Goodman School of Business: 2022 Research Highlights

Goodman Research 2022 Research Highlights

Table of Contents

Dean’s message

Departmental Award winners ................................................................................

Distinguished Scholar Eugene Kaciak ..................................................................

Distinguished Scholar Kai-Yu Wang

Emerging Scholar Sadia Jahanzeb LCBO

PUBLICATION MANAGER

Narongsak (Tek) Thongpapanl

EDITOR

Kaitlyn Little

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Tiffany Mayer

DESIGNER

Cynthia Fulkerson

PUBLISHER Goodman School of Business

CONTRIBUTORS

Erika Barbosa, Kaitlyn Little, Cathy Majtenyi, Tiffany Mayer

PHOTOGRAPHY

Fab Formisano, Darby Patterson

PRODUCTION

Brock University

St. Catharines, Ontario

goodman@brocku.ca

ON THE COVER Goodman 2022 grant and Research Award recipients from left: Waqar Nadeem, Kai-Yu Wang, Dirk De Clercq, Magnus Hultman, Sadia Jahanzeb and Tanya Tang. Read through this issue to see all the 2022 winners.

Dean’s Message

I’m pleased to introduce the new Goodman Research brochure. This publication will share some of the 2022 research highlights from the Goodman School of Business.

You will gain insight into our 2022 Research Award winners and learn why they care so much about their craft; profile our four Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant recipients; learn more about the projects our Departmental Research Award Winners are working on and see the valuable contributions being made by our faculty members publishing in FT 50 journals.

Building on the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s (LCBO) Spirit of Inclusion initiative, the LCBO partnered with Goodman to have our scholars examine ways to increase and foster diversity in this field. This issue will share insight into the work the LCBO-Hennessy Cognac Spirit of Inclusion Research Scholar is doing to increase the number of diverse voices working in the beverage alcohol industry.

In the past two years, my Goodman colleagues published 315 journal articles, with 17 being published in FT-50 journals and I’m proud of our collective accomplishment in terms of both the quality and quantity of contributions we have made in advancing our field of studies.

In 2022, we also celebrated Goodman researcher Princely Ifinedo, Professor of Information Systems, for joining the world’s top two per cent of scientists with the most citations included on Stanford University’s global index.

Goodman faculty are helping to raise the profile of the School at home and abroad through sharing their research and expertise with the media. In 2022, Goodman scholar’s media interviews received mention in notable publications including The Wall Street Journal, BNN Bloomberg, CBC and the Globe and Mail to name a few. Associate Professor of Operations Research Michael Armstrong led our media coverage with popular pieces published in The Conversation and 91 media hits.

When research is worth doing, it’s worth sharing and we are proud to present this piece to you as evidence of that.

Barry Wright, PhD Dean, Goodman School of Business

2022 Departmental Researcher of the Year Award Recipients

Dirk De Clercq

Professor of Management

Departmental Researcher of the Year Award Winner for Organizational Behaviour, Human Resources, Entrepreneurship and Ethics

Primary research focus: Determining the various resources that reduce the risk of workplace bullying increasing other pervasive behaviours, particularly negative gossiping, in organizations.

Why are employees exposed to workplace bullying susceptible to participating in negative gossiping behaviours? When employees are threatened by workplace bullying, they experience a desire to shield themselves by allocating more time to activities that help them release their negative energy and feel better about themselves again. If employees are constantly ridiculed and put down by colleagues, they sense a lack of respect for their professional and personal well-being, so expressions of their frustrations, such as spreading negative rumours behind others’ backs, seem like viable ways to deal with the detrimental work situation.

What should organizations do to counter negative gossiping behaviours caused by employee exposure to workplace bullying?

Based on a sample of Canadian-based employees who work in the religious sector, the study findings indicate four resources that reduce the likelihood of employees spreading negative rumours about other organizational members in response to workplace bullying. The probability is lower when employees draw from their religious faith; are motivated to generate innovative ideas; derive meaning from their work; and have confidence in the trustworthiness of top management.

What do you hope your findings will achieve? This study helps organizations understand how workplace bullying can escalate into personal smear campaigns, which further deteriorate the organization’s internal functioning. It also informs organizations how this escalation can be subdued to the extent that employees can draw from resources that make a negative reaction in the form of gossip behaviours less desirable or necessary.

