Ohio State News

Taylor Swift owns her master recordings – now what?

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

On May 30, Taylor Swift made an announcement that surprised fans and music industry insiders alike:

“All of the music I’ve ever made… now belongs… to me,” she said in a statement on her website.

In 2019, Swift’s then-label Big Machine Records sold her entire catalog, six albums at the time. She maintained that she was not provided the opportunity to purchase them herself, under acceptable conditions. In an effort to regain control of her work, and dilute the value of her original albums, she re-recorded four of the six.

But now, she owns everything: the originals and the new versions.

Two Ohio State professors offer their thoughts on what this means for the record industry and for musical artists.

What is a master recording?

When an artist signs a contract with a record label, the label typically covers recording fees, marketing fees and other costs upfront. This provides the artist a better chance of having a successful album. The record label also owns these original, or master, recordings.

Jesse Walker, assistant professor of marketing and logistics at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, played bass for the group Flobots for nine years. While this initial monetary support can be helpful, he said, it can also present a challenge to a band.

“You basically pay back that advanced cash through your royalty percentage,” he said. “Essentially the record company is giving you a massive loan. Only once you pay it back do you start receiving your portion of the royalties.”

Walker, who was in the band from 2005-2014, said they still do not own the masters for the three records they released while signed to labels.

While Swift no longer needs to worry about the royalties – her estimated net worth is $1.6 billion – she has talked about the sentimental and creative attachment she has to her work. Jason Rawls, assistant professor of hip-hop in the School of Music, echoed this sentiment.

“There’s something to be said for owning your own music, your own product,” said Rawls, who is both a producer and recording artist, going by J Rawls professionally. “When you create music, it’s part of you. It’s who you are. It’s almost like having a baby.”

Will this change the record industry?

Neither Walker nor Rawls thought Swift’s announcement would change much in the record industry.

“There may be changes here and there,” Rawls said, “but I don’t see sweeping changes. The industry is the way it is for a reason. The record companies aren’t going to give up that much power. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.”

Walker agreed. Swift’s ability to craft a narrative around the sale of her masters, including the re-recordings, made this a unique situation.

“The re-recordings, from a business perspective, that’s brilliant,” he said. “She was able to do that because she’s a highly effective storyteller. I don’t know if another artist out there would be able to spin that narrative as successfully as she did.”

Getting people to listen to the re-recordings, dubbed “Taylor’s Versions”, is impressive on its own, Walker said. In fact, many of Swift’s fans refused to listen to the masters out of loyalty to the performer.

“Replications of art are not valued nearly as much as the original,” he said. “What she’s done is a kind of replication. It may have worked because she built this amazing story around it. I don’t think most artists would be able to do that.”

What does the future look like?

While Walker doesn’t anticipate a cascade of change in the record industry, he does believe that the conversation around Swift’s music has raised other concerns.

“What does it mean to monetize art?” he said. “I don’t think most people like the idea of a faceless corporation owning the music that they’re listening to. They want to support the artist, right? But the labels could argue that they add a lot of value, that they do things artists can’t do themselves. So, how valuable is that?”

Rawls is happy that Swift’s campaign is calling attention to the complexities of record deals.

“Most artists assigned to major record labels never own their masters,” he said. “To be able to own them must be one of the best feelings in the world. What she’s accomplished is magnificent. It’s a win for all of us.”

Giving a gift? Better late than never, study finds

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:59:05 -0500

If you feel terrible about giving a late gift to a friend for Christmas or their birthday, a new study has good news for you.

Researchers found that recipients aren’t nearly as upset about getting a late gift as givers assume they will be.

“Go ahead and send that late gift, because it doesn’t seem to bother most people as much as givers fear,” said Cory Haltman, lead author of the study and doctoral student in marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

In a series of six studies, Haltman and his colleagues explored the mismatch between givers’ and recipients’ beliefs about the importance of a gift being on time. Their paper was published this week in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

It is not surprising that people worry about giving a late gift. A survey by the researchers found that 65% of Americans believed that if you’re sending an occasion-based gift for a holiday or birthday, the gift should arrive on time.

“A majority of U.S. consumers seem to think that gifts should be given on time – but our study shows that there’s more to the story,” said study co-author Rebecca Reczek, professor of marketing at the Fisher College.

In one study, undergraduate students were asked to imagine giving or receiving a birthday gift of a pint of ice cream that would arrive on time or two weeks late. They were asked to rate how likely that a late gift would have a negative impact on their relationship.

Results showed that those who imagined giving the late gift thought it was more likely to hurt the relationship than did those who imagined receiving the late gift.

Those who imagined giving a gift late put more importance than those receiving the gift on the norm of making sure that you give gifts on time, the study found.

Another study found that participants feared that giving a late gift signaled that they cared less about the gift recipient.

“One of the key social functions of gift giving is to communicate care for the gift recipient, so it is not surprising that people fear a negative impact on their relationship if they are late with their present,” Reczek said.

But that’s not how gift recipients perceived a late gift, Haltman said.

“They didn’t see a late gift as signaling a lack of care. They were more forgiving than those giving late gifts thought they would be,” he said.

The fear of giving a late present even had an impact on what kind of gift people said they would give.

In one study, participants who imagined giving a late gift basket to a friend said they wouldn’t worry as much if they put together a basket of goodies by themselves rather than buying a pre-made basket containing the same items.

“People felt that if they put extra effort into the gift, made it more personalized, that can make up for it being late,” Reczek said.

But even if being late is OK in general, is there such a thing as being too late? The researchers asked participants in one study to imagine giving or receiving a birthday present that was two days late, two weeks late or even two months late. Results showed that both gift givers and gift receivers thought that the later the gift, the more harm that the delay would cause to their relationship.

Still, gift recipients never thought that the relationship harm would be as serious as did the gift givers, no matter how tardy the present.

Beyond even being severely late with a gift, there is one more line to cross: not giving a gift at all. How could that impact a relationship? In another study, findings showed that both givers and receivers thought that not giving a gift would harm a relationship even more than being severely late.

“Late is definitely better than never when it comes to giving a gift,” Haltman said.

It is interesting that the study showed that people in general believe that it is important to give gifts on time – but gift givers thought violating that norm was more serious than gift recipients, the researchers said.

But Reczek noted that everyone will be a gift giver and a gift recipient at various times in their lives.

“If you’re late giving a gift, put yourself in the role of receiving a late gift,” she said. “Based on our results, we believe that should reduce your worry that the lateness is going to be harmful to your relationship.”

The most important rule: “Just make sure you give the gift,” Haltman said.

Other co-authors on the study are Grant Donnelly, assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State, and Atar Herziger of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Why some abusive bosses get a pass from their employees

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 06:46:09 -0400

Why do employees sometimes accept working for an abusive boss?

A new study suggests that when a leader is seen as a high performer, employees are more likely to label abuse as just “tough love.”

Results showed that workers were less likely to show hostility to abusive bosses when the leader’s performance was high, and employees were even likely to think their career could be boosted by a successful – if abusive – boss.

The findings suggest that employees may be reluctant to call a successful boss abusive – even if the behavior warrants it, said Robert Lount, lead author of the study and professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“If employees see their boss as a successful leader, that seems to be incompatible with being abusive,” Lount said. “So they label the abuse as something more positive, like ‘tough love.’”

The study was published recently in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

The researchers conducted two studies. One involved a three-wave study of 576 workers in a variety of industries across the United States. Participants completed online surveys three times, each two weeks apart. They were asked about abusive behaviors by their boss, and how they would rate their leader’s overall effectiveness.

For those participants who reported abuse, other questions aimed to find if employees would label their boss as an abuser, or if they thought he or she was more of a “tough love” type of leader. In the survey, tough love bosses were described as “stern but caring,” “insensitive but nurturing” and “rough but well-meaning.”

The results showed that when employees rated their bosses as higher on use of abusive behavior – like using ridicule and saying an employee’s thoughts and feelings were stupid – the label they put on their supervisor depended somewhat on performance.

When they rated the boss as a high performer, workers were more likely to label their abusive boss as a “tough love” kind of supervisor. But when the boss’s performance was seen as lower, employees were more likely to give them the abuser label.

Why might abusive bosses be seen differently if they are successful?

Study co-author Bennett Tepper, also a professor of management and human resources at Ohio State, said employees may be looking for a silver lining of sorts.

“These bosses may treat employees harshly, but presumably their intent is to help their followers realize their potential – that’s the ‘tough love’ part,” Tepper said.

“And if the leaders have high performance, that suggests they are successful at bringing out the skills of their followers.”

Employees of abusive but successful bosses may not have liked the abuse – but they reported that they expected something good to come out of their bad situation. Findings showed these workers were more likely than others to think they would be promoted within their organization – presumably because of their experience working for a successful boss.

In addition, employees were less likely to lash out at abusive bosses who were high performers, by disobeying them or giving them the silent treatment.

A second study examined how the dynamic of working for an abusive and successful leader plays out in real time in a lab experiment.

In this case, 168 undergraduate students participated in a study in which they were told they were working in teams online led by an MBA student. Teams would compete against each other to solve a campus problem. (In actuality, there were no teams or leaders.)

Participants in the study read a message on their computer screen that was supposedly from their team leader, but was actually from the researchers. The researchers sent participants one of two messages – either abusive or not.

The abusive message supposedly from the MBA leader told the undergrads, “Don’t waste my time coming up with stupid ideas! Do better than a typical undergrad and don’t embarrass us!” The non-abusive message simply encouraged participants to “try hard.”

Participants developed ideas which were then supposedly assessed by their team leader and sent on to experts for evaluation. Later, all participants received one of two messages: one said that their team performed well above average compared to the other teams, according to the experts. The other said their team performed well below average.

Participants were then asked to evaluate their leader. And sure enough, participants who received the abusive message tended to give their leader a lower score on being abusive when their team was above average than when it was below average.

“We found that in a very short amount of time, you could quickly abate abusive labeling of a boss with high performance,” Lount said.

“Just finding out your team did better because of your leader’s judgment really dampened the willingness to label that person as abusive – even though your leader made the exact same statements as the other leaders who were called abusive after a below-average performance.”

Lount and Tepper emphasized that their study isn’t saying that abusive behavior can make some leaders successful. There is overwhelming evidence from years of research that abusive leadership is not good for employees or organizations, they said.

In fact, other research suggests that successful bosses known for their “tough love” approach might be even more successful if they used more accepted management techniques.

Instead, this study is about how employees respond to abusive supervision, according to the researchers.

“I think our data really speak to how followers react to leaders who are both abusive and successful. They’re hesitant to call them abusive. Employees think they can’t be abusive because they are successful,” Lount said.

The findings may also suggest why, even today, some abusive bosses can have long careers, Tepper said.

“The bosses who get away with abusive behavior may be those who somehow find a way to get high performance despite their behavior,” Tepper said.

“Their high performance insulates them from the consequences because even their employees say he’s just a ‘tough love’ kind of boss.”

Woohee Choi, who received her PhD from Ohio State and who is now an assistant professor at Providence College, was also a co-author of the study.

Ohio State grad Noah Wheeler among 3 generations of MBAs from Fisher

Fri, 17 May 2024 10:00:34 -0400

When Noah Wheeler received his Master of Business Administration (MBA) at The Ohio State University’s May 5 spring commencement, he was walking in his grandfather and father’s footsteps. Wheeler’s family represents three generations of MBAs earned at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business.

For Wheeler’s graduation, his grandfather, Ken Coleman, and father, Chris Wheeler, returned to their alma mater to celebrate Noah’s accomplishments and reflect on their own.

After earning his bachelor’s in industrial management in 1965 and his MBA in 1972 from Ohio State, Coleman went on to become a pioneer in the technology industry. He has been instrumental in many successful startups and technology firms, having served as chief operating officer of Silicon Graphics and chairman of Saama Technologies.

Coleman is currently chairman of EIS Group, which provides automated claims processing solutions for the insurance industry. He is also an adviser to venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Coleman’s accomplishments are especially noteworthy, as he is one of the leading African Americans in the field. He said the business principles he learned while earning his MBA have been key to his success.

“When I give a talk or a speech or something … I talk about what, especially, the MBA did for me: It taught me how to problem-solve in a situation where you don’t have all the information,” he said. “And No. 2, it taught me how to better communicate and present your idea, your issue, so you’re a better communicator.”

Coleman has maintained ties to Ohio State, serving on Fisher’s Dean’s Advisory Council. He has also hosted Ohio State students in Silicon Valley for company visits and networking.

Noah Wheeler said his grandfather and father’s professional success partly influenced his decision to earn his MBA from Fisher. Noah, who was born in Columbus and raised in upstate New York, holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and management from Capital University.

By observing his forebears’ careers, Noah learned “what an MBA allows you to do, especially as someone in the minority community, in terms of the doors it opens and your ability to have the qualifications,” he said. “You don’t want to be excluded in an interview process or even just being considered for something. You want to give people as many checkmarks as possible.”

Chris Wheeler earned his MBA in 1994. He is vice president of alliances and channel at Board, an international technology company that provides planning, reporting and analytics services to businesses.

Chris also said his parents, who are both Ohio State alumni, partly inspired his decision to earn his MBA from Fisher. Chris is a Columbus native who, like his son, completed his undergraduate degree at Capital University and holds a bachelor’s in accounting.

“Ohio State was always the big school that everyone thought about,” Chris said. “After undergrad, I went into public accounting and then when I decided to go back to graduate school to change the trajectory of my career because I no longer wanted to be in accounting, I fell in love with technology, which was because of my father. I then chose to go to Ohio State.”

Chris added that David E. Harrison, senior director of Fisher’s Diversity and Inclusion Services office, was also influential in choosing Ohio State.

Connecting with Harrison and his team “was the great one of the greatest experiences that I’d ever had in my life,” Wheeler said.

Like his father, Noah said he will draw on his experiences at Fisher as he embarks on his career. Noah plans to use his MBA in the customer success field, which helps clients get the most from a company’s products and services.

“Fisher’s decision to keep the MBA class small, I think, is a real strength. I know everybody in the class, everybody knows me, and I think it creates a sense of community that makes learning and growing very connected,” Noah said. “The class size was a really impactful experience overall, especially learning from other professionals and people with different backgrounds.”

Coleman said the advice he offers to young people like his grandson who are just starting their careers is to find a line of work that will spark their interest and make the best use of their skills.

“If you end up in a career and a job that’s something you’re passionate about, it doesn't feel like work,” he said. “The only thing you can really control is how hard you work, so work hard. Make sure no matter what happens, nobody can out-work you because you’re so focused on effort.”

Coleman also advises not to underestimate the value of networking.

“Build your network, nurture that network, feed that network,” he said, “because you never know when a contact that you had years ago will matter in the future.”

When consumers would prefer a chatbot over a person

Mon, 13 May 2024 09:36:16 -0400

Actually, sometimes consumers don’t want to talk to a real person when they’re shopping online, a new study suggests.

In fact, what they really want is a chatbot that makes it clear that it is not human at all.

In a new study, researchers at The Ohio State University found that people preferred interacting with chatbots when they felt embarrassed about what they were buying online – items like antidiarrheal medicine or, for some people, skin care products.

“In general, research shows people would rather interact with a human customer service agent than a chatbot,” said Jianna Jin, who led the study as a doctoral student at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business.

“But we found that when people are worried about others judging them, that tendency reverses and they would rather interact with a chatbot because they feel less embarrassed dealing with a chatbot than a human.”

The study was published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology with study co-authors Jesse Walker, assistant professor, and Rebecca Walker Reczek, professor, both in marketing at Ohio State’s Fisher College.

“Chatbots are becoming more and more common as customer service agents, and companies are not required in most states to disclose if they use them,” Reczek said. “But it may be important for companies to let consumers know if they’re dealing with a chatbot.”

The new research explored what happened when consumers had what psychologists call self-presentation concerns – this is when people worry about how their behavior and actions may affect how others perceive them. Buying some products may trigger these concerns.

In one of the five studies that was part of the Journal of Consumer Psychology paper, the researchers asked 386 undergraduate students to imagine buying either antidiarrheal or hay fever medication. They were given the choice between two online drug stores, one of which used chatbots and another that used customer service agents.

When participants were told they were buying hay fever medication, which doesn’t cause most people to feel embarrassed, 91% said they would use the store that had human service agents. But when they were buying antidiarrheal medicine, 81% chose the store with the chatbots.

But that’s just the beginning of the story. The researchers found in other studies that it was important how human the chatbots appeared and acted onscreen.

In another study, participants were asked to imagine buying an antidiarrheal medicine from an online drugstore. They were then shown one of three live chat icons: One was a chatbot with an icon that was just a speech bubble, with no human characteristics; a second was a chatbot with a cartoon of a human; and the third featured a profile picture of a real clearly human woman.

Both chatbots clearly identified themselves to participants as chatbots – but the one with the cartoon of a real human used more emotional language during the exchange, such as “I am so excited to see you!”

Results showed that participants were more willing to receive information about the embarrassing product from the two chatbots than from the human. But the effect was not as strong for the chatbot with the human cartoon avatar that used more emotional language than the other chatbot.

The fact that this chatbot had a cartoon human avatar and used emotional language may have left those in the study feeling uneasy and less willing to interact – even though they were told it was a chatbot, Walker said.

“It was as if the participants were proactively protecting themselves against embarrassment by assuming the chatbot could be human,” Walker said.

In another study, Jin actually designed a chatbot and had participants engage in a real back-and-forth interaction. Participants in this study were chosen because they all strongly agreed that they wanted to make a good impression on others with their skin.

In other words, they had self-presentation concerns related to their skin and may have been interested in buying skincare products because they were embarrassed about their skin. Because of this, the researchers believed that they would respond more positively to clearly identified chatbots.

Participants in the study were told they were interacting with an agent for a skincare brand and whether they were talking to a chatbot or a customer service representative. Participants answered a series of questions, including one in which they were asked if they would like to provide their email address to get a free sample of the brand.

As the researchers hypothesized, participants were more likely to provide their email address if they thought they were interacting with a chatbot (62%) than a human (38%).

In this study, as well as others, the researchers asked questions designed to get at why participants prefer chatbots when they had self-presentation concerns.

Walker said the results of the study suggest chatbots decrease embarrassment because consumers perceive chatbots as less able to feel emotions and make appraisals about people.

“Consumers feel less embarrassed because chatbots don’t have the level of consciousness and ability to judge them,” he said.

Jin, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the results suggest companies need to pay attention to the role of chatbots in their business.

“Managers may not realize the importance of using chatbots when consumers have self-presentation concerns,” she said.

And as conversational AI continues to get better, it may become more difficult for consumers to tell the difference between chatbots and human service agents, Reczek said. That could be a problem for companies whose customers may prefer to interact with chatbots because of their self-presentation concerns and fears of embarrassment.

“It is going to be even more important for firms to clearly disclose that they use chatbots if they want consumers to realize they are interacting with a bot,” Reczek said.

US regulators scramble to catch up with boom in donor-advised funds

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 12:36:57 -0400

Originally published in

By Brian Mittendorf, Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University

DAFs more or less operate as a mini foundation. Wong Yu Liang/Moment via Getty Images

A revolution in charitable giving is underway due to the growth of donor-advised funds in the United States.

Known widely as DAFs, these financial accounts are designated for charitable giving. Donors can get an immediate tax deduction by putting money or other assets into the accounts, and advise the accounts’ managers to give away the money at a later date.

After years of concerns about how quickly the money reserved for charity gets distributed and whether donor-advised funds need to operate more transparently, proposed new federal regulations are now pending. Though the regulations would not create new requirements for how rapidly these funds distribute money, they do provide some new guidelines for what uses for DAFs are allowed by law.

As an accounting researcher who studies DAFs, I believe these new changes may mark the start of what could become a series of reforms.

Nearly $230 billion

DAFs have been around since the 1930s but got off to a slow start. After decades of being concentrated in community foundations, DAFs became more widely accessible with the introduction of Fidelity Charitable – a DAF-sponsoring organization tied to Fidelity Investments – in 1991.

Many more DAF sponsors connected to investment companies have since emerged.

Because donors get tax breaks when they put money in them and can then wait a long time before distributing it to nonprofits, DAFs essentially operate as streamlined foundations.

DAFs are not, however, subject to the same restrictions.

Foundations have to disclose their donors to the public and also have to distribute minimum amounts for charitable use each year. DAFs face neither requirement.

DAFs held nearly US$230 billion in assets by the end of 2022 and distributed some $52 billion to charities that year. Those are significant sums as giving of all kinds totaled about $500 billion that year.

As of 2023 there were about 2 million donor-advised funds, according to the National Philanthropic Trust.

40% don’t distribute a dime

Critics of DAFs say that the government should require them to regularly disburse at least some of their charitable funds.

Foundations have faced that kind of obligation for more than five decades. They must pay out at least 5% of their assets each year – although some of that money can be used to pay for their operations or even be set aside in a donor-advised fund.

Supporters of DAFs counter that the payout rate for those accounts is already much higher than the foundation floor of 5%. It hovers around 20%.

However, that statistic applies to all the money held in DAFs, not what happens with each one of them. And almost 40% of them don’t distribute any money at all in a given year.

Calling for change

Other changes have been proposed over the years, including:

Not letting foundations count money they put in a DAF toward their annual 5% payout requirement.

Introducing new disclosure requirements because currently the public, the charity that gets money from a DAF and even the IRS have no way of knowing for sure who originally provided those funds.

Reining in the commercial investment companies that have been at the center of much of the growth in DAFs, by limiting the fees they can earn or restricting the ties between them and their affiliated charities.

