades for online students dropped by 0.215 standard deviations, a result apparent in both assignments and exams and largest for academically at-risk students. A post-course survey finds that online students struggled to concentrate in class and felt less connected to their instructors and peers. We find that the shift to online education had negative results for learning.

Friday, September 30, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | via Zoom

Zhonghao Wang
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Up in Smoke: Longitudinal Reciprocal Effects of Cannabis Use and Job Complexity on Extrinsic Career Success

Although cannabis use is on the rise with the passage of cannabis-friendly legislations, there is still limited understanding of its implications in the workplace. Drawing on social selection theory, we argue that cannabis use will negatively influence one’s extrinsic career success (i.e., income and occupational prestige) via job complexity. Furthermore, based on psychogenic theory, we propose an alternative model in which job complexity will reduce cannabis use to facilitate one’s extrinsic career success. Using eight years of longitudinal panel data from multiple sources, we found support for the hypothesized reciprocal effect between cannabis use and job complexity and their influences on income and occupational prestige. Moreover, we found that the impact of job complexity on extrinsic career success via cannabis use was stronger than the impact of cannabis use on extrinsic career success via job complexity. We discuss this study’s implications for cannabis use research and practical implications for employees, employers, and the society.

Friday, October 7, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Michael Price
Professor
College of Business and Economics
Australian National University

Michael Price is a Professor of Economics, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Associate at the Environmental and Resources Department at RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research. An internationally recognized expert in behavioral economics and the use of field experiments, Michael’s research focuses on the design of policies based on behavioral insights and the use of field experiments to evaluate whether and why policies may or may not work. Michael has written on a variety of topics such as charitable giving, energy and water conservation, obesity and food choice, stress and economic decision-making, discrimination, and collusion. His work has appeared in a number of leading economic journals including The Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Experimental Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Econometrics, International Economic Review, and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Michael’s research has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Presentation

The Importance of Routines: Changes in Daily Commute Patterns Impact Stress and Preferences

We assess the importance of daily routines by exploring the impact of trac induced changes in daily commute patterns on stress and individual decision-making. To do so, we use a yearlong closure of a one mile stretch of Interstate 59/20 through Birmingham, Alabama. We use survey data to show that the closure caused many individuals to change their daily commute to and from work. We then explore the eects of such changes on stress and experimentally elicited choices over risk and time, charitable giving, and honesty. We show that changes in daily routines caused by the closure of the highway lead to: (i) increased stress and reduced life-satisfaction, (ii) increased impatience, but no change in the consistency of intertemporal choices made with and without front-end delay, (iii) increased risk-seeking over lotteries, and (iv) increased free-riding and subsequent reductions in average donations to charity. Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature exploring the stability of preferences and the extent to which our choices are shaped by prolonged shocks or major life changes.

Friday, October 21, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Dasom Jang
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Algorithmic management as a new tool for organizational control

Recently, practitioners and scholars have taken an interest in algorithmic management (AM), and this interest is increasing. Focusing on the novelty of AM, earlier research studying the relationship between AM and workers did not reveal AM characteristics that are already prevalent in the organization as a result of other technical breakthroughs. By pointing out that AM is both new and has been performed before, I create a conceptual framework that shows how AM adoption can be thought of as a spectrum with human labor on one end and algorithms on the other. On the basis of the spectrum, I claim that AM is not exclusive to the gig economy, but has been widely implemented in other types of organizations as well. I propose empirical models to investigate (a) how workers' perception of control interacts with algorithms in the workplace and (b) how perception of control with algorithm is influenced by organizational and institutional contexts by adopting variables from diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory and technology-organizational environment (TOE) theory.

Friday, October 28, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Nathan Eva
Associate Professor
Department of Management
Monash Business School

Dr Nathan Eva is a Fulbright Scholar (2021) and an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the Monash Business School. His research focuses on changing the conversation with respect to how people lead within organizations, by challenging dominant ego-centric leadership paradigms using the servant leadership framework. His work demonstrates that inclusive approaches to leadership have more profound and lasting effects on follower and organizational in-role and extra-role behaviors, than dominant paradigms of ego-centric leadership.

Dr Eva received his PhD from Monash University in 2014, received the 2015 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctorial Research Award in Leadership, awarded as a 2016 Greenleaf Scholar by the Greenleaf Centre for Servant Leadership, received the 2020 Dean's Awards for Excellence in Research by an Early Career Researcher, and was Highly Commended for his research as an Early Career Scholar for the 2018 ANZAM Excellence Awards. His peer-reviewed work appears in international outlets such as The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, and Journal of Vocational Behavior.

Presentation

Is there one best way to lead: Reconceptualising how we measure leadership

The leadership literature contains a myriad of approaches, with the typical study focusing on one leadership style in isolation. To address the significant theoretical and empirical overlap across the many leadership styles, we use bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling to examine whether 12 dominant leadership measures: (a) capture unique information, (b) explain variance in employee outcomes above and beyond a general factor of leadership, and to (c) determine what the shared variance of these leadership measures represents. Across seven samples, five countries, multiple organizational contexts, and 4,000 respondents, none of the leadership measures could systematically capture unique information and explain variance in employee outcomes beyond a general leadership factor. Further analyses indicated that this shared variance (the general factor) mainly represented the affective quality of the leader-follower relationship. The results reveal an inconvenient truth for leadership researchers: these measures predominately capture leader affect rather than unique construct-relevant information.

