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PARADIGM WARS
Doing lab experiments is like smoking cigarettes. It’s a filthy habit. But, if this guy musters up the courage and we pressure him enough, he can be cured.
Sure. And finding that extra .1% of variance explained using an eigenvalue you borrowed from a downloaded dataset that some other blokes collected is really the voice of God whispering in your ear.
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As a junior professor, I scribbled down this pair of invectives from faculty colleagues while they argued the merits of a job candidate. Since then, I’ve heard similar tirades about favored methods at multiple conferences and universities — including our own. Those screeds epitomize a virtually never-ending battle between two camps of organizational scholars.
In business school parlance, the first of these camps is often referred to as the “behavioral” or “micro” paradigm. Investigators working in it evoke a psychological foundation for their theory, evidence, and data collection. Although behavioral scholars work in IS/IT, finance, and accounting (globally unrivaled at McCombs), they most likely find safe harbor in management (organizational behavior) and marketing (consumer behavior). Many such scientists use the laboratory experiment to strip away contextual nuisance and pinpoint explanatory mechanisms. It is the premier vehicle for establishing cause and effect.
The other camp is often referred to as the “archival” or “macro” or sometimes “theoretical” (read, math modeling and computer simulation) paradigm. Mother disciplines that these investigators draw from tend to be economics, sociology, and occasionally engineering. These scholars are spread throughout the business school as well, most often residing in finance, accounting, (managerial) marketing, (strategic) management, and sometimes operations or logistics. Their data almost always come from a field study, where “real” agents exist in and are affected by variables in natural contexts and time systems. Complex multivariate analyses complete the paradigm; it is the premier vehicle for estimating population parameters.
Disrespect, derision, disdain, denunciation, and dismissal (there are even more “d” words I can throw in there) often get flung between these two camps, each believing in their One True Way. The diatribes (told ya) get wearisome. They can even get destructive, particularly if decisions are being made about across-camp resource allocation. I thought it was clear that each paradigm has endemic, fundamental flaws for knowledge accrual, and that combining the two yields the most bulletproof insights, which is what Insiya Hussain shows in her terrific research below.
Indeed, this pan-paradigm approach was how Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory of behavioral decisions came to be. It is the best-supported set of general predictions in all of social science, and the most cited paper in the history of economics. It upended entire disciplines. It won the Nobel Prize.
Sigh.
The wars rage on.
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Dr. David A. Harrison
Associate Dean for Research
Charles & Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair of Business Administration
Distinguished University Chair
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WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA? SOCIAL IMPACT FRAMING LEADS EMPLOYEES TO NEGOTIATE FOR LESS
By Dr. Insiya Hussain, Management
Job postings today are peppered with companies advertising that their work is “mission-oriented” and “makes the world a better place.”
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Many employees willingly give up some pay to work for companies promoting social responsibility, because they find the work to be personally meaningful. This makes sense: People often happily trade off some features of jobs for others as a natural part of deciding between different work opportunities.
The big idea from me and my colleagues, however, is that when it comes to jobs touting a higher purpose, a different mechanism is also at play: the feeling it would be a norm violation to try negotiating higher pay — even when employees think they deserve it. Supporting this idea, we find in five multimethod studies that the strong use of social impact framing can make job candidates feel it’s taboo to ask for more compensation. Employees reported being concerned that their hiring manager would see it as selfish and inappropriate to ask for a better wage when the company appeared to be focused on the greater good. Crucially, this effect held across a variety of industries — from education to finance — and even when accounting for the organization’s perceived ability to pay.
This idea furthers work showing that managers often unfairly view employee motivation in strictly binary terms. Specifically, employees are seen as being either intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, but not both. We observe that employees are intuitively aware of this managerial bias and adjust their requests for pay accordingly in situations pitched to them as demanding greater intrinsic motivation.
The implications for employees’ livelihoods are nontrivial. Failure to negotiate even a negligible pay increase can cumulate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a lifetime’s lost income. Are companies themselves aware that their focus on social impact (whether sincere or not) could be suppressing employee wages? If that is not their aim, greater pay transparency can help to level the playing field and ensure that employees get a fair shake no matter how much their work is focused on helping others.
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| JUST-ACCEPTED JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS
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AWARDS
Amit Kumar (Marketing) was named a 2024 Top 50 Best Undergraduate Professor by Poets & Quants, receiving international recognition for impactful teaching and research by a business school faculty member. Congratulations, Amit.
Amit Kumar (Marketing) was named to the Journal of Consumer Research editorial review board. Congratulations, Amit.
Yifan Yu (IROM), starting in 2025, will be one of the two co-chairs of the INFORMS AI Cluster. The cluster is a prominent subdivision within the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), dedicated to advancing research, education, and practice in artificial intelligence. Congratulations, Yifan.
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A SPECIAL THANK-YOU!
Thank you to all the faculty members and Ph.D. students who participated in the research luncheon on Jan. 24. Special thanks to Kishore Gawande, Aaron Pancost, Brady Williams, and Ashish Agarwal.
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CBA Legacy Events Room 3.202
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Instructional Teaching Lunch (MOII)
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CBA Legacy Events Room 3.202
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This communication is from Texas McCombs — Official.
View this email online.
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