Three Great New Papers, One Blogging Screwup
Well, there’s always a danger in trying to be productive during the holidays, given the vast amounts of chocolate, speck, and champagne that seem to be circulating the house. So we erroneously attached the wrong authors and title to our description of a great new forthcoming paper by Laura Doering and András Tilcsik on gender discrimination and remote work, instead matching it with another great paper by Alfonso Gambardella and Danilo Messinese. So no, the ION lab at Bocconi is not pivoting to gender studies, and we are grateful to Thorsten Grohsjean for spotting this immediately and letting us know. I’d like to claim that Chief Editorial Cat Butterburger is responsible, but he’s been busy all week doing his best Alaric impersonation.
So with our apologies to Laura, András, Alfonso, and Danilo, let’s dive into their respective papers, and also cover another great forthcoming paper by our hero Thorstein and coauthors Gina Dokko and Philip Yang.
Doering and Tilcsik tackle two of the most important organizational issues of our time: discrimination and the locational shift of labor away from the office. We’ve always published a lot of papers on discrimination, but remote work is a huge shift in organizational design driven by technology and the pandemic and is now culturally embedded and difficult to reverse. For those of you following the political transition here in the United States, remote work is front and center in the organization of the federal workforce, as it is in corporate and government settings across the globe. In fact. . . Organization Science has a special issue call out now on remote and hybrid work. So once you read this paper by Laura and András, and are filled with inspiration to study this topic, you should definitely submit it there. Or maybe ASQ, where András is Deputy Editor, and which now has a great Substack that you should subscribe to.
Laura and András are two of the great sociologists working on organizations, and their research is always on my reading list.
Location Matters: Everyday Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-site Work
Laura Doering, András Tilcsik
This study offers fresh insights into how remote work can reduce everyday gender discrimination. The authors explore how working remotely versus on-site impacts women’s experiences with gender-based biases. As remote work becomes more common, understanding its effects on gender dynamics is essential. The study applies gender frame theory and research on virtual work, finding that the “gender frame” becomes less visible in remote settings. As a result, women encounter fewer instances of gender discrimination when working from home compared to the office. This is especially true for younger women and those working with mostly male colleagues. For organizations adopting hybrid or fully remote models, the findings suggest that remote work can help reduce bias, promoting more inclusive work environments. With data from 1,091 professional women, the research shows that remote work isn’t just about flexibility—it also supports gender equality.
Alfonso and Danilo are part of a larger initiative at Bocconi on applying theory-based and scientific thinking to entrepreneurship. As someone who doesn’t study entrepreneurship, but is heavily involved with it in practice, it’s great how quickly organizational scholars are advancing the study of new firms, and how this advancement is coming from the diverse set of fields and theory that we publish in our journal. We’ve always heard lots of hyperbole in the media and industry (and sometimes in academia) about the “secrets” to successful entrepreneurship, many of which evidently involve a pitch deck, but what I love about this paper and others in this stream is that it demystifies and demythologizes (probably not a word) entrepreneurship, instead presenting it as strategy. In addition, the emphasis here on A/B testing is important given how socially embedded entrepreneurship is and how difficult it is to separate underlying quality from embedded privilege.
Design-Based and Theory-Based Approaches to Strategic Decisions
Alfonso Gambardella, Danilo Messinese
How do we make decisions under uncertainty? Some rely on probabilities and logical evaluation (“theory-based”), while others believe in shaping outcomes through bold action (“design-based”). To explore these approaches, researchers conducted a randomized trial with entrepreneurs. The findings revealed that theory-based entrepreneurs were cautious, avoiding low-probability ventures and earning higher average revenues by steering clear of common pitfalls. Design-based entrepreneurs, on the other hand, persisted despite unfavorable odds, achieving success in highly innovative projects by taking bold, transformative actions. Both trained groups demonstrated greater decisiveness, committing more readily to ventures and needing less information than the control group. The study underscores that while theory-based reasoning helps avoid costly mistakes, a design-oriented mindset is vital for navigating highly uncertain and innovative challenges.
Labor mobility has always been one of the most important questions for organizational scholars from across disciplines, whether they’re studying social structure, wage premiums, value capture, productivity, discrimination, or more. Typically, these studies examine single moves, or career progressions across organizations. A common, but less studied phenomenon, is when employees leave for other organizations but then are hired back. These moves have extensive implications for learning and firm-specific human capital, but also for coordination in teams. . . such as in professional basketball. One of the great things about sports settings is the extensive and public data available to researchers, which can enable them to study mechanisms not observable in most organizations. This paper is a strong example of that, in a sport where helpfulness and coordination are crucial to team success.
Can You Go Home Again? Performance Assistance Between Boomerangs and Incumbent Employees
Thorsten Grohsjean, Gina Dokko, Philip Yang
Hiring back former employees, i.e., boomerangs, is attractive because their familiarity with the work context enables them to “hit the ground running.” But what do boomerangs actually do when they rejoin organizations? And how do the incumbent co-workers treat returning employees? This study examines the behavior of boomerangs in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and finds that they are more helpful to incumbent employees than other new hires. However, incumbent employees are not more helpful to boomerangs in return. In fact, the authors find that when the incumbents were former colleagues, they helped the boomerangs even less than they did other new hires. Further analysis suggests that incumbent former colleagues may feel lingering resentment or bad feelings that prevent the full benefits of hiring boomerangs from being realized.