Friday, November 4, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Maite Tapia
Associate Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Maite Tapia is an Associate Professor at the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on worker voice within the workplace as well as worker organizing and movement-building within the broader society, confronting specifically workers' social identities and systemic inequality.

She received her PhD in the Department of Comparative and International Labor at the School of Industrial Relations at Cornell University in 2013.

Presentation

The Militarization of Human Resources: Contemporary Models of Worker Control in Amazon Fulfillment Centers

In this paper, we deeply examine Amazon’s employment practices at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama – a facility located in a highly racialized antilabor context of the US South. Through innovative qualitative analysis grounded in Critical Race Theory/Intersectionality (CRT/I) and anchored in worker experiences, we highlight the ‘militarized’ nature of employment practices in and outside the workplace. Specifically, contextualizing our analysis in the counternarratives of the workers most impacted, we examine the effect of Amazon’s use of public and private policing and show how it consists of regimental control of worker bodies, robotized management of HR, and the creation of a modernized corporate police state. Furthermore, we show how Amazon’s near-carceral work culture has a uniquely intensified effect on a majority Black workforce at the facility. This research grounds labor process theory within CRT/I and has crucial implications for workers increasingly controlled by heighted surveillance through technology and use of public and private policing.

Friday, November 11, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | via Zoom

Steven Vallas
Professor
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Northeastern University

Dr. Steven Vallas is a Professor at Northeastern University in Boston teaching sociology work and contemporary sociology theory. His research focuses among the transformation of work, struggles over new technologies, and responses to the demands of the new economy. He is currently conducting a research study funded by NSF of the algorithmic workplace, particularly on ride hailing, home maintenance, courier, and caregiving platforms.

Dr. Vallas received his PhD in Sociology at Rutgers and was the International Fracqui Chair in the Social Sciences from KU Leuven in Belgium from 2017-2018.

Presentation

Coming to Terms with Platform Labor: The Normalization of Risk among Gig Workers in Boston

How do gig workers view the various financial, physical, legal, and other risks their work entails? Answers to this question have remained ambiguous in the literature. In this paper we use 70 in- depth interviews with workers in ride-hail, grocery shopping and food delivery sectors to analyze how gig workers perceive job-related risks. We distinguish five types of risk orientation on a continuum from consent to contestation. We find that most workers fall at the consensual end; they normalize job risks and do not expect the rights of conventional employment. Three conditions account for this normalization—distance from necessity, a sense of agency and personal efficacy, and the prominent role platforms assign to customers. These findings suggest that efforts to expand gig workers’ rights face structural obstacles, many fostered by the work itself, as a fractured workforce experiences the risks of gig work in highly differentiated ways.

Friday, November 18, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Mahl-Geum Choi
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Empirical Examination of Diversity Training Backlash: The Role of Moral Credentialing Process

My dissertation seeks to promote the transition of “diversity training backlash” from a general concept that means different things to different researchers to a scientific construct regarding which there is a significant consensus, and to experimentally examine when and how such backlash unfolds in the organizational context. I define DT backlash and review the DT literature to provide existing evidence of DT backlash and how it relates to common criteria used to evaluate training effectiveness. I propose and empirically examine how moral credentialing theory explicates a previously unexamined underlying psychological mechanism of DT backlash. More specifically, I test how one’s recalling of the previous DT experiences may morally license trainees before participating in DT, thereby leading to a likelihood to express prejudice and discriminatory behavior against minority group members. I also test how one’s pretraining attitudes (e.g., distributive, procedural justice perceptions) and individual differences (e.g., social dominance orientation, and belief in a just world) moderate such relationships, thereby forming three-way interactions. Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed.

Friday, January 27, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Amanda Chuan
Assistant Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Amanda Chuan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. She received her PhD from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Her research focuses on labor and behavioral economics. Within labor economics, she studies human capital investment decisions and how they contribute to gender and socioeconomic inequality within labor markets. Within behavioral economics, she uses a variety of experimental methods to explore pro-social behavior and team dynamics between individuals. Her work has been published in the Journal of Public Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. It has appeared in popular media outlets such as the New York Times and Scientific American.

Presentation

Evaluating the Impact of Preschool on Patience, Time Inconsistency and Commitment Demand

We use a field experiment to evaluate patience, time inconsistency and commitment demand among young children. We first show that patience positively predicts later reading scores even after controlling for traditional measures of cognition and executive function. In contrast, time inconsistency and commitment use do not. Next, we evaluate whether preschool can change patience. We leverage a field experiment which randomized children to different preschool curricula. We find greater stability of patience among children who received the preschool curriculum that focused on self-regulation, while children in the control group exhibited declining patience over our two-week experiment. We find that preschool does not change time inconsistency, but can help children use commitment devices to manage their time inconsistency. Our paper provides the first evidence that preschool can change stability of patience, the component of time preferences that is correlated with future reading achievement. It illustrates pathways by which preschool can better equip children to invest in their human capital.