Magnus Hultman

Associate Professor of Marketing

Departmental Researcher of the Year Award Winner for Marketing, International Business and Strategy

Primary research focus: Significance of gathering and sharing information on social media and its positive impact on international ventures of small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

How is social media a useful tool for small- and medium-sized businesses to strengthen their international competitiveness? Social media offers an alternative method of internationalization for firms that do not have the resources to use traditional methods such as conventional advertising and large-scale personal selling, which are both more costly and time-consuming. Research has shown that, because of these emerging communication technologies, the cost of internationalization is no longer such a large barrier, especially among SMEs that are often underresourced. As an example, Facebook provides a platform for over 50 million SMEs, representing a doubling in just a few years, with 30 per cent of the customer base being international. Therefore, it seems clear that social media has provided previously disadvantaged firms with access to global markets. At the same time, they benefit from low development and maintenance fees, regular online traffic, potential for high brand awareness and increased networking opportunities.

Should these companies prioritize collecting or dispersing information in foreign markets? Our findings from Kazakhstan-based SMEs show that using social media for listening (collecting information) and talking (dispersing information) appears to trigger different organizational outcomes. We found those that are good at listening via social media develop more effective promotional programs adapted to foreign markets while those that are good at talking via social media develop superior foreign market networks. Promotion adaptation and networking, in turn, improve international performance through new customer generation, customer retention and better customer service. Businesses that master both the art of listening and talking perform the best, thus we recommend devoting resources to each activity.

What inspired you to do this research? After studying drivers of international marketing performance among larger, developed market firms, I thought it might be interesting to discover what firms with less resources and institutional support from developing and emerging markets can do to compete internationally. These under-resourced businesses are interesting to study because they often have to come up with more creative, competitive solutions compared to their larger competitors in North America and Europe, who often rely on more traditional marketing methods. Also, by providing research insights to smaller businesses from emerging markets, we can hopefully contribute to levelling the competitive playing field in the global marketplace.

Eugene Kaciak

Professor of Operations Management and Business Research

Primary research focus: Investigating the influence of the business ecosystem on gender differences in entrepreneurial success.

The three levels of the entrepreneurial ecosystem are cultural, social and material. What are examples of resources in the threelevel ecosystem and how can they help diminish the gender gap in the success of entrepreneurs? Our research looks at the three levels of the business ecosystem to help determine how the gender differences in entrepreneurial success can be erased. Firstly, society’s attitudes towards entrepreneurship constitutes as a supportive (or unsupportive) cultural resource – family moral support being a prime example. These supportive relationships mean women entrepreneurs can count on or turn to family members who will help facilitate their business endeavours. Social attributes of entrepreneurship, in which social networks and investment capital play an essential role, are another type of resource in the ecosystem. Social networks help increase access to strategic tacit knowledge, including technologies, share scarce resources, and develop trust and connections among entrepreneurs as well as other key actors of the ecosystem, such as investors. Through these mechanisms, female entrepreneurs can gain a competitive advantage. Lastly, the geographical scope of the market when starting a business is a key material resource. The more female entrepreneurs are exposed to local markets at the start of their business, the more prosperous they are in terms of entrepreneurial success compared to their male counterparts.

Were there any surprises in your findings? We hypothesized that when women entrepreneurs have adequate investment capital at the start of their business venture, the initial gap in entrepreneurial success between male and female entrepreneurs will diminish. However, this conjecture is not supported by our results.

What is a significant challenge for female entrepreneurs that hinders their success? Work-family interface has predominantly been considered to be the concern of women rather than men. Female entrepreneurs tend to have limited control over broader, culture-related expectations that they, more so than men, should assign greater priority to family over work. As a result, women generally experience restricted access to relevant resources, such as human, social and financial capital. These limitations remain a frustrating reality in many countries.

Primary research focus: Corporate tax-related political activity through bribery and the resulting payoffs that businesses gain.

