Leadership & Organizational Behavior

INSPIRE presents three novel insights about leadership, and about human nature more broadly.

Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members’ views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar’s burgeoning labor movement. Union leaders are positively selected on both ability and personality traits that enable them to influence others, yet they earn lower wages. In group discussions about workers’ views on an upcoming national minimum wage negotiation, randomly embedded leaders build consensus around the union’s preferred policy.

In an ever-shifting work landscape, leaders can no longer ignore their most overlooked stakeholders—their employees.

In a data economy, transactions of goods and services generate data, which is stored, traded and depreciates. How are the economics of this economy different from traditional production economies? How do these differences matter for measurement of  GDP, firm values, depreciation rates, welfare and externalities? We incorporate active experimentation and data as an

We study whether, and how, managers can increase government productivity in the context of public health provision. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we document that top managers (CEOs) account for a significant amount of variation in hospital mortality. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show how the introduction of a competitive selection system for recruiting public hospital CEOs reduced hospital mortality by approximately 7%. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition and is robust to several alternative explanations.

Nearly everyone keeps secrets, but only recently have we begun to learn about the secrets people keep in their everyday lives and the experiences people have with their secrets. Early experimental research into secrecy sought to create secrecy situations in the laboratory, but in trying to observe secrecy in real time, these studies conflated secrecy with the act of concealment. In contrast, a new psychology of secrecy recognizes that secrecy is far more than biting our tongues and dodging others’ questions.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many employees have spent a considerable amount of time being forced to work from home (WFH). We draw on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and self-affirmation theory to study how the anticipation of returning to the physical workplace affects work engagement and burnout. We assumed that employees are conflicted about returning to work (RTW). Whereas they may look forward to RTW they also appreciate aspects of WFH which would have to be foregone.

Although organizations increasingly seek to communicate allyship with the Black community, their ally statements can receive vastly different responses from Black observers. We develop and test a theoretical model outlining key drivers of allyship evaluations among these perceivers. Drawing from signaling theory and integrating insights from the literature on identity safety, we reveal the costliness and consistency of ally statements as critical determinants of Black perceivers’ evaluations of organizations as allies.

In response to increasing societal divisions, an extensive literature has emerged examining the construct of receptiveness. This literature suggests that signaling receptiveness to others confers a variety of interpersonal benefits, such as increased persuasiveness. How do people signal their receptiveness to others? The current research investigates whether one of the most fundamental aspects of language—pronoun use—could shape perceptions of receptiveness.