7th Dissertation Poster Session

Name: David Benson
Department: Ross School of Business, Strategy
Email: bensond@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 734-927-0852
Year in Grad School: 4

Dissertation Title: Corporate Venture Capitalists as Acquirers of Entrepreneurial Firms: Trade-Offs and Performance Implications

Dissertation Description: Between 1980 and 2003, established corporations invested $40 billion in entrepreneurial ventures. The past few decades witnessed a simultaneous surge in takeover markets for young, private companies. This study explores possible linkages between these business development activities. More specifically, the paper examines conditions under which external corporate venture capital (CVC) investments could enhance the performance of established firms as acquirers of startups. Theoretically, the effect of CVC spending on acquisition performance is predicted to hinge on (1) the share of R&D spending an established firm devotes to external ventures (“CVC intensity”), (2) the stability of CVC investments over time, and (3) the internal governance of CVC programs. Empirical tests are based on an event study of abnormal acquirer returns that controls for numerous unrelated factors known to affect the stock market reaction to acquisition announcements. The estimation sample includes 244 venture-backed startups acquired between 1987 and 2003 by 36 corporate investors in the information technology sector. Empirical results are consistent with two of the three predictions. As predicted, acquirers that invest more intensively in external corporate venture capital (as a share of total R&D spending) and that maintain more stable CVC programs earn significantly greater returns when acquiring startups. At odds with initial predictions, internal CVC governance fails to play a significant moderating role. The study provides new insights regarding how and when corporate venture capital may confer strategic benefits to established firms in takeover markets for young, technology-intensive companies.

---

Name: Ruth Blatt
Department: Ross School of Business, Management & Organizations
Email: rblatt@umich.edu
URL: www.bus.umich.edu/Academics/Departments/MO/Phd/Students/Blatt.htm
Phone: 734-546-0503
Year in Grad School: 5

Dissertation Title: Developing relational capital in entrepreneurial teams

Dissertation Description: My dissertation explores how entrepreneurial teams build and leverage relational resources to facilitate coordination in light of the unique challenges faced by new ventures. Relational resources are qualities of relationships that enable people to work together, and include trust, identity, obligations, and norms. I develop and test a model that specifies that communality, or concern for the others’ needs, paired with contracting, or formalizing behavioral commitments, enables entrepreneurial teams to develop relational resources. Although apparently paradoxical, I argue that the combination of communality and contracting is optimally suited to meeting the unique relational challenges of new ventures. I intend to test this model with a survey of young technology ventures founded by teams of two or more entrepreneurs.

---

Name: Benjamin Hak-Fung Chiao
Department: School of Information
Email: bchiao@umich.edu
URL: http://benjaminchiao.org
Phone: 646-732-2215
Year in Grad School: 2.5

Dissertation Title: Essays on Spam, and Open Contents

Dissertation Description: This dissertation is a collection of essays on solving the spam problem, and understanding open contents, respectively. At this stage, one essay on spam is completed. Other papers are still in early progress. ***** Benjamin Chiao and Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, “Using Uncensored Communication Channels to Divert Spam Traffic”, 2006. We offer a microeconomic model of the two-sided market for the dominant form of spam: bulk, unsolicited, and commercial advertising email. We adopt an incentive-centered design approach to develop a simple, feasible improvement to the current email system using an uncensored communication channel. Such a channel could be an email folder or account, to which properly tagged commercial solicitations are routed. We characterize the circumstances under which spammers would voluntarily move much of their spam into the open channel, leaving the traditional email channel dominated by person-to-person, non-spam mail. Our method follows from observing that there is a real demand for unsolicited commercial email, so that everyone can be made better off if a channel is provided for spammers to meet spamdemanders. As a bonus, the absence of filtering in an open channel restores to advertisers the incentive to make messages truthful, rather than to disguise them to avoid filters. We show that under certain conditions all email recipients are better off when an open channel is introduced. Only recipients wanting spam will use the open channel enjoying the less disguised messages, and for all recipients the satisfaction associated with desirable mail received increases, and dissatisfaction associated with both undesirable mail received and desirable mail filtered out decreases.