Through which actions do businesses participate in consumption bribery and what is the return of such practices? This paper investigates a unique type of tax-related corporate political activity (CPA) in China. Specifically, it examines how firms bribe government officials to establish a political connection by offering lavish business trips with first-class flights and six-star hotels, extravagant banquets, excessive entertainment and luxurious gifts. As a return, the corrupt tax officials selectively enforce tax policies to favour bribing-active firms. Evidence shows that firms with higher consumption bribery exhibit lower total tax burden and income tax burden. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in consumption bribery decreases a firm’s total tax burden by 0.65 per cent, translating into tax savings of RMB 40 million (US$6.44 million), nearly a tenfold return.

What are some of the firm characteristics and regional factors that influence the likelihood, as well as payoff, of companies bribing tax officials? Firm size, political connectedness strength, local corruption level, economic development, marketization level, and industry competitiveness determine a firm’s bribery strategies and outcomes. Small firms, non-stateowned firms, state-owned firms with weak political connections, and firms in competitive industries engage in more consumption bribery, presumably because they have a stronger need to build political connections to clear bureaucratic obstacles and gain competitive advantages. The payoffs of tax bribery are more pronounced in more corrupt, less economically developed, and less marketized regions.

How can governments prevent consumption bribery to avoid detrimental effects on the country's overall development? In 2012, China launched an anti-corruption campaign, which led to a dramatic decrease in the revenues of restaurants, hotels, tourism, other recreation industries and luxury goods sales. This paper further documents that the returns on tax bribery declined by 45.4 per cent after 2012. This suggests that a political campaign does play a vital role in curtailing consumption bribery that adversely affects investment and economic growth, governance quality and the justice of legal systems.

Departmental Researcher of the Year Award Winner for Finance, Operations and Information Systems

Tanya Tang

Professor of Accounting Departmental Researcher of the Year Award Winner for Accounting

The Goodman School of Business presents the annual Departmental Researcher of the Year Award to recognize research excellence among faculty members in each of the School’s four departments. The award acknowledges and celebrates the recipients’ scholarly contributions as represented by the quality and quantity of refereed publications, grants, awards and other research-related activities achieved in the previous academic year. Each recipient is presented with a plaque and a monetary award deposited in the recipient’s university research account.

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Distinguished Scholar ‘dreams’ of research

Some people wake in the morning and think of that first cup of coffee. Not Eugene Kaciak.

“I wake up in the morning thinking about whether I will accomplish what I thought about in the night,” Kaciak says. “I dream about research solutions.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Kaciak, Professor of Operations and Management, has been named Distinguished Scholar of the Year at Goodman School of Business. It’s a title he shares with Kai-Yu Wang, Chair of Marketing, International Business and Strategy.

Kaciak not only thinks and dreams of research, he chooses it over nearly all else in his daily activities, too.

“I’m really fortunate that I’m really passionate about research,” he says. “If I had the choice between going to the movies and crunching numbers and working on a paper, I’d choose the latter happily. It gives me a lot of excitement.”

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Kaciak often gets tapped to join prominent business research projects that require the honing of data. His analytical talents have helped lead to innovative insights about sustainability, women and entrepreneurship, and family business.

His interpretations of numbers and the unique research perspectives Kaciak brings have resulted in him analyzing data on women entrepreneurs in more than 20 countries together with his primary

co-researcher, Dianne Welsh, a world-renowned authority in entrepreneurship from the University of Greensboro in North Carolina. Together, the two scholars have published 23 papers since 2010, including about the impact of culture on the support women entrepreneurs receive and their ability to balance work and family life.

“You will have different researchers coming at the same data from different angles and you’ll get somewhat different results,” Kaciak says. “I have colleagues who send me numbers and ask my interpretation.”

Kaciak is not only distinguished, he’s versatile, having taught in Poland, where he holds the title of Professor, conferred last year by the country’s president, and Algeria before coming to Canada. He’s lectured in Polish, French, Arabic and English, and has adeptly collaborated with more than 40 scholars on five continents, including his colleagues at Goodman and Brock University.

He’s so prolific and his work so relevant that he ranked No. 6 in the world in 2022 for number of publications on women entrepreneurship, helping Brock’s third-place ranking for contributing institutions on the same subject. Kaciak’s list of awards and achievements is also long like his bibliography.