IRS regulations

The IRS released proposed new DAF regulations at the end of 2023, and gave the public an opportunity comment on them.

The proposed regulations would clarify what constitutes a DAF, who is considered a fund’s adviser, and restrictions on DAF disbursements.

Though largely focused on definitions, these proposed regulations are not without teeth. Nor have they been immune to controversy.

The proposed regulations would identify certain distributions as taxable and declare that donors are not the only parties considered DAF advisers – the donors’ personal financial advisers are, too. This means the financial advisers, like donors, cannot receive any benefits from a DAF.

In identifying taxable distributions, the regulations include the possibility that funds used to support lobbying or activities tied to political campaigns could lead to penalties for both the donor and the fund’s manager. And evidence suggests DAFs are commonly used to support lobbying.

A tax would be levied on the DAF totaling 20% of the distribution and another 5% charged to a participating fund manager.

By including a donor’s personal financial adviser in the group considered advisers to the DAF, investment fees paid to such financial advisers for their services would become impermissible “excess benefit” transactions. As such, the proposed new rules would require the repayment of their compensation plus a 25% penalty.

Some DAF proponents have objected to the proposed regulations. A key concern they’ve expressed has to do with what the regulations could mean for financial advisers.

Since financial advisers often oversee investments of both the donor and the donor’s charitable funds, such dual advisory roles may be eliminated by the threat of penalties.

Changes possible in Congress

Additional, bigger, changes could occur in the near future through legislation.

Possibilities include requiring DAFs to disclose donors and connect them with distributions so the public can follow the money or delaying tax benefits when donations to DAFs are not immediately distributed to charities to encourage donors with DAFs to dispatch their gifts quickly.

Although legislation aimed at requiring faster payouts was first proposed in 2014, few lawmakers have made it a priority.

The most recent bill, the Accelerating Charitable Efforts Act, was first proposed by Sens. Angus King and Chuck Grassley in 2021. It did not amass enough support to garner a vote. At this point, it is unclear whether the lawmakers will reintroduce that measure.

But as DAFs play an ever larger role in charitable giving, I believe that Congress will eventually have to take action if it wants to meaningfully regulate this new charitable environment.

Brian Mittendorf, Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Wayne LaPierre leaves a financial mess behind at the NRA

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 15:08:08 -0500

Originally published in

By Brian Mittendorf, Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University

Former NRA Leader Wayne LaPierre arrives for his civil trial at New York State Supreme Court on Jan. 8, 2024, in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s longtime leader, plans to retire by the end of January 2024. He cited “health reasons” when he announced his departure three days before the organization’s civil fraud trial got underway in Manhattan.

New York authorities have accused the NRA, LaPierre and three of his current or former colleagues of squandering millions of dollars the gun group had obtained from its members.

As a nonprofit accounting scholar who has followed the NRA’s finances for years, I believe the organization is not only at a legal crossroads but also at a financial one.

NRA business model

To see why the NRA finds itself in this difficult spot, it helps to first see how its business model allows for only a small margin of error. Despite the nonprofit’s long history– it was founded in 1871 by Civil War veterans who fought for the Union – the NRA has never had enough money stowed away to inoculate it from financial problems.

Consider the NRA’s circumstances in terms of its unrestricted net assets, which reflect the money an organization has available to spend after accounting for its commitments to donors.

Comparing this with the scale of an organization’s annual budget can provide a sense of how much of a rainy day fund is on hand.

In 2015, the NRA had unrestricted net assets that constituted just 9% of its total expenses. In contrast, that same year, the AARP, another long-standing social welfare organization with millions of members, had unrestricted net assets that amounted to 87% of its expenses.

In other words, the NRA’s coffers reflected a circumstance more in line with an employee living paycheck to paycheck than an heir living off a trust fund. For this reason, the NRA has always relied on its members’ annual dues to cover its costs, and it is less able to weather financial storms that can last years.

The controversies over the NRA’s spending and the organization’s political entanglements that have swirled around since 2016 constitute that kind of turbulence.

Declining financial fortunes

Following its substantial spending spree during the 2016 election cycle, the NRA found itself needing to dig out of a hole, with a budget deficit of more than US$40 million.

Subsequent years saw fluctuations in spending along with ongoing challenges to generate sufficient revenues to keep up with spending.

In recent years, the organization’s approach to its budget shortfall has been to cut costs, or at least some of its costs.

Spending on programming went from nearly $176 million in 2017 to just $73 million in 2022, its most recent reporting year.

Its traditionally core programs have taken the biggest hit: Spending on education and training fell from $7.7 million to $3.2 million; law enforcement support dropped from $3.8 million to $1.8 million; recreational shooting slipped from $7.2 million to $5.1 million; and field services declined from $11.9 million to $1.3 million.

Back in the red

The NRA hasn’t cut all of its spending, however.

During the same time frame, the NRA’s budget for administrative legal costs ballooned, from $4 million in 2017 to over $40 million in each of the past three reporting years, with this amount hitting $43.7 million in 2022.

The organization’s shrinking programming budget helped eliminate its deficit, at least for a time.

Thanks to its reduced spending, the NRA was able to finish the year with a surplus in both 2020 and 2021. However, that surplus, which came from slashing costs – particularly those geared toward core programs for members – proved short-lived.

The organization has also seen the ranks of its members dwindle. Fewer members mean less revenue from dues. In 2022, revenues were down by more than $100 million from their 2017 levels, a drop of more than one-third.

The declining revenues meant that, despite its trimmed-down budget, the NRA was back in the red in 2022 and again facing a negative unrestricted balance in net assets.

What’s next?

The NRA, in short, is in a financial spiral. Its shrinking budget has begotten a shrinking member base, leading to an even smaller budget. It may be hard to stem.

The organization has pared what it spends on its programs to the bone.

While there are no easy answers for what the organization can do about its financial predicament, it’s not the only pressing question the organization faces.

How long will the NRA’s remaining members stay loyal to it? When will high legal costs subside enough to ease the budgetary pressures? What does a smaller NRA mean for its ability to flex its political muscle?

Despite its many challenges, the NRA’s imminent changing of the guard does offer an opportunity to make more drastic shifts in its priorities, spending approaches and the pitches it makes to members and donors.

Further, with its large legal budget being the last remaining area ripe for cost cutting, perhaps the NRA’s next generation of leaders will set the stage for the organization to rid itself of its oversized legal burdens and refocus on core programs.

What is clear, however, is that financial constraints will dictate much of whatever course the new leadership seeks to chart.

Brian Mittendorf, Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How nonprofits can become more resilient

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:35:31 -0400

Originally published in

By Telesilla Kotsi, The Ohio State University
and Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, University of Notre Dame

Food banks can operate on a large scale that requires expensive equipment and skilled management.
Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images

Most food banks, homeless shelters and other social services nonprofits constantly face hard decisions about how to use their limited funds. Should they spend as much as possible on meeting the immediate needs of people who need help? How much of their budget is appropriate to spend on new equipment, skilled managers and everything else required for an organization to thrive and endure?

To help nonprofits tackle this quandary, we teamed up with two other business professors, Arian Aflaki and Goker Aydin, to develop a mathematical model to guide nonprofits on how to divvy up their spending to optimize both current performance and future resilience through their spending priorities.

Having observed how charity watchdogs like Charity Navigator rate nonprofits, our model takes into account that spending more on core programs leads to increased funding for a nonprofit. In consultation with the Indiana Hoosier Hills Food Bank, we also studied the relationship of administration costs with a nonprofit’s capacity, which comprises the organization’s infrastructure, equipment, staff and other resources. This capacity is crucial for the nonprofit’s ability to meet its immediate and future needs.

Building on this, our research challenges the conventional wisdom that nonprofits should allocate nearly all of their budget to program costs. We found that striking the right balance depends on an organization’s existing capacity.

Our model indicates that new organizations and groups that are operating on small budgets need to spend a larger share of their revenue on administrative costs than larger, more established nonprofits. This investment lays a solid foundation for long-term resilience and ensures they are better equipped to serve their beneficiaries.

As nonprofits grow and establish some level of capacity, the emphasis should then shift to fundraising. That approach allows them to gather the funding necessary to maximize their existing capabilities. Importantly, the share of spending for administration or fundraising should align with the organization’s anticipated future needs.

For instance, if a nonprofit expects to take on larger projects or greater responsibilities in the future, it would be prudent to increase administrative spending now to prepare for those challenges.

Why it matters

Administrative costs, also known as overhead, encompass salaries, training, infrastructure, equipment and upkeep.

Donors and grantmakers often pressure nonprofits to devote as much of their budgets as possible to providing services, generally known as a nonprofit’s program. Many funders even set admin and fundraising caps in grant agreements. These well-meaning practices can compel nonprofits to scrimp in ways that make them less effective.

After years of investing too little money in, say, computers and professional development, nonprofits eventually have to pivot and devote more money to those neglected needs. Once their financial health is no longer shaky, those groups tend to cave again to their donors’ concerns, cutting their budgets for fundraising and administrative activities.

Scholars of nonprofit management have sounded the alarm about this “starvation cycle,” for two decades. But there are some signs that this loop might be breaking.

Big donors like the Ford Foundation are now dedicating 20%-25% of their grants to cover overhead – or even providing their support with no strings attached, recognizing that for a nonprofit to be successful it needs to be well managed. Meanwhile, organizations that rate nonprofits, like Charity Navigator, are starting to broaden their criteria to look at an organization’s overall well-being and impact, not just how they minimize spending on administration and fundraising.

Rather than neglect urgent spending priorities, some nonprofits resort to misclassifying certain expenses. That is, they pay for administrative work with money designated as program related in their budgets. This strategy makes financial distress less likely but interferes with transparency and can undermine budget discipline.

What isn’t known

In the future, we plan to collaborate with charity watchdogs to gain their insights on how our evaluation recommendations could be applied to reflect each organization’s specific capabilities and goals. This will help us understand any limitations and make necessary adjustments for broader use.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Telesilla Kotsi, Assistant Professor of Operations and Business Analytics, The Ohio State University and Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Aviation senior Torrington Ford sets sights on breaking barriers

Mon, 01 May 2023 11:30:00 -0400

May 1-5 is In-Demand Jobs Week. In-Demand Jobs Week is an annual statewide celebration of the jobs, industries and skills that are in demand in Ohio. Ohio State News highlights students as they transition from graduation into the workforce.

When Torrington Ford, a fourth-year with a double major in air transportation and aviation management at The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business, graduates Sunday, he plans to take his career prospects to new heights.

Ford, 20, is one of the youngest graduates who will be awarded a bachelor’s degree during Ohio State’s spring commencement on May 7 in Ohio Stadium.

“Torrington’s story is inspiring in so many ways ̶ from his amazing journey to Ohio State as a young man, to his passion for aviation, to his hard work turning that passion into a career path,” said Anil K. Makhija, Fisher dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business. “His is an example of tenacity, perseverance and dedication that are hallmarks of so many of our Business Buckeyes. I can’t wait to see where Torrington’s next step as a member of our Class of 2023 will take him!”

A Washington, D.C., native, Ford completed an average of two grades per school year while being homeschooled by his mother, Tarita. He earned an associate degree before enrolling at Ohio State at age 15.

Ford said he was motivated to start college as soon as possible and begin the formal study of his passion ̶ aviation.

“I’ve always wanted to fly. To be up in the air, flying a plane, is joyous, freedom,” he said. “Nothing can top it.”

Ford developed a love of flying as a small child, growing up near the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Base Andrews. The love of flying was passed down by extended family members who are Air Force veterans.

Ford, who is African American, said he also admired a friend of his grandfather who was one of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen. The Black Air Force pilots formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group in World War II, earning three Distinguished Unit Citations for their outstanding combat record.

Ford said he’s also inspired by the story of Jesse Brown, who attended Ohio State in the 1940s and was heralded by the Navy as the first Black Naval aviator. Brown went on to become a Korean War hero whose life was immortalized in the 2022 film “Devotion” starring Jonathan Majors.

Ford emphasizes the importance of role models, especially for African Americans in the aviation industry. Only 3.4% of the nation’s aircraft pilots and flight engineers are Black, according to 2020 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“In my 20 years, I’ve probably only seen two or three African American pilots for any airline,” he said. “My generation, specifically, we’re disconnected culturally from the aviation industry. We just haven’t seen anybody prominently make it a mainstream, notable enterprise to capitalize on.”

To make inroads in the industry, Ford said he has already begun to tap into Ohio State’s large alumni network.

“It’s given me connections I have in the aviation industry, both for pilots and corporate personnel,” he said. “I’m grateful to Ohio State for putting those people in my path.”

As he prepares for a future in aviation, Ford plans to expand the runway for others.

“In the long run, the ultimate goal is to, at some point, own an airline,” he said. “Whether it’s a scheduled service like Delta or American or to do a private charter (company), which would be like Jet Edge or NetJets.”

As graduation approaches and he evaluates opportunities, Ford says the sky is the limit.

“I have the option to go straight into grad school and do my master’s in business administration or I’ll take an employment opportunity, get some work experience under my belt and go back for my MBA,” he said. “An aviation management and flight transportation degree can take you anywhere.”

NRA vulnerable as it seeks financial recovery

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 09:46:21 -0400

Originally published in

By Brian Mittendorf

Fisher Designated Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University

The gun group might be less sturdy than it appears. Kelly Nigro/Moment Open via Getty Images

The National Rifle Association’s financial firepower, which arose in part due to its large and loyal membership base, has long been one of the gun group’s main sources of strength.

But the NRA has in recent years faced a financial tsunami, one that came to light after the 2016 election. A swirl of disagreements with longtime business partners, accusations of waste and misspending, ballooning debt and lawsuits from the New York and Washington, D.C. attorneys general have triggered one embarrassment after another. The NRA tried to declare bankruptcy to cushion some of these blows, with no luck.

At this point, the threat of being forced by the authorities to shut down due to alleged improprieties is minimal. But has the NRA managed to weather its financial storm?

As an accounting researcher who focuses on the financial performance of nonprofits, I have been closely studying NRA finances throughout its crisis. I can say the NRA financial picture is, as of early 2023, a mixed bag. The gun group has shored up its financial position over the last few years. However, the way in which that financial recovery came about risks hemorrhaging the NRA’s core supporters.

Digging out of a financial hole

The NRA’s financial troubles arose at the same time that scandalous aspects of the organization’s woes – such as longtime NRA leader Wayne LaPierre’s free yacht getaways and luxury suit purchases billed to an NRA contractor – were drawing public attention.

Perhaps the best measure of a nonprofit’s financial health is its unrestricted net assets – the money at the organization’s disposal after leaving out amounts it has to spend on activities promised to donors and what it owes to others. A multimillion-dollar unrestricted net asset reserve for an organization the size of the NRA can provide financial security. On the other hand, a negative reserve is typically a sign of serious trouble.

The NRA’s reserve was negative at the end of 2017, with a deficit of more than US$30 million – a sure sign of the troubles already underway. Such a negative balance indicates that after satisfying donor promises, the organization owes more money to others than the value of its assets.

Things only got worse in the following two years, with the NRA approaching an unrestricted net asset deficit of nearly $50 million in 2019. This degree of weakness even led the organization to suggest that it risked imminent failure. However, there was time for a turnaround.

And that’s what happened. In 2020, the NRA slashed its unrestricted net asset deficit by over $38 million. Ironically, it was shortly after pulling off this marked improvement that it filed – unsuccessfully – for bankruptcy.

This financial resurgence continued in 2021, with the organization reporting it had eliminated its unrestricted net asset deficit, building up a surplus of over $10 million. When also including the money set aside for specific uses stipulated by donors – the group’s net assets – the NRA’s total available funds reached over $75 million.

These developments may seemingly bode well for the organization’s ability to withstand its continuing financial troubles. Below the surface, however, there’s an ominous trend.

Selective cost cutting

How did the NRA get on a steadier financial footing?

It wasn’t through growth. NRA revenue declined in 2020 by 4% from $296 million to $284 million, even without taking inflation into account. Revenue fell another 18% to under $234 million in 2021.

Instead, it cut many core programs, including education and training, field services, law enforcement initiatives and recreational shooting.

Cost cutting can help stabilize faltering companies or nonprofits, depending on which costs they cut. The NRA’s over 4 million dues-paying members may tolerate lean spending only on certain things and only for so long. What the NRA spent on programs fell by $45 million – more than a 35% decline – in 2020. The organization was quick to attribute the change to the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, program spending declined even further in 2021, when life had begun to return to normal, especially for gun enthusiasts. The NRA spent just $75 million on its programs in 2021, nearly $53 million less than it had two years earlier.

It didn’t cut all costs during these lean years.

Administrative spending in the “legal, audit and taxes” category skyrocketed, from just over $4 million in 2017 to almost $47 million in 2021. Much of this reflects the money NRA paid for its various legal entanglements, largely in fees to its new legal team.

What once was a member-focused organization has quickly become an organization whose primary growth area is legal fees.

Was 2022 a turning point?

Though the NRA apparently shored up its bottom line, its financial neglect of programs like firearms training, competitions and field services could ultimately disappoint its members and donors.

The organization has seen membership dues decline in the past several years, with a loss of more than 1 million members since the start of the crisis. I see a risk of a downward spiral: lower revenue, leading to less spending on programs, which leads to further declines in member dues, donations and so on.

The full NRA financial filing for 2022 is not yet available, but there are early signs that it may have been a turning point.

Journalist Stephen Gutowski has reported at The Reload that NRA membership declines meant that even with its more lean spending profile, the organization was poised to end 2022 at a loss.

I believe that with fewer members and fewer items left to cut, the NRA may take more drastic steps in the years ahead. And, with 2022 having been an election year – prime time for the NRA to take center stage – declining funds prevented an all-out political spending blitz.

Though it may once have seemed like the NRA would suddenly implode due to its weak finances, its decline today is more of a slow burn that’s diminishing its scale and threatens its future. The growth of other pro-gun groups, such as Gun Owners of America and the Second Amendment Foundation, poses further risks for a shrinking NRA.

In my view, the NRA’s risky strategy of cutting program costs while spending more on legal battles could portend a further and continued weakening of the organization in the years ahead.

Brian Mittendorf, Fisher Designated Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Technology entrepreneur Ratmir Timashev shares secrets of success with Ohio State students

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

The Ohio State University alumnus Ratmir Timashev visited the university’s Columbus campus on Feb. 16 to announce a historic $110 million gift from the Timashev Family Foundation to establish the Center for Software Innovation. During his visit, Timashev participated in a fireside chat with Max M. Fisher College of Business students and shared insights about software entrepreneurship, product management, sales and marketing – priorities that the newly established center will advance.

In a conversation led by Anil Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business at Fisher, Timashev described how his career as a software entrepreneur began as an Ohio State graduate student in 1995.

“I fell in love with the software business. It’s the best place to be,” Timashev said. “All these things that you hear today – AI (artificial intelligence) – is all about software. That’s where the value-add is.”

Timashev and his close friend and partner Andrei Baronov built two successful software companies in Columbus. Their first company, Aelita Software – which developed software management tools for Windows NT administrators – was sold to Quest Software in 2004. The duo later founded Veeam Software, and Timashev served as CEO before the company was sold to Insight Partners in 2020. Today, Timashev is building a new data hardware company, Object First.

Ohio State students can look to Timashev and Baronov on how to become innovators of the future, Makhija said.

With Timashev’s approach to entrepreneurship, “one of the things I see is a form of leadership,” Makhija said. “Here at Fisher College of Business, we really stress leadership training. We want it for everyone.”

Identifying core values is important for leaders in every industry, Timashev said.

“How they treat people, how they hire people, how they fire people is all determined by core values,” he said. “Being a Midwestern company, we have some Midwestern core values: hard work, integrity. … We like highly ethical people. Those are the core values that come from leaders.”

Citing his partnership with Baronov, Timashev said a key factor in entrepreneurial success is finding partners who can complement each other’s strengths and compensate for knowledge gaps.

“You need a partner who will help you make less mistakes. Mistakes will be inevitable,” he said. “Entrepreneurs are a special breed of people who are not afraid of failing.”

Launching a successful technology company consists of understanding the market, capitalizing on early-stage trends and assessing how to deliver better products and services than competitors, Timashev said.

“What does it take to create a successful technology company?” he said. “It’s simple: right time, right place, brilliant product.”

Justin Hauser, a third-year finance major, said he can apply Timashev’s advice both to his future career in finance and the startup venture he’s developing in which autonomous vehicles deliver relief supplies after natural disasters. Hauser is launching the venture through Ohio State’s President’s Buckeye Accelerator, which provides skill-building support, mentorship and funding to help students turn their ideas into businesses.

Hauser said he was inspired by Timashev’s description of the variety of opportunities available in the technology industry.

“The thing he kept saying was to get a job in software, you don’t have to be technical or into coding,” Hauser said. “It could be marketing, it could be finance.”

Samuel Saldarriaga, a senior majoring in finance, said he appreciated Timashev encouraging him and his classmates to have self-confidence and not to be afraid to make mistakes.

“I was impressed with him being willing and able to respond to any and all of our questions. At the end, he asked about how our year was going and about our interests,” Saldarriaga said. “He seemed like he was genuinely passionate about targeting what students wanted. It came from a good place of wanting to give back to Ohio State.”

Good things happen when leaders reflect on their mistakes

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:54:05 -0500

While some leaders may believe they should appear flawless to their teams, a new study finds there are benefits for those who reflect on and learn from their mistakes.

In four related studies, researchers found that when leaders took time to reflect on what they learned from their errors, they showed more humility, a quality known to make managers more effective.

In addition, this research found that under some circumstances, teams performed better when their leaders learned from missteps.