---

Name: Marlys Christianson
Department: Ross School of Business, Management & Organizations
Email: mkchrist@bus.umich.edu
URL: www.bus.umich.edu/Academics/Departments/MO/Phd/Students/christianson.htm
Phone: 734-332-3931
Year In Grad School: 4

Dissertation Title: Updating in the Emergency Department: How Emergency Department Physicians Notice, Interpret, and Respond to Changes in Patient Status

Dissertation Description: My dissertation examines a fundamental but poorly understood aspect of organizing: updating, which I define as the ongoing process through which individuals notice, make sense of, and respond to changes in their environment. This topic is important because organizations today face environments that are ever more competitive, dynamic, and uncertain (D’Aveni, 1994; Eisenhardt, 1989, Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999). As a result, work within organizations is becoming increasingly fast-paced and complex. Successful performance often depends on individuals’ ability to update and revise their understanding of changing situations in an accurate and timely manner. However, despite the importance of updating, we know that it is difficult for people to change their original understanding of a situation, even in the face of mounting evidence that their understanding is mistaken (e.g., Klayman, 1995; Rudolph, 2003).

While previous research has identified numerous barriers to updating (e.g., Staw & Ross, 1987), little is known about how individuals overcome these barriers. My dissertation aims to fill this gap by asking “When and how do individuals engage in effective updating?” I will develop a model of updating by observing when and how emergency department physicians update their understanding of a patient’s changing medical condition and the experimentally test the model in a medical simulation lab setting. Theoretically, my findings will contribute to a diverse set of literatures including learning, adaptation, and uncertainty management. Practically, my findings will identify factors that enable physicians to detect and correct medical error.

---

Name: Eric Eide
Department: Sociology
Email: eide@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 415-336-3063
Year in Grad School: 4

Dissertation Title: Industrial Upgrading in India’s Service Export Industries

Dissertation Description: This dissertation investigates the mechanisms that result in or constrain skill development and dissemination of industry knowledge in the service export industry. This industry, commonly referred to as outsourcing, has received widespread attention, yet the focus has traditionally been on the impact outsourcing has on the country that loses these jobs. This study takes a counter view by focusing on the consequences for the country that gains these jobs. An analysis focused on the impact of job creation in developing countries is timely. Service exports have emerged as India’s fastest growing industry in terms of gross domestic product, which has prompted other developing economies to try to replicate India’s service export model. While many developing countries are incorporating a service strategy into their overall development policy, relatively little is known about the impact the export of services has on building industry skills and knowledge. Yet industry skills and knowledge are crucial in helping developing countries increase economic output and their standard of living. By focusing on skill development at the firm level within financial service industry, I will specify the processes by which organizational learning occurs and the conditions that facilitate a move from low-skill, low-value service work to skill-intensive, high-value work. The project is motivated by the following questions: (1) to what extent has skill development and the transfer of knowledge occurred in the financial services industry; (2) what are the steps that have led to this process; and (3) what factors constrain skill development and knowledge transfer?

---

Name: Anne Fleischer
Department: Strategy/Sociology
Email: ahbowers@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 734-846-6562
Year in Grad School: 5

Dissertation Title: Is there Equity in Equity Analysis? The creation of brokerage rating systems 1993-2000

Dissertation Description: My dissertation examines how organizations create and change categorization systems. Most understandings of categorization argue that systems arise as a cognitive simplification device: in order to better understand something, actors group like items together, separating them from items seen as dissimilar. Prior literature privileges the items being categorized as the basis for the creation of the system. When categorization systems are created by organizations, the systems themselves are artifacts of the organization. Much like an organization’s product, structure, and mission statement, the way in which an organization classifies something conveys information about the organization. Thus, I argue that it is important to consider a classification system not only as a way to better understand something being categorized, but also as a product of the organization that created it. In the first part of my dissertation, I focus on the coupling of the organization’s categorization system to its overall identity as a determinant of the type of system it has. When the identity of the firm is closely linked to the creation and maintenance of a categorization system, then the system is likely to be closely aligned to the items being categorized. On the other hand, when the system is loosely coupled with the organization’s overall identity, the firm may create a system that is less aligned with the items being categorized. I use equity rating systems from brokerage firms during 1993-2000 as a setting in which to consider this issue.