Friday, February 10, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

James H. Dulebohn
Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Obesity Discrimination: An fMRI Study

This study uses fMRI to scan subjects to determine what areas of the brain are involved in deciding among subjects of different weight categories. The study involves a realistic scenario that involves selecting subjects in order for each person to view subjects of different weight categories. Each person goes through a scenario involving a sequence of events selecting subjects. After they are presented with the scenario, subjects are presented with pictures of normal weight, obese weight and morbidly obese, and they will make choices regarding who they prefer. The scans highlight the different areas (for normal weight, obese, and morbidly obese) that are signified through fMRI processing. Also, the experiment includes an eye tracking device to determine how long subjects stare at the pictures that distinguish between the normal weight, obese, and morbidly obese.

Friday, March 3, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | via Zoom

Jia (Jasmine) Hu
Professor & Denman Scholar
Fisher College of Business
The Ohio State University

Dr. Jia (Jasmine) Hu is a Professor of Management and Denman Scholar at Ohio State University. Her primary research interests focus on prosocial leadership and teams. Her work has been mentioned in media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and The U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Some of her achievements include being among the top 10 most productive leadership scholars in OB from 2011-2017, named as a “Best Reviewer of the Year” by PPsych in 2019, a “Best 40 under 40 Professor” by Poets and Quants in 2021, and a J. Donnelly Fellow in Participatory Management from her time as a faculty member for the University of Notre Dame.

Dr. Hu currently serves as a deputy editor for Management and Organizational Review and board editor for seven leading management journals such as AMJ, JAP, OBHDP, PPsych, JOM, Human Relations and JOB. Dr. Hu received her PhD in OBHR from University of Illinois and her MA from Renmin University of China.

Presentation

When Making a Difference at Home Helps Leaders be Other-Oriented at Work: Insights from Two Field Experiments

Although studies highlight the benefits of receiving gratitude, little is known about how receiving gratitude from family members at home may spill over to impact leaders’ behavior at work. In this study, we take a whole-person view of leaders to understand how their receipt of gratitude at home impacts their other-oriented behaviors at work. To do so, we integrated the broaden-and-build theory and the work-family resource model to propose and test how receipt of gratitude from family members at home motivates leaders to be more helpful and empowering toward their followers at work. We studied these ideas across two daily field experiments. In the first daily field experiment, we surveyed 103 full-time managers from high schools and in the second daily experiment, we surveyed 116 leader-follower dyads from a variety of industries. Across both experiments, we found that when leaders reflected on receiving gratitude from family members at home, they felt higher prosocial impact at home, which in turn fulfilled their basic daily needs, consequently motivating them to engage in more helping and empowering behaviors at work. We also found some evidence that leaders high in trait negative affect benefited the least from receiving gratitude. I will discuss how our findings provide meaningful extensions to the literatures on gratitude, leadership, and work-family issues.

Friday, March 17, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Carla Aranzaes
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Uriel Saldivar
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentations

Gaining support via social media: evidence from Amazon’s unionization campaign (Aranzaes)

Unions and other social movements can rely heavily on public support to achieve their goals and advance their causes. Social media platforms are becoming more prominent as a means of gaining such support. On these platforms, two aspects stand out: first, how ideas and information are framed, and second, how these ideas are disseminated to the general public, all of which are critical for garnering traction. Frames are the conceptual basis or schemata of interpretation by which an individual makes sense of social events (Goffman, 1974), and collective action frames elicit action from movement adherents, gain new adherents, and neutralize the opposition (Snow et al., 2018). Analyzing open and extensive Twitter data from the union election led by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, I aim to answer whether collective action frames during the stages of the representation process influenced the public’s opinion of unions, and if so, whether the influence of collective action frames increases as a union moves forward through the representation process. I use the influence model (Frank, 2011), which represents how an individual’s beliefs, knowledge or behavior are impacted by other individuals in the social network of the former, and conduct an analysis taking into consideration the stages of the unionization effort. This analysis of Twitter data allows for a better understanding of how US unions acquire supporters through social media which can be critical especially during representation efforts.

The Great Return: An I-deals Perspective on the Termination of Negotiated Work-Location Arrangements (Saldivar)

The number of workers completing a portion of their work outside of the central work location has dramatically increased since the onset COVID-19. One way workers voluntarily obtain work location flexibility is via successful direct personal negotiation with their supervisors, or idiosyncratic deals (i-deals). Location flexibility i-deals involve personal negotiation of where workers complete a portion of their work and meet the personal needs of workers. Yet, in the wake of the height of COVID-19, a growing list of employers including Disney and Amazon are looking to force workers back to the standard work location (e.g., the office), equating to the termination of previously negotiated location i-deals. In a tripartite model linking location termination to absenteeism, CWB-O, OCB, and work engagement, I examine three competing theories represented by three explanatory mechanisms: perceived organizational support, autonomy need satisfaction, and emotional exhaustion. Perceived i-deal duration is proposed as a boundary condition for the relation between location termination and theorized mechanisms. Theorized relationships are tested in a two-part study consisting of a vignette experiment with 292 full-time U.S workers (Study 1) and a field study (Study 2). As predicted, preliminary results from study 1 suggest experiencing location i-deal termination has the most dysfunctional effect on outcomes due to feelings of reduced support and emotional exhaustion but not autonomy, compared to workers who keep their location i-deal and even those who never had one. Thus, we find an instance where having an i-deal and losing it is worse than never having one at all. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Friday, March 24, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Giavanna Ruscitto
PhD Student
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Presentation

Roles and Resources: Understanding Gender Identity, Social Class, and Relational Reconciliation at Work

This study focuses on a novel form of socialization called relational reconciliation that emphasizes the importance of demographics in building relationships at work. Building on this concept, we emphasize two important demographics: gender identity and social class origin. We integrate social role theory and social class theory to explain the function of gender-based social roles and social class-based resources in how people form relationships at work. We also explore possible benefits and drawbacks based on individuals’ gender identity and social class origin. We surveyed 166 fully employed individuals. Our study reveals that an individual's gender identity and social class background affect the motivational factors related to relational reconciliation and the relationship between relational reconciliation and job satisfaction.

