04.09.08
Posted in Business, Jacob Canon, Relationships, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, sociology at 12:04 pm by Jacob Canon
In last week’s show we examined the research of University of Virginia politics professor Paul Freedman that suggests that the ever-growing barrage of political ads actually contributes to citizen education and engagement, and only rarely have negative impacts.
In today’s show, adapted from an article recently published on the Oscar Web site written by Melissa Maki, research communications coordinator for the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, we look at the research of Rob Cross, associate professor in the McIntire School of Commerce, and his work helping businesses discover potential bottlenecks or disconnects in their network — providing information that is critical for businesses to improve.
One of the secrets to running a business, and getting the highest productivity is understanding how a company is structured to maximize efficiency. In the past, companies have used formal organizational charts that delineate chains of command, oversight and work flow.
But Rob Cross, associate professor in the McIntire School of Commerce, doesn’t put much stock in these formal organizational charts. His research has proven them largely irrelevant in understanding how businesses actually operate on a day-to-day basis.
Cross, an expert in social network analysis, works with companies to determine the intricate, but largely invisible connections that people form in order to get their work done.
In order to illustrate and understand these relationships, Cross interviews and surveys employees about topics such as whom they rely on for information and who helps them to accomplish tasks. “It’s like taking an X-ray to see who’s important in an organization,” he says. “A lot of the times, it’s not who leaders think it is.”
Rather than a hierarchy, the results of Cross’ mapping more closely resemble a web, graphically demonstrating countless interconnections. The diagrams Cross constructs help him to understand who is central to getting things done as well as to visualize bottlenecks or disconnects in the network — providing information that is critical for businesses to improve.
For instance, at the edges of these maps, Cross often finds people with important expertise who are underutilized by their organization. Finding ways to connect these outliers and their resources back to the organization can dramatically improve business performance.
In his analysis, Cross also looks closely at the notion of enthusiasm or what he terms “energy” and its role in an organization. He has found that people who have the ability to create enthusiasm around them establish more connections and ultimately perform better than others. Cross can pinpoint areas of a company with high and low levels of energy and give managers suggestions for fostering energy, and thus new ideas.
Cross said, “Energy is hugely predictive of where innovation starts to occur deep within an organization.”
In 2004, Cross published The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations. This book incorporated his research into a practical tool for executives.
He plans to release another book in 2009 that will feature more business ideas and diagnostics. It will be geared towards not only executives but also business students. Partnering with the Batten Institute, at the Darden School of Business, Cross is developing stories about company experiences, using social network analysis, into multimedia case examples that will accompany the book.
Cross founded and directs the “Network Roundtable”, a consortium of 80 member organizations who work with McIntire faculty to apply network techniques to critical business issues. The Roundtable tests new business ideas and measures their impact. Findings are available to members, as is faculty expertise.
Cross said, “The intent of the Roundtable is to be a conversation between McIntire and the broader commercial world. The real focus for me is how we, as a business school, can show impact.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of John C. Herr, director of U.Va.’s Center for Research in Contraceptive and Reproductive Health, and his development of the FDA approved “SpermCheck Vasectomy”, a home test that confirms men’s post-vasectomy sterility.
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03.05.08
Posted in Business, Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, ethics, happiness at 12:04 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Anne Bromley, a senior editor/writer for UVa Media Relations, we look at a recent study by University of Virginia Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman which said, no matter how the data was sliced or certain variables controlled: women say they have to work harder than men.
The statement, “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” may not be totally off the mark in the workplace states a recent study by University of Virginia Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman and Julie Kmec of Washington State University.
The study analyzed five surveys of men and women in Britain and the US, given in 1977, 1992, two in 1997, and 2001. They concentrated their analysis on the two surveys conducted in 1997, both comprising cross-sectional interviews of about 3,500 workers in the US and almost 2,500 in the UK. To yield comparable answers, they evaluated results from the following survey question: “My job requires that I work very hard.” And, according to the results, a gender gap persisted in ratings of the statement. Women were significantly more likely to say they strongly agreed or agreed, than men.
Gorman noted, “The statement in the survey about required work effort is not one in which employees are comparing themselves to the opposite sex, it’s also not asking for a perception of how hard the work is or how much effort they actually exerted. Our focus is on required work effort, the effort that an employee is expected to exert in order to perform her or his job at a level that is satisfactory to the employer. It is important to distinguish required effort from an employee’s actual exerted effort.”
The researchers analyzed the survey data to see if, in fact, women did have more difficult jobs, but that was not the case. Even when the jobs were almost identical, women still were significantly more likely to say they had to work very hard. And, while controlling for physical and mental demands of a particular job, Gorman and Kmec found that neither group of factors explained the different findings about work effort.
Looking for other potential reasons, the sociologists considered domestic responsibilities outside of work. They stated, “Marriage and parenthood had the same effect on reports of required effort for women and men. In the U.S. sample, the researchers matched the number of hours spent on childcare and housework. Between men and women who performed the same amount of time on these tasks, women were still more likely to say their jobs required them to work very hard.”