“Everyone makes mistakes – even the best leaders inevitably do – but leaders are often expected to act dominant, confident, and be the people fixing mistakes rather than making them. And that attitude may actually make them less effective,” said Jasmine Hu, lead author of the study and professor of management at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“Understanding your own blind spots and vulnerabilities can help make you a better manager and leader.”

The study was published online recently in the journal Personnel Psychology.

Humble leaders are those who acknowledge their own limitations and mistakes, appreciate others’ strengths and contributions, and are open to new insights and feedback, Hu said.

Research shows that, when they have a humble leader, team members are more likely share their knowledge and voice their concerns, and increase their improvement-oriented behaviors.

Hu and her colleagues found that one key for leaders is not only to admit mistakes, but to reflect on them and learn how to do better.

In one of the four studies, the researchers recruited 454 managers who worked in a wide variety of industries, including finance, retail, manufacturing and health care, to participate in the online research.

Some of the participants were asked to write about and reflect on a mistake they made with their subordinates and what they learned. Others wrote about a mistake where they felt there was nothing to learn.

The managers were then presented with a workplace scenario and asked to write about how they would behave in that situation.

Trained graduate students who were not involved in the study rated the managers’ responses for how much humility they showed. For example, they rated how much each manager acknowledged that others had more knowledge and skill than himself or herself.

Results showed that managers who reflected on a past mistake where they learned a lesson showed more humility than those who thought about a mistake without learning.

“The goal should be to learn from mistakes, not just focus on what went wrong,” Hu said.

Another key for maximizing the benefits of learning from mistakes is to approach the learning from a promotion focus, rather than a prevention focus.

With a promotion focus, a leader is oriented toward improvement and growth and seeing how mistakes can point toward better ways to achieve goals, Hu said. A prevention focus sees learning from mistakes as a short-term way to correct failures and avoid punishment.

Hu and her colleagues found the importance of a promotion focus in several of their studies, including one involving 210 college students who worked together in teams of three to six people to help a small business.

Findings showed that a heightened promotion focus strengthened the relationship between leaders’ learning from mistakes and how much they expressed humility to their team members. That relationship was not as strong when leaders had a prevention focus.

The importance of a promotion focus became even more apparent in a real-life study of 85 non-physician managers from medical schools and hospitals in the Midwest.

In the study, the managers took twice daily surveys for 10 consecutive workdays that examined how they learned from mistakes and expressed humility, and how they viewed their teams’ improvement-oriented behavior and overall performance.

Findings showed that managers who learned from their mistakes and took a promotion focus – meaning they used the learning to improve and grow as leaders – were more likely to show humility. Most importantly, they also rated their teams as showing greater improvement-related behaviors and better performance.

“When leaders take what they learn from mistakes to improve and reach goals, that is what seems to be most valuable”, Hu said.

“That builds humility, and teams respond to that. It makes team members look for ways they can improve.”

Overall, the results suggest the need for a shift in how organizations, and society itself, views the meaning of leadership, she said.

“We often see leaders who are afraid of even admitting they make mistakes, because they are worried it goes against the historic image of leadership,” according to Hu.

“But what we found is that reflecting on and learning from your mistakes can make you a more effective manager and leader. That’s what the mindset should be.”

Co-authors on the study were Robert Lount and Bennett Tepper of Ohio State’s Fisher College and Shuxia Zhang of Wayne State University.

Staying connected to work after hours is good – up to a point

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 11:26:40 -0400

There’s a “sweet spot” for how much employees should be digitally connected to their jobs after hours, a new study suggests.

Some work after hours – like checking email or doing other tasks - makes employees feel more connected with their colleagues and supervisors and makes them more productive, results showed.

But after a certain point, digital connectivity to the office turns into “too much of a good thing,” said Jia “Jasmine” Hu, corresponding author of the study and professor of management at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“When workers spend too much time on their phones and laptops outside of working hours, it leads to emotional exhaustion and lower job performance,” Hu said.

The study was published online in the journal Personnel Psychology.

Hu and her colleagues conducted two studies, both in China, with similar results. Both were done before the COVID-19 pandemic.

One study included 467 employees and their supervisors at a large pharmaceutical company. The second study involved 313 employees and their supervisors at a large financial institute.

At the beginning of the studies, participants rated how often they used mobile digital devices to perform work outside of normal hours in a variety of different contexts, including while they were shopping and while eating at a restaurant. They rated connectivity on a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (always).

A month later they completed a questionnaire that measured what is called social capital development at work. They were asked questions about how much they networked with others at work and how well-connected they felt to their colleagues. They also assessed how emotionally exhausted they felt, rating how burned out they were from work and answering similar questions.

After another month, supervisors rated the performance of participants in the study.

Results showed that up to a certain point, after-hours connectivity for work-related matters led to more social capital for employees and better performance ratings from their supervisors.

“At low to moderate levels, staying connected to work was beneficial for both employees and employers,” Hu said.

“Connectivity allowed employees to build better and stronger connections with people who could help them with their jobs, enhance their performance, and advance their career.”

But when employees reported more than moderate levels of connectivity, they were more likely to say they felt burned out at work and felt fatigued when they got up in the morning and had to face another day at work – signs of emotional exhaustion.

And that tended to have a negative effect on their job performance, according to the ratings of their supervisors.

The “sweet spot” for how much digital connectivity is ideal is likely to be different depending on the job, the company and the employees themselves, Hu said.

But it is important to find that spot, according to Hu.

“Organizations risk damage if they fail to recognize that too much connectivity may be detrimental to employee performance,” she said.

“It is a good idea for organizations to work with employees to identify when connectivity is too much and to clarify expectations regarding when to respond to after-hours messages from work.”

This study was done before the pandemic, when the lines between work and non-work time became even blurrier, Hu said.

“COVID-19 has changed how people work and it is more vital than ever to find that balance in how much we connect to work after work hours and create appropriate boundaries between our work and private lives,” she said.

This popular type of investment fund nearly always loses money

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 07:57:47 -0400

Investors hoping for big returns by putting their money into trendy topics like work-from-home and the metaverse through exchange traded funds (ETFs) will instead likely face gross underperformance, a new study shows.

Researchers found that ETFs based on these and similar hot topics earn an average return about 30% lower than more diversified funds over the five years after they are launched.

“When people chase these popular investment themes, they are going to be disappointed,” said Itzhak Ben-David, co-author of the study and professor of finance at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“These hot-topic funds are based mostly on hype and tend to lose value relative to the general market almost as soon as they are launched.”

The study was published online recently in the journal Review of Financial Studies.

ETFs, which were first developed in the mid-1990s, are popular investment funds that are traded on stock markets and are set up like mutual funds, holding a variety of stocks in their portfolios.

The popularity of ETFs is growing quickly. By the end of 2021, in excess of $6.6 trillion was invested in more than 3,200 ETFs. The original ETFs were broad-based products that mimicked index funds, meaning that they invested in large, diversified portfolios, such as the entire S&P 500, Ben-David said.

But more recently, some companies have introduced what Ben-David and his colleagues call “specialized” ETFs, which invest in specific industries or themes – usually ones that have received a lot of recent media attention, like Bitcoin, cannabis, and even firms associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.

“These specialized ETFs are all about areas hyped in social media and other platforms as the ‘next big thing.’ But by the time these ETFs are launched into the market and available to investors, it is already too late to make money,” Ben-David said.

“Specialized ETFs are basically boiled down to a soundbite: ‘You should invest in electric vehicles,’ for example. That’s it. Most of the investors in this don’t know anything about the stocks in the ETF’s portfolio, the fees, the price to earnings ratio. They just want to be part of the trend.”

For the study, the researchers used Center for Research in Security Prices data on ETFs traded in the U.S. market between 1993 and 2019.

They focused on 1,086 ETFs. Of those, 613 were broad-based, investing in a wide range of stocks.

The remaining 473 were specialized ETFs, investing in a specific industry or multiple industries that are tied by a theme.

Broad-based ETFs had earnings over the study period that were relatively flat, the analysis showed. But specialized ETFs lost about 6% of value per year, with underperformance persisting at least five years after launch.

“It is not that the ETFs cause the losses. It is just that they are almost always launched when the hype for that particular area is at its peak and is already starting to decline,” Ben-David said.

Ben-David gives the example of work-from-home. The time to invest in that area would have been in March 2020 when stay-at-home orders for COVID-19 first appeared, he said. But by the time that specialized ETFs around that theme were launched a year later, the stocks in that area had already peaked.

Investors in specialized ETFs often put their money into areas hyped by the traditional and social media, he said.

The researchers found that media sentiment – a measure of positive media coverage of the individual stocks contained in a specialized ETF – generally peaked at nearly the same time as a specialized ETF was launched.

Positive media coverage tended to decline after launch as the financial press soured on the future prospects of the stocks in the ETFs’ thematic area.

The study found that the types of investors who bought into specialized ETFs were different from those who invested in the broad-based products.

For example, large institutional investors who have professional managers, such as mutual funds, pension funds, banks and endowments, generally avoid specialized ETFs.

Data from the online discount brokerage Robinhood, which caters to individual investors, showed that its customers are much more likely to invest in specialized than broad-based ETFs.

Specialized ETFs also charge higher fees than broad-based ETFs – probably because the investors in these trendy areas don’t care as much about fees and just want to be part of the fad, Ben-David said.

Results showed that while specialized ETFs make up about 20% of the ETF market, they generate about a third of the industry’s revenue from fees.

The findings of this study show the dark side of what has been called the “democratization of investing,” Ben-David said.

“The firms that market these specialized ETFs are supposedly giving the people what they want. But that’s not a good idea when investors are not sophisticated and don’t know how to think about investing,” he said.

“It is a lot like junk food. It may be what some people want, but it is not necessarily good for them.”

Co-authors on the study were Byungwook Kim, a graduate student in finance at Ohio State; Francesco Franzoni, professor of finance at USI Lugano and senior chair at the Swiss Finance Institute; and Rabih Moussawi, associate professor of finance at Villanova University.

How to protect supply chains sending weapons to Ukraine

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 15:37:53 -0400

Originally published in

By Vincent E. Castillo

Assistant Professor of Logistics, The Ohio State University

Ukrainian soldiers move U.S.-made Stinger missiles that were shipped from Lithuania to Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 13, 2022. Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)

Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, invoking King in his virtual address to Congress on March 16, 2022, said he has a need. “We need you right now,” Zelenskyy told U.S. lawmakers.

Since November 2021, the U.S. has provided three shipments of military aid to Ukraine, sending weapons and equipment from its own stocks held at bases throughout Europe. The U.S. has provided everything from rifles and body armor to Stinger missiles capable of shooting down helicopters or fighter jets, as well as Javelins, anti-armor weapon systems used to destroy tanks.

Once the U.S. approves a request for military aid, how do the weapons get from the U.S. storage sites in Europe into the hands of Ukrainian soldiers? What steps are involved in the logistics of moving US$350 million worth of weapons and equipment from Europe into an active combat zone?

Supply chains

As a logistics scholar who also served in the Iraq War, I see parallels between civilian and military supply chains. To help understand how military goods, or materiel, as it is known, move from storage to soldiers, consider a generic e-commerce supply chain like that of Amazon or Walmart.

First, a supplier sells and delivers raw materials to a manufacturer. The transportation segment of that transaction is known as the “first mile.”

Next, a manufacturer transforms the raw materials into finished goods. These goods are then sold at wholesale to retail customers like Amazon or Walmart and then transported to an e-commerce distribution center over a segment referred to as the “middle mile.”

When the consumer places an order for online delivery, it will be shipped from a distribution center located in the same geographical area. This is the last leg of the supply chain, which is known as the “final mile.”

An important performance metric is the time between order receipt and fulfillment. This is especially essential for a retailer like Amazon or Walmart as they distribute across the final mile because it affects the consumer’s perceived quality of delivery service and consequently, whether they purchase again.

Ukrainian soldiers load a truck with boxes of U.S.-made Stinger missiles on Feb. 13, 2022. Sergei Supinsky/ AFP via Getty Images

In other words, delivery speed is an essential metric that can make or break the consumer experience.

Similarly, delivery speed is an essential performance metric for the entire military supply chain from U.S. bases into Ukraine, not just over the final mile.

The Ukrainians are fighting a war against a larger invading force, and military aid is needed as soon as possible. What differentiates the military supply chain from commercial supply chains is the need for speedy delivery while also maximizing security.

The weapons and equipment need to be moved quickly while preventing Russian intelligence from identifying or predicting potential routes. Without operational security, the risk of a Russian attack that disrupts the movement of those supplies or prevents them from reaching Ukrainians fighting on the front lines is elevated.

The first mile

Materiel that Ukraine needs is stored at U.S. bases throughout Europe. Once the weapons and equipment are pulled from these U.S. stocks, they’ll be transported by air, truck or rail across the “first mile.” The length of the first mile in this case could be up to 600 or 700 miles to a location or locations in a NATO territory bordering western or southwestern Ukraine, including Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

The movements along the first mile within NATO territory will need to be concealed to maximize security and prevent Russia from predicting the destination of the materiel.

In military jargon, the first destination is known as a “staging area.” To maintain security of the materiel, the staging area will likely be an armory or ordnance depot located on a NATO base before transporting it into Ukraine. An important strategic decision for U.S., NATO and Ukrainian leaders planning the mission is whether to use a single staging area or multiple staging areas.

Whether a single staging area in one NATO country is used or multiple staging areas either within one or across multiple NATO countries are used depends on several factors. Where the materiel is needed within Ukraine is one such factor. The condition of roads and bridges is another, as are enemy activity, the origin of the materiel and, of course, operational security.

Using a single staging area is relatively simple to plan and execute but can create a lot of risk in that Russia only has to find and attack one area across the border inside Ukraine to disrupt the resupply mission.

On the other hand, using multiple staging areas is more complex to plan and execute but lowers the risk of a Russian disruption on resupply since the Russians would have many locations on which to focus.

The middle mile

Once the staging area decision is made, plans are developed to coordinate the transfer of materiel to Ukraine’s military. At that point, Ukraine will be responsible for transporting the materiel from the NATO country along the middle mile to the next set of staging areas within Ukraine. The importance of operational security grows drastically in this segment, and complicates transportation.

In this Feb. 10, 2022, photo, Ukrainian soldiers conduct live-fire exercises in the Kharkiv region. Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images

NATO’s refusal to establish a no-fly zone allows Russia to maintain air superiority over Ukraine. This prevents Ukraine from transporting the supplies by air and as a result, Ukrainians are forced to use vehicle convoys to travel from the western border to the next location in the supply chain. Russian air superiority also prevents deploying one large convoy to transport military resupply because Russian attack helicopters or fighter jets could easily destroy such a large target.

Instead, the weapons and equipment will likely need to be broken down into smaller shipments and transported in multiple convoys.

This is one of the first ways to reduce the risk of a disruptive attack by Russia.

Since Ukraine cannot use its air assets, such as helicopters, to protect the convoys due to Russian air superiority, Ukraine must secure convoys transporting the materiel by positioning soldiers with surface-to-air missiles, like the Stingers the U.S. is providing, in key terrain along the routes leading to the next staging areas.

They need to be far enough away from the roads themselves, however, such that they don’t unnecessarily expose the convoys to aerial attacks.

The convoy will also need security elements within it. That includes anti-tank weapons like Javelins, vehicle-mounted weapons and tank or mounted infantry escorts of their own to provide security. This will allow the convoy to defend itself against any ground attacks as it attempts to reach the next staging areas throughout Ukraine.

The convoys will also likely need units that can clear the roads of any obstacles, like burned out cars or destroyed tanks, to ensure the materiel can keep moving toward its destination.

The final mile

The final staging areas are likely within major cities.

Once a convoy reaches these ultimate staging areas, the shipments will be broken down from their bulk packaging into smaller quantities for further distribution to soldiers fighting on the front lines.

In this Feb. 6, 2022, photo, a Ukrainian soldier prepares equipment during the massive Russian army buildup along the border with Ukraine. Celestino Arce/NurPhoto via Getty Images

This “final mile” in a combat zone is more precarious because there are active Russian aerial and ground attacks. As a result, the logistics units traveling the final mile also need protection, including small arms, as well as anti-tank weapons.

Once the military equipment reaches combat units on front lines, it will be distributed to the individual soldiers.

Ultimately, while the materiel supply chain required to fulfill the Biden administration’s agreement to support Ukraine with military aid has some conceptual similarities to that of an e-commerce supply chain in the U.S., the stakes in Ukraine are obviously much higher.

A missed delivery in this case doesn’t just mean a dissatisfied customer. It means that over time, a sovereign nation may not be able to defend itself against an invading force.

[The Conversation’s Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly.]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Calling all readers: Vote for Ohio State’s Coolest Science Story of 2021

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 14:48:21 -0500

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for the Ohio State News research communications team, when we invite readers to vote for the university’s Coolest Science Story of the Year.

This is our fifth annual contest, and the winner receives a trophy from Ohio State News and a $500 award from the Ohio State’s Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge.

We’ve written over 170 science stories this year, making it a difficult task to select the list of five finalists. But whittle down to that finalist list we did:

Black hole is closest to Earth, among the smallest ever discovered: Scientists discovered one of the smallest black holes on record – and the closest one to Earth found to date. It was dubbed “The Unicorn,” in part because it is, so far, one of a kind, and in part because it was found in the constellation Monoceros – “The Unicorn.”

COVID-19 in our dust may help predict outbreaks, study finds: A study done in rooms where COVID-19 patients were isolated shows that the virus’s RNA – part of the genetic material inside a virus – can persist up to a month in dust, a finding that offers another option for monitoring COVID-19 outbreaks in specific buildings, including nursing homes, offices or schools.

Newly identified saber-toothed cat is one of largest in history: Researchers completed a painstaking comparison of seven uncategorized fossil specimens with previously identified fossils and bone samples from around the world to describe a new species: a giant saber-toothed cat that lived in North America between 5 million and 9 million years ago, weighing up to 900 pounds and hunting prey that likely weighed 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.

A quantum step to a heat switch with no moving parts: Researchers discovered a new electronic property at the frontier between the thermal and quantum sciences in a specially engineered metal alloy – and in the process identified a promising material for future devices that could turn heat on and off with the application of a magnetic “switch.”

Think leisure is a waste? That may not bode well for your mental health: Feeling like leisure is wasteful and unproductive may lead to less happiness and higher levels of stress and depression, a series of studies revealed. Researchers examined the effects of a common belief in modern society: that productivity is the ultimate goal and time’s a-wasting if you’re just having fun.

Voting starts today and is open for one month, until 5 p.m. Jan. 21, 2022. The process is decidedly unscientific: Participants may cast one vote per day until the poll closes.

Thank you in advance for deciding which story will reign as Ohio State’s Coolest Science Story of 2021!

Ohio State launches online option of its Working Professional MBA program

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0400

As part of its commitment to connecting professionals with greater access to a graduate business education at The Ohio State University, the Max M. Fisher College of Business has created a new online component to its Working Professional MBA (WPMBA) program.

The new offering provides students with even more flexibility in how they access Fisher’s highly ranked WPMBA curriculum and experiences. Now, students can enroll in the program entirely on campus, online or a mix of both.

“This is a new opportunity to meet our students where they are. The Working Professional MBA is already ranked among the nation’s best at meeting the needs of our working students,” said W. Randy Smith, Ohio State’s vice provost for academic programs. “The new online opportunities will continue to help Ohio State meet the workforce demands in Ohio and beyond.”

The addition of the online component represents the newest enhancement to a program that for years has been a leader in the part-time MBA space. The Online WPMBA builds on the program’s continued emphasis on creating a graduate-level educational experience that is personalized, experiential and transformational. These differentiators have established Ohio State’s WPMBA program as an industry leader, with U.S. News & World Report ranking the program No. 10 nationwide, No. 5 among public universities and the No. 1 part-time program in Ohio.

“The option is a mirror image of our WPMBA program with the added flexibility of being online,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business. “We’ve created a new modality that draws directly from our existing WPMBA program, one that is highly ranked and offers students unparalleled intimacy and interactivity. It’s the latest step in our efforts to continuously innovate to meet the needs of business and its leaders.

“We’re excited by the momentum this new option has generated as we explore launching other online programs, such as a new supply chain management program, and collaborating across the university on convergent research and thought leadership initiatives, including FinTech. As a college, we remain committed to finding new and creative ways to meet the needs of a dynamic marketplace and workforce.”

The Online WPMBA option was created to reflect business as it is happening now. Students electing online or hybrid delivery will have the same access as in-person students to the hallmarks of Ohio State’s MBA program, including: premier faculty and industry experts; a rigorous, hands-on curriculum; wide-ranging electives, including specializations; award-winning one-on-one career coaching, mentorship and professional development; and personalized academic advising.

The result is an expanded WPMBA delivery model that provides professionals the learning flexibility that fits their schedules while keeping them connected to their cohort and Ohio State’s Columbus campus.

“The Ohio State University and Fisher College of Business are excited to be bringing this offering to our students,” said Steve DeNunzio, academic director of the Online WPMBA. “We look forward to providing the same program excellence, with added flexibility and convenience.”

WPMBA recruitment is currently underway, with the program accepting applications for Spring and Autumn 2022.

Ohio State graduate programs score high marks from U.S. News & World Report

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0400

Sixteen of The Ohio State University’s graduate and professional programs are ranked in the top 10 in their fields in the nation, according to the U.S. News & World Report 2022 edition of America’s Best Graduate Schools.