Friday, April 7, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Alex Eble
Assistant Professor
Teachers College
Columbia University

Alex Eble is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Education at Columbia University's graduate school of education, Teachers College. He works in the fields of development and applied microeconomics. Most of his research has to do with the economics of education in the developing world. Alex is affiliated faculty at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and a part of Effective Intervention, a group of researchers based at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance working on how to raise education levels and reduce child mortality in pockets of extreme poverty in the developing world.

Presentation

How does gender shape the career benefits that come from personal networks? We study this question in the setting of academic science, focusing on mid-career scientists competing to serve on a major scientific funding body, a role which brings substantial networking opportunities. We estimate how this service influences later-career outcomes and how these impacts differ by gender. After service, males win 56 percent more high-stakes, high-value grants, and they are more than twice as likely to be promoted to senior roles. Colleagues in their same field at their home institution are also significantly more likely to win grants from the funding body. In contrast, female rotators and their colleagues enjoy no such gains on any of these outcomes. Exploring mechanisms, we show that men are more likely than women to develop connections with influential scientists who are mostly male. The benefits of service are also more equal in fields with greater opportunities for female-to-female networking. In contrast, we find no evidence that service is associated with higher academic productivity. Our findings help explain the persistence of gender inequality in senior roles in science and related fields, and illustrate a key mechanism through which historical advantage can persist.

Friday, April 14, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Carrie Freshour
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
University of Washington

Dr. Carrie Freshour is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. She identifies as a Southerner and abolitionist who focuses on low-wage food and agricultural labor in the South, racial capitalism, carceral geographies, and Black Radicalism. Her fields of interest range among history, food, geographies, labor, and the environment.

She is currently finishing her book project titled Making Life Work, that discusses the experiences of Black women, their families, and the communities in Northeast Georgia. Dr. Freshour received her MSc (2013) and PhD (2018) in Developmental Sociology from Cornell University.

Presentation

The title of this talk is drawn from an interview with Kendaliyn Granville during a Black worker-led walkout in Kathleen, GA in late March 2020. In the early days of the COVID-19 global pandemic, Black workers engaged in a spontaneous, non-union affiliated action where 50 workers walked off the line against working conditions and the lack of safety precautions. I think about this walkout in relation to other seemingly “spontaneous” small-scale actions found in the archive and experienced through ethnography alongside other strategies to “make life work” by moving across plants, fast food, and informal employment, as well as piecing together a reliance on liminal social welfare programs. In this talk, I bring Marxist feminist scholarship on the wage relation and what Kathi Weeks’ conceptualizes as an “antiwork politics” together with Black studies scholarship on the politics of refusal to think through Black women workers’ actions at, and extending beyond, the poultry plant. I wonder if we might consider these acts as a sort of politics of refusal, not only of work, but the “conditions of work,” borrowing from Du Bois, as a challenge to those of us interested in labor organizing and anti-capitalist futures. This research comes from my in-progress manuscript, Making Life Work: Black Families, Racial Capitalism, and the Poultry Capital of the World.

Friday, April 21, 2023

12:00pm - 1:20pm | S133 South Kedzie Hall

Jamie K. McCallum
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Middlebury College

Jamie McCallum is Associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. His research focuses on labor and work issues around the globe. His work has been featured in scholarly social science outlets, medical journals, as well as popular places like the New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post, The Nation, and Jacobin. His third book, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice, was published by Basic Books in late 2022.

Presentation

This talk builds on McCallum's new book on front-line workers during the pandemic, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice. Through interviews, surveys, and other data, McCallum traces and contours of the pandemic through them prism of essential industries. Their struggles for higher wages, public health, and new politics help us understand the pandemic and labor organizing in a new light.

Co-sponsored by MSU Department of Sociology
2021-2022 Speaker Series
Friday, September 17, 2021

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

Briar Kukla and Aylasia Steen
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

HCS Student Researcher Presentations
- History of Labor Education, Labor Outreach, and Joint Labor-Management Programming - Briar Kukla
  