The Journal of Business Research also singled out Kaciak and Welsh as the most active and influential researchers when it comes to work on determinants of women entrepreneurs’ firm

performance, women’s entrepreneurial success, and women entrepreneurs and work-life interface”

He does research for the pure joy that exploration of ideas brings. With 50 years of teaching at the university level on his resume, Kaciak also does it to better prepare his students for successful business careers.

“When you’re a good researcher, you’re a better teacher,” he says. “You know more, so when students ask questions about something, you can give them deeper perspective they may not have been thinking about. I love when I get questions from students and sometimes I will stop lecturing and wait for them to ask.”

Kaciak hopes his work has impact elsewhere, including in public policy and among women entrepreneurs themselves.

But he doesn’t want to be remembered for his academic pursuits alone, even as he relishes his latest accolade from his home institution, a place Kaciak says has always encouraged and supported his research.

“This is like being the gold medal winner at the Olympics,” he says. “But I would like to be remembered not as being a researcher. All my life, I have tried to find a balance between life and research and health. I try to build a healthy balance between these and that’s how I want to be known.”

Persistence, curiosity and passion drive Distinguished Scholar’s research

Kai-Yu Wang is proof that persistence is key to being a successful researcher.

During his first two years at the Goodman School of Business, Wang worked in earnest to get his research published with no luck.

Today, the Chair of Marketing, International Business and Strategy has a long list of publications to his name, and this year, Wang was named Distinguished Scholar for his prolific research in digital marketing.

Wang is one of two Goodman professors to be recognized for his work. Eugene Kaciak, Professor of Operations Management, also received the award this year.

“It’s truly an honour to me and, of course, it’s very encouraging to me because when I reflect on my past 15 years at Brock, I wasn’t publishing papers in the first two years,” Wang recalls. “I just continued working despite the rejection I received. I just kept pushing forward. Then I started to get papers published, and to be named Distinguished Scholar, it’s quite a journey.”

These days, Wang counts the Journal of Business Research, Computers in Human Behaviour and the International Journal of Information Management among the many that have published his work in three areas: Consumer response to marketing applications of artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and the metaverse; social media and psychological wellbeing, particularly during the pandemic; and strategies for responding to customer complaints on social media.

Distinguished Scholar of the Year is one of many awards Wang has also received during his time at Goodman. He’s also earned Faculty and Universitywide recognition for teaching excellence, and awards for best conference papers, departmental researcher of the year, and innovation in business education.

In addition to persistence, curiosity has been essential to Wang’s research.

“I just want to explore things,” he says. “In the business world, there are lots of fascinating things to explore.”

Considering the relative newness of his areas of focus, there are many questions Wang has and hopes to answer. He wants his work to benefit existing practitioners, but as someone who teaches digital marketing, he knows his research is helping to shape the future of the industry. So, it’s imperative Wang stay current and fill any gaps in knowledge in the everchanging digital marketing landscape.

“Similar to science, business has lots of areas to do research and lots of need for research. No matter which area is your focus, learning how to do research is essential,” Wang says. “With research, that will help me help students understand what they’re facing. Everything we’re seeing in a textbook happened five years ago, so doing research and sharing my findings helps my students keep up to date with knowledge in marketing.”

The other secret to Wang’s success? A pure love for what he does.

“Even without this award, I’d still do my research. I love research and the work, but this award makes me feel that my hard work to publish all those papers is valued and shows the research culture at Goodman School of Business, which is important,” he says. “Doing research – the whole process from start to finish – is very rewarding for me.”

Research helps two-time Emerging Scholar award winner make sense of the world

Most people have heard of the glass ceiling and the metaphoric barrier that women, in particular, encounter when trying to advance their careers.

But what about the glass cliff? It’s a concept that’s been piquing Sadia Jahanzeb’s curiosity lately, especially since former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her retirement in January.

Jahanzeb, Associate Professor of Human Resources Management, is fascinated by the idea that women are encouraged to take positions they’re bound to fail at in order to prove women aren’t good leaders or can’t have it all. She’s especially interested in how that applies to women of colour.