So what explains the difference between genders and perceived required effort in the work place?
In their paper, “We (Have to) Try Harder: Gender and Required Work Effort in Britain and the United States,” released in the December issue of the journal “Gender and Society” the researchers said, “We argue that the association between sex and reported required work effort is best interpreted as reflecting stricter performance standards imposed on women, even when women and men hold the same jobs.”
Gorman said, “A lot of experimental research has shown that people rate the same performance as better when told it was done by a man. People give lower marks to an essay, a painting or a résumé when it has a woman’s name on it. And when a man and a woman work together on a project, people assume the man contributed more than the woman did. Even when a woman’s work is indisputably excellent, people don’t believe she’s good — they think she got lucky.” It follows then, that women have to do better than a man in order to get the same evaluation.
Gorman then added, “This is what women are up against. They have to work harder… And in light of this previous research, it makes sense to conclude that women have to work harder to win their bosses’ approval.”
Some possible consequences of this “effort gap” in the workplace include: the quality of women’s work experience is likely to be lower than men’s; this difference in required effort could also have consequences for women’s careers, making it harder for them to be recognized and promoted. Also, the physical and emotional effects could, in turn, have negative repercussions for families.
Gorman went on to say, “It wouldn’t be fair to use this research to reinforce stereotypes.”
Kmec added, “Instead, employers should take into account women’s hard work when considering who to promote and reward. We do not want to insist that female workers shirk their job responsibilities to make this gap go away. Rather, we hope employers make job performance standards more transparent and be held accountable for their evaluations of women at work.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will look at the work of Maurie McInnis and her perspective of class politics, social structures and hierarchies of antebellum South through the examination 19th century art and material objects.
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02.13.08
Posted in Business, Fraud, Jacob Canon, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, ethics, philosophy at 3:21 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Melissa Maki, we look at business ethics and strategy through the eyes of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and his search for the answers to these questions:
“What motivates a company to cook the books? AND What happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?”
Financial Fraud [6:11m]:
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Arthur Anderson… Enron…The Mortgage Loan Crisis, these names and events are synonymous with corporate malfeasance. They symbolize a loss of business ethics that occurred when financial profits were prioritized above all else, even to the long-term detriment of the firm. So, what motivates a company to cook the books? And what happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?
Such business ethics and strategy questions drive the research of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Harris joined Darden’s faculty in 2006 and has taught ethics and strategy courses for the MBA program as well as a doctoral seminar on corporate governance and ethics. His teaching responsibilities in business ethics and strategy align with his research interests. Harris said, “at the Darden School, cross-disciplinary work is valued… we take ethics seriously, not only within the classroom but also in our research, it’s a great fit for me.”
Harris recently won accolades for his dissertation research at the 2007 annual meetings of the Academy of Management — one of the foremost professional associations dedicated to the study of management and organizations. His work titled, “Financial Misrepresentation: Antecedents and Performance Effects” won the Best Dissertation Award from the academy’s Social Issues in Management Division and was also one of six finalists in the academy’s Business Policy and Strategy Division, an unusual cross-disciplinary accomplishment.
Harris’ thesis builds his academic theory through two related empirical studies. He examined nine years of data from a large sample of publicly traded corporations that were identified by the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, as having misrepresented their financial information.The first study, featured as the lead article in the May-June 2007 issue of Organization Science, focuses on predictors of a company’s propensity toward financial fraud.
In his study, Harris found two factors — relative performance and CEO incentive pay — were highly influential. That is, companies performing below average for their industry are more likely to compensate by misrepresenting their financial data. And surprisingly, the higher a CEO’s stock options as a percentage of total pay, the more likely a company is to cheat — running counter to the notion that incentive pay aligns the individual aspirations of management with the collective ambitions of a company. Harris controlled for other possible predictors, such as increasing board independence by having outsiders on the board and separating the CEO and chair roles in a firm, but he notes that they had “no effect whatsoever on preventing the cheating.”
In the second study, Harris looked at what happens to these companies once ethical violations are announced to the public. Predictably, they see an immediate downturn in their stock prices, but he also found that a firm’s operating performance was severely impaired. This negative impact on profitability was more persistent than market-based effects; even a year or two later, companies were still feeling the effects of their transgressions. On average, the companies’ operational profits dropped by nearly 50 percent. Harris said, “Firms do worse by doing bad. If they cheat, they take a big hit in overall performance.”
But, as with much of life…public perception matters more than reality. Despite his earlier finding that an autonomous board does not deter companies from committing financial fraud, Harris noted that corporations are able to recover from some of this negative fallout if they took swift steps to increase the number of outsiders on their board and replace their CEO. Harris went on to say, “the research shows that stakeholders value these things. Firms get rewarded for making such changes because we all think it is part of good governance — yet in the case of something like board independence, this is ironic, given that the data shows it has no actual preventative effect.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Dr. William Petri who directs a U.Va.-led research team doing research on a parasite said to kill nearly 100,000 people each year.
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