These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.
SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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Determinants of Managerial Intensity in the Early Years of Organizations
This paper examines how founding conditions shape subsequent organizational evolution— specifically, the proliferation of management and administrative jobs. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative information on a sample of young technology start…
Effects of Epistemic Motivation on Conservatism, Intolerance, and Other System Justifying Attitudes
In this chapter, we investigate the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of attitudes toward social and organizational systems. Specifically, we draw on the theory of lay epistemics to address individual and situational variations in the…
How Cultures Move Through Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition
While increasingly influential, cross-cultural psychology has been critiqued for an overly static, overly integrated conception of culture and for methodological weaknesses, such as reliance on under-controlled quasi-experiments. Responding to…
Intrinsic Motivation and Optimal Incentive Contacts
This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation on optimal incentive contacts. Agents engage in effort to generate projects with both financial return and intrinsic value to the agent. In a neutral environment, where intrinsic motivation has…
Learning Through Networks: Effects of Partner Experience on Acquisition Premia
There is a strong emphasis in sociological theory on imitation as a basis of firm action. Firms do what others are doing, and the explanations for this effect tend to center on normative pressures, cultural models, and legitimation of activities…
Learning from a Brush with Danger: Evidence that Pilot Learning from Dangerous Incidents is Enabled by Counterfactual Thinking and Hindered by Organizational Accountability
We investigate learning from experience and how it is hindered by threatening accountability. We hypothesize that aviation pilots learn from a “close call” when they respond with self-focused upward counterfactual comparisons - thorughts about…
Perceived Consensus as a Foundation of Racial Stereotyping
In four experiments, it was demonstrated that the expression of racial stereotyping and prejudice is highly affected by perceptions about the extent to which stereotypic beliefs are consensually shared by members of relevant reference groups.…
Social Capital at Work: Networks and Hiring at a Phone Center
We argue that a common organizational practice—the hiring new workers via employee referrals—provides key insights into the notion of social capital. Employers who use such hiring methods are quintessential “social capitalists,” viewing workers’…
When Social and Knowledge Ties Are Incongruent: Effects on Group Information Sharing
This study investigates how congruence between social and knowledge ties affect group information sharing, specifically, the bias against sharing unique information (Stasser & Titus, 1985). Three-person groups composed of two familiar…
When is Criticism Not Constructive? The Roles of Fairness Perceptions and Attributions in Employee Rejection of Critical Supervisory Feedback
The effects of justice and dispositional attribution on reactions to negative supervisory feedback were examined in two studies. Study 1 showed that criticism delivered with greater interpersonal fairness resulted in more favorable dispositional…
Group Justification and System Justification as Distinct Components of Social Dominance Orientation among African Americans and European Americans
Social dominance orientation (SDO) has been found to predict racism, sexism, political conservatism, and a variety of other “hierarchy enhancing” attitudes and behaviors (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallwork, and Malle, 1994). On the basis of system…
Is It Better to Have Status or to Know What You Are Doing? An Examination of Position Capability in Venture Capital Markets
Previous research on status in markets has posited that status orderings are stable, self-reproducing entities. Higher status facilitates an actor’s ability to acquire resources that will in turn allow the actor s actually know what the correct…
Misperceiving Negotiation Counterparts: When Situationally Determined Bargaining Behaviors are Attributed to Personality Traits
Several experiments provided evidence that negotiators make systematic errors in personality trait attributions for bargaining behaviors of their counterparts. Although basic negotiation behavior is highly determined by bargaining positions,…
Self Organization and Social Organization: American and Chinese Constructions
From the writings of William James (1890) onwards, the construct of the social self has been widely employed in North American and European social psychology (see Markus & Cross, 1990 for a review). Many of the most influential theoretical…
The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Legitimacy Discount
This paper explores the social processes that underlie conformity with legitimate systems of classification. I address two weaknesses in research on such isomorphism: a failure to demonstrate that deviation from accepted practice generates…
Women and Power: Conformity, Resistance, and Disorganized Co-Action
In this paper we explore an additional reason for the exodus and the persistence of gender inequality in organizations. This paper’s focus on high ranking executive women allow us to separate the effects of formal power and gender. These women…
Getting A Job: Networks and Hiring in a Retail Bank
A significant strand of research on the job-person matching process has focused on the role of social networks in the hiring process. Past empirical studies of the comparative effectiveness of recruiting sources for getting jobs have started with…
Keeping a Job: Networking Hiring and Turnover in a Retail Bank
Abstract not available.
Organizational Justice in the Global Economy: How Justice Perceptions are Influenced by Culture and Ethnicity
Abstract not available.
Person Perception in the Heat of Conflict: Attributions About the Opponent and Conflict Resoution Preferences in Two Cultures
Procedural justice researchers have modeled decisions among conflict resolution procedures in terms of a disputant’s perceptions—the perception that a procedure is favorable and also that it is fair, that it offers control, and that it reduces…