Leadership & Organizational Behavior

Top marketers today don't shy away from financial accountability. In fact, they actively hold themselves and their organizations to account for the return on marketing investments because they believe marketing makes a big difference in building the business. That commitment plays out in many ways, from  more effective campaigns to more satisfied customers; from more profitable promotions, to higher returns to shareholders.

We wrote this book to address the most pressing marketing performance questions for CMOs who have an investor's mindset.

Who behaves dominantly—and why? Much compelling prior research spotlights motivational sources. We focus here on beliefs, proposing that people are less likely to behave dominantly when they expect dominance to incur greater relationship costs. We posit that this situation-specific expectancy is shaped by a general competitive worldview, seeing the social world as a “competitive jungle.” In five preregistered studies, we tested whether those with a competitive worldview expected dominance to incur less relationship harm and whether expected relationship harm predicted dominance.

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.

In evaluative contexts, evaluatees typically seek to present themselves in a favorable light, while evaluators ask penetrating questions to assess these claims. Here we develop a framework to identify curveball questions: ones that are on-topic yet perplexing (i.e., difficult to predict) relative to past discourse. We develop a language-based measure of curveball questions and apply it to a corpus of quarterly earnings calls.

Organizations emphasize specific production practices to deal with authenticity pressures, but the practices that signal authenticity to audiences must be continually adapted when production environments are unstable. Changes in the environment can make production practices suddenly infeasible, compelling organizations to perform in different ways the highly visible practices that audiences have come to associate with authenticity.

We use topic modeling to construct novel news-based measures for tracking energy markets. Our parsimonious yet comprehensive set of indicators summarizes the information content of millions of news articles and forecasts oil spot, futures, and energy company stock returns, and changes in oil volatility, production, and inventories. Using an econometrically robust framework to evaluate both in- and out-of-sample predictive performance, we show that our measures are not spanned by existing text and nontext variables.

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.

Introduction: Research on MBA student performance typically relies on GPA as the primary indicator of success. However, business schools aim to develop future leaders for diverse career paths, which value multiple forms of performance. We examine whether performance is better understood as multidimensional, testing a longstanding distinction in MBA discourse between “poets” and “quants.” We also examine how different forms of admissions data (i.e.

Elected officials are increasingly extreme. Research trying to understand this trend has tended to focus on structural factors, such as primary elections and changes in the supply of candidates. Less emphasis has been placed on psychological perspectives. The current research advances such a perspective. Leveraging research on attitudes, we investigate when and why people prefer extreme over moderate candidates from their own party. We posit that the identity relevance of people's attitudes plays a key role.