---

Name: Adam M. Grant
Department: Organizational Psychology
Email: amgrant@umich.edu
URL: www.umich.edu/~amgrant
Phone: 248-330-6161
Year in Grad School: Finished

Dissertation Title: A Relational Perspective on Job Design and Work Motivation: How Making a Difference Makes a Difference

Dissertation Description: My dissertation adopted a relational perspective on job design and work motivation. The dissertation is divided into three papers that examine the contextual antecedents, psychological mechanisms, behavioral consequences, and boundary conditions of prosocial motivation. The first paper builds on recent conceptual work to develop and validate measures of the relational job characteristics predicted to cultivate prosocial motivation and the psychological states that undergird this motivation. The second paper reports a field experiment and three laboratory experiments that investigate the behavioral effects, mediating mechanisms, and boundary conditions of prosocial motivation. The third paper focuses on prosocial motivation in the context of public service work, presenting a field experiment testing the hypothesis that exposure to stories about the prosocial impact of their jobs can enhance the motivation of lifeguards. Together, the eight studies illuminate how the relational architectures of jobs can enable prosocial motivation, and document the surprising strength of this motivation in guiding employees’ behaviors and experiences. The findings offer significant implications for research on job design, work motivation, prosocial behavior, public service, high reliability organizing, and meaning-making and relationships in organizations. This dissertation thus illustrates how work contexts can be designed to motivate employees to care about making a positive difference in other people’s lives, and examines when, how, and why this motivation can make a positive difference in employees’ lives.

---

Name: Daniel A. Gruber
Department: Ross School of Business, Management & Organizations
Email: dagruber@umich.edu
URL: www.bus.umich.edu/Academics/Departments/MO/Phd/Students/Gruber.htm
Phone: 734-763-4613
Year in Grad School: 3

Dissertation Title: Dollars and Sense? A multi-method investigation of the financial news media’s influence on firms, financial markets, and the investing public

Dissertation Description: My dissertation is intended to advance scholars’ understanding of the financial news media in the United States. The popularity of financial news is perhaps best exemplified by The Wall Street Journal, boasting a circulation in excess of 2 million. I aim to apply divergent theoretical perspectives (e.g. population ecology, resource dependence) to investigate whether firms structure themselves in particular ways to facilitate interactions with the financial news media. Under shareholder capitalism, firms are driven by signals from financial markets, and therefore structure themselves in order to interact with the financial markets to maximize shareholder value (see Davis, 2005 for a review and synthesis). For example, research has shown that firms followed by certain Wall Street analysts benefit from enhanced legitimacy (Zuckerman, 1999). The financial news media offers an additional signal of legitimacy and is an important mechanism through which information is transmitted. A deeper theoretical understanding of the role of the financial news media in creating organizational legitimacy adds to the study of organizations, particularly since news can be reflected in a firm’s stock price within seconds. I will also examine the internal structure of financial news organizations using a high reliability organizations lens (e.g., Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001), employing qualitative methods to understand the organizational processes financial news organizations use to make sense of information and report news instantaneously. Finally, I will examine the evolution of financial news consumers with a focus on the ubiquity of key stock market reports and numbers from Wall Street to Main Street.

---

Name: Larry Hearld
Department: Public Health/Health Services Organization
Email: lrh@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 734-645-8475
Year in Grad School: 5

Dissertation Title: Modes of Physician Control: Correlates & Consequences

Dissertation Description: A fundamental component of the Institute of Medicine’s proposal to improve the U.S. healthcare system is better coordination of care (IOM, 2001). Coordination of care, or clinical integration, is defined as the organization of patient care services across provider, place, and time to maximize the value of health services (Shortell, Gillies, & Anderson, 2000). At the center of clinical integration is the physician-patient relationship. Access to the right health services in a timely manner is dependent upon a patient’s ability to coordinate that care with a clinician. An important change in the U.S. health care system is the transformation from a system dominated by clinical professionals (especially physicians) to one increasingly dominated by corporate entities (Starr, 1982). The rise of corporate medicine shifts the locus of control from professional groups to corporate entities (Starr, 1982; Freidson, 1972), where physician autonomy is increasingly replaced by mechanisms intended to control physician behavior. One potential consequence of this shift is a negative effect on the physician-patient relationship and subsequently the ability to coordinate care. This project will examine the association between market characteristics, types of physician control, and coordination of patient care. The study will utilize the health services literature relating to managed care, joint ventures, and physician-organization alignment (e.g. Alexander et al., 2001) to develop hypotheses regarding market characteristics, while theories of professions (Freidson, 1970) and professional bureaucracies (e.g. Scott, 1982; Kitchener et al., 2005) will be used to develop the physician control typology and how each type influences coordination of care.

