The Glass Wall

Is greater autonomy in the new world of work an equalizer? Or does it come with a price? For female professionals who seek to escape the masculine corporate ladder and better balance their professional and personal lives, this is an interesting and important question. Indeed, women often choose to freelance to have a greater say on when, what, and with whom to work. 

In this paper, we find that women find themselves faced with "The Glass Wall", where women who expand their work roles face an evaluative disadvantage compared with men who expand. We call this a wall not only because it is a hurdle that women need to break through to fulfill greater independence in their work and adapt to the perils of unstable jobs and income, but also because it may discourage women from further advancing their freelancing careers. It is also a glass because the evaluative disadvantage comes more implicit in people's evaluation. 

The evidence comes from three studies using mixed methods—an archival study that examines whether female K-Pop songwriters who expanded their work role have a higher likelihood of survival than their male peers, an experiment that tests our theoretical model where female songwriters who expanded their roles are perceived less agentic than their male peers, and another experiment that tests the same model with a better design and in a different context of film producers. Although the evidence is from creative careers, we believe the glass wall is likely to be present in other careers as well; the evaluative disadvantage on the level of perceived agency presumed in role expansion is likely to work in other career contexts where people gain greater autonomy in shaping their career. 

It remains to be seen how pervasive the glass wall is in the new world of works. But we believe we are making an early step in understanding how the changing landscape of careers can leave a mark on women. 

Lee, Y.G., Koval, C.Z., & Lee, S.S. (In-press) “The Glass Wall and the Gendered Evaluation of Role Expansion in Freelancing Career.”, Academy of Management Journal 

To read a preprint version, please click here.

To read a related article from Harvard Business Review, please click here.

JUST DIVERSE AMONG THEMSELVES

Diversity of the board is important for modern large corporations. It helps them not only get exposed to a diversity of mindsets, which can let them find under healthy governance but also gain legitimacy amid the growing societal call to improve gender and racial underrepresentation on the board. 

Yet, things quickly change when firms underperform—against their past performance and/or their competitors. The board must help find the source of the problem and advise the executives on alternative options. These need to happen quickly since the underperforming firm and its board faces immense pressure to react. 

All this means that the board would change once its firm underperforms. But the question remains on how. 

In this research, we find that the board of an underperforming firm becomes more diverse in terms of its directors’ expertise background, but becomes more homogenous in terms of their gender and race—unfortunately, this means that the board becomes more dominated by White males. 

These changes are linked to the firm’s motivation to remedy its underperformance quickly. Diversifying directors’ expertise backgrounds—by inviting directors with different expertise, letting go of those with redundant expertise, or seeking new expertise from the existing directors—is consequential in looking for a new strategic direction. But to do so quickly directors must share trust and solidarity. Unfortunately, this is more challenging for directors whose gender and race are different because these social groups are attached to different norms and historical conflicts. Considering that around 80% of directors are White males, the board of an underperforming firm is likely to keep directors who are White males, while easily letting go of female and racial minority directors. This is a pretty grim playing field for underrepresented groups of people. 

Perhaps a silver lining of our finding is that such challenges against female or racial minority directors can be removed when the board has a committee chair from an underrepresented group of people. The power of the chairs can help shield against the social-psychological impetus to homogenize the board under the underperformance threat. Knowing that directors from underrepresented groups are only given limited opportunities to occupy committee chairs, the next focus in the movement to improve underrepresentation should be to help these directors become chairs. Doing so will not only increase their influence but also safeguard them from being let go of when the ship goes south.

Jung, H.J., Lee, Y.G., & Park, S.H. (2023) “Just Diverse Among Themselves: How Does Negative Performance Feedback Change Board Diversity in Expertise and Ascriptive Backgrounds.”, Organization Science,  34(2): 657-679

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ESCAPING THE SURVIVAL TRAP 

Starting a new career can feel daunting. As you are inexperienced, it is difficult to convince others of your talent, subsequently making it difficult to find opportunities. 