  In this research project, I collected qualitative data to comprehensively document and summarize the history and role of the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations (SHRLR) in engaging in local and national labor outreach and extension services, labor education, and joint-labor management. I collected qualitative data using three sources: interviews with current and past Labor Outreach faculty and staff; publicly available press articles and information on websites, and MSU library resources (e.g., Vincent Voice Library recordings). My interviews included questions on the schools' most notable accomplishments in labor education, joint-labor management initiatives, and extension services, on local or national labor organizations/unions that our school has partnered with or provided services to, on what was accomplished with these partnerships/clients, and on the types of projects SHRLR Labor Outreach faculty are currently leading. I conducted five interviews (for a total duration of five hours of interview data) with current/past faculty/staff members and received written responses to interview questions from one past faculty member. Several themes emerged from these data, including the finding that Labor Outreach faculty members have a common goal to promote decent work for all, and are dedicated and motivated to make the workplace better. My findings also suggest that the Labor Outreach faculty/staff have built-long lasting relationships with many of the labor organizations that the SHRLR provides services to at present, resulting in spinoff programming or referrals with new clients. I also found evidence of constraints and challenges as well as opportunities to grow labor outreach programming to face the demands of the future.
- Restorative Justice: Healing Circles Giving Voice to Employees - Aylasia Steen
  
  Conflict gives the impression of being unavoidable and in some cases it is. However, in the workplace conflict could be averted if people understood the severity of their actions and biases against their colleagues and overall, the work environment. As society continues to diversify it is important that everyone in the workplace can coincide in order for effectiveness and productivity. Diversity is a crucial part of the workplace as diversity brings forth different beliefs, values and backgrounds which attracts unique talent and innovation. Unfortunately, there are those who are ingrained with bigotry and/or are racially insensitive. These individuals often refuse to acknowledge how their behaviors have caused discomfort for not only the workplace but their minority colleagues. Frequently organizations inadequately hold the offenders accountable and dismiss the feelings of those victimized. We tend to see when someone has transgressed against another person they are given a slap on the wrist for their behavior, but this response may be ineffective in promoting a diverse work environment, especially for someone who is a repeated offender of the same transgression. In particular, conflicts that involve racism/discrimination are not as simple to overlook or at least shouldn’t be. Organizations need to take restorative justice practices into consideration for positive reinforcement. Restorative justice is when someone addresses the harm they have caused with criminal behavior to repair the relationship with their victim. This research explores the potential benefits of turning to restorative justice to address and repair damaged colleague relationships associated with race.
Friday, September 24, 2021

11:00am - 12:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

Matt Hinkel
PhD Candidate
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Matt Hinkel is a PhD Candidate in the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. His research focuses on (1) labor market dynamics and regulations, particularly within the U.S. construction industry; (2) employment relations issues in sports, with a focus on biases faced by union activists who represent sports teams and what factors affect union voting behavior in certification elections; and (3) compensation and benefits, with a focus on how different forms of compensation (e.g., stock options, cash-based pay, and severance agreements) impact behavior of female CEOs and senior leaders in the face of bias. He has been published in the Labor Studies Journal and currently has a paper under second review at the British Journal of Industrial Relations. In addition, he has co-authored a book chapter published by MIT Press on how to improve job quality in the U.S. residential construction industry. Matt is also a research scholar at the Institute for Construction Economic Research (ICERES) and has served as a research fellow at the National Alliance for Fair Contracting (NAFC).

Presentation

The Effect of Prevailing Wage Laws on Informal Construction

Informal employment, defined as the illegal misclassification of employees as independent contractors or employment of workers using cash-only payments, has long been rampant in the American construction industry. These actions rob workers of legally earned benefits, defund social programs, and undermine the competitiveness of law-abiding contractors. While enforcing labor laws has proved difficult, one way a state may be able to strengthen enforcement—and limit informality—is a prevailing wage law. These regulations require certified payrolls to be submitted on public works projects. This study uses state-level data from 2010-2019 to examine the impact of prevailing wage laws on informal construction employment. State prevailing wage laws, even those of weak strength, are associated with significant reductions in informality.

Friday, October 15, 2021

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

Jacob McCartney
PhD Candidate
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Jacob McCartney is a PhD candidate in the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. He has research interests in accountability and diversity, equity, and inclusion. His dissertation looks at accountability in labor platforms (e.g., Uber, MTurk). While traditional workers are held accountable by bosses and coworkers, platform workers are held accountable by customers and algorithmic management. These differences in accountability systems may ultimately impact a worker's felt accountability, with implications for worker well-being and productivity.

Presentation

Accountability in Labor Platforms

Accountability is a requisite for social order; without it chaos would ensue. In organizations accountability keeps employees on the straight and narrow ensuring that they follow orders and that their actions are part of the collective. In organizations accountability has traditionally been administered by bosses and coworkers, however, a new form of work has a radically different structure. Workers on labor platforms (e.g., Uber, MTurk) have no bosses and no coworkers to keep them accountable. Instead, workers on labor platforms work individually, and are held accountable by requests from customers. Differences in accountability systems between traditional organizations and labor platforms have been detailed by extant research, but what has been left unexamined are differences in workers’ felt accountability that result from these different accountability systems. This distinction is important, in that it is ultimately a worker’s felt accountability which guides their actions. Thus, examining felt accountability will help shed light on the relative strengths of traditional organizations and labor platforms by illuminating how workers behave in the various organizations.

Friday, October 22, 2021

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

Salil Sapre
PhD Candidate
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Salil R. Sapre is a PhD Candidate in the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. His research is anchored in three primary themes: (i) international political economy of global supply chains; (ii) intersectionality in the context of work and employment; and (iii) trade union strategies for organizing new members and mobilizing existing ones. He employs qualitative 'immersive' approaches to data collection and analysis.