---

Name: Eric Neuman
Department: Ross School of Business, Management & Organizations
Email: eneuman@umich.edu
URL: www.bus.umich.edu/Academics/Departments/MO/Phd/Students/neuman.htm
Phone: 734-223-1265
Year in Grad School: 5

Dissertation Title: Public Policy and Entrepreneurship: The Development of the Competitive Local Telephone Service Industry

Dissertation Description: In my dissertation, I use and extend organization theory to advance our understanding of deregulation, entrepreneurship, and industry evolution. An ideological shift in the U.S. over the past 30 years has created entrepreneurial opportunities in previously regulated sectors such as transportation, financial services, energy, and communications. Yet deregulatory policy rarely yields free market competition at the snap of the invisible hand’s fingers. Rather, years of re-regulation interact with other economic and social institutions to give entrants a chance to compete with incumbents. The goal of my dissertation is to unpack the processes that link deregulation with entrepreneurship. My core argument is that the roles of ideology, legitimacy, and power shape the rate at which deregulated competition develops and the organizational forms that new competitors take. For a setting, I study the local telephone service industry. The federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened this industry to competition for the first time in almost 100 years. Hundreds of new service providers were subsequently founded, yet the industry did not develop uniformly across the country. States were responsible for setting specific parameters within the act, and the approaches states took varied considerably. With three interrelated papers, I examine the role played by state regulatory agencies and legislatures in managing–both intentionally and unintentionally–deregulation. I ask: 1. Why did states deregulate local telephone service prior to the 1996 Telecommunications Act? 2. Why did the founding rates of entrants differ across states, by form, and over time? 3. Why and where did entrants expand their areas of service?

---

Name: Isabel Ng
Department: Psychology
Email: iwn@umich.edu
URL: sitemaker.umich.edu/isabel
Phone: 734-276-2243
Year in Grad School: 5

Dissertation Title: A Cross Cultural Study of Power and Power Motivation in China and the United States

Dissertation Description: Power is a central concept in social sciences. Current social science conceptions of power, however, are largely derived from the Western tradition of thought and practice. In a globalizing world, alternative theories and practices of power are readily encountered and thus important to incorporate into our understanding. My dissertation explored how people may experience power differently in “eastern” and “western” cultures, specifically, the culture(s) of China and that of the United States. I hypothesize that Chinese people have a stronger mental association of power with status but weaker association of power with decision-making, whereas Americans would have a stronger association of power with decision-making than with status. To test these hypotheses, two contrasting power-arousing procedures were developed — one reflecting the decision-making aspect of power (allocating bonus to other employees) and one reflecting the status aspect of power (sitting in a professor’s seat). 360 participants were randomly assigned to the experimental and control conditions. As expected, I found that mainland Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese wrote more power relevant stories after exposure to the status power cue than Americans, and vice versa for the decision-making power cues. Moreover, I also conducted mediation analysis with individual difference (personality) variables to explain the cultural differences observed. In addition to quantitative statistical analysis, I also did a qualitative search for indigenous Chinese power constructs by comparing stories written under power arousal conditions and neutral condition.

---

Name: Brian A. Sandoval
Department: Psychology
Email: sandoval@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 734-649-3315
Year in Grad School: 4

Dissertation Title: The interaction of social identity, job role and occupational context in hiring decisions

Dissertation Description: My dissertation brings together work on social identity, job roles and occupational contexts to suggest that the emergence of prejudice in hiring decisions is the result of the interaction of the stereotypes and schemas associated with an applicant’s social identity, job title, and context in which the job takes place. Studies examine the occurrence of female and male leaders in different fields, and also experimentally manipulates social identity, job types and fields to demonstrate the emergence of prejudice in hiring decisions. Implications for the definition of prejudice and the nature of stereotyping, along with discussion of the special role that hiring decisions play in managing an organization’s goals towards diversity and society’s stereotypes and prejudice are also discussed.

