Economic Sociology Conference
The Economic Sociology Conference is the premier annual gathering for business school faculty studying financial transactions, market structures, and career trajectories.
Now in its thirteenth year, the conference rotates among leading institutions; recent hosts include Yale, Emory, Duke, Rice, and the University of Michigan. Each year, it brings together 60 to 80 scholars for two days of presentations and discussion and is widely regarded as the venue where long-term scholarly collaborations in the field are formed. A substantial share of the work presented examines questions central to leadership scholarship: how careers advance to senior positions, how networks and social capital shape influence and authority, how founders build and lead organizations, and how status and decision-making operate within firms. This focus aligns directly with the Leadership Center’s mission. Hosting this year strengthens Wharton’s visibility in this community and creates opportunities for leadership-focused faculty to engage with new research relevant to the Center’s priorities.
The conference is co-organized by Mae McDonnell and Tiantian Yang, with input from faculty across the Entrepreneurship (Tyler Wry, Lori Rosenkopf), Multinational (Mauro Guillén, Leo Pongeluppe), Strategy (Ronnie Lee), Human and Social Capital (Matthew Bidwell, Peter Cappelli, Lindsey Cameron), and Organizational Behavior (Damon Phillips) sectors.
Who’s Afraid of Remote Work? Narcissistic Leaders Crave a Return to the Office.
Leaders have displayed diverging reactions to remote work, with some supporting it and others resisting it. Surprisingly little research has examined the personality roots of leader opposition to virtual work. Integrating the extended agency model of narcissism with media richness theory, we hypothesize that narcissistic leaders resist remote work because it threatens their motivations for power and status. In Study 1, an archival analysis of 259 Fortune 500 CEOs, unobtrusive measures of narcissism via photo size, signature size, and relative compensation predicted greater resistance to remote work in public statements early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
This relationship was partially explained by exploratory proxies for narcissistic leaders’ power and status motivations, contingent on their industry not depending on frontline workers. Study 2, a preregistered three-wave survey with 359 leaders, constructively replicated and extended these results. Leader narcissism predicted resistance to remote work, mediated by power and status motivations—even after controlling for trust, the Big Five, and the remaining Dark Triad traits. In Study 3, a preregistered experiment with 546 leaders, manipulating state narcissism evoked resistance to remote work via power but not status motivation. Our findings extend knowledge about remote work and narcissistic leadership.
Research by Marissa Shandell, Doctoral Candidate in Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
Junior Organization Theory Conference
The Junior Faculty Organization Theory Conference has been around for about 15 years, and is for–and is organized by–junior faculty in the Organizational Theory (OT) field (broadly construed). This is “the premier annual conference” for up-and-coming OT scholars, and has long been considered the place where long-term relationships are formed. Many of the faculty’s research centers on practices relating to people, management, and leadership.
The location of the conference is rotating. The most recent hosts were Harvard, London Business School, University of Michigan, McGill, Columbia, and Yale. The conference brings roughly 40 to 50 junior OT scholars together to present and share ideas as well as develop relationships. The Wharton School is honored to be hosting this year and excited to help build the junior OT community.
The conference is being organized by Lindsey Cameron and Tiantian Yang with input from junior faculty in the Entrepreneurship (Danny Kim, Jax Kirtley), Multinational (Leo Pongeluppe), Strategy (Ronnie Lee), and Organizational Behavior Sectors (Stephanie Creary).
Saved by the No: Gatekeeping and the Benefits of Third-Party Help Rejection for Requesters
Employees are not always willing or able to provide help at work; however, refusing to help can be interpersonally costly. Helpers often worry that saying no will make them appear selfish or uncaring, while requesters can feel embarrassed and reluctant to interact with the helper again after being rejected. I build on network theory of third-party ties and research on gatekeeping to investigate the role of third parties in preventing help exchanges, a phenomenon I refer to as help gatekeeping, and which has thus far been overlooked in the helping literature. Compared to direct rejection by helpers, I hypothesize that help gatekeeping increases perceived helper benevolence and decreases requester embarrassment, and that through both mechanisms, results in greater exchange satisfaction and willingness to seek assistance from the helper in the future. I am conducting a series of studies to examine these hypotheses in both the lab and the field. This research contributes to emerging work on triadic help exchanges and offers practical implications for how organizations can better manage help requests and refusals.
Research by Grace Simon, Doctoral Candidate in Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
Patchwork Embeddedness: How Workers Reconstitute Platforms in Informal Economies
The burgeoning of the platform economy has sparked a growing interest in the global phenomenon of platform work. Yet, few studies have examined how platform work changes in a global context, implicitly assuming that digital scalability of algorithmic code translates to geographic scalability. Drawing on a three-year qualitative study of platform workers (ride-hailing workers), in three informal economies in the Global South (Brazil, Ghana, and Nigeria), I describe how workers reconstitute platform systems through enlisting new actors to compensate for gaps in the physical and digital infrastructures. By employing highly localized coordination mechanisms — of delegation, kinship, and troubleshooting —workers foster system-wide reliability, enabling the geographic scalability of platforms. However, the introduction of new actors adds a new managerial layer, further eroding the autonomy and flexibility promised to gig workers. I conclude with implications for how to build a global high-road platform company.
Research by Lindsey Cameron, Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania