A new research paper provides a framework for companies to respond to pressures on issues from global warming and sustainability to child labor and discrimination.
We consider an online retailer facing heterogeneous customers with initially unknown product preferences. Customers are characterized by a diverse set of demographic and transactional attributes. The retailer can personalize the customers' assortment offerings based on available profile information to maximize cumulative revenue. To that end, the retailer must estimate customer preferences by observing transaction data.
Why do managers act unfairly even when they recognize the significant organizational benefits of treating employees fairly? Prior research has explained this puzzling phenomenon predominantly through an “actor-centric” perspective, proposing that managers’ just behavior is an outcome of their own individual differences.
Employee cynicism is on the rise, and thus is increasingly part of the social fabric in modern workplaces. In this paper, we investigate whether interactions with cynical others may produce undesirable effects on employee energy.
We hypothesized that individuals in cultures typified by lower levels of relational mobility would tend to show more attention to the surrounding social and physical context (i.e., holistic vs. analytic thinking) compared with individuals in higher mobility cultural contexts. Six studies provided support for this idea. Studies 1a and 1b showed that differences in relational mobility in cultures as diverse as the U.S., Spain, Israel, Nigeria, and Morocco predicted patterns of dispositional bias as well as holistic (vs. analytic) attention.
Networks of serial entrepreneurs, investors, and their affiliated companies play a critical role in driving entrepreneurial behavior, investor focus, and innovation hot spots within specific industry sectors and are critical for shaping the character of robust regional economies.
Customer care employees (CCEs) are an excellent source of ideas for new and enhanced services for customers. By serving many customers, CCEs have the ability to see patterns in unserved and underserved needs. By being inside rather than external to the firm, CCEs have the ability to offer suggestions that build on existing capabilities, which result in ideas that are more easily implementable. There is a long history of research and practice for soliciting suggestions from employees, but little of this work has described how CCEs can be organized into a temporary online crowd to cocreate innovative ideas.
The Kenan Scholars program congratulates two graduating students for their receipt of the Kenan Institute’s two highest honors. Kenan Scholar Chris Dean Karras received the John Kasarda Research Excellence Award and Sarah Muneton, Kenan Scholars program assistant, was awarded the Kenan Institute Impact Award.
Greater focus on social justice has brought systemic inequities in the corporate sector to light, leading companies to step up their efforts in attracting and retaining a diverse workforce – but many challenges remain in implementing those goals. Following a joint report between the Kenan Institute and EY, this week’s Kenan Insight breaks down some challenges companies may face while trying to reach their diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
The health and economic data from this past week brought both good and bad news about the state of affairs in North Carolina. Health data suggest the growth in new cases is slowing, that hospital capacity remains available and that we might be getting a better handle on identification. While this is certainly encouraging in the battle against the pandemic, a similar levelling off in business activity does not bode as well for the economy. In this week’s commentary we seek to unpack some of the details in the data to understand what may be a new plateau.
Increased consumer demand for healthier product options and looming regulation have prompted many consumer goods brands to adjust the amount of sugar content in their product lines, including adding products with reduced sugar content or smaller package sizes. Even as brands adopt such practices, little guidance exists for how they should do so to protect or enhance their brand performance. This paper studies whether and when sugar reduction strategies affect sales.
Adopting a justice enactment perspective, we explore managers' consistent versus inconsistent application of existing rules in allocation decisions. We propose that when managers form friendship relationships with their employees, they are likely to experience greater tensions when fulfilling their managerial duties as resource allocators. On the one hand, managers may wish to deviate from the rules to benefit an employee who is also a friend. On the other hand, benefiting one employee (but not others) might lead to tensions in managers' friendships with other employees.
There is growing recognition that justice enactment is a complex activity and that managers face significant contextual and situational roadblocks when attempting to enact justice. However, research has not fully examined how managers, in the course of their jobs, can (a) identify and respond to justice-related issues and (b) assemble and synthesize relevant information required to act in a manner consistent with justice rules.
In this article, we investigate the effects of leader subjective ambivalence on team performance. Integrating the ambivalence literature and social learning theory, we propose a multi-level model of whether, when, and why team leaders’ subjective ambivalence enhances team performance outcomes.
This paper experimentally tests the Fox-Tversky (1995) source preference hypothesis as axiomatized in Chew and Sagi (2008) where people may have preference between equally distributed risks depending on the underlying sources of uncertainty.
Can investing in polluting industries be a tool for fostering sustainability? Yes, according to research by Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow Jacquelyn Pless, and it may be more effective than divesting.
Distinguished Fellow Christine Moorman leverages data from The CMO Survey to uncover the view of marketplace threats and resilience strategies from the perspective of actual managers as part of our 2024 Grand Challenge.
Some are worrying about the future of commercial real estate because of recent falls in valuations. Our expert discusses the challenges facing CRE and how to disentangle the trends that are shaking up the sector.
UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Kurt Gray discusses how research can help us understand – and navigate – our rapidly changing professional and social lives.