External seminars

Middle age is the golden age for employees, with assumptions of greater expertise and stability resulting in being “leadership material”.  Middle age also brings new experiences for those with female reproductive organs – namely, menopause – about which organizational scholarship is largely silent. Prior research shows that women are embarrassed to share their menopausal status at work, but vasomotor symptoms (“hot flashes”) -- sweating and flushing – are a common and observable experience that may “out” her menopausal identity. I will draw on the social cognitive view of stigma to propose that menopausal stigma constrains leadership opportunities for women and what can be done about it.  Describing findings from survey and experimental vignette studies, I will answer the following questions: 

1) Why is menopause relevant to organizational contexts?

2) What stereotypes are evoked by menopause and are they incongruent with leadership?

3) How should women manage menopausal status with work colleagues?  

In short, I aim to share why it is both prevalent and relevant to study menopause in organizational science, and what we can do to reduce the potential for biased decisions about leader potential.

Performance-based pay (PBP) can increase worker productivity, but its effectiveness to do so varies because it may increase both performance-enhancing effort and psychological motivators of performance, such as extrinsic motivation, as well as performance-reducing affective experiences, such as anxiety and fatigue. Its effectiveness may also differ between workers based on their preference for different pay schemes, and by quality and quantity indicators of performance. We use a laboratory experiment to study the effect of PBP on quality and quantity performance through between-individual selection and within-individual changes in productivity. To understand how PBP succeeds or fails to increase within-individual performance, we investigate underlying factors in the decision-making process that allow PBP to change within-individual productivity. We find that PBP may attract more productive workers but does not increase within-individual performance, because PBP activates both performance-increasing factors, including effort and extrinsic motivation, and performance-decreasing factors, particularly anxiety.

Which social decisions are influenced by intuitive processes? Which by deliberative processes? The dual-process approach to human sociality has emerged in the last decades as a vibrant and exciting area of research. Yet, a perspective that integrates empirical and theoretical work is lacking. In this talk, I will present a review and meta-analysis of the existing literature on the cognitive basis of cooperation, altruism, truth-telling, positive and negative reciprocity, and deontology, and present a framework that organizes the experimental regularities. The meta-analytic results suggest that intuition favours a set of heuristics that are related to the instinct for self-preservation: people avoid being harmed, avoid harming others (especially when there is a risk of harm to themselves), and are averse to disadvantageous inequalities.

A threshold of desperation exists if there is a range in the utility function which is non-concave, with concave regions on either side. For example, I might have a much better life if I can maintain a camel than not. If I can maintain 95% of a camel, it is no better than if I could maintain 50% or 5% of one. On the other hand, maintaining 150% of a camel has little advantage compared to maintaining 105%. If people have thresholds of deprivation, they may oscillate between risk aversion and risk proneness as their material situation changes. Thresholds of desperation have the potential to explain some puzzling phenomena, such as the combination of risk aversion and risk proneness that seems to be associated with poverty, and some of the apparent effects of income and wealth inequality on societal outcomes. I will present a combination of theory, observational and experimental evidence on desperation thresholds and their consequences.

Habits play an important role in people’s daily life. Although research provided important insights about everyday habits (e.g., concerning health behavior), little is known about the habits people show at work. In this presentation, I will focus on our ongoing research on work-related habits. In this research, we study how people can address work-related habits that they see as undesirable (e.g., checking smartphone messages while working on a task) and how they can replace such undesirable habits with an alternative behavior they would prefer. I will present findings from a correlational daily-survey study that showed that daily implementation intentions (i.e., if-then plans about how to behave in a habit-prone situation) and vigilant monitoring (i.e., observing one’s habitual action tendencies) are associated with a low frequency of undesired habitual behavior and an increased frequency of a preferred alternative behavior. In addition, I will report findings from two experiments that aimed at testing causal mechanisms. My presentation includes a short discussion of implications for future research and practice recommendations.