Presentation

Going Global but Staying Local: The Mechanics of a Local Labor Control Regime in Export-Oriented Garment Manufacturing in India

Internal (within-country) migrant women constitute an increasingly significant proportion of workers employed in global supply chain (GSC) settings. Yet, migrant women’s intersectional subjectivities and agency remain largely underexplored in GSC scholarship. In this fine-grained qualitative study, I take a worker-centered approach to analyze migrant women’s intersectional experiences and the influence of their agency on local employment relationships in a South Indian garment industrial cluster. I interrogate how employer practices are tailored towards extracting surplus value from migrant women in ways that reinforce workers’ intersecting vulnerabilities anchored in gender and migration status. Expressions of worker agency, in turn, impact local worker-management dynamics in unique ways, including those that are self-exploitative for workers themselves. The paper thus encourages a push within GSC scholarship towards consideration of diverse worker groups and their intersecting subjectivities, their agency, and its unique impact on local employer practices. These dynamics have important theoretical implications for better explaining regional competitive advantage as well as practical ramifications for supporting worker rights in GSCs.

Friday, October 29, 2021

12:00pm - 1:20pm ET | via Zoom

Paul Osterman
Nanyang Technological University Professor
Professor of Human Resources and Management
MIT Sloan School of Management

Paul Osterman is the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Professor of Human Resources and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as a member of the Department of Urban Planning at MIT. From July 2003 to June 2007 he also served as Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School. His research concerns changes in work organization within companies, career patterns and processes within firms, economic development, urban poverty, and public policy surrounding skills training and employment programs.

His most recent book is Who Will Care For Us: Long Term Care and the Long Term Workforce (Russell Sage,2017). Other recent books include Good Jobs America: Making Work Better for Everyone (Russell Sage, 2011); The Truth About Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, How They Matter (Harvard Business School Press, 2009); Gathering Power: The Future of Progressive Politics in America (Beacon Press, 2003),; Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market: How It Has Changed and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Working In America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market (MIT Press, 2001).

Presentation

Contract Employment: Measurement and Implications For Employer-Employee Relationships

This paper utilizes a new nationally representative survey, executed in January, 2020, that measures non-standard work. We focus on contract company employees. At 10.8 percent of the workforce these are the largest group of non-standard workers. We describe this workforce and estimate selection models. We then study earnings and access to employer provided training. The latter outcome is important because training impacts wage growth and career trajectories and also captures the evolving character of employment relationships.

We find that contractors face an earnings penalty but that there is considerable heterogeneity within the category and the penalty disappears after controls for skill level of the job. The analysis of multiple forms of formal training finds that contractors receive less than standard employee even after rich controls. Informal training is more textured due to the nature of social interactions inherent in its availability. Throughout the analysis racial and ethnic disparities are apparent.

Friday, November 5, 2021

12:00pm - 1:20pm | via Zoom

JR Keller
Assistant Professor of Human Resource Studies
ILR School
Cornell University

JR Keller is an Assistant Professor of Human Resource Studies in the ILR School at Cornell University. His research focuses on how firms combine internal and external hiring to meet their human capital needs as well the various ways in individuals build careers within and across organizations. He has explored the factors which lead firms to hire externally versus promote from within, supply chain approaches to talent management, the use of nonstandard work arrangements and talent management more generally. His work has appeared in the Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Industrial & Labor Relations Review, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology, and Organizational Behavior, as well as a recent book on strategic talent management.

Presentation

Advance 'em to attract 'em: An argument against internal talent hoarding

Allowing workers to move to new jobs within the firm that better match their interests and abilities benefits firms and workers alike. Recent work suggests that such moves are more likely to occur when firms embrace free-flowing internal talent markets in which employees are encouraged to actively pursue new internal opportunities. Yet individual managers, fearful of not being able to adequately replace subordinates who might be willing and ready to move on to a new internal opportunity, often introduce friction into internal talent markets by dissuading or otherwise preventing their subordinates from pursuing other jobs within the firm, a practice known as talent hoarding. Indeed, recent data suggest that as many as half of managers engage in talent hoarding, and firms increasingly recognize talent hoarding behaviors as problematic. We argue and show–through an analysis of 96,712 internal applications submitted to 9,896 open jobs over a five-year period within a single large employer–that managers who facilitate internal mobility by securing promotions for their subordinates actually attract more, better, and more functionally diverse internal candidates for their open jobs. In doing so, we provide a powerful counterargument to one of the primary rationales underlying talent hoarding.

Friday, January 28, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm | via Zoom

Lynn A. McFarland
Assistant Professor of Management
Darla Moore School of Business
University of South Carolina

Lynn A. McFarland is an Assistant Professor of Management and Dean’s Fellow in the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. McFarland’s research focuses primarily on staffing, workplace diversity, and contextual influences on organizational behavior. She has published in leading management journals including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, and Personnel Psychology, and has presented over 60 papers at national conferences. She has also consulted and conducted research with a variety of public and private organizations.

Presentation

The Nature and Business Unit Consequences of the Collective Candidate Experience

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, February 11, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm | via Zoom

Daniel Cornfield
Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and American Studies
Vanderbilt University

Dan Cornfield is Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, Editor-in-Chief of Work and Occupations, and a Fellow of the Labor and Employment Relations Association. His work on artist careers, labor, civil rights, and immigration addresses the formation of inclusive and expressive occupational communities and their impact on cultural pluralism. Dan’s work has been widely published in social science journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and the ILR Review. Among his books are Beyond the Beat (Princeton University Press), Becoming a Mighty Voice (Russell Sage Foundation), and Worlds of Work (Springer), co-edited with Randy Hodson. Cornfield earned his BA (1974), MA (1977), and PhD (1980) all in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Friday, March 4, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

Amanda Chuan
Assistant Professor
School of Human Resources & Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Amanda Chuan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. She received her PhD from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Her research focuses on labor and behavioral economics. Within labor economics, she studies human capital investment decisions and how they contribute to gender and socioeconomic inequality within labor markets. Within behavioral economics, she uses a variety of experimental methods to explore pro-social behavior and team dynamics between individuals. Her work has been published in the Journal of Public Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. It has appeared in popular media outlets such as the New York Times and Scientific American.

Friday, March 18, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

John Kammeyer-Mueller
Professor, Curtis L. Carlson Professor of Industrial Relations
Director, Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies
Department of Work and Organizations
University of Minnesota

John Kammeyer-Mueller is the Curtis L. Carlson Professor in the Department of Work and Organizations, and Director at the Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies at University of Minnesota. Kammeyer-Mueller's research examines how employees adjust to new jobs, the process of career development, and how attitudes and emotions shape behavior in organizations. He is particularly interested in learning how interpersonal relationships with co-workers and supervisors can affect how new hires see their work environments over time. Ongoing projects also look at topics such as stress and coping, workforce diversity, and applied research methods. His work has appeared in publications such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, and Organizational Research Methods, among others.

Presentation

Brittle Teams: Do Engaged Work Units Face Greater Voluntary Turnover Following Disruptive Staffing Events?

Drawing on turnover event theory (TET) and context-emergent turnover (CET) theory, we examine how staffing events and organizational practices affect turnover dynamics in work units. Analyzing panel data from1,620 retail stores over 22 months, we first examine the effects of staffing events—including hiring, dismissals, layoffs, and voluntary turnover—on subsequent unit-level voluntary turnover. Our findings show that hiring events are associated with large and persistent increases in unit-level voluntary turnover. Layoff announcements and voluntary turnover are also positively associated with unit-level voluntary turnover, although compared to hiring, the effects are smaller for voluntary turnover and more transient for layoff announcements. Dismissals are associated with minor short-term increases in unit-level voluntary turnover. Second, our results demonstrate that units with high levels of engagement in appreciation rituals, an organizational practice used to promote collective positive attitudes, experience higher voluntary turnover rates in response to hiring, layoff announcements, and voluntary turnover, and lower rates of voluntary turnover following dismissal events. Our findings suggest that appreciation rituals make units more vulnerable to turnover following staff disruptions. Taken together, we contribute to the turnover and strategic HR literatures by showing how organizations can anticipate and manage voluntary turnover consequences of staffing events.

Friday, April 8, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

Alan Benson
Associate Professor
Department of Work and Organizations
University of Minnesota

Alan Benson is an Associate Professor in the Work and Organizations Group at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, the graduate faculty of the University of Minnesota's Department of Applied Economics and Minnesota Population Center, and is an Associate Editor (AE) in the Organizations department of Management Science.

His research is in personnel economics: the economic analysis of human resources. His studies primarily involve working with companies to analyze their hiring, promotions, and incentives using interviews, applied theory, and econometric methods. He received his Bachelor's degree from Cornell's ILR School and PhD from the Institute for Work and Employment Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Friday, April 15, 2022

12:00pm - 1:20pm | S133 South Kedzie Hall and via Zoom

David (DK) Kryscynski
Visiting Associate Professor of Strategy
Stephen M. Ross School of Business
University of Michigan

Associate Professor of Management
The Marriott School of Business
Brigham Young University

David Kryscynski (DK) is visiting associate professor of strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and associate professor of management at the Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. His research broadly focuses on strategic human capital issues with more focused interests on non-monetary worker incentives and value creation and capture when workers are involved. His work has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Journal of Management, and other top management journals.

Presentation

Documenting workforce rents: Empirically exploring the veracity of the new stakeholder perspective in strategy

It is likely not surprising to the broad body of management scholars that employees sometimes receive more total compensation than would be required to keep them working for and contributing to their companies. Many of us have some idea of what total compensation we require to stay and contribute at our current employer, and most of us are receiving more than what is technically required (otherwise we would be actively moving to another job). In this paper we will refer to these payments to the workforce above what is technically required as "workforce rents." While most of us intuitively expect that firms pay workforce rents, we may not have clear expectations about how the size of workforce rents relative to other important metrics (like accounting profits) nor the variance in workforce rents across firms. Workforce rents are a particularly important theoretical construct in strategy because they represent portions of the firm's created economic value that flow to stakeholders other than shareholders. The purpose of our paper is to document the existence of, and variance in, workforce rents in a population of firms, and explore the theoretical implications of our findings.
2020-2021 Speaker Series

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).

