Inclusion & Belonging

The book gives evidence and advice for leveraging values as a concrete way to improve outcomes in leadership and life.  The first part of the book is about leveraging values as an individual, the second half is about organizational values.  The audience is thoughtful students of business, leaders, and scholars.

Comment sections on social media extend social influence beyond offline networks, allowing  a small, vocal minority of users to reach much larger audiences. We provide causal evidence that  the views expressed in comments below social media posts shape both on-platform engagement  and off-platform attitudes and behavior, and that these effects move in opposite directions. In  collaboration with a leading racial justice organization, we conduct a large-scale field experi ment on Facebook reaching a million U.S.

This chapter examines the spillover effects of the 2023 SCOTUS decision limiting race-conscious university admissions (SFFA v. Harvard/UNC) on broader employer hiring practices. Drawing on survey data from 505 human resources experts that was collected approximately one year post-ruling in summer of 2024, we find marked confusion regarding the ruling's applicability to workplaces. Specifically many employers—particularly those uncertain or mistaken about its scope—made precautionary changes to hiring processes, including sourcing, screening, and selection activities.

Cooperativeness is essential to individual and organizational success. We exploit a unique feature of conference calls to study individual executives’ cooperativeness, indicated by their directly inviting colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions, and its relation with their career outcomes and firm performance. After validating our measure, we find that cooperativeness is associated with relevant executive characteristics. Older, more senior, and more experienced executives are more likely to display cooperativeness.

Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a significant gender pay gap, which is largely attributed to women working at lower-paying employers. To interpret this fact, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, amenities, and hiring. We provide a constructive proof of identification of all model parameters. The estimated model suggests that amenities are important for both men and women, and that compensating differentials account for half of the gender pay gap.

We document gender and race dynamics in performance evaluations in a multi-national company, examining the impacts of a feature of the performance appraisal process: managers’ knowledge of employees’ self-evaluations. Generally, (White) women were rated higher than men and people of color were rated lower than White employees. Women of color gave themselves the lowest self-ratings. When self-evaluations were unavailable due to a quasi-exogenous shock, manager and self-ratings were less correlated.

One common explanation for the gender wage gap is that women have less favorable negotiation outcomes than men in labor markets. Yet, women might also start out with lower offers upon which negotiations occur. A challenge in examining the latter explanation has been that salaries, not salary offers, have been previously available to researchers. In this study, we overcome this empirical challenge by obtaining data on more than 700,000 initial salary offers provided to job candidates in the United States from 2017 to 2020.

Immigrants are highly entrepreneurial. But, what is the broader relationship between high-skilled immigration and regional entrepreneurship activity beyond the ventures that immigrants establish themselves? Using administrative data on newly awarded H-1B visas in the United States, we document a positive relationship between highskilled immigration and regional entrepreneurship. A doubling of immigrants to a metropolitan statistical area is followed by a 6% increase in entrepreneurship within three years.

Although organizations increasingly seek to communicate allyship with the Black community, their ally statements can receive vastly different responses from Black observers. We develop and test a theoretical model outlining key drivers of allyship evaluations among these perceivers. Drawing from signaling theory and integrating insights from the literature on identity safety, we reveal the costliness and consistency of ally statements as critical determinants of Black perceivers’ evaluations of organizations as allies.