This cannot be more true for those pursuing freelancing careers, like creative workers. Those who start a creative career may have an aspiration for success and fame, but the reality is that she is not even sure whether she can make the ends meet by the end of the month. Opportunities to shine come only sporadically. The hip-hop legend Eminem raps, “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.”

How do they navigate such predicaments? A network of collaborators plays an important role. But there is a conundrum. Research has shown that to survive, one may benefit from building a network of close and cohesive collaborators who share trust and solidarity—that is, those who would have got their back when shit hits the fan. But, such a network tends to lack the diversity of knowledge and skillsets that are integral to creative production. Those are better found in a network that connects otherwise disconnected collaborators. These opposing forces eventually create a survival trap, where one may build a network adept at helping her survive in the precarious career, but this very network will be unlikely to help her achieve coveted success. 

But some escape this trap, while others don’t. What explains this difference? In this research that tracks the career of K-pop songwriters from their debut, we find that successful songwriters indeed escape from this trap quickly. But the force behind such an escape takes the form of a wake-up call. Those who find their close collaborators succeed before they did and those who have gambled their career on developing their styles but failed persistently are the ones who seek out new collaborators from afar and escape from their cohesive network. In more street terms, FOMO (the fear of missing out) and the grim reality that one’s work is not going to succeed push people out of their comfort zone where trivial survival is more or less secure.

Before we conclude that people need some push to recreate their network, there is yet another twist. While these factors made songwriters in the survival trap motivated, such an escape only led their misery to find company—in their search for new collaborators from afar, they are more likely to join forces with others unsuccessful as they are. The successful ones did not want to bet on these desperate people; in fact the successful ones avoided the ones trying to escape the survival trap. So, the challenges remain, taking a different form—perhaps furthering the chasm between the ones who aspire to become successful and those who are already successful. 

Lee, Y.G., & Gargiulo, M. (2022) “Escaping the Survival Trap: Network Transition among Early-Career K-Pop Freelance Songwriters.”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 67(2):339-377

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ANCHORED DIFFERENTIATION

Product designs are valuable assets. They are unequivocally an important source of a firm’s competitive advantage—like Apple won the minds of the smartphone consumers and more. In fact, estimates show the value of a design patent, on average, surpassed that of a utility patent since early 2000.

What makes a product design more valuable? The customary understanding is that there are two factors that make a product design appealing and valuable. A good and valuable design should help customers understand the product and use it with ease. It also needs to appear new and cool such that customers can express their uniqueness. These imply that firms should develop a design that is similar to other designs so that customers can easily understand how to use the product, but at the same the design should be different from others so that it can appeal to the product’s uniqueness. This led researchers to think an optimally distinctive design that is similar, yet sufficiently different from the existing designs will be most valuable.

In this paper, we engage with this question, but propose that the reference points by which consumers judge its functionality and uniqueness are different. Consumers use past designs that have been in the market for some time to evaluate whether a design is easy to use. However, they use designs that are concurrently in the market to evaluate whether a design is unique enough. This led us to think of a more fine-grained way of how firms should make their designs optimally distinctive. A design that is similar to past designs yet different from contemporary designs—what we call an “anchored differentiation”—would evoke greater appeal from the consumers.

Using a rich data from 30 years of design patent grants by USPTO, we find that design patents with anchored differentiation had higher market return in the day of the grant announcement. We corroborate our findings through a pre-registered experiment; consumers inferred greater informational value from the comparison vis-a-vis past designs yet inferred greater expressive value from the comparison vis-à-vis contemporary designs.

Chan, T.H., Lee, Y.G., & Jung, H.J. (In-press) “Anchored Differentiation: The Role of Temporal Distance in the Comparison and Evaluation of New Product Designs”, Organization Science

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To listen to a podcast (Resoundingly Human by Ashley Kilgore INFORMS) featuring this article, please click here.