Seven colleges have top 10 graduate and professional programs in the latest rankings: the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business (Fisher), Education and Human Ecology, Engineering, Law (Moritz), Nursing, and Public Affairs (John Glenn). U.S. News’ rankings of graduate and professional programs cover just a small portion of the programs offered at Ohio State, and not all programs are ranked each year.

“The excellence displayed across the university reflects Ohio State’s focus on developing the next generation of leaders throughout society,” said Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron. “Our comprehensive scope and focus on collaboration across disciplines acts as a force multiplier, preparing our graduate and professional students for leadership roles.”

Ohio State enrolls more than 14,000 graduate and professional students in 90 doctoral and 110 master's programs.

The Top 10 graduate and professional programs include dispute resolution (2), pediatric primary care nurse practitioner (3), business supply chain/logistics (4), psychiatric/mental health nurse practitioner (5), student counseling and personnel (5), doctor of nursing practice: administration (6), higher education administration (8), public management and leadership (8), education administration and supervision (9), business production/operations (9), nursing master’s (9), adult/gerontological primary care nurse practitioner (10), biological/agricultural engineering (10), part-time MBA (10), social stratification (10) and sociology of population (10).

Below are some highlights from U.S. News’ 2022 rankings of Ohio State graduate programs, by college.

The College of Arts and Sciences has five of its social sciences and humanities programs newly ranked this year. Political science is ranked 17th, sociology is ranked 18th, and economics, English and history are each ranked 30th among programs in the United States. Additionally, political science, which ranks sixth among programs at public universities, houses top specialties in American politics (11), international politics (12), political methodology (13) and comparative politics (20). Sociology, ranking eighth among programs at public universities, boasts two specialties ranked 10th in the nation: social stratification and sociology of population. Finally, English’s specialty in American literature after 1865 is ranked 13th.

Led by its MBA for Working Professionals Program (WPMBA), Fisher College of Business is home to two graduate programs highly ranked in the 2022 list. The WPMBA program was 10th among all U.S. programs (rising three spots), and fifth among U.S. publics — up two spots. Its full-time MBA program was 14th among U.S. publics. In addition, several specialty areas were highly ranked: supply chain management (4) and productions/operations (9).

The College of Education and Human Ecology ranks 28 out of 277 graduate education programs nationwide, putting it in the top 10% of similar programs. Three of its specialty graduate education programs were ranked in the top 10 nationally, and four additional programs made the top 20 list.

The College of Engineering’s graduate program is ranked first in Ohio and 16th among all public universities. Several departments within the college also placed among the top programs in the nation. The Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering ranked 10th among its peers within American universities. The Department of Materials Science and Engineering retained its rank of 12th overall. Other top 25 engineering disciplines at Ohio State include nuclear engineering (15), industrial/manufacturing engineering (16), aerospace engineering (19) and computer engineering (22). Overall, 216 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees were surveyed. Ohio State Engineering is ranked 30th overall.

Moritz College of Law ranked best in Ohio and 40th in the nation out of 193 accredited law schools. The specialty program in dispute resolution is ranked second in the nation and five programs rank in the top 25 in the country: dispute resolution, criminal law, contract law, health law, and legal writing.

The College of Medicine ranked 28th in the ranking of Best Medical Schools–Primary Care, moving up 10 spots versus last year, and ranked 33rd among Best Medical Schools–Research, moving up one spot. In addition, Ohio State ranked seventh for Most Diverse Medical Schools, a new category this year. Specialty programs in surgery ranked 17th, anesthesiology ranked 18th and pediatrics ranked 21st. This recognizes the College of Medicine as one of the most diverse institutions in the country, providing top-tier medical and graduate education programs.

The College of Nursing’s master of science in nursing and doctor of nursing practice (DNP) programs were recognized for excellence in academic rigor and outcomes, with several specialization tracks singled out as top-five programs among public institutions. The rankings included ninth overall and third among public colleges for the master of science in nursing and 18th overall and eighth among public colleges for the DNP programs. This is the third consecutive year that the College of Nursing’s master’s program ranks in the nation’s top 10 and that its DNP program ranks in the nation’s top 20.

The John Glenn College of Public Affairs is ranked 13th in the country out of 285 ranked schools, placing it among the top 5% of public affairs graduate professional degree programs. No other public affairs program in Ohio is ranked in the top 50 schools. The college is also rated in eight out of 12 specialties ranked by U.S. News.

The College of Public Health is ranked first in Ohio and in the top 25 in the nation among 188 public health schools and programs accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health. The college’s specialty program in health care management — the Master of Health Administration — was also ranked first in the state and seventh overall in the most recent analysis of those programs.

A number of Ohio State programs earned high marks in previous years and the magazine reprints rankings from previous years in some fields.

In the sharing economy, consumers see themselves as helpers

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 07:28:28 -0400

Whether you use a taxi or a rideshare app like Uber, you’re still going to get a driver who will take you to your destination.

But consumers view an employee of a taxi company differently from an independent driver picking up riders via an app, a new Ohio State University study suggests.

Consumers see themselves as helping independent providers like those on rideshare apps. When they use traditional firms, like a taxi company, they don’t view themselves as helping the employees – they’re just purchasing a service.

The peer-to-peer business model of firms like Uber or Airbnb is changing how consumers view some service providers, said John Costello, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in marketing at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business.

“Previous work has shown that consumers view employees as being an extension of the company they work for,” Costello said.

“But we found that consumers see providers for these peer-to-peer companies as separate from the company – as people just like themselves.”

The study was published online recently in the Journal of Marketing.

These different views of service providers have important implications for how firms like Uber and Airbnb market themselves to consumers, the study found. It may also have consequences for issues like how consumers tip independent providers and their support for regulations in the sharing economy.

Results showed that peer-to-peer companies had better success marketing themselves to consumers when they focused on the people that provide their service, and less success when they focused on their companies or apps.

“When peer-to-peer companies focus their marketing on the people who provide their services, we found it made consumers think about how their purchases benefit the individual providers,” said study co-author Rebecca Reczek, professor of marketing at Ohio State’s Fisher College.

“But when peer-to-peer firms focused on their apps instead, it makes people think that they’re just purchasing from a company rather than thinking about how their purchase helps an individual.”

In one real-life field study, the researchers partnered with a peer-to-peer company whose app allowed college students to buy or rent textbooks from each other.

The company set up a table on a college campus for several days to promote their service. On half the days, the banner on the table and the promotional cards they had available focused on using the company’s app to buy or rent books. On the other half of the days, the banner and cards focused on how you could buy or rent books directly from your classmates.

Results showed that more of the promotional cards were taken when the focus was on the student providers (379) than when the focus was on the app itself (281).

In a second study, 259 students were shown ads for one of two fictitious firms, either “Reliable Rideshare” or “Reliable Cab.” Some of the ads focused on the companies themselves (the cab or the rideshare company) and some focused on people (employees of the cab company or drivers for the rideshare company).

Participants were also asked if they thought their purchases from either the rideshare or cab company would help someone.

Findings showed that consumers were more likely to say they would purchase from the rideshare company when the ad focused on the providers rather than the company itself. But for the cab company, the ads’ focus made no difference in purchase intention.

The reason was that participants were more likely to say their purchases were helping people when they used the rideshare drivers than when they used the cab company employees, the study found.

“When people are buying from an employee, like those who work for a taxi company, they don’t really think of themselves as helping these workers. They’re just making a transaction,” Costello said.

Overall, the results show that peer-to-peer companies should focus on people who provide their services in their ads and marketing materials, Reczek said.

But the findings may also have wider implications. For example, if people think they are already helping rideshare drivers simply by hiring them, they may be less likely to tip them or tip them less. They may also be less likely to support regulations that financially protect these workers.

But some research suggests that rideshare drivers often make less than minimum wage, she noted.

“This perception of consumers that they’re helping simply through their purchases may have negative consequences for providers,” Reczek said.

“Their beliefs may not match the economic reality of what it is like to be a provider for a peer-to-peer firm.”

Researchers find the worst reason to give a gift

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 06:27:19 -0400

Here’s a good way to make sure a friend hates a gift from you: Say it will save him money.

In a series of studies, researchers found that people reacted negatively to gifts that they were told – or that they inferred – were given to help them save money.

Receiving this kind of present makes a person feel inferior to the gift-giver, the research found. People are more receptive to gifts that are intended to save them time.

“Most of us have this belief that any gift we give is going to be appreciated – but the way a gift is presented can influence how people feel about it,” said Grant Donnelly, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

The study was published recently in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

While money-saving gifts often miss the mark, gifts intended to save people time are seen as a compliment, Donnelly said.

“When you don’t have time, you’re perceived as busy and in high demand. There’s something high-status about that, compared to not having enough money, which is seen as low status,” he said.

In one study, the researchers asked 405 people recruited online to recall recently receiving a gift that they thought was intended by the gift-giver to save them either time or money.

They were asked to write a few sentences about how they felt about the gift and then completed various measures assessing their impression of the gift and gift-giver.

Results showed that those who received the gift intended to save them money were more likely to say the gift made them feel embarrassed, ashamed and bad, compared to those who recalled the time-saving gift.

The reason? Those who received the money-saving gift reported that they believed the gift-giver perceived their own status as higher than the recipient’s.

“They thought the gift-giver was implying they couldn’t take care of themselves and were incompetent because they needed money,” Donnelly said.

The results held true in a real-world situation, too. The researchers provided 200 college students with a $5 Starbucks gift card to give to a friend. Half of the gift cards included the message “I know you’ve been stressed for money lately. I hope you’ll enjoy this gift card in hopes that it will save you some money.”

The other half had a message that was identical except the message was that it would save them time, rather than money.

All gift cards had a survey for the gift recipients to return to the researchers.

Results were identical to the first study: Those who received gift cards intended to save them money had more negative emotions than those who received the cards intended to save them time. In addition, those who received the money-saving cards said they thought the gift-givers believed they were higher-status than themselves.

If there was any bright spot for the people who sent the money-saving gift card, it was that their friends were just as likely to redeem the card as those who received it as a time-saver, Donnelly said.

Another study showed that people who imagined getting a gift card intended to save them money were more likely to choose to buy a higher-status item with that card – presumably to boost their self-esteem that was damaged with the money-saving gift.

“In part because people feel they have lower status if they need money, they are more drawn to buy status-oriented products that can help them bolster this deficiency they perceive,” Donnelly said.

But sending your friends gifts to save them money doesn’t just make them feel bad about themselves. In one study, participants felt less appreciation for a money-saving gift than for a gift intending to save them time, or a gift with no communicated motive.

Donnelly said it is important for people to consider the message they send with their gifts.

“We can have this perspective gap where we don’t really consider how our gifts are received. It can harm your relationship with the recipient if you’re not careful,” he said.

“It may be best to give a money-saving gift without acknowledging the reason, or to find a way to make it about saving time.”

Co-authors on the study were Alice Lee-Yoon, a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ashley Whillans, assistant professor at the Harvard Business School.

Mangurian Foundation $10 million gift to support six diverse Ohio State areas

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 09:31:12 -0500

The Harry T. Mangurian, Jr. Foundation is making its largest-ever gift to The Ohio State University – $10 million to support dementia and leukemia research, cancer drug development, health and wellness initiatives for student-athletes and scholarships for business students.

Harry and Dorothy Mangurian established the Harry T. Mangurian, Jr. Foundation in 1999 to provide support to medical, educational and environmental organizations nationally and internationally. Mangurian, a Florida businessman and former owner of the Boston Celtics, died of leukemia in 2008. His wife died in 2015 after being diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, the third most common form of dementia.

“For two decades, the Mangurian Foundation has helped Ohio State champion human potential — developing leaders and healers while creating healthy, vibrant communities,” said Ohio State President Michael V. Drake. “We are deeply grateful for how this gift advances this important work and creates bright futures for patients, students and student-athletes alike.”

The gift includes $5 million for the Interdisciplinary Research Facility in the new West Campus Innovation District. The proposed five-story, 305,000-square-foot laboratory will serve multiple research disciplines, including biomedical, life sciences, engineering and environmental, among others. The building will support both wet lab and computational researchers, and will include the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology.

The remaining $5 million will be divided equally among:

Drug Discoveries – accelerates cancer drug discoveries at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James and Richard J. Solove Research Institute’s Drug Development Institute.
Leukemia Research – supports medical research for leukemia, including additional clinical trials, developing novel synthetic microRNAs and purchasing equipment.
Neurological Disease Research – supports science to advance new diagnostics and treatments for neurological conditions, including Lewy body and other dementias, gene therapy and neuro-inflammation.
MBA Program – supports the Max M. Fisher College of Business partnership with the Drug Development Institute, including scholarships for business students focusing on drug development.
Health and Wellness – supports student-athlete health and wellness initiatives with Ohio State Athletics, including upgrading and replacing strength, conditioning and biomechanics equipment and expanding the use of diagnostic, tracking, performance and recovery tools and techniques.

“The Mangurian Foundation has been a longtime, loyal supporter of the university, and their generous gift will have broad, meaningful impact here,” said Dr. Hal Paz, executive vice president and chancellor for health affairs at Ohio State and CEO of Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. “We’re deeply thankful for their philanthropic investment across the medical center, athletics and our business college. I’m personally thrilled to see the tremendous breakthroughs that will come as a result of this gift.”

This new funding builds on previous gifts from the Mangurian Foundation that have supported brain and human performance research with athletics and Ohio State’s Neurological Institute, along with cancer drug development.

“Our Foundation Board is thrilled to support the collaborative, innovative and groundbreaking research being conducted across the Ohio State campus involving student athletes, business students and medical researchers focusing on cancer and neurological conditions,” said Stephen Mehallis, president of the Mangurian Foundation. “Our goal is to continue to support visionary research that will change and save lives.”

This new gift comes amid Time and Change: The Ohio State Campaign, the university’s largest fundraising endeavor in its 150-year history. It strives to engage one million supporters, an unprecedented level in higher education. The goal is to raise $4.5 billion for three core areas of focus: student success, discovery and healthy, vibrant communities.

Share your goals – but be careful whom you tell

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 06:00:00 -0400

If you want to achieve a goal, make sure you share your objective with the right person.

In a new set of studies, researchers found that people showed greater goal commitment and performance when they told their goal to someone they believed had higher status than themselves.

It didn’t help people at all to tell their goals to someone they thought had lower status, or to keep their objectives to themselves.

These results run counter to a widely reported 2009 study that suggested telling other people your goals is actually counterproductive, said Howard Klein, lead author of the new study and professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“Contrary to what you may have heard, in most cases you get more benefit from sharing your goal than if you don’t – as long as you share it with someone whose opinion you value,” Klein said.

Results showed that people were motivated by sharing a goal with someone they thought had higher status because they cared about how that higher-status person would evaluate them.

“You don’t want them to think less of you because you didn’t attain your goal,” Klein said.

In these studies, higher-status people were those who the participants thought had more prestige and respect than they did.

The study was published online recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.

In one study, the researchers found that working adults frequently do share their personal career goals and that their commitment to attaining those goals was higher when those goals were shared with someone higher in status.

In another study, 171 undergraduate students were seated at computers and told they had to move a slider on the screen to the number 50 as many times as possible within the allotted time.

After counting how many times they successfully did this, they had to do it again, but this time they were told to set and write down a goal.

The experimenter then informed participants that a lab assistant would come around and check on their goals. The same person always checked on the participants’ goals – but there were two different versions of this assistant.

In some cases, the lab assistant was dressed in a suit and introduced himself as a doctoral-level student in the business school who was an expert on today’s study topic. That was someone the undergraduate participants agreed was a higher-status person than themselves.

For other participants, the same lab assistant dressed in casual clothing and introduced himself as a student at a local community college who was working part time at the business school. In this case, the students rated the assistant as lower in status than themselves.

A third group of participants didn’t share their goals with the lab assistant.

Results showed that participants who shared their goals with the higher-status lab assistant reported that they were more committed to achieving the goal they set for themselves than were those who told the lower-status assistant.

And, in fact, those whose goals were seen by the higher-status assistant did perform better on the task than did the others.

Participants who shared their goal with the lower-status assistant performed no better than those who told no one about their goal.

“If you don’t care about the opinion of whom you tell, it doesn’t affect your desire to persist – which is really what goal commitment is all about,” Klein said.

“You want to be dedicated and unwilling to give up on your goal, which is more likely when you share that goal with someone you look up to.”

A third similar study also asked participants about their “evaluation apprehension” – how much they cared about what the lab assistant thought of them.

The results showed that participants who cared more about what the lab assistant thought of them were more committed to their goal and were more likely to achieve it. In addition, evaluation apprehension was higher when the lab assistant was viewed as having higher status.

Evaluation apprehension may be one key to why it helps to tell a higher-status person about your goals, Klein said.

But it may be possible to take that too far.

“We didn’t find it in this study, but it is possible that you may create so much anxiety in trying to impress someone that it could interfere with your performance,” Klein said.

A final, more long-term study examined 292 college students over the course of an entire semester. The participants set challenging grade goals at the beginning of the semester and shared them.

As in the other studies, students who told higher-status people about their goal showed more goal commitment and were more likely to achieve their target grade than those who told lower-status people.

These findings provide evidence that counters popular media recommendations – including a TED talk with more than 6 million views – that one should stay silent about a goal, Klein said.

Those recommendations are based on an oversimplification of one journal article, the results of which run counter to the majority of studies in the field, he said.

So whom should you share your goals with?

For work goals, a supervisor is an obvious choice, but it depends on the situation, Klein said. If your goal is to get a better job or if you have another goal you would not want your supervisor to know, a mentor may be a better choice. You can even look to someone you admire outside of work to tell.

No matter what kind of goal you’re talking about, one thing matters when sharing, according to Klein.

“The important thing is that you need to care about the opinion of who you are telling,” he said.

Klein’s co-authors were Robert Lount, professor, and Bryce Linford, doctoral student, both in management and human resources at Ohio State; and Hee Man Park of Penn State University.

Fisher College of Business transforms MBA experience at Ohio State

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 08:17:04 -0500

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business is transforming its Master of Business Administration programs.

The college just completed a comprehensive redesign of the Full-Time MBA program, which takes advantage of Fisher’s strong relationships with employers and recruiters to cultivate career competencies sought by organizations.

“Continuous innovation is a priority which is explicitly highlighted in the college’s strategic plan. This innovation guides our approach to how all of our programs are delivered,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business at Fisher.

The program offers students an experience designed to be more personalized, applied and integrated than ever, adding to a functional curriculum delivered by world-class faculty. The Full-Time MBA now utilizes student assessments to tailor an individualized experience that maximizes growth while addressing students’ professional needs.

Students will undergo an assessment at the beginning of their MBA experience to identify their strengths and skills gaps. Their program builds on these strengths to close the gaps so they earn an MBA that fits and distinguishes them in the marketplace.

Each student has access to a team dedicated to their success: a conventional academic adviser, career consultant, mentor and professional development coach. The comprehensive support team provides continuous feedback throughout the MBA journey.

Along with teaching by a renowned faculty and built-in enhanced experiential learning with businesses, the program’s coaching and assessment component is a major differentiator among MBA offerings.

The Full-Time MBA includes a revamped curriculum that incorporates immersive, cross-functional projects with top companies and organizations locally and globally. Program elements such as the Global Applied Projects with international experience, Business Lab Project involving top companies and Core Capstone Experience with integrated content provide MBA students with opportunities to apply insights learned in the classroom, shape business through consulting projects and maximize social impact.

“The data-driven approach to this redesign has yielded a Full-Time MBA program that is able to maximize the potential of each student,” said Roger Bailey, co-director of Fisher’s Full-Time MBA program and a senior lecturer in marketing. “We are excited about how these many changes leverage Fisher’s strengths, and the increased value it will provide to our students, our alumni and the greater business community.”

Along with the enhancements to its MBA program, Fisher continues to innovate across its other graduate degree offerings.

“Whether through the added flexibility offered to our Working Professional MBA students, or recognizing that every Full-Time MBA experience can — and should — be unique, we’re meeting students where they are and equipping them to get to where they want to go,” Makhija said.

In 2017, Fisher augmented its Working Professionals MBA program by adding to its weekday evening format the flexibility of a weekend option for busy students who simultaneously juggle responsibilities with family, work and school. Now, students can access a top-10 nationally ranked program at Ohio’s flagship university through a weekend option that provides free round-trip transportation in Wi-Fi-equipped buses for students traveling to Columbus from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton.

Earlier this year, Fisher launched a Specialized Master in Business Analytics to meet marketplace demand for business professionals equipped with data and analytics skills. The 10-month program has a hybrid format that blends online instruction with weekend classes to accommodate the schedules of working and non-working professionals.

“Just as the needs of businesses and industries change, the methods by which we’re equipping the next generation of leaders are constantly evolving,” said Walter Zinn, associate dean for graduate students and programs at Fisher. “These enhancements are great first steps, and we look forward to fostering continued innovation in how we’re shaping our graduate programs and our students.”

Why popcorn tastes better when you eat it with chopsticks

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

If you are not enjoying your favorite things as much as you used to, new research suggests a way to break through the boredom: Try the same old things in new ways.

Researchers found that people found new enjoyment in popcorn, videos – even water – when they consumed them in unconventional ways.

Findings suggested that using unconventional consumption methods helped people focus on what they enjoyed about the product in the first place, said Robert Smith, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“When you eat popcorn with chopsticks, you pay more attention and you are more immersed in the experience,” Smith said.

“It’s like eating popcorn for the first time.”

This phenomenon may explain such things as the popularity of “pitch black” restaurants that serve diners in the dark.

“It may not be anything special about darkness that makes us enjoy food more. It may be the mere fact that dining in the dark is unusual,” Smith said.