Friday, February 26, 2021

12:00pm-1:00pm | via Zoom

Stacy Hickox
Associate Professor
School of Human Resources and Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Stacy practiced law in the area of disability law at Michigan Protection and Advocacy Service prior to coming to SHRLR. Ms. Hickox also taught for several years at MSU's law school, including courses in employment law, civil rights, and disability law. Stacy has written a book on the Americans with Disabilities Act and several law review articles on various aspects of employment law. Her current research focuses on the employment of ex-offenders, including potential claims for adverse impact and negligent hiring liability.

Chenwei Liao
Associate Professor
School of Human Resources and Labor Relations
Michigan State University

Chenwei's research is focused on the phenomena happening in the context of leaders and followers within organizations (e.g., servant leadership, leader-member exchange, idiosyncratic deals). Supported by awards from National Science Foundation, SHRM Foundation (Society for Human Resources Management), International Association of Chinese Management Research, and the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, Chenwei’s research has appeared in high-quality journals, such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Human Resource Management Review. He is currently on the Editorial Review Board of Journal of Management. At Michigan State, Chenwei teaches leadership at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He serves on SHRLR’s Doctoral Program Committee and Undergraduate Curriculum Committee as well as the College Curriculum Committee.

Presentation

Remote Work as an Accommodation for Employees with Disabilities

Remote work allows employees to work despite geographic and family limitations, and has proved essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. For employees with disabilities, remote work can mean the difference between working and being unemployed, since they may need to work from home because of their limitations. A review of 125 court claims seeking remote work as an accommodation shows that employers have resisted providing remote work arrange arrangements to employees with disabilities for four main reasons, often preventing remote work even where physical presence is not essential for performance of the job duties. This paper proposes a new approach to remote work as an accommodation based on Stone & Colella’s model, while explicating four factors that may influence its success, including the attributes of employees with disabilities, co-workers and supervisors, as well as organizational characteristics. If the feasibility of remote work as an accommodation were analyzed in light of these four factors, utilizing the wealth of research on what makes remote work successful, employees with disabilities would have more equitable access to work that can be performed at home.

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

Are Women Less Effective Leaders Than Men? Evidence from Experiments Using Coordination Games

We study whether one reason behind female underrepresentation in leadership is that female leaders are less effective at coordinating action by followers. Two experiments using coordination games investigate whether female leaders are less successful than males in persuading followers to coordinate on efficient equilibria. Group performance hinges on higher order beliefs about the leader’s capacity to convince followers to pursue desired actions, making beliefs that women are less effective leaders potentially self-confirming. We find no evidence that such bias impacts actual leadership performance, identifying a precisely-estimated null effect. We show that this absence of an effect is surprising given experts’ priors.

Friday, April 16, 2021

12:00pm-1:00pm | via Zoom

Samantha C. Paustian-Underdahl
Assistant Professor
College of Business
Florida State University

Dr. Samantha Paustian-Underdahl is a professor, researcher, and consultant whose work is dedicated to enhancing employee and organizational well-being and effectiveness. Her research focuses on gender and diversity in organizations, the work-family interface, and leadership, in the context of work and organizations.

Her research is published in premier academic journals including the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), the Journal of Management (JOM), the Journal of Organizational Behavior (JOB), and the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (JOOP), among others, and has been presented at international and national conferences. Additionally, Dr. Paustian-Underdahl served as the assistant editor for the Journal of Business and Psychology (JBP) in 2011, and currently serves on the editorial board for JOM, JBP, and JOB, and is an ad-hoc reviewer for JAP, JOOP, Academy of Management Journal, and Human Resources Management.

She holds a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Georgia, as well as an M.A. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and a PhD in Organizational Science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She joined Florida State University as an Assistant Professor of Management in 2018. In 2020, she was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Scholar’s award to conduct research in Dublin, Ireland, and she won the FSU College of Business’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award which has one recipient per year across six departments in the college. Previously, she was employed at Florida International University (FIU) as an Assistant Professor of Management, where she was named a Top Scholar in 2015 and was awarded Best Professor and Best Course teaching awards by FIU MBA students in 2017 and 2018.

Presentation

When and Why does a new Telecommuting Policy Affect Employee Attitudes? Perceived Value is Key

The most well-known form of flexible work, which is called telecommuting or working remotely, has become widespread practice. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of workers in the United States who spent at least 50% of their work either at home or some location other than their office grew by 115% (FlexJobs, 2017). Given the increased prevalence of telecommuting, organizations must believe that they are helpful for improving employee attitudes and experiences. Yet, previous studies have found mixed effects of FWA policy availability and policy usage on employee attitudes. Additionally, these studies do not examine the factors that may explain why employees may or may not use a FWA policy when it is available. The current study uses data collected before and after a new telecommuting policy became available to employees, enabling us to better understand the factors driving telecommuting usage and changes in employee attitudes as a result of the policy. We integrate Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001) with the human resource practices literature to propose that there are two paths for how the availability of a new telecommuting policy may improve employee attitudes of job satisfaction and turnover intentions: 1) a symbolic path by which the perceived value of a telecommuting policy—regardless of the usage of telecommuting—improves job attitudes for employees via increased engagement, and 2) an instrumental path by which usage of telecommuting improves job attitudes through improvements in exhaustion. We use latent change scores and path analysis to examine our model.
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 University

Professor 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 University

Areas 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 University

Professor 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 Island

Sean 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 Technology

Dr. 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 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.

Postponed due to COVID-19

HRLR News & Events