MIDDLE-STATUS CONFORMITY REVISITED

In one's professional career, people need to craft an identity to make sure they are known for something. This is true for conductors of large orchestras. Their choice of repertoire for a season defines how audiences perceive and evaluate them. Therefore, conductors deliberate on what music their orchestra will perform for a season. They also pay close attention to what other conductors perform, so that they might not appear too conventional nor too weird.

In this paper, we examine how conductors' status among their peers affect their choice of repertoire. We focus on conductors' status, because we know that conductors with different status level would face diverging levels of pressure to show that they "conform" to the conventional type. In particular, those in the middle feel more conformity pressure, as they are often questioned whether they should be considered high-status or not. In contrast, those in the high- and low-status positions feel less pressure to conform, either because their status is pretty much secure so they don't care, or because their status is so low that it doesn't matter even if they care. This is a phenomenon known as middle-status conformity.

However, we find that this only applies to conductors with high-status nationalities, in our case being a German or an Austrian, two countries from which most prominent classical music writers came.  If conductors are not from these high-status countries, we find that middle-status conductors deviate more than high- or low-status actors. Not being secured of the legitimacy that their nationality confers, non-German/non-Austrian high-status conductors need to show that they are a part of the high-status group. Low-status conductors from the other countries also need to conform, because otherwise they will considered a total outsider whose survival in the conductor career could be challenged. We find supporting evidence.

The need to craft an identity might be universal, but how people should craft one differs. What one must recognize is that both status markers, one based on prior achievement and the other ascribed to a person at birth, seem to play equally significant part, unfortunately. 

Prato, M., Kypraios, E., Ertug, G., & Lee, Y.G. (2019) “Middle-status conformity Revisited: The Interplay between Achieved and Ascribed Status”, Academy of Management Journal, 62(4):1003-1027

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THE ART OF REPRESENTATION

In the contemporary art field, artists engage with multiple audiences, notably museums and galleries. Museums are mostly publicly funded, while galleries are owned by a small number of individuals seeking for profits. Accordingly, museums value the artistic quality of a work, while galleries value its commercial viability. They also face varying levels of accountability in selecting whose work to exhibit; museums face greater accountability pressure than galleries do, because of their public nature.

These differences in museums and galleries affect how different reputations help artists’ career. In this paper examining the career of emerging artists in the contemporary art field, we find that artists who won prestigious awards for their artistic quality have a greater chance of exhibition at museums than at galleries. We also find that the reputation for artistic quality has greater effect when artists have exhibited in high-status museums, such as The Museum of Modern Art. However, the reputation for artistic quality is devalued if artists had many exhibitions with galleries.

These are not true for artists known for the commercial viability of their works. While these artists have a greater chance of getting gallery exhibitions, such a chance is not affected by their past record with high status galleries or with museums.

Ertug, G., Yogev, T., Lee, Y.G., & Hedstrom, P. (2016) “The Art of Representation: How Audience-Specific Reputations Affect Success in the Contemporary Art Field”, Academy of Management Journal, 59(1):113-134

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RELATIONAL CHANGES DURING ROLE TRANSITIONS

A promotion to managerial positions is a significant advancement in professionals’ career. But it also brings a significant challenge as they are given more responsibilities that go beyond those of a functional specialist. In order to successfully adapt to their new and enlarged roles, professionals need to renew their networks by keeping, losing, and adding network contacts.

In this paper, we ask how do professionals change their networks after their promotion? Based on two‐waves of social network survey, we find that professionals consider both pull of cohesion (i.e., sticking with old and close contacts) and push of efficiency (i.e., economizing and replacing unnecessary contacts) while networking. More specifically, newly promoted professionals keep powerful, competent, and trusted contacts with whom they share multiple types of social relationships. At the same time, they lose redundant contacts, especially when they have alternative contacts who are competent. Finally, we find that professionals who used to have network that connects otherwise unconnected people add new contacts with greater competence.

Jonczyk, C., Lee, Y.G., Galunic, C., & Bensaou, B. (2016) “Relational Changes During Role Transitions: The Interplay of Efficiency and Cohesion”, Academy of Management Journal, 59(3):956-982

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