Smith conducted the study with Ed O’Brien of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The results appear online in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The researchers conducted four experiments.

In one study, 68 people came to a laboratory supposedly for an experiment about “helping people eat more slowly.” Half the people ate 10 kernels of popcorn using their hands, one at a time. The other half ate the kernels one at a time with chopsticks.

Afterward, participants rated the experience on a variety of measures, including how much they enjoyed the popcorn, how flavorful it was and how much fun it was to eat it.

Results showed that people who ate the popcorn using chopsticks reported enjoying it more than those who used their hands, Smith said.

Another finding suggested why that might be.

Those who used chopsticks – compared to those who ate with their hands – reported that they felt more immersed in the experience, that it helped intensify the taste and helped them focus on the food.

But the researchers then had the participants repeat the experiment. In this second trial, everyone enjoyed the popcorn equally and felt equally immersed, regardless of how they ate it.

“This suggests chopsticks boost enjoyment because they provide an unusual first-time experience, not because they are a better way to eat popcorn,” Smith said.

A second study of 300 participants recruited online found that even drinking water was rated as more enjoyable when it was done in novel ways. In this study, participants came up with their own “fresh, new and fun” ways to drink water – everything from drinking out of a martini glass to drinking out of a shipping envelope to lapping at the water with their tongue like a cat.

Those who drank water in these novel ways enjoyed it more than those who drank it normally.

In the final two studies – one conducted in a lab and one done online – participants watched a one-minute video three times in a row. The video showed an exciting motorcycle ride filmed with a GoPro camera from the driver’s perspective.

All participants watched it twice normally, rating how much they enjoyed it after each viewing.

But the third viewing was different for some participants.

One-third were asked to watch the videos using “hand-goggles” – forming circles with their thumbs and index fingers around their eyes, and using them to track the ride by bobbing their head back and forth to follow the cyclist.

For another third of the participants, the video was flipped upside down. The final third watched the video in the conventional way.

As expected, those who watched the video in the conventional way showed less enjoyment by the third viewing. Those who watched the video upside down didn’t enjoy it very much because, even though the viewing was unconventional, it was also disruptive.

However, those who watched the video for the third time with hand-goggles enjoyed it more than the other groups.

But did participants really enjoy the video more – or did they just like the strange experience of using hand-goggles? Results suggest the unconventional way of watching really did make the video itself more enjoyable.

After the study, the researchers offered to let all participants download the video to keep – and three times more people who watched with hand-goggles asked to download the video than those in the other conditions.

“They actually thought the video was better because the hand-goggles got them to pay more attention to what they were watching than they would have otherwise,” he said. “They were more immersed in the video.”

Smith said these findings apply in a variety of ways to everyday life.

For example, when you’re eating pizza, after eating one slice normally, you could try eating one slice with a knife and fork and then folding the next slice.

And if you’re sick of your sofa, try putting it in another room rather than getting rid of it.

“It may be easier to make it feel new than you might think. It is also a lot less wasteful to find new ways to enjoy the things we have rather than buying new things,” he said.

Keenan Family Foundation establishes Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship at The Ohio State University

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

The Keenan Family Foundation has made a $17 million commitment to The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business, strengthening the university’s expertise in the field of entrepreneurship. The Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship will focus on cultivating students’ entrepreneurial skill sets and create an enriched extracurricular experience around entrepreneurship. The students will be connected to the startup ecosystem in central Ohio and beyond.

“Kathleen and I have dedicated our philanthropic lives to the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to help regions of the country that need new job development,” Tim Keenan said. “Our first endeavor was in upstate and central New York and now we have focused on the Midwest. We are excited to partner with The Ohio State University and Fisher College of Business to position the university as a thought leader and focal point of action for the Midwest and the nation as a whole.

“We are confident that the talented students of Ohio State, combined with the faculty and staff, will position the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship as an impact leader across all industries, and that it will be a driving contributor to job creation in Ohio and the nation.”

“The Tim and Kathleen Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship is a remarkable resource for our students as well as Ohio’s rapidly growing start-up ecosystem,” said Ohio State President Michael V. Drake. “Their inspiring gift honors Buckeye Nation’s proud entrepreneurial legacy, while laying the educational foundation for tomorrow’s business leaders. I am truly grateful to Tim and Kathleen for their longstanding service and generosity to Ohio State.”

Pending approval by Ohio State’s Board of Trustees, The Ohio State University Tim and Kathleen Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship will provide generations of future leaders with the capabilities to turn ideas into action.

“We are honored that Tim and Kathleen have entrusted Fisher College of Business and Ohio State to equip and empower our students and thought leaders with the skills, experiences and insights to produce the next great breakthrough, technology or process,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business at Fisher. “We look forward to working with the Keenans to carry out our shared vision for this exciting new chapter in how we create and foster entrepreneurially spirited leaders.”

The Keenan Family Foundation was established by Tim (BS ’80) and Kathleen Keenan in 2012. Tim Keenan is currently the CEO of Keenan & Associates, a company that works with small- to mid-sized organizations to provide direction and guidance with strategic planning and development. He also serves as the vice president and treasurer of the Keenan Family Foundation. In addition to making one of the largest commitments recorded at Fisher, Tim Keenan is a longtime member of the college’s Dean’s Advisory Council, served as an adviser to The Ohio State Office of Research in advancing the Ohio Technology Consortium and is a life member of The Ohio State University Alumni Association.

About The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business provides tomorrow’s business leaders with the foundation needed to succeed in business today. Led by world-class faculty, Fisher students experience an academically rigorous learning environment that fosters the development of an entrepreneurial spirit, global awareness and principled leadership skills. Organizations from around the globe thrive under the leadership of Fisher alumni, who are positively impacting their communities and the world.

When consumers don’t want to talk about what they bought

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

One of the joys of shopping for many people is the opportunity to brag about their purchases to friends and others.

But new research found one common situation in which people would rather not discuss what they just bought: when they’re feeling like money is a little tight.

In a series of studies, researchers found that consumers who felt financially constrained didn’t want to talk about their purchases, large or small, with friends or strangers, face-to-face or online.

“It wasn’t about what other people might think or what they bought. Consumers who feel poor at the moment don’t want to talk about their purchases because it reinforces negative feelings about their unpleasant financial state,” said Anna Paley, lead author of the study and a visiting scholar in marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

One reason that the results are so interesting, Paley said, was because they could have gone in the other direction.

“One plausible theory was that consumers who felt poor would chat more about their purchases as a way to show their spending ability and validate their decision to spend the money,” she said. “But that’s not what we found.”

Paley emphasized that this study wasn’t about whether people were rich or poor. This was about the feeling that they didn’t have as much money as they wanted. “Millionaires can feel financially constrained too,” she said.

Paley conducted the study with Stephanie Tully of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and Eesha Sharma of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Their results appear online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers conducted seven studies.

In one study, the researchers found that participants who reported feeling financially constrained also were less likely to talk about products they bought with friends, family members and colleagues.

The results held even after taking into account the income of participants.

“This suggests that our results can’t be explained by differences in objective wealth,” Paley said.

A second study recruited online participants. They were told the study was about “what people talk about.” All of them answered questions probing how financially constrained they felt.

Participants had the choice of posting in one of two chat rooms – one called “recent purchases” and the other called “local/state parks.” The researchers chose this topic because in a previous study, a separate group of people had rated parks to be a less interesting topic than recent purchases.

Nearly two-thirds of participants chose to discuss recent purchases rather than parks. But participants who felt financially constrained were significantly more likely to post in the parks chat room.

“Consumers who felt poorer would rather talk about a less interesting topic than discuss what they bought recently,” Paley said.

The results held up in another study in which the researchers induced some participants to feel poorer by writing about aspects of their financial situation that made them feel like they didn’t have enough money.

These participants were less likely to say they would talk about an upcoming purchase than participants who wrote about another subject.

In this study, the researchers also asked participants to report on how talking about a purchase would make them feel about their financial situation.

“We found that financially constrained consumers expected less enjoyment from talking about their purchases because it would bring up negative feelings about their money situation,” she said.

The researchers found a few exceptions in other studies. When people thought about their purchases as expenditures of their time rather than expenditures of their money, even those who felt money was tight would talk about them. The same went for gifts and tickets to a free event.

The findings are important for marketers because consumers consistently rate word-of-mouth as one of the most trustworthy and credible sources of information about products and services, Paley said.

Their findings suggest some things marketers can do to encourage word-of-mouth.

“Word-of-mouth campaigns will be more effective if marketers can separate the cost of the item from the experience of sharing the purchase,” she said.

For example, many online retailers send people a receipt after a purchase with a request that they share about what they bought with friends on social media.

“If the money you spent is right there in front of you on your receipt and you’re feeling a little poor at the moment, you’re not going to want to share,” she said. “Marketers should consider separating receipts and sharing requests.”

Why an upcoming appointment makes us less productive

Wed, 23 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

You’ve got a full hour until your next meeting. But you probably won’t make the most of that time, new research suggests.

In a series of eight studies, both in the lab and real life, researchers found that free time seems shorter to people when it comes before a task or appointment on their calendar.

“We seem to take a mental tax out of our time right before an appointment,” said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business

“We figure something might come up, we might need some extra time, even when there’s no need to do that. As a result, we do less with the available time.”

The study appears online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In an online study of 198 people, Malkoc and her colleagues asked some participants to imagine they had a friend coming over to visit in one hour and “you are all ready for your friend to come by.” The others were told that they had no plans for the evening.

All participants were asked how many minutes “objectively” they could spend reading during the next hour and how many minutes they “subjectively” felt like they could spend reading during that same hour.

“Regardless of whether they had a friend coming by or not, participants said that they objectively had about 50 minutes available to read,” Malkoc said.

“That’s an amazing finding right there. Most people didn’t think even objectively they had a full hour to read. People are putting a little ‘just-in-case’ time into their schedules when there is no real reason to do that.”

When they were asked how much time they felt they had to read – the subjective measurement – those with a friend coming by felt that they had 10 more minutes missing in their hour – about 40 minutes.

The results held up in real-life studies as well.

The researchers asked participants recruited online to provide their actual schedules for the next day. Participants indicated when each scheduled task on their calendar would begin and how much time they would need before each task to prepare.

Participants were then offered the opportunity to take part in either a 30-minute or a 45-minute study on that day. The 30-minute study paid $2.50 and the 45-minute study paid twice as much: $5.

For some participants, the study was scheduled in the one hour before they said they had to start getting ready for their next appointment. The others were not scheduled up against another of their appointments.

Even though they had plenty of time to finish the 45-minute study, participants who had an appointment in an hour were significantly more likely than the others to choose the 30-minute study instead of the 45-minute version.

“It was clear they would have plenty of time to finish and have extra time before their next appointment, but they still were more likely to choose the 30-minute study – even when they had a clear financial incentive to choose the longer study,” Malkoc said.

People also seem to get more done when they don’t have a scheduled task hanging over their heads, the researchers found.

In a study of 158 college students, a researcher told participants when they arrived at the lab that study sessions were running faster than expected so she wanted to wait to see if more participants arrived.

Some participants were reminded that they had a task coming up soon: They were told “they had about five minutes before we could get started. You can do whatever you want before we will get started.”

Others weren’t reminded about their upcoming task and were simply told “they had about five minutes to do whatever you want.”

After the time had passed, all participants wrote down what they did during the five-minute interval. The students indicated they did things like sending a text message, checking email and visiting social media sites.

But those who weren’t reminded they had an upcoming task performed more activities (an average of 2.38) than those who were told they had a task soon (an average of 1.86).

“You don’t feel like you can get as much done when you have a task coming up soon. The time seems shorter,” Malkoc said.

These findings suggest that looming tasks on our calendar make us less productive, according to Malkoc.

“We feel that if we have a meeting in two hours, we shouldn’t work on any big projects. So we may spend time just answering emails or doing things that aren’t as productive,” she said.

That may explain why, on days when we have meetings spread throughout, we feel like we have accomplished little. The problem is that we aren’t maximizing the time in between those meetings, she said.

One solution, she said, is to try to stack all your meetings together. That way, you have longer, uninterrupted times when you feel you can tackle the bigger projects on your agenda.

It is also good to remind yourself of how much time you really do have available.

“We seem to overestimate the things that might happen to take up our time, so we don’t get things done,” she said.

Malkoc conducted the study with Gabriella Tonietto, assistant professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, and Stephen Nowlis, professor of marketing at Washington University’s Olin Business School.

Why some of your old work commitments never seem to go away

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

You can quit work commitments if you want – but some of them never really leave you, new research suggests.

In a study of 420 employees representing a wide variety of occupations and work settings at three organizations, researchers found that commitments that workers no longer had were still lingering in their minds.

“It was clear to us that past commitments were still affecting employees,” said Howard Klein, lead author of the study and professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

While these effects could be positive or negative, the study revealed that many employees harbor negative feelings about long-gone obligations that their supervisors may not realize.

“We need to find out what managers can do to mitigate the negative effects of these prior commitments that may be holding people back in their jobs,” Klein said.

The study appears online in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries.

While there has been a lot of research on commitment in the workplace, Klein said he believes this is the first to examine the impact of past commitments.

The researchers called these “quondam commitments.” Quondam means “that which once was.” Workplace commitments examined in the study included those to organizations, supervisors, workplace teams, projects, goals or occupations, among others.

The research involved surveys of employees at a health care facility, a financial institution and a large, unionized manufacturing plant. As this was an exploratory study, the researchers asked employees just two questions: The first asked participants to describe in a few words a specific thing that they were committed to at work but were not anymore. The second asked them to say why they no longer had that commitment.

After reading the responses, the researchers sorted them into 11 broad reasons for why commitments ended. The most common was changes in work circumstances, which included about 30 percent of all responses. This could involve changed jobs or positions or shifted responsibilities.

“The fact that changes in work circumstances was the No. 1 reason was surprising to me,” Klein said. “We all talk about the rapidly changing workplace, but I still didn’t expect it to be the most cited reason for commitments ending.”

The second most common reason, cited 16 percent of the time, was over-commitment. This included conflicting responsibilities or there simply not being enough time or capacity to fulfill all of one’s obligations.

“Over-commitment at work hasn’t been given the attention it deserves. Our findings suggest we need to look at this a lot more closely,” he said.

“There is evidence that having commitments facilitates well-being because it gives you a sense of purpose. But commitments become a problem when employees feel they have too many to keep up.”

Indeed, “negative effects on well-being” was another category of identified reasons for no longer being committed.

Several of the other reasons cited for quondam commitments also had troubling implications for companies, including “negative perceptions of other personnel,” “negative perception of leadership/management,” and a “significant negative work event.”

A strong negative quondam commitment could make employees reluctant to fully commit to new projects, supervisors or goals in their jobs, Klein said.

“The closest thing to this that has been studied is romantic relationships. Workplace commitments are not the same, of course, but there are parallels,” he said.

“People talk about how they have been burned in the past and don’t want to make the same mistake again. Something similar could happen to employees whose past work commitments didn’t end when, or the way, they wanted.”

Klein said that, as an exploratory study, this research asks a lot more questions than it answers. But it points out the need to take quondam commitments seriously in the workplace.

“We need to figure out when a quondam commitment is going to be positive or negative for both employee and/or the organization, and when its effects are going to linger or dissipate quickly,” he said.

“Companies today often need to pivot quickly and they need employees to change commitments just as fast. How managers deal with these changes for their employees, and the effects of prior commitments, is crucial.”

Klein’s co-authors on the study were Chad Brinsfield of the University of St. Thomas, Joseph Cooper of the University of Toledo and Janice Molloy of the University of Michigan – Dearborn.

Jeans made with child labor? People choose willful ignorance

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Many consumers have found a way to cope with the knowledge that products they like have been made unethically: They simply forget they ever knew it.

In a series of studies, researchers found that consumers conveniently “forgot” that brands of desks were made with wood from rainforests or that jeans may have been made with child labor.

In fact, consumers not only forget the uncomfortable truth, but sometimes misremember the facts and believe that the offending product was made ethically.

“It’s not necessarily a conscious decision by consumers to forget what they don’t want to know,” said Rebecca Reczek, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“It is a learned coping mechanism to tune out uncomfortable information because it makes their lives easier.”

The study appears online in the Journal of Consumer Research and will be published in a future print edition.

In one study, 236 college students were asked to read and memorize descriptions of six made-up brands of desks. The descriptions discussed quality, price and an ethical dimension – the source of the wood. Participants read that the wood either came from sustainable tree farms or endangered rainforests.

When asked immediately after memorization, participants accurately recalled whether the wood came from rainforests or tree farms in 94 percent of the cases.

But those memories faded quickly. After the participants completed 15 to 20 minutes of tasks meant to distract them, they were then given a sheet of paper with all six desk brand names and were asked to write down as much as they could remember about each desk.

Participants were right 60 percent of the time about desks made from tree farms, but right only 45 percent of the time about desks made of rainforest wood.

“It is not that the participants didn’t pay attention to where the wood came from. We know that they successfully memorized that information,” said study co-author Daniel Zane, a doctoral student in marketing at Ohio State.

“But they forget it in this systematic pattern. They remembered the quality and price attributes of the desks. It is only the ethical attributes that cause people to be willfully ignorant.”

A second study involved a national sample of 402 people who participated online. Here, participants were asked to put together an outfit that included a pair of jeans. About half of the participants saw a brand of jeans that was described as being made with child labor while the other half saw a brand of jeans made ethically, with no child labor.

Results were similar to the first study: People who saw the jeans made with child labor were much less likely to remember this information than people who saw a brand of jeans made with adult labor.

Why is forgetting ethical information so popular with consumers? Well, another study suggested that it makes people feel a little better about themselves.

In this study, the researchers had participants consider a hypothetical person named Chris who bought a pair of jeans made with child labor. In some cases, participants were told Chris had earlier learned that the jeans were made with child labor, but forgot when making the purchase. In other cases, participants were told Chris remembered the information, but ignored it when buying the jeans.

“What we found is that people judged the person who forgot the ethical information as more moral than the person who ignored the information,” Reczek said.

“So, for most people, forgetting is seen as the more acceptable coping strategy.”

If you really want to be an ethical consumer, there are steps you can take, Zane said.

“You need to realize that this memory bias exists and eliminate memory from your buying process,” he said.

“Don’t put something in your online shopping cart that you know was made unethically and say you’ll think about it. By the time you come back, there is a good chance you will have forgotten what troubled you in the first place.”

There’s a lesson for ethical companies too, Reczek said.

“Don’t make your customers rely on memory. Make sure you have reminders at the point of purchase that you’re an ethical brand,” she said.

Other co-authors were Julie Irwin, professor of business at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin; and Kristine Ehrich, lecturer of marketing at San Diego State University.

Sometimes, it pays for the boss to be humble

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 08:30:57 -0500

COLUMBUS, Ohio – It’s good to be humble when you’re the boss – as long as that’s what your employees expect.

Researchers studying workplaces in China found that some real-life teams showed more creativity if the employees rated their bosses as showing more humility.

“Whether leader humility is a good thing really depends on the team members’ expectations,” said Jia (Jasmine) Hu, lead author of the study and associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

Humble leaders are most effective when team members expect a low degree of distance between the leaders and followers, Hu explained. When there is low power distance, employees share power with their boss in a collaborative way.

Jasmine Hu

But humility may be seen as a weakness when the power distance is high and employees expect their boss to be dominant, take charge and give strong direction, she said.

“One practical implication for managers is that they need to understand what their team members expect and value from them,” Hu said.

The study, conducted with colleagues at Ohio State, Portland State University, and Renmin University of China, was published online recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

For the study, the researchers collected data on work teams and team leaders from 11 information and technology companies in a major city in northern China at three time points over six months. In all, the final study sample included 354 members from 72 teams.

At the beginning of the study, team members rated their leaders’ humility on a six-item scale. Workers rated how much they agreed with statements like “Our team leader is open to the advice of others.”

“Humble leaders were those who gave employees a chance to speak up and have a voice in the decision-making process and who also acknowledged their own limitations,” Hu said.

Power distance between team members and leaders was measured by asking workers how much they agreed with statements like “When a performance appraisal made by the supervisor does not fit with subordinates’ expectations, the employees should feel free to discuss it with the supervisor.” The more employees agreed with a statement like this, the lower the measured power distance assigned by the researchers.

Three months later, team members rated how much they shared information with each other. And six months after the start of the study, team leaders rated how creative their teams were.

Results showed that humble leaders promoted higher levels of creativity on their teams when team members had low power distance values.

The reason appeared to be that these teams exchanged and shared more information with each other than did other teams.

“Leaders who scored higher on humility tended to facilitate information sharing between team members,” Hu said.

“And when they shared more information with each other, they broadened the scope of team skills, more actively looked for novel solutions to problems, and were more creative.”

While this study was done in China, Hu said the results should be applicable to the United States. Other research has shown that, both in the United States and China, there is a wide variation in what employees expect from their managers and what they think their relationship should be like.

Other studies have also shown that levels of leader humility are similar in Chinese and U.S. samples.

One lesson from these results should be that a business leader’s success is not dependent only on his or her attributes, she said.

“It is not as easy as saying humility is always a good or a bad thing for leaders,” Hu explained.

“We often ignore the contextual factors that explain the failure or success of leaders. Leadership is not just about how leaders behave, but also about their team members and what they want and expect.”

Hu’s co-authors were Kaifeng Jiang, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State; Berrin Erdogan and Talya Bauer of Portland State; and Songbo Liu of Renmin University.

Want to rebound from failure? Feel the pain

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Feeling the pain of failure leads to more effort to correct your mistake than simply thinking about what went wrong, according to a new study.