As a woman of colour herself, Jahanzeb says she’s always had supportive people around her “but sometimes, there are so many balls you’re trying to balance.”

One ball that Jahanzeb is balancing masterfully is research. She has been named the Goodman School of Business Emerging Scholar of the Year for the second year in a row, a rare and remarkable achievement for a Faculty member and researcher.

“A lot of times, opportunity is one of the very reasons some people are more successful than others. I feel coming to Brock, and having supportive colleagues and mentors has made it all possible,” Jahanzeb says. “When you feel your research is appreciated, that people understand the research you’re doing and you have like-minded people around you, everything comes together.”

It all starts with an idea, however, and like her interest in Ardern’s seeming march toward the glass cliff, they often come to Jahanzeb when she’s perusing the daily headlines from around the world.

Research provides Jahanzeb with a lens to understand and make sense of what’s going on.

“For me, research is sense-making. I try to make sense of the world through research,” she says. “I feel like every day when I wake up there’s new things coming my way.”

Like Ardern’s resignation.

“With her resigning, lots of people are talking about how women can’t have it all; it’s burnout. There are countless perspectives floating around. I would like to use these perspectives to develop my own. For me, research is developing my own perspectives for what’s happening around me.”

Some of Jahanzeb’s recent work includes a study published in the Applied Psychology International Review about the Big 5 personality traits and how each trait – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – affected job performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the course of her career, Jahanzeb has concentrated her research on workplace mistreatment and behaviours, including ostracism, bullying, incivility and abusive supervisors. Her interest is rooted in her experience working in banking and academia in Pakistan and Canada.

Her findings have been shared in numerous publications, including the Journal of Business Ethics and the Journal of Business and Psychology.

Jahanzeb hopes her research will bring greater awareness to a topic while building the overall body of knowledge.

“Whenever someone tries to do research, it’s like putting a dot on the landscape and one day, someone else will create another dot, and one day those dots will make a big ball,” she says. “It’s creating awareness around something, leading to better or different practices around the organizational behaviour landscape, and hoping it becomes something more substantial.”

Spirit of Inclusion Scholar looks to add diversity to beverage alcohol industry

Dave Bouckenooghe can list by name many of the women at the top of the corporate ladder in the alcoholic beverage industry.

It’s not only because the Professor of Organizational Management and Human Resources is an avid industry watcher for research purposes. It’s also due to so few women reaching the upper echelons of wine, spirit and brewery operations.

There aren’t that many names for Bouckenooghe to remember and he’s working to change that.

He’s doing research to identify elements that would enable women and people of colour to climb industry ranks because, in its current state, the white, maledominated workforce of alcohol beverage production doesn’t reflect the diversity of its consumers, he explains.

“The primary goal of this project is to improve our understanding of how organizations can become more gender diverse with a specific focus on empowering women and people of colour to adopt leadership roles in all facets of the industry, but also to empower men to be voices for and drivers of this mission,” Bouckenooghe says.

He’s also curious about the internal resources that women, including Maggie Timoney, CEO of Heineken USA and Michelle DeFeo, president of LaurentPerrier, have which helped them adapt and succeed professionally when the odds would appear against them.

“Change won’t happen overnight, so we’ll look to role models in the industry and what’s making them successful,” Bouckenooghe says.

The aim is to use that information to help women in the industry grow their career adaptability in the short term while longer-term work targeting barriers to equity, diversity and inclusion is happening.

Bouckenooghe’s efforts are supported by Charton Hobbs and Moët Hennessy as part of the LCBO Spirit of Inclusion initiative, which supports university-based research to create more opportunities for diverse women looking to enter, advance and thrive in the alcoholic beverage industry.

Bouckenooghe has been appointed to a three-year term as the LCBOHennessy Spirit of Inclusion Research Scholar. He brings with him a background in research on fairness in the workplace and abusive leadership.

Funding from alcoholic beverage industry partners, including Charton Hobbs and Moët Hennessy means his work will be supported by two master’s students, who are diverse women.

Together, they hope to establish best practices for a more equitable and industry with inclusive leadership that celebrates uniqueness and diversity in its workforce.