---

Name: Scott Sonenshein
Department: Ross School of Business, Management & Organizations
Email: ssonensh@umich.edu
URL: www.scottsonenshein.com
Phone: 734-644-1061
Year in Grad School: 5

Dissertation Title: Communicating and Constructing Meaning During the Implementation of Strategic Change

Dissertation Description: My dissertation examines the interpretive foundations of strategic change implementation. I use data collected at a Fortune 500 retailer for three interrelated empirical papers. Paper one is an analysis of senior managers’ and employees’ strategic change narratives and develops theory about the micro-processes of strategic change implementation. Paper two uses survey data to analyze the relationship between sensemaking and individual-level change implementation behaviors. Paper three focuses on how sensemaking convergence affects unit-level change implementation performance. This research contributes to organization theory by illustrating micro-processes of strategic change implementation based on interpretations, more comprehensively explaining the strategic change implementation process (including proposing mechanisms that show how change gets produced endogenously and broadening understanding of the role of employees beyond change resistance), and connecting interpretive processes to change implementation outcomes.

---

Name: John Paul Stephens
Department: Organizational Psychology
Email: jpsteph@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 734-709-6371
Year in Grad School: 3

Dissertation Title: The Self-in-Relation-to-Other: Foundations for a Psychology of Organizing

Dissertation Description: In my dissertation I will look at how individuals in a choir meaningfully assemble their contributions in the work of a collective. Choirs are a form of interdependent collective similar to crews on aircraft carrier flight decks and temporary disaster relief teams; these groups all combine diverse contributions to respectively produce beautiful sound, safe landings for pilots and successful rescues. I suggest that a common mechanism operating across all these contexts is the attention that the individual must pay to the self in relation to the other in order to have his/her actions positively correspond to the actions of others. I propose to examine the role of the attentional mechanisms behind coordination in these highly interdependent and consequential contexts as they are yet to be empirically examined. I will use quantitative and qualitative methods to capture the effect of the variables of attention, responsiveness and coordination in experiments and in the context of a community choir. In order to tap into the full experience of the individual in a choir, I propose a qualitative study in which I would be a participant-observer in the UMS Choral Union here at Michigan. In addition to recording observations made as a baritone in the choir, I will also interview the choir director and members. Quantitative work will involve measuring the influence of attention on how people interrelate their contributions in interdependent work. To this end, I propose experiments in which participants create a song as a group, based on manipulations of their attention.

---

Name: Ali Tafti
Department: Ross School of Business, Business Information Technology
Email: atafti@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 734-615-8728
Year in Grad School: 3

Dissertation Title: Does IT Enhance the Value of Corporate Alliance Activity? A Cross-Industry Empirical Study

Dissertation Description: There has been a persistent debate regarding whether Information Technology (IT) contributes to firm value. What needs more attention in this debate is the role of IT in various strategic contexts and organizational forms in which firms create value. Encompassing a large variation of governance and value-creation mechanisms, strategic alliances provide a rich and varying context for studying the role of IT in value creation. Our study draws from a cross section of over 120 firms that are publicly listed in the United States and that span multiple industries; these firms have collectively engaged in more than 8100 alliances. We seek to answer the following questions: 1) Are IT investment and alliance activity complementary in their effects on firm value? 2) Does IT have stronger enabling effects on deep, collaborative alliances than on shallow, transactional alliances? Our preliminary results indicate that IT enables firms to derive greater value from frequent corporate alliance activity, particularly when alliances are collaborative in nature. One implication is that IT contributes to firm value by enhancing not only coordination but also strategic flexibility. This study may become a part of my dissertation.