Researchers found that people who just thought about a failure tended to make excuses for why they were unsuccessful and didn’t try harder when faced with a similar situation. In contrast, people who focused on their emotions following a failure put forth more effort when they tried again.

“All the advice tells you not to dwell on your mistakes, to not feel bad,” said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“But we found the opposite. When faced with a failure, it is better to focus on one’s emotions – when people concentrate on how bad they feel and how they don’t want to experience these feelings again, they are more likely to try harder the next time.”

Selin Malkoc

While thinking about how to improve from past mistakes might help – this study didn’t examine that – the researchers found that people who reflect on a failure do not tend to focus on ways to avoid a similar mistake.

When asked to think about their mistakes, most people focus on protecting their ego, Malkoc said. They think about how the failure wasn’t their fault, or how it wasn’t that big of a deal, anyway.

“If your thoughts are all about how to distance yourself from the failure, you’re not going to learn from your mistakes,” she said.

Malkoc conducted the study with Noelle Nelson of the University of Kansas and Baba Shiv of Stanford University. Their results appear online in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

The researchers conducted several studies. In one, 98 college students were asked to price search online for a blender with specific characteristics, and with the possibility of winning a cash prize if they found the lowest price.

Before they found out if they won, half the participants were told to focus on their emotional response to winning or losing, while the other half were instructed to focus on their thoughts about how they did. They were told they would write about their response afterward.

The price search task was rigged, though, and all participants found out that the lowest price was $3.27 less than what they found.

After writing about their failure, the students had a chance to redeem themselves.

The researchers wanted to find out if the effort put forth by participants in a new task would be related to whether they focused on their thoughts or emotions involving the previous failure. The researchers believed that a task similar to their failed job – in this case a search for the lowest price - would trigger participants into recalling their unsuccessful attempt, while an unrelated job would not.

So the participants were given another task. Half were asked to search for a gift book for a friend that was the best fit for their limited college-student budget. In other words, they were looking for the lowest price, as they were instructed in the first task.

The other half of the participants were given a non-similar task, which was to search for a book that would be the best choice as a gift for their friend.

The results showed emotional responses to failure motivated participants much more than cognitive ones when they were faced with a similar task.

Emotionally motivated participants spent nearly 25 percent more time searching for a low-priced book than did participants who had only thought about – rather than dwelled on the pain of – their earlier failure.

There was no significant difference in effort made by participants when the second task wasn’t like the first (when they were searching for the best gift, rather than the cheapest).

“When the participants focused on how bad they felt about failing the first time, they tried harder than others when they had another similar opportunity,” Malkoc said.

“But the situation has to be similar enough to trigger the pain of the initial failure.”

One reason why an emotional response to failure may be more effective than a cognitive one is the nature of people’s thoughts about their mistakes.

When the researchers analyzed what participants who thought about their failure wrote about, they found significantly more self-protective thoughts (“This wasn’t my fault,” “I could not have found it even if I tried”) than they did self-improvement thoughts (“I know how I can do better next time”).

Unfortunately, that may be the default mode for most people, at least in many everyday situations.

In another similar study, the researchers didn’t tell some participants how to respond to their failures. They found that these people tended to produce cognitive responses rather than emotional ones, and those cognitive responses were the kinds that protected themselves rather than focused on self-improvement.

Malkoc said that in most real-life situations, people probably have both cognitive and emotional responses to their failures. But the important thing to remember is not to avoid the emotional pain of failing, but to use that pain to fuel improvement.

“Emotional responses to failure can hurt. They make you feel bad. That’s why people often choose to think self-protective thoughts after they make mistakes,” she said.

“But if you focus on how bad you feel, you’re going to work harder to find a solution and make sure you don’t make the same mistake again.”

Scientists find clever way to help you de-clutter your home

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 04:57:26 -0400

Rebecca Reczek explains how to purge your home of stuff you can't bear to give up.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – If your attic is full of stuff you no longer use but can’t bear to give away, a new study may offer you a simple solution.

Researchers found that people were more willing to give away unneeded goods that still had sentimental value if they were encouraged to take a photo of these items first, or find another way to preserve the memories.

Such a strategy could help parents part with old baby clothes they no longer need or help a former athlete give up a favorite basketball or hockey stick.

“What people really don’t want to give up is the memories associated with the item,” said Rebecca Reczek, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“We found that people are more willing to give up these possessions if we offer them a way to keep the memory and the identity associated with that memory.”

Reczek conducted the study with Karen Winterich, associate professor of marketing at Pennsylvania State University, and Julie Irwin, professor of business at the University of Texas at Austin.

The results were just published online in the Journal of Marketing.

“The project got started when I realized I was keeping an old pair of basketball shorts just because they reminded me of beating a major rival basketball team in junior high,” Winterich said.

“I didn’t want the shorts – I wanted the memory of winning that game and that’s what I thought of when I saw the shorts. A picture can easily mark that memory for me and I can donate it so someone else can use it, which is even better.”

Inspired by this story, the researchers conducted a field study involving 797 students at Penn State who lived in six residence halls on campus. At the end of a fall semester, the researchers advertised a donation drive before the students left for the holidays. But there was a catch: There were actually two different advertising campaigns that varied by residence halls.

In the memory preservation campaign, signs in the residence hall bathrooms stated, “Don’t Pack up Your Sentimental Clutter…Just Keep a Photo of It, Then Donate.” In the control campaign, fliers told students, “Don’t Pack Up Your Sentimental Clutter, Just Collect the Items, Then Donate.” Similar numbers of students were exposed to both campaigns.

After finals week, research associates who were unaware of what the study was about emptied donation bins in each residence hall, counting the items donated.

The researchers found 613 items were donated in the halls that hosted the “memory preservation” campaign, versus only 533 in the control campaign.

Reczek said the results show it may be relatively easy to break our old habits of clinging to some of our possessions with sentimental value.

“It is not terribly surprising that we can keep the same memories alive just by taking a photo of these possessions, but it is not a natural behavior. It is something we have to train ourselves to do,” she said.

In other related experiments, the researchers found that it wasn’t just the memories associated with these possessions that were keeping people from donating – it was the identities linked to those memories.

For example, older parents may still feel connected to their identity as new mothers and fathers and not want to part with their infant clothes.

In one study, some people who were donating goods at a local thrift shop in State College, Pennsylvania, were given instant photos of the items they were donating, while others were not. They were then asked about whether they would feel a sense of identity loss from giving away the item.

Results showed that those who received the photos reported less identity loss than those who did not.

“These memories connected to possessions are a carrier for identity. It is this reluctance to give up a piece of our identity that is driving our reluctance to donate,” Reczek said.

This memory preservation strategy won’t work for items that don’t have sentimental value, she said. It also won’t work for items you want to sell instead of donate. She also suspects there may be a limit to what some people are willing to give away.

“It may not work for something that has a lot of sentimental value, like a wedding dress,” Reczek said.

The bottom line is that everyone benefits by using this memory preservation strategy to de-clutter a home, Winterich said.

“We hope that it will not only make it easier for people to clear out clutter, but it will also help spur the donation process, benefiting nonprofits and the recipients that they serve,” she said.

Fisher College of Business receives President’s Award for global trade, exporting initiatives

Mon, 22 May 2017 06:00:00 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business has been named a recipient of the prestigious President’s “E” Award by the U.S. Department of Commerce for its efforts to explore and expand global trade and exports in Ohio.

Ohio State, via Fisher, was one of just three universities represented among the 32 winners at an award ceremony in Washington, D.C., on May 22. United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross presented the awards at the Department of Commerce Headquarters, located in the Herbert C. Hoover Building.

The award recognizes the creation and efforts of Fisher’s Global Trade Network, a collaboration among state and federal agencies, university partners, economic development entities, and small- to medium-sized businesses in Ohio that are focused on expanding their global footprint. The network was made possible, in part, by Fisher’s decades-long partnership with the Title VI federally funded Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER).

“The entire Fisher College of Business community and our many partners within the Global Trade Network are honored to receive the President’s ‘E’ Award,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business at Fisher. “As part of a modern land-grant institution, Fisher strives to address our society’s most compelling needs, build Ohio’s future, and connect the state, its business, our partners and students with valuable opportunities – including those beyond the nation’s borders. The Global Trade Network demonstrates our continued commitment to this foundational tenet and our dedication to building leaders who are globally aware.”

A key component of Fisher’s Global Trade Network is the Global Trade Consulting Group, composed of students who have successfully completed the Ohio Export Internship Program (OEIP) and an export-focused internship. The OEIP began as a collaboration between Fisher, the Ohio Development Services Agency, other Ohio universities and small- to medium-sized businesses across the state that has increased Ohio’s expected export sales by an estimated $25.5 million.

Students in the Global Trade Consulting Group engage with real clients to provide higher-level, strategic global trade consultation. The group worked with the City of Dublin (Ohio) Economic Development Team on a strategy to increase global opportunities for companies considering expanding or enhancing their export capabilities. Davenport Aviation, located in central Ohio and the only other “E” Award winner from the state, also plans to host another OEIP intern this summer.

Additionally, the Global Trade Network has partnered with Columbus 2020 and Ohio’s Small Business Development Centers on a number of programs, including the Global Trade Speaker Series and a Global Summit that explored international expansion in the Americas. This past year, the speaker series connected students, faculty, staff and business partners with trade leaders including the Ambassador of Japan and the Consul General of Korea.

“The futures of so many businesses lie in global trade and export, and Fisher’s Global Trade Network is building bridges to connect our students, faculty, business partners and export professionals across the U.S. in this strategic frontier,” said Joyce Steffan, director of Fisher’s Office of Global Business. “We’re proud to be recognized among select organizations that are advancing U.S. exports.”

The President’s “E” Award is the highest recognition any U.S. entity can receive for making a significant contribution to the expansion of U.S. exports. In 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order reviving the World War II “E” symbol of excellence to honor and provide recognition to America's exporters. Fewer than five universities have received the award in the last five years. The other two 2017 university recipients are University of Colorado Boulder and Western New England University.

“The ‘E’ Awards Committee was very impressed with Fisher College of Business’ work to train and develop the next generation of international business leaders while providing valuable support to Ohio companies,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stated in the initial award letter to the college. “Fisher College of Business’ achievements have undoubtedly contributed to national export expansion efforts that support the U.S. economy and create American jobs.”

About The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business

Struggling with different work identities? Your work may suffer

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 03:45:51 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Few people are just one person at work. You may be both a manager and an employee. Or you may be a salesperson who represents two very different brands.

Now a new study suggests that how you juggle those different work identities may affect your job performance.

Employees who believe their different identities enhance each other are more productive than others, the study found. But workers who feel their identities are in conflict see a hit to their performance.

Steffanie Wilk

“We tend to think of our work role identities one at a time, as if they were completely separate,” said Steffanie Wilk, co-author of the study and associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“But this research shows that theinteractions are important. The way we manage and think about our different roles could be affecting how well we do our jobs.”

Wilk conducted the study with Lakshmi Ramarajan of Harvard University and Nancy Rothbard at the University of Pennsylvania. Their results were published in a recent issue of the Academy of Management Journal.

People are familiar with the concept of identity conflict and enhancement. There’s been a lot written about the tensions between the roles of women who are both mothers and employees, for example.

But this research suggests that people can have issues dealing with different identities within the workplace, Wilk said. Companies need to be more attuned to what roles they ask their employees to take on.

“If your employees feel they have to make trade-offs between different role identities in the workplace, they may not do as good a job,” she said.

That’s what the researchers found when they studied 763 employees of a company that managed customer service for credit cards associated with a number of well-known brands in retail and financial services, among others.

In this case, employees had to juggle their identities representing very different brands.

Was being a representative for a particular clothing company’s credit card opposed to – or compatible with – the work they had to do for particular bank’s credit card?

The researchers had a very good way to answer that question. Part of each employee’s job was to sell additional products and services to customers on calls. So the question was: Would identity conflict hurt their sales – and would compatibility help?

Employees were asked in a survey to name the two brands they worked with most. They then rated how much they agreed with a variety of statements. These statements measured if their identification with the two brands was in conflict (“Life would be easier if I represented only one of these brands and not another”) or if working with both brands enhanced each other (“I am a better representative of one brand because I am also a representative for the other brand”).

Results showed that employees whose responses implied identity conflict between their two brands had lower-than-average sales for the four months after they took the survey, while those who indicated their brands enhanced each other had better-than-average sales.

“There are real-world effects for not being able to successfully juggle your identities,” Wilk said. “Your performance can suffer, as we found in this call center.”

The researchers conducted two experimental studies that replicated many of the same results, and gave additional insight into how identity conflict or enhancement might work to affect performance.

The studies showed that participants who thought their identities enhanced each other showed more intrinsic motivation. In the first study, for example, they were more likely to agree with statements like “I work at this job because I think it is interesting.” And intrinsic motivation, in turn, improved sales.

The researchers also looked at how identity enhancement and conflict related to perspective-taking by participants, which was the extent to which they took on a customer’s point of view.

Perspective-taking had an effect that surprised the researchers, at least at first – it actually reduced sales in the first study. After additional studies, the researchers think they better understand why.

“We believe if you put yourself into your customers’ shoes too much, you may start to wonder if they really want or need what you’re selling,” Wilk said. “That can hurt performance.”

The bottom line is that companies need to help their employees find common elements between their different identities, Wilk said.

“There needs to be connections between the identities that make sense to your employees. If there is conflict, your employees will ruminate, take up their mental energy, and struggle with their jobs. But if the connections are there, it can help.”

The strange effects of thinking healthy food is costlier

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 23:00:00 -0500

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Consumers believe healthy food must be more expensive than cheap eats and that higher-priced food is healthier – even when there is no supporting evidence, according to new research.

The results mean not only that marketers can charge more for products that are touted as healthy, but that consumers may not believe that a product is healthy if it doesn’t cost more, researchers say.

And this belief in the health power of expensive foods may lead people to some other surprising conclusions.

Rebecca Reczek

For example, people in one study thought eye health was a more important issue for them when they were told about an expensive but unfamiliar food ingredient that would protect their vision. If the same ingredient was relatively cheap, people didn’t think the issue it treated – eye health – was as important.

“It’s concerning. The findings suggest that price of food alone can impact our perceptions of what is healthy and even what health issues we should be concerned about,” said Rebecca Reczek, co-author of the study and professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

Reczek conducted the study with Kelly Haws of Vanderbilt University and Kevin Sample of the University of Georgia. Their results appear online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Reczek said she and her colleagues conducted the study to examine the lay theory that we have to pay more to eat healthfully. Lay theories are the common-sense explanations people use to understand the world around them, whether they are true or not.

Messages consistent with the healthy = expensive lay theory are all around us, she said. One example is the “Whole Paycheck” nickname people have given to Whole Foods, which touts itself as “America’s Healthiest Grocery Store.”

There are certainly categories of food where healthy is more expensive, such as some organic and gluten-free products, Reczek said. But it is not necessarily true all the time. Still, this research wasn’t meant to investigate the true relationship between healthy foods and price – just people’s perceptions of that relationship.

The researchers conducted five related studies, all with different participants. In one, participants were given information on what they were told was a new product called “granola bites,” which was given a health grade of either A- or C. They were then asked to rate how expensive the product would be. Participants who were told the health grade was A- thought the granola bites would be more expensive than did those who were told the grade was C.

In a second study, the researchers found that the healthy = expensive belief operates in both directions. In this study, participants rated a breakfast cracker that they were told was more expensive as healthier than an identical cracker that cost less.

But could this lay belief influence how people act? In the next experiment, a different group of people was asked to imagine that a co-worker had asked them to order lunch for them. Half the people were told the co-worker wanted a healthy lunch, while the others weren’t give any instructions.

On a computer screen, participants were given their choice of two different chicken wraps to choose for their co-worker, one called the Chicken Balsamic Wrap and the other called the Roasted Chicken Wrap. The ingredients were listed for both.

The key was that for some participants the Chicken Balsamic Wrap was listed as more expensive, and for others the Roasted Chicken Wrap cost more.

Results showed that when participants were asked to pick the healthiest option, they were much more likely to choose the more expensive chicken wrap – regardless of which one it was.

“People don’t just believe that healthy means more expensive – they’re making choices based on that belief,” Reczek said.

It was the results of the next study that most intrigued Reczek.

In this experiment, participants were told to imagine they were at a grocery store to buy trail mix and they were presented with four options, all at different price points. The option that the researchers were interested in was called the “Perfect Vision Mix.” Some participants saw the mix touted as “Rich in Vitamin A for eye health.” Others saw the line “Rich in DHA for eye health.”

While both Vitamin A and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) are indeed good for eye health, the researchers had previously determined that few people are familiar with DHA.

Some participants saw the trail mix listed at an average price, while others saw it listed at a premium price above the other three trail mixes.

Participants were then asked about their perceptions of the key ingredient in the trail mix, either Vitamin A or DHA.

When the ingredient was Vitamin A, people thought it was equally important in a healthy diet, regardless of the price. But if the ingredient was DHA, participants thought it was a more important part of a healthy diet if it was in the expensive trail mix than when it was in the average-priced mix.

“People are familiar with Vitamin A, so they feel they can judge its value without any price cues,” Reczek said.

“But people don’t know much about DHA, so they go back to the lay theory that expensive must be healthier.”

But the healthy = expensive theory had an even more surprising effect. When participants were told DHA helped prevent macular degeneration, people thought this was a more important health issue when the trail mix with DHA was more expensive. When the DHA product was an average price, they were less concerned about macular degeneration.

This effect was not seen with people who were told the trail mix had Vitamin A – again, probably because it was more familiar to the participants, Reczek said.

In the final study, participants were asked to evaluate a new product that would have the brand slogan “Healthiest Protein Bar on the Planet.” They were told this bar would compete against other products that averaged $2 per bar.

Some participants were told this new bar would be $0.99, while others were told it would be $4.

They were then given the opportunity to read reviews of the bar before they offered their own evaluation.

Findings showed the participants read significantly more reviews when they were told the bar would cost only $0.99 than when it cost $4.

“People just couldn’t believe that the ‘healthiest protein bar on the planet’ would cost less than the average bar,” Reczek said. “They had to read more to convince themselves this was true. They were much more willing to accept that the healthy bar would cost twice as much as average.”

While these results may be concerning for consumers, Reczek said there is a remedy.

“We need to be aware of our expensive-equals-healthy bias and look to overcome it by searching out objective evidence,” Reczek said.

“It makes it easier for us when we’re shopping to use this lay theory, and just assume we’re getting something healthier when we pay more. But we don’t have to be led astray. We can compare nutrition labels and we can do research before we go to the grocery store. We can use facts rather than our intuition.”

Scheduling leisure activities makes them less fun

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 05:46:55 -0500

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Nothing ruins a potentially fun event like putting it on your calendar.

In a series of studies, researchers found that scheduling a leisure activity like seeing a movie or taking a coffee break led people to anticipate less enjoyment and actually enjoy the event less than if the same activities were unplanned.

That doesn’t mean you can’t plan at all: The research showed that roughly planning an event (but not giving a specific time) led to similar levels of enjoyment as unplanned events.

“People associate schedules with work. We want our leisure time to be free-flowing,” said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

Malkoc conducted the study with Gabriela Tonietto, a doctoral student at Washington University in St. Louis. Their results are published in the Journal of Marketing Research.“Time is supposed to fly when you’re having fun. Anything that limits and constrains our leisure chips away at the enjoyment.”

In the paper, they report on 13 separate studies that looked at how scheduling leisure activities affects the way we think about and experience them.

In one study, college students were given a calendar filled with classes and extracurricular activities and asked to imagine that this was their actual schedule for the week.

Half of the participants were then asked to make plans to get frozen yogurt with a friend two days in advance and add the activity to their calendar. The other half imagined running into a friend and deciding to get frozen yogurt immediately.

Results showed that those who scheduled getting frozen yogurt with their friend rated the activity as feeling more like a “commitment” and “chore” than those who imagined the impromptu get-together.

“Scheduling our fun activities leads them to take on qualities of work,” Malkoc said.

The effect is not just for hypothetical activities.

In an online study, the researchers had people select an entertaining YouTube video to watch. The catch was that some got to watch their chosen video immediately. Others chose a specific date and time to watch the video and put in on their calendar.

Results showed that those who watched the scheduled video enjoyed it less than those who watched it immediately.

While people seem to get less enjoyment out of precisely scheduled activities, they don’t seem to mind if they are more roughly scheduled.

In another study, the researchers set up a stand on a college campus where they gave out free coffee and cookies for students studying for finals.

Before setting up the stand, they handed out tickets for students to pick up their coffee and cookies either at a specific time or during a two-hour window. As they were enjoying their treat, the students filled out a short survey.

The results showed that those who had a specifically scheduled break enjoyed their time off less than did those who only roughly scheduled the break.

“If you schedule leisure activities only roughly, the negative effects of scheduling disappear,” Malkoc said. Aim to meet a friend “this afternoon” rather than exactly at 1 p.m.

One study showed that even just setting a starting time for a fun activity is enough to make it less enjoyable.

“People don’t want to put time restrictions of any kind on otherwise free-flowing leisure activities,” she said.

Malkoc said these findings apply to short leisure activities that last a few hours or less.

The results also have implications for leisure companies that provide experiences for their customers, Malkoc said. For example, some amusement parks offer tickets for their most popular rides that allow people to avoid long lines. But this research suggests that people will enjoy these rides less if the tickets are set for a particular time. Instead, the parks should give people a window of time to board the ride, which would be the equivalent of rough scheduling in this study.