---

Name: Manny Teodoro
Department: Political Science/Public Policy
Email: mteodoro@umich.edu
URL: sitemaker.umich.edu/mteodoro
Phone: 734-730-5491
Year in Grad School: 6

Dissertation Title: Bureaucratic Ambition: Professional Careers, Personal Motives & Policy Leadership

Dissertation Description: “The leader with progressive ambitions is the hero,” wrote Joseph Schlesinger in Ambition and Politics. “If anyone is to look for solutions it is the man whose career depends on finding solutions.” This dissertation identifies institutional structures that foster or frustrate heroes—glorious and tragic alike—in public administration. Substantial research confirms intense administrator involvement in every phase of the policy process. But why and to what ends bureaucrats play at politics remains little understood. Why do some administrators lead policymaking while others do not? What kinds of policies do they promote? I advance a theory of bureaucratic ambition that explains administrators’ policymaking behavior. Individuals’ psychological motives gain traction as ambition for advancement within a career opportunity structure. Ambition channels administrators’ policymaking decisions, and the movement of individuals through institutional career systems creates patterns of policymaking leadership. The subjects of this study are school superintendents, police chiefs, and utilities managers, and evidence comes from a survey of administrators. Complementing the survey are case studies from the three professions. Comparing the opportunity structures of each of these professions, I demonstrate the ways that administrators’ careers shape their political choices.

---

Name: Laura Wernick
Department: Social Work/Political Science
Email: lwernick@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 734-330-4128
Year in Grad School: 9

Dissertation Title: Social Justice Philanthropy and Young Donor Organizing: How Young Progressives with Wealth are Leveraging their Power and Privilege to Support Social Justice…A Case Study of Resource Generation

Dissertation Description: Laura Wernick’s dissertation explores what effective roles people with power and privilege can play in supporting movements that address root causes of social and economic injustices. More specifically, this is a case study examining the role and impact an organization called Resource Generation (RG) is playing in organizing young people with wealth to become more effective donor activists and organizers for social change. RG is a national organization, with a constituent based of over 800 people. Programmatically, RG bridges the development of critical consciousness around issues of power and privilege with political action. They go beyond seeing themselves as just “donors” and include understanding their class and (often) race privilege and power, and how they can bring their whole selves as allies to social justice movements. In particular, as young people with access to elite institutions that are closed to most people, they are organizing within these institutions to shift their practices, while being accountable to cross-class movements. This case study has the potential to shed light on how people with wealth – individually and collectively – can move beyond their own self interest and make personal, financial and political decision to support a more participatory democratic movement for social justice, including changing those institutions that – may on the surface – benefit them.

---

Name: Nathan E. Wilson
Department: Ross School of Business, IB/BE
Email: nathanew@umich.edu
URL: N/A
Phone: 202-299-4741
Year in Grad School: 2

Dissertation Title: Essays on the Impact of Regulations

Dissertation Description: I seek to determine how the organizational form decisions of a large multinational hotel chain operator are impacted by local country characteristics. In particular, I focus on the regulatory environment and how it affects managers’ concerns about both expropriation and the enforceability of contracts. I hypothesize that regulatory instability impacts organizational form decisions in two ways. First, by raising the likelihood of hold-up activities by local officials, it reduces the desirability of organizational forms in which the firm shoulders the bulk of the financial risk. Second, a more uncertain policy environment diminishes confidence in the enforceability of contracts. Therefore, if there are important reputational externalities, then greater policy instability should cause the firm to prefer organizational forms in which it retains operational control rather than arrangements in which local agents are contractually obliged to perform certain actions. The hotel industry presents an excellent opportunity to test these hypotheses because individual units take one of three different forms, which differ in the extent to which the firm is involved in the financing and operation of the unit. Because these options cannot be straightforwardly ordered, I apply a multinomial logic specification and find considerable support for the hypotheses described above. This result has implications for recent research that has sought to refine the standard principal-agent model of contracting to bring it into greater agreement with the empirical literature in terms of how risk impacts the boundaries of the firm.

---

Name: Jun Zhang
Department: School of Information
Email: junzh@umich.edu
URL: www-personal.si.umich.edu/~junzh
Phone: 734-476-8271
Year in Grad School: 5
Dissertation Title: Understanding and Augmenting Community Expertise Networks

Dissertation Description: Seeking expertise from other people is one of the most important ways for people to solve real life problems. My dissertation research examines the characteristics and dynamics of community expertise networks (CEN), in which people search and share expertise, using a mixture of methods of social network analysis, empirical observation, and simulation. New designs based on these analyses, such as using graph-based algorithms to identify expertise, are proposed and evaluated. A tool to analyze and simulate CEN is also provided