Post-transplant anxiety linked to complex instructions, caregiver empathy

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 06:00:01 -0400

COLUMBUS – Some anxiety is perfectly normal for kidney transplant patients, but new research suggests that medical staff can help patients feel more at ease when they leave the hospital and that could decrease the chances they’ll be readmitted.

High levels of anxiety a week after a kidney transplant patient went home more than doubled the chances he or she would be readmitted within 30 days of release, researchers found.

And anxiety was higher for patients who received inconsistent directions related to post-discharge care while in the hospital and who reported less-than-optimal empathy on the part of nurses, doctors and other caregivers, researchers from The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business and Wexner Medical Center report in September's Journal of Surgical Research.

Aravind Chandrasekaran

“The more patient-centric the care, the more trust the patient had in the information provided, the lower the anxiety level after discharge,” said Aravind Chandrasekaran, study co-author and an associate professor of operations and associate director of Fisher’s Center for Operational Excellence.

“If you’re anxious, you’re going to come back."

Readmissions can happen for true medical reasons – such as a patient taking the wrong medications or not adhering to post-transplant safety measures.

Susan Moffatt-Bruce

They can also arise when the worried well return unnecessarily, said Susan Moffatt-Bruce, study co-author, cardiothoracic surgeon and chief quality and patient safety officer at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.

“Sometimes we can make ourselves unwell because we’ve been so anxious,” she said.

Standardizing post-transplant care and training caregivers to convey more empathy during their educational interactions could go a long way toward keeping new kidney recipients well and out of the hospital, the study concluded.

“It comes down to understanding the whole patient,” Moffatt-Bruce said. “With some simple interventions, including being kind and being present, we can make a difference.”

About 17,000 people receive kidney transplants each year in the United States and more than 100,000 are on the waiting list, according to 2014 data from the Health Resources and Services Administration. More than 30 percent of them are readmitted within 30 days of their release, previous research has found.

When patients head home, good self-care – including taking medications properly and avoiding infection risks – is critical for maintaining good health.

But the list of instructions for transplant patients is long and it can be confusing, Chandrasekaran said. On top of that, patients sometimes hear conflicting advice from different members of their care team.

Prior to beginning the study, he and his collaborators reasoned that anxiety after discharge could be a significant player in the high rate of readmissions.

Ohio State’s research team first interviewed 20 patients who received a transplant at the Wexner Medical Center to get a handle on the quality of care delivered during hospitalization. In general, the interviews suggested that information conveyed to patients varied depending on the caregiver and was delivered “in a somewhat rushed manner.”

Researchers also shadowed the care team to listen first-hand to the instructions they gave transplant patients after their surgeries.

One example of inconsistent advice they witnessed: One nurse recommended “a lot of fluids,” another said to drink two liters a day and another told the patient to consume 100 ounces.

“There must have been 16 different ways to tell them to drink a lot of water,” Chandrasekaran said, adding that this wasn’t because the nurses weren’t following protocol. Rather, they were passing along various guidelines they’d been told over the years.

The researchers then used information from those shadowing experiences and the initial 20 interviews to develop surveys given to another 77 kidney recipients, 24 of whom were readmitted within 30 days.

“We wanted to see what was it that caused them to have anxiety and what could we do to alleviate that,” Moffatt-Bruce said.

“We asked patients, ‘What went right, what went wrong?’ ”

The researchers assessed the consistency of patient education using a five-item test that measured the ease of getting information and the level of understanding of symptoms and procedures. To evaluate empathy, they used a three-item scale that asked patients about their comfort level when they interacted with caregivers.

The researchers worked closely with the entire transplant team at Ohio State’s medical center, including 24 nurses and several physicians.

They found a strong association between anxiety levels a week after discharge and readmission within a month. They also found that the odds of getting readmitted increase by 110 percent for a one-unit increase in anxiety levels.

They did not find a direct link between consistency and empathy measured in the surveys and readmissions. But they did find that those elements appeared to play a clear role in raising anxiety, which was linked to readmissions.

The researchers took into account factors that could skew their findings – including age, ethnicity, preexisting health conditions and the function of the transplanted organ upon discharge.

Since conducting this work, the researchers and transplant staff designed interventions to improve pre-discharge care and attempt to reduce preventable readmissions.

The discharge nurses, in particular, played a key role in the changes, which have cut the number of individual instructions given to patients from about 80 to 25, Moffatt-Bruce said.

“When you go home you’re going to be more confident, you’re going to be safer and you’re going to be less likely to come back to the hospital,” she said.

The researchers plan to publish results from the follow-up study soon.

The 6 elements of an effective apology, according to science

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 03:22:00 -0400

There are six components to an apology – and the more of them you include when you say you’re sorry, the more effective your apology will be, according to new research.

But if you’re pressed for time or space, there are two elements that are the most critical to having your apology accepted.

“Apologies really do work, but you should make sure you hit as many of the six key components as possible,” said Roy Lewicki, lead author of the study and professor emeritus of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

In two separate experiments, Lewicki and his co-authors tested how 755 people reacted to apologies containing anywhere from one to all six of these elements:

1. Expression of regret

2. Explanation of what went wrong

3. Acknowledgment of responsibility

4. Declaration of repentance

5. Offer of repair

6. Request for forgiveness

The research is published in the May 2016 issue of the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. Lewicki’s co-authors were Robert Lount, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State, and Beth Polin of Eastern Kentucky University.

While the best apologies contained all six elements, not all of these components are equal, the study found.

“Our findings showed that the most important component is an acknowledgment of responsibility. Say it is your fault, that you made a mistake,” Lewicki said.

The second most important element was an offer of repair.

“One concern about apologies is that talk is cheap. But by saying, ‘I’ll fix what is wrong,’ you’re committing to take action to undo the damage,” he said.

The next three elements were essentially tied for third in effectiveness: expression of regret, explanation of what went wrong and declaration of repentance.

The least effective element of an apology is a request for forgiveness. “That’s the one you can leave out if you have to,” Lewicki said.

The first study involved 333 adults recruited online through Amazon’s MTURK program. All the participants read a scenario in which they were the manager of an accounting department that was hiring a new employee.

At a previous job, the potential employee had filed an incorrect tax return that understated a client’s capital gains income. When confronted about the issue, the job candidate apologized.

The participants were told that the apology contained one, three or all six of the apology components. They were then asked to rate on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (very) how effective, credible and adequate the apology statement would be.

The second study included 422 undergraduate students. The students read the same scenario as in the first study, but instead of being told which components the apology contained, they read an actual apology that included anywhere from one to six statements based on the six elements. For example, for acknowledgment of responsibility, the apology statement read “I was wrong in what I did, and I accepted responsibility for my actions.”

They again rated how effective, credible and adequate the apology statement would be.

The results of the two studies were not identical, but they were very similar, Lewicki said. For both studies, the more elements that the apology contained, the more effective it was rated.

When the elements were evaluated one at a time, there was general consistency in the importance of the components across the two studies, with slight variations. But in both studies, the request for forgiveness was seen as least important.

In both studies, half the respondents were told the job applicant’s incorrect tax return was related to competence: He was not knowledgeable in all relevant tax codes. The other half were told it was related to integrity: He knowingly filed the tax return incorrectly.

The value of each of the six components was the same whether the apology was related to failures of competence or integrity. But overall, participants were less likely to accept apologies when the job applicant showed a lack of integrity versus a lack of competence.

Lewicki noted that, in this work, participants simply read apology statements. But the emotion and voice inflection of a spoken apology may have powerful effects, as well.

“Clearly, things like eye contact and appropriate expression of sincerity are important when you give a face-to-face apology,” he said.

Workplace status matters – but not in the way you think

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 06:48:55 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Are employees more likely to help co-workers above them or beneath them in the corporate pecking order?

A new study suggests that may be the wrong question to ask. Researchers found that workers are most likely to help colleagues who are moderately distant from themselves in status – both above and below them.

The results offer a new way to think about how status affects workplace relationships, said Robert Lount, co-author of the study and an associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“A lot of attention has been focused on the direction of the relationship – which employee is above or below the other in the hierarchy and how that affects their work together. But status distance may be more important in some circumstances than whether your colleague is above or below you,” he said.

Robert Lount

“The sweet spot for helping seems to be those who are moderately distant from you in status.”

The study was led by Sarah Doyle, a doctoral student at the Fisher College of Business. It appears online in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries and will be published in a future print edition.

The study didn’t examine why colleagues who were moderately distant in status were most likely to help each other. But Doyle said it may be related to how workers perceive their own status within the company.

“Someone near you in status poses more of a threat. The help you provide could help them pass you in status, or make it more difficult for you to pass them,” Doyle said.

Those who are far above or below you in status could require a lot more time and effort to help, which could hurt your own job performance.

Those colleagues who are moderately distant don’t pose much of a threat and offer the best opportunity for workers to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate with their teammates.

The researchers conducted two separate studies – one in a real workplace – and both reached similar conclusions.

In the first study, 267 undergraduate students read a work scenario in which they imagined they were part of a 15-person workgroup in a large sales organization.

Participants were told that one of their group members was close to securing a large account, but was running short on time. The participants were asked if they would be willing to provide help, knowing that helping was optional.

The crucial point was that participants were told that the person asking for help was either similar to them in status (small status distance), very dissimilar (large status distance) or neither similar nor dissimilar (moderate social distance).

Results showed that participants were most likely to say they would help a team member who was moderately different from them in status.

The real-world study was conducted in a large Midwestern customer call center. Employees were asked to try to make sales during their calls with customers. A list of how employees ranked in terms of sales was emailed to workers each month. That means employees always knew how their status compared to the other members of their team.

While they each worked separately in cubicles, they were encouraged to help each other. Often, they would put customers on hold and ask their teammates for help with answering a question.

“There were plenty of opportunities for collaboration and to give each other assistance,” Lount said.

For the study, 170 employees completed an online survey asking a variety of questions. Included was a question asking each employee to list co-workers who regularly came to them for help and co-workers whom they regularly went to seeking help.

A helping relationship was included in the study if two employees both agreed that the assistance did occur.

In this real-world office, the finding of the first study was confirmed: Workers were most helpful to teammates who were just the right distance away as far as status goes – not too close and not too far.

Lount said the results don’t mean that most people regularly refuse requests for assistance from their co-workers.

“We found that people are generally willing to lend a hand. It is not a story of withholding assistance. It is more about who are you most likely to go out of your way to help.”

There are certainly situations in the office where who is above the other in status will matter when it comes to offering assistance, he said. But especially when it comes to informal helping, status difference will be key.

What can managers do with these results? Lount suggests that the findings might be useful when assigning people to train new employees.

“You might want to avoid assigning the most recently hired employee to train the newcomer,” he said. “If that relative newcomer is worried about his or her status in the organization, they may be less than helpful with this new person who could surpass them,” he said.

“Someone who is moderately successful, but not the top performer on the team, might be the most willing to help.”

Doyle noted that while many organizations consider whether to flatten or expand hierarchies at their firms, this study suggests the question may often be more complex than assumed.

“Managers have to consider how status distance plays a role in how well their corporate hierarchies work,” she said.

Other co-authors on the study were Steffanie Wilk, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State; and Nathan Pettit of New York University.

Targeted online ads can actually change how you view yourself

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 06:13:00 -0500

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Online advertisements targeted specifically at you because of your behavior can actually change how you feel about yourself, a new study suggests.

In a series of experiments, researchers found that young Internet users tended to embrace the identity labels – such as “environmentally conscious” or “sophisticated” -- implied by the online ads they received. The key was that they needed to know that the ads were targeted to them because of their browsing history.

For example, in one experiment, people felt more environmentally conscious after they received a behaviorally targeted ad for a “green” product.

The study appears online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Rebecca Reczek

“The power of a behaviorally targeted ad for a green product isn’t just that it persuades you to buy the advertised product. It actually makes you feel more environmentally conscious and can change your behavior,” said Rebecca Walker Reczek, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

Christopher Summers

“In a sense, you become more like what the ads say you are.”

Robert Smith

That’s what the researchers found in one experiment involving 188 college students. The students spent 10 minutes on the Internet, much of it browsing on websites they chose. Afterward, the students were presented an online ad for a fictitious restaurant called Eatery 21, which advertised “Refreshingly Sophisticated American Classics.”

All of the students received the same ad. But some were told the ad was targeted to them based on their earlier Internet browsing. Others were told the ad was sent to them because of their demographics, such as gender and age. Others were not given any information about why they received the ad.

Participants were then shown a fictitious Groupon coupon for Eatery 21 (offering a discount on food purchased) and asked how likely they would be to purchase it.

Study participants who were told that the ad was targeted to them because of their Internet browsing history were more likely than others to say that the ad suggested they had “sophisticated food preferences.” (Remember that the ad said the restaurant offered “sophisticated American classics.”)

They were also more likely to say they would purchase the Groupon than those in the other two groups.

“When you know that you have been targeted by a specific ad, you realize that the ad carries information about you – and that can change how you view yourself,” said Christopher Summers, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in marketing at Ohio State.

“In this case, receiving a behaviorally targeted ad from a restaurant suggesting that you are a ‘sophisticated’ food consumer makes you think, ‘I may be more sophisticated than I thought.’ That in turn makes you more likely to buy a Groupon for the restaurant.”

The participants who were targeted because of their demographic characteristics were not more likely to purchase the Groupon compared to participants who did not think the ad was targeted.

“Just being aware of being targeted is not enough to change how you act,” said Robert W. Smith, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State.

“The targeting has to be based on your behavior and not just demographic attributes such as age or gender,” Smith said.

When the targeting is based on behavior, consumers believe the advertiser is labeling them as a particular type of consumer: a sophisticated consumer, or a green consumer. Those are the types of labels that can change people’s views about themselves.

“The reason this works is because it is changing your self-perceptions first. If an ad makes you feel sophisticated or environmentally conscious, you are more likely to engage in all kinds of behaviors related to that trait – not just buy the advertised product,” Reczek said.

For example, in one experiment, participants who received a behaviorally targeted ad for an environmentally friendly product were more likely than others to donate to an environmental cause later because they saw themselves as being more “green” as a result of receiving the ad.

One key qualification: The information the behaviorally targeted ad conveys about the consumer must be accurate. In one experiment, targeted ads for outdoor products had no impact on the perceptions and behaviors of consumers who had no interest in outdoor activities.

“The ad has to be plausible to the consumer for it have any effect,” Reczek said.

While the advertising industry has been reluctant to tout its use of targeted ads because of privacy concerns, this research suggests there may be benefits for companies that indicate to consumers that they are sending ads meant specifically for them.

“If you’re a person who goes out hiking occasionally and you see a behaviorally targeted ad for hiking boots that suggests you’re rugged and outdoorsy, our results suggest you will feel more outdoorsy and then be more likely to buy that product,” Reczek said.

How do consumers even know that they are receiving behaviorally targeted ads? One way is that online marketers actually tell them. The marketing industry has adopted the “AdChoices” icon (a small blue triangle that usually appears in the corner of advertisements) to indicate that the ad is meant especially for the consumer who receives it. However, surveys suggest few people know what the icon means, at least so far.

The study’s findings have broader implications beyond advertising, Smith said.

“We like to think we are quite certain of who we are, but this study suggests that’s not quite the case,” he said. “We are actually open to suggestions that can change, for example, how ‘outdoorsy’ or ‘sophisticated’ we feel we are. Our views of ourselves can be nudged one way or the other by something as simple as an online ad.”

The ugly consumer: Ridiculing those who shop ethically

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 01:53:05 -0500

COLUMBUS, Ohio – No one wants to knowingly buy products made with child labor or that harm the environment.

But a new study shows that we also don’t want to work too hard to find out whether our favorite products were made ethically. And we really don’t like those good people who make the effort to seek out ethically made goods when we choose not to.

In fact, we denigrate consumers who act more ethically than we do, seeing them as less fashionable and more boring. Worst of all, seeing others act ethically when we don’t undermines our commitment to pro-social values.

Rebecca Walker Reczek

“It is this vicious cycle,” said Rebecca Walker Reczek, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“You choose not to find out if a product is made ethically. Then you harshly judge people who do consider ethical values when buying products. Then that makes you less ethical in the future.”

Walker conducted the study with Daniel Zane, a graduate student at Ohio State’s Fisher College, and Julie Irwin, a professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. The results appear online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and are slated to be a published in a future print edition.

In earlier research, Irwin had found that consumers often choose to be “willfully ignorant” when it comes to how their favorite consumer goods were made. They will consider ethical information, such as whether a product was made using fair labor practices and in an environmentally friendly way, if it is readily available, such as on product packaging. But they won’t go through the trouble of looking on a website or asking a salesperson.

For this new research, Reczek and her colleagues conducted several experiments to determine the consequences of this willful ignorance.

In the first study, 147 undergraduates were told they would be evaluating four brands of blue jeans that differed on only four attributes: style, wash, price and a fourth attribute. The fourth attribute pertained either to an ethical issue (whether the company used child labor) or a control issue (delivery time for the jeans).

Participants were told that due to time constraints, they could choose only two of the four attributes to make their evaluations.

As expected, most of the participants who were given the opportunity to know whether the jeans were made with child labor chose to remain “willfully ignorant.”

That was key to the next part of the study, in which the same participants provided their opinions about different types of consumers, purportedly for market segmentation purposes.

Those who were willfully ignorant about child labor use on the jeans they evaluated were asked to rate consumers who would choose to research clothing manufacturers’ labor practices before making a purchase. The finding? These participants were more likely to denigrate these ethical consumers as odd, boring and less fashionable, among other negative traits.

“They judged ethical consumers less positively on positive traits and more negatively on negative traits,” Reczek said.

However, participants who didn’t choose to find out about delivery times on the jeans they evaluated didn’t judge those who did investigate delivery times more harshly. It all had to do with the ethics.

“Willfully ignorant consumers put ethical shoppers down because of the threat they feel for not having done the right thing themselves,” she said. “They feel bad and striking back at the ethical consumers makes themselves feel better.”

Another experiment demonstrated why the threat of feeling unethical was a key driver for the actions of the willfully ignorant. This experiment was much like the first. But in this case, the willfully ignorant consumers were later given the chance to click a button on a website that would make a donation to a charity.

In this case, willfully ignorant participants who donated to charity did not harshly judge consumers who acted ethically when buying products.

“If we give people a chance to prove that they are indeed ethical, they don’t judge more ethical consumers as harshly,” Reczek said.

A third study showed what could happen when people choose to remain willfully ignorant about ethical concerns when shopping. In this experiment, consumers who didn’t consider environmental concerns when choosing a backpack – and denigrated those consumers who did -- were less likely to later support a pro-sustainability “Think Green Pledge” online.

“After you denigrate consumers who act ethically concerning a specific issue, you actually care a little less about that specific issue yourself,” Reczek said. “This may have some disturbing implications for how ethical you will act in the future.”

Reczek said the results of this study suggest consumers want to do the right thing – they just need help to do it.

“Most consumers want to act ethically, but there can be a discrepancy between their desires and what they actually do,” Reczek said.

“Companies that use ethical practices in producing their products can help by making that information very prominent, right on the packages if possible. People are not going to go to your website to find out your company’s good deeds. If consumers don’t see ethical information right when they are shopping, there can be this cascade of negative consequences.”

Why corporations don’t always ‘learn’ their way to success

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 06:28:23 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Any business guru will tell you that companies achieve success by learning from their experiences in the marketplace.

But a new study of the aircraft industry suggests that the belief in ‘learning by doing’ may be overstated. This study provides an alternative explanation for why we may observe a strong relationship between experience and performance, even without actual learning.

Successful companies engage in “astute self-selection” of what they do, said Jaideep Anand, co-author of the study and professor of strategy at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. In other words, they find something they do well and simply repeat it.

“In some cases, companies don’t learn so much from what they’ve done in the past as carefully choose to only repeat those activities with which they have been the most successful in the past and expect to be the most successful in the future,” Anand said.

Jaideep Anand

He argued that if a firm discovers that it has certain capabilities, it will repeat activities related to those capabilities, thereby simultaneously achieving more experience as well as superior performance.

“That is not the same as learning from experience,” Anand said.

Anand conducted the study with Louis Mulotte of Tilburg University in The Netherlands and Charlotte Ren of the University of Pennsylvania. Their results appear online in the Strategic Management Journal and will be published in a future print edition.

Anand emphasized that he is not discounting the importance of learning from past experiences in all corporate activities. But he said there are situations in which learning from experience doesn’t work.

Specifically, learning doesn’t seem to help in corporate development activities such as new product introductions, diversification moves, international expansions, alliances, and acquisitions -- business activities that are infrequent, very different from each other, and where it is difficult to assess cause and effect.

Take, for instance, new product introductions. Companies don’t normally put out many new products, these product launches are often very different from each other, and it is usually difficult to tell the reason why one particular product succeeded or failed.

“In any corporate activity where these three factors are in play, the role of learning from experience may be negligible,” Anand said.

“There is a role of serendipity in this. If a company finds the right formula in the beginning, they can just keep repeating it.”

The researchers tested their theory by analyzing essentially all jet aircraft projects launched by Asian, European, South American and North American firms between 1944 and 2000. The sample consisted of 437 new aircraft introductions undertaken by 159 firms. It included 189 fighter jets, 110 turboprops, 74 helicopters and 64 jets.

The data comes from the Aerospace Systems Group Library, which includes individual reports on each aircraft project commercialized since World War II.

Using a statistical analysis, the researchers concluded that firms tended to succeed by sticking with building aircraft in the same mode that offered them success in the first place.

“It is all very self-reinforcing. Companies repeatedly self-select the activities with which they have been the most successful in the past and expect to be the most successful in the future,” Anand said.

There are a couple of different lessons here for managers, Anand said. First, don’t overgeneralize from successes in activities like new product introductions that occur infrequently, are very different from each other and where the cause of success can’t readily be determined.

“These are very complex activities and not easy to learn from,” he said.

Also, if your firm is struggling with one of these complex activities, don’t assume that you’ll eventually figure it out.

“There’s a danger in relying on learning in these particular situations. It is not always as successful as you believe,” Anand said.

Study shows what business leaders can learn from Formula One racing

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Formula One racing teams may have a lesson to teach business leaders: Innovation can be overrated.

That’s the conclusion from academic researchers who pored over data from 49 teams over the course of 30 years of Formula One racing. They found that the teams that innovated the most – especially those that made the most radical changes in their cars - weren’t usually the most successful on the race course.

Moreover, radical innovations were the least successful at exactly the times when many business leaders would be most likely to try them: when there were major changes in their regulatory environment.

“We found that it wasn’t always good to be the aggressive innovator,” said Jaideep Anand, co-author of the study and professor of strategy at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“The conventional wisdom that companies need to embrace change is often wrong.”

The study appears in the current issue of the journal Organization Science.

Jaideep Anand

Formula One racing is actually a very good venue to study the value of innovation in business, Anand said. It is an innovation-intensive industry with teams of engineers, drivers and sponsors who all have to work together to succeed.

The independent governing body for Formula One (FIA) imposes changes to racing teams’ environments by releasing a new set of rules each year, which is similar to changes in the regulatory and business environment that businesses face on a regular basis.

The FIA rules define basic guidelines for technology advances in the sport and let teams know how much innovation they are allowed to incorporate each year.

Anand said the rule changes are more major in some years than others, allowing teams more leeway in how much change they can make in their cars.

When the researchers analyzed how much the teams innovated each year, and how well they performed on the race tracks, some findings stood out, Anand said.

For one, small amounts of innovation were generally good, but at some point, teams actually performed more poorly when they changed too much.

This was particularly true when the FIA made major changes to the rules, allowing teams more freedom to innovate.

“Teams sometimes believed that the more the rules changed, the more they had to change along with them,” Anand said.

“But we found that small, incremental improvements were often better than big changes.”

That’s because Formula One cars – like many businesses – are complex, interconnected systems. If you change one part of the system, you risk changing other parts of the system that you want to stay the same.

“There’s a risk when you make some kinds of changes that you won’t be able to make the whole system work together again,” Anand said.

The best path, he said, is usually to make changes on the margins, where you can gain some efficiency without disturbing all the other parts of the system.

Anand and his colleagues did a case study of one particular year in Formula One racing – 2009 – that illustrates many of these larger points.

That year the FIA approved a radical change allowing teams to use a new component – an energy-efficient technology known as the kinetic energy recovery system, or KERS.

This device could store the kinetic energy from the waste heat created by the car’s brakes. Once stored in a battery, the energy could be used for acceleration.

The upside was intriguing, but it came with costs, Anand said. For example, it added weight to the car and the driver had to learn how to use the technology correctly.

Several teams jumped at the opportunity to add KERS to their cars, believing the possibilities outweighed the potential costs. But at the end of the year, two teams that did not use KERS – but instead concentrated on other, more marginal improvements – were the ones who finished on top in the standings.

“The KERS example in Formula One shows the dangers of jumping too quickly at the chance to innovate,” Anand said. “You don’t always get an advantage by moving first.”

The lessons from Formula One can apply to many businesses, according to Anand. Like some Formula One teams, many older, mature businesses are especially tempted by the siren call of nimbleness and agility. They believe that if they can innovate quickly, they can protect their market.

“But if you have a firm that has grown and prospered, you have traded innovation and constant change for efficiency and reliability. Those can be real advantages, too,” he said.

Anand said that, in his experience, it is often the top managers of a firm who most believe that they need to change and innovate more.

“Maybe they have too much exposure to management gurus and read too many books,” he said jokingly. “The mid- to lower-level managers are often the ones who see how change can create problems for the rest of the system. They are closer to the customers and supplier and shop floor.”

Anand cautioned that the results don’t mean innovation, even radical innovation, is not sometimes needed in business.

“But we’re pushing back at the conventional wisdom that innovation is always good, and is always the right choice for business. Sometimes there is value in going slow.”

Anand’s co-authors on the study were Alessandro Marion of LUISS University in Rome, Italy; Paolo Aversa of City University London; and Luiz Mesquita of Arizona State University.

How having racially diverse friends can help you on the job

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Employees with a racially diverse group of friends outside of work may actually perform better at their jobs, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that workers who had more different-race friends in their personal lives than their co-workers also tended to have a more racially diverse network of friends on the job. This broader network was linked to employees who did more tasks beyond their job responsibilities and who, under certain circumstances, had more trust in their supervisors.

“Your friends outside of work actually have this connection to how you behave in the workplace, through the shaping of your relationships on the job,” said Steffanie Wilk, co-author of the study and associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

How does it work?

Wilk said that people with diverse friend networks in their personal lives tend to build similarly diverse networks in their workplaces.

“They’re more likely to see their ingroup – the people they most identify with – as a broader group of people which includes those of different racial backgrounds. And we tend to help people in our ingroups,” Wilk said.

“That means they are being helpful to more of their work colleagues. Supervisors notice that.”

Wilk conducted the study with Erin Makarius, a Ph.D. graduate of Ohio State who is now an assistant professor at the University of Akron. The results are published online in the journal Organization Science and will appear in a future print edition.

The study involved 222 people who worked in customer service centers at a large financial institution. These employees worked with customers to fix problems and sell products. The company encouraged employees to get to know each other so that they could share information and help each other with questions.

The researchers surveyed the employees and their supervisors.

Employees were asked to list up to five people in their personal network of friends and list each person’s race. They were also asked to select up to 10 people who were in their network of friends at the company. These people could be within or outside of their immediate work group. The researchers used data from the company to determine the race of all the workplace friends.

Results showed that people who had more different-race friends outside of work also had a more diverse group of friends among their co-workers – even after taking into account how many different-race colleagues they had in their immediate work group.

Having a diverse friend network outside work paid dividends on the job, the study showed.

Supervisors rated all of their employees on how much they created team spirit and went beyond their roles to help the company. For example, one question asked supervisors to rate their employees on a scale of 1 to 5 on “This person has done more work than required.”

Workers with more friends of different races outside of work scored higher on these scales, Wilk said. The reason was that these were the same employees who created more diverse friend networks on the job and thus who had a broader ingroup of people to help.

The researchers also found that employees who had a racially diverse group of friends were more likely to trust supervisors who also had a diverse friend network.

Many studies have found there is greater trust between supervisors and employees if they are more alike, Wilk said. But most such research focuses on whether the employee and supervisor are alike in race or ethnicity.

“Trust can be built on deeper similarities than just sharing the same race. Here we find that there’s more trust when they share similar values and beliefs when it comes to the kinds of friends they have,” Wilk said.

These results show the challenges facing companies and organizations that want to build more diverse workplaces. Other studies have shown that racially diverse work groups often perform better than more homogenous groups, but they tend to have more interpersonal conflicts.

“The issue is choice. We first thought you just needed to create contact between people of different races or backgrounds to create better teams. But it is not just contact, but how that contact is made and the form that it takes,” Wilk said.

The most constructive contacts are ones that are built on friendship – and not everyone is equally likely to build friendships with different-race people at work, she said.

“I think companies should continue to create opportunities for people of different races to collaborate and mingle with each other socially, but they have to let friendships evolve naturally,” she said. “These friendships can’t be forced or made to happen immediately.”

Wilk said this research shows yet another way that employees’ personal lives affect their work lives.

“Most of the research examining workers’ personal lives has focused on the role of family on work performance. Here we show how we carry our friendship patterns across the boundary of personal and work lives,” she said.

“These friendships are affecting us in terms of our relationships at work in ways that we may not even be aware of.”

Contact: Steffanie Wilk, 614-292-0311; Wilk.17@osu.edu

Written by Jeff Grabmeier, 614-292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu

Creating new companies based on university research

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 08:41:53 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Two teams from The Ohio State University were among eight chosen from around the state to participate in an innovative new program designed to turn university research into commercial products.

The I-Corps@Ohio (short for Innovation Corps) is a new seven-week program that aims to help the chosen faculty and student teams determine if their intellectual property – such as a new technology – could be the basis of a startup company.

“The ultimate goal is to help the amazing technologies that are developed at colleges and universities in Ohio to move out of the lab and into the marketplace,” said Michael Camp, who is executive director of The Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (TEC) Institute at Ohio State, and who is serving as program director for the I-Corps@Ohio program.

“We want to increase innovation and entrepreneurship among our faculty and students and help them build their business acumen and contacts with industry.”

I-Corps@Ohio is modeled after and approved by the National Science Foundation’s successful I-Corps program. Ohio is the first to have a statewide collaboration based on the NSF model, but fully funded by the state. The program is funded and supported by the Ohio Department of Higher Education (formerly the Ohio Board of Regents).

Michael Camp

“I want to congratulate our participating universities for taking this first step toward better commercializing our research,” said Ohio Department of Higher Education Chancellor John Carey. “This program builds upon the work that was put into our Condition Reports, and I look forward to seeing the results of their efforts.”

Governor John R. Kasich has identified research commercialization as a prime factor in sustaining job creation and has stressed to Ohio’s college and university presidents and boards of trustees that the issue must be among their top priorities.

The two teams from Ohio State chosen to be part of the first I-Corps@Ohio cohort are led by:

Glenn Daehn, professor of materials science and engineering, and Anupam Vivek, senior research associate. They have developed an impact spot welding technology for lightweight metals.
Renukaradhya Gourapura, associate professor of veterinary preventive medicine in the Food Animal Health Research Program at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster. He has developed a nanoparticle-based swine influenza vaccine for pigs.

Of the other six winning teams, five are from the University of Akron and one is from Case Western Reserve University.

The I-Corps@Ohio Program is a collaboration between Ohio State, the University of Akron, the University of Cincinnati, Lorain County Community College, Ohio University and the University of Toledo.

Ohio State is the lead administrator and will organize and facilitate the program. All the instructors for the program will be certified by the NSF I-Corps.

The program is open to teams from all Ohio universities, colleges and community colleges.

The first eight winning teams were chosen from among about 40 applications by an independent committee that was appointed by the six founding institutions. Each winning team will receive up to $15,000 in funding. Teams will convene at Ohio State July 21 for the program, which will run through Sept. 3.

In addition to the faculty lead, each team will have an entrepreneurial lead, usually a student, and an executive mentor, who will be an experienced or emerging entrepreneur with real-world experience.

During the program, each team will do a rigorous analysis of its technology and market potential to see if it can be the basis of a startup company, Camp said. Among the tasks will be to interview potential customers to see if this technology really does answer a need that they have.

The teams should end the program knowing if their product has clear market viability, Camp said. If it does, they will have created a transition plan to move forward and made plans for a technology demonstration for potential investors and partners. A final report summarizing the lessons learned and the progress made is due eight weeks after the program ends.

“These teams are entering I-Corps@Ohio with phenomenal concepts. Some of these technologies may have been around for years, but the researchers just don’t know how to take them out of the lab,” Camp said.

“With the visionary support of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, we hope that we can help them create companies that will drive sustainable technology-based economic development in Ohio.”

And this first cohort is just the beginning, Camp said. The plan is to run two of these seven-week programs each year, with eight to 12 teams in each cohort.

“This is an exciting program,” Camp said. “I-Corps@Ohio represents a great opportunity to take the best technology created at Ohio universities and use it to accelerate the growth of income and jobs in the state.”

When a sudden boost in status at work isn’t all good

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 05:29:13 -0400

COLUMBUS, OHIO – Imagine getting a sudden boost in status at work that changes you from a largely ignored worker to someone that others turn to for advice and help.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But a new study finds that an unanticipated gain in status can come with some negative baggage – if you did not earn the boost.

Researchers studied American employees of a Japanese firm who didn’t enjoy particularly high status with the company – until it adopted English as its official language. Then, all of a sudden, Japanese employees who didn’t speak English had to rely a lot more on their American counterparts.

While the American employees enjoyed their sudden boost in status, they also had some misgivings, said Tracy Dumas, co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“It wasn’t all positive. It was very obvious that the American employees knew that they lucked into this change of status and were very aware that the status boost was not tied to their performance or achievement,” Dumas said.

“They had a feeling that their good luck was unstable – that another new policy could reverse their good fortune.”

Tracy Dumas

The study highlights the dynamic nature of status in organizations, whereas other studies often treat status as a stable property – you have high status or you don’t. The study also shows that the experience of status gains at work – typically viewed as completely positive – may be more complex than often assumed, Dumas said.

Dumas conducted the study with Tsedal Neeley, associate professor at the Harvard Business School. Their research appears online in the Academy of Management Journal, and will appear in a future print edition.

The study involved employees at an unnamed multibillion-dollar high-tech firm headquartered in Tokyo. English was named the company’s official language a year before the study. In the announcement, the CEO stipulated that all employees would need to show sufficient skill with English (as measured by a test) within two years or be subject to demotion.

At the time of the announcement, only about 10 percent of the company’s Japanese workforce had adequate English skills. About 5 percent of the company’s workforce was native English speakers.

For the study, researchers led by Neeley interviewed 90 native English-speaking American employees of the company about their experiences and thoughts concerning how they were affected by the language mandate.

Dumas said that, before English was named the official language, the American employees generally felt lower in status than their Japanese counterparts, and perceived limitations to their opportunities for advancement in the company. After the announcement, the Americans saw their status rising within the company, but with some uncomfortable side effects.

“They thought ‘I was nobody last week, but this week I’m somebody.’ Their Japanese colleagues were now coming to them and asking them to read their memos before they sent them out, to make sure the English was proper. They were definitely enjoying that, but it was not a 100 percent positive feeling,” Dumas said.

For one, they knew that this status boost was given to them – they didn’t earn it – and they knew it could be taken away.

“There was a clear sense of a lack of control,” Dumas said. “They couldn’t tie this status boost to something they did. If you earn it, you feel some sense of control and certainty about your new position within the company, but they didn’t have that.”

In interviews with the researchers, the American employees also would occasionally take the perspective of their Japanese counterparts. They talked about how hard it must be for them and some wondered how they would have reacted if Japanese was named the official language.

In order to assuage their own guilt about this unearned status boost, many American employees rationalized about how this was actually good for the Japanese employees.

“They said things like ‘this is really hard on them now, but learning English will be good for their careers,’” Dumas said. “The Americans were convincing themselves that their Japanese colleagues benefitted from the change as well.”

While this study focused on a language mandate, Dumas said there are a lot of different ways that employees may find their status has changed within their company for reasons they didn’t control.

“Steve Jobs elevated designers at Apple, somewhat at the expense of engineers,” Dumas said. “The work didn’t necessarily change, but suddenly designers saw their value rise at Apple.”

It could even be a less obvious change in status. A new manager may favor more introverted employees at his firm that more match his own style.

But whatever the reasons, managers should pay close attention to how changes in status affect all employees at their companies.

“Managers have to consider how changes will shape power and status dynamics and how people work together,” Dumas said. “And they need to realize that even employees who have seen a boost in status may be experiencing some negative feelings about the change.”

Student entrepreneurs win national competition with MRI motion-correction system

Wed, 27 May 2015 03:08:00 -0400

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A team of Ohio State University students has won a national competition that supports their launch of a new business to commercialize innovative medical imaging technologies.

The student entrepreneurs created Buckeye SmarterImage (now called NeuroCognetix Inc.) to commercialize a patent-pending system consisting of a camera and proprietary software algorithm that compensates for patient movement during brain MRI scans. Discarded scans and rescans to replace degraded images add up to a $6 billion annual problem for the nation’s health care system, the students estimate.

The Ohio State group was among 13 winning teams of the Neuro Startup Challenge, a competition designed to foster commercialization of promising medical inventions that are based on technologies created with National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. These inventions include therapeutics, diagnostics, prognostics and medical devices designed to improve brain health.

The development team was led by Safa Salman, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. The same team also placed second in the open-track category of Fisher College of Business’ Ohio State Business Plan Competition earlier this spring.

“We think we have had so much success with our business model because there are a lot of advantages associated with the motion-correction system: It can be installed on existing machines, it won’t lengthen the scan time or distort the image, and we can document predicted savings that will result from acquiring higher-quality images,” Salman said. The team estimates a savings of $220,000 per machine per year after covering the initial investment in the technology.

Salman said she and her colleagues are initiating collaborationwith Ohio State’s Department of Radiology, the Wright Center of Innovation in Biomedical Imaging, Wexner Medical Center and MRI manufacturers to bring this technology to market.

The founding team also includes electrical engineering graduate students Markus Novak and A.T.M. Sarwar, biomedical engineering student Michael Bush and Fisher College MBA graduate John Lockwood. The entrepreneurs are supported by an extensive group of mentors and industry insiders, including technical specialists from several major MRI system manufacturers.

The winning teams were selected based on their business plans, financial models and live pitches. They now move forward to phase three, when they will be mentored to launch startups, incorporate their business, apply for licensing and execute development and regulatory requirements.

More than 578 students and entrepreneurs in 70 teams competed in the Neuro Startup Challenge. The competition was organized by the Center for Advancing Innovation and sponsored by the Heritage Provider Network in collaboration with the NIH.

Hostile Boss? Study Finds Advantages to Giving it Right Back

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 01:30:33 -0500

COLUMBUS, Ohio – In a result that surprised researchers, a new study found that employees who had hostile bosses were better off on several measures if they returned the hostility.

The study found that employees felt less like victims when they retaliated against their bad bosses and as a result experienced less psychological distress, more job satisfaction and more commitment to their employer.

“Before we did this study, I thought there would be no upside to employees who retaliated against their bosses, but that’s not what we found,” said Bennett Tepper, lead author of the study and professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“The best situation is certainly when there is no hostility. But if your boss is hostile, there appears to be benefits to reciprocating. Employees felt better about themselves because they didn’t just sit back and take the abuse.”

Hostile bosses were ones who did things like yell at, ridicule and intimidate their workers.

Bennett Tepper

Employees who returned hostility did it by ignoring their boss, acting like they didn’t know what their bosses were talking about, and giving just half-hearted effort.

“These are things that bosses don’t like and that fit the definition of hostility, but in a passive-aggressive form,” Tepper said.

“I expect that you don’t have too many employees yelling and screaming at their bosses.”

The research, which was recently published online in the journal Personnel Psychology, involved data from two related studies that the researchers conducted.

The first study included 169 people who completed two surveys by mail, seven months apart.

In the first survey, the respondents completed a 15-item measure of supervisor hostility developed by Tepper in 2000. It asked participants to rate how often their supervisors did things like ridiculing them and telling them that their “thoughts and feelings are stupid.”

The participants reported how often they retaliated by doing things like ignoring their supervisor.

Seven months later, the same respondents completed measures of job satisfaction, commitment to their employer, psychological distress and negative feelings.

Results showed that when bosses were hostile – but employees didn’t retaliate – the workers had higher levels of psychological distress, less satisfaction with their jobs and less commitment to their employer.

However, those employees who returned the hostility didn’t see those negative consequences, Tepper said.

But that study left unanswered the questions of why employees felt better if they returned their bosses’ hostility and whether retaliation hurt their careers. As a result, the researchers conducted a second study, which involved an online survey of 371 people from across the country who were surveyed three times, each three weeks apart.

The first survey asked respondents many of the same questions as the first study. The second survey asked questions designed to test if the employees felt like a victim in their relationship with their boss.

In addition to other questions, the third survey asked employees about career outcomes, such as whether they had been promoted and whether they were meeting their income goals.

Results showed that employees who turned the hostility back on their bosses were less likely to identify themselves as victims – and were then less likely to report psychological distress and more likely to be satisfied with and committed to their jobs.

Of course, fighting against your boss may seem like a risky career move. “In this second study, we wanted to see if employees who retaliated against their bosses also reported that their career was damaged by their actions,” Tepper said. “But in our survey anyway, employees didn’t believe their actions hurt their career.”

How can returning hostility not only help employees avoid psychological distress, but also allow them to remain committed to their employer and be more satisfied with their jobs?

Although this study didn’t examine that issue directly, Tepper said he believes employees who fight back may have the admiration and respect of co-workers.

“There is a norm of reciprocity in our society. We have respect for someone who fights back, who doesn’t just sit back and take abuse. Having the respect of co-workers may help employees feel more committed to their organization and happy about their job.”

Tepper said the message from these findings shouldn’t be that employees should automatically retaliate against a horrible boss.

“The real answer is to get rid of hostile bosses,” he said. “And there may be other responses to hostile bosses that may be more beneficial. We need to test other coping strategies.”

Tepper conducted the study with Marie Mitchell of the University of Georgia; Dana Haggard of Missouri State University; Ho Kwong Kwan of the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics; and Heeman Park of Ohio State.

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By Telesilla Kotsi, The Ohio State University
and Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, University of Notre Dame

Why popcorn tastes better when you eat it with chopsticks

When consumers don’t want to talk about what they bought

Why some of your old work commitments never seem to go away

Sometimes, it pays for the boss to be humble

The 6 elements of an effective apology, according to science

Workplace status matters – but not in the way you think

The ugly consumer: Ridiculing those who shop ethically

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When a sudden boost in status at work isn’t all good

Student entrepreneurs win national competition with MRI motion-correction system

Hostile Boss? Study Finds Advantages to Giving it Right Back