“Successful leaders are focused on being inclusive and on the uniqueness of employees, but the problem is many leaders are white men who might not be aware of the challenges different groups face,” Bouckenooghe says. “So the white male approach to solving this might be different than the approach that women or people of colour would take. We need to learn from them and grow the mindset of equitable treatment in the workplace.”

Bouckenooghe notes The Spirit of Inclusion initiative aligns with the United Nations’ Sustainability Development Goal 5 of granting women and girls equal rights and opportunities to live free of discrimination, including in the workplace.

He’s taken up this work as a white male because he refuses to be complacent about an issue that’s pervasive in more than just the alcoholic beverage industry.

“As a white male, I don’t want to stand at the sideline,” he says. “We have to be involved in the process and in consultation with those who are passionate about this project.

“Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire said social change always has two ailments: One is too much reflection on a topic with not enough activism or too much activism without reflection. Through this project, we hope to achieve that balance for this group that has been underrepresented in the industry.”

2022 Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Grant Recipients

Insight Development Grant: Customer-supplier relationships and corporate diversification

When suppliers are developing their business strategy, is having major customers a good or bad thing for business?

Associate Professor of Accounting Jin Lei is looking to better understand the customer-supplier relationship and how firms might be able to mitigate supply chain disruptions using this knowledge.

“Most of the current literature examines the dark side of a firm having major customers such as rent extraction and credit risk contagion,” Lei said. “The early results of this research have revealed there’s also a bright side to it too.”

Lei found that benefits to having major customers include knowledge spillover, which can lead to lower costs and potentially more research and development.

Major customers can monitor and deter supplier firm managers from agency-induced over-diversification and misallocation of internal capital market funds. As a result, diversified suppliers with major customers are more core-focused and enjoy superior operating efficiency and performance. Lei also found that suppliers diversify to co-insure against the operating risk that stems from major customers and diversify into new product markets.

Lei hopes this project will provide information businesses need to identify the trade-offs of having major customers and provide details on how they might mitigate potential risks from whatever strategy they undertake by helping organizations choose an optimal structure.

This project uses data from publicly traded, non-financial and non-utility suppliers listed in the Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) data platform from 1980 to 2019 and the work compares firms with major customers to those without.

Insight Development Grant: The Metaverse: Understanding ethical risks and opportunities for businesses and consumers

‘Metaverse’ was runner-up for the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2022. But for all its prevalence in the current zeitgeist, what is the metaverse anyway?

Waqar Nadeem, Associate Professor of Marketing, defines it as the “new internet,” a place where the digital and physical realms converge by combining video, augmented reality and virtual reality to allow users to do everything from business dealings to vacationing in a digital environment.

Nadeem also knows this next big technology-driven platform, with an estimated market potential of $800 billion, will have significant societal implications. There will be benefits: businesses and consumers will be able to engage in novel ways. But there are also potential ethical risks with something that is still largely unfamiliar, including surveillance, unsolicited data harvesting and behavioural targeting.

Substantial research is needed to more fulsomely understand the risks and opportunities for businesses and consumers presented by the metaverse, and Nadeem intends to grow the knowledge around both. He will also investigate how businesses can use the metaverse for value creation.

With this information, he can then tackle another critical need: defining ethical and unethical use of the metaverse to establish guidelines and a framework for responsible use of this platform.

“The potential for new forms of commerce, entertainment, education, and communication makes the metaverse so fascinating,” Nadeem says. “We hope to gain new insights into the metaverse, specifically regarding how brands can thrive in this virtual world. Furthermore, we aim to explore the strategies that companies can adopt to provide exceptional customer experiences within the metaverse. These insights will be highly beneficial for both industry practitioners and researchers alike.”

Insight Development Grant: Railroad transportation of dangerous goods in Canada: Data-driven risk analysis and emergency management

Canadians watched in shock and outrage in the aftermath of the Lac-Megantic train derailment in 2013. The disaster saw about 6 million litres of crude oil spill in this small Quebec town, resulting in fire and explosion, and tragically, the deaths of 47 people.

Such a significant event is rare, says Ali Vaezi, Assistant Professor of Operations Management, but the consequences are disastrous. With the movement of hazardous materials (hazmat), including crude oil, by rail on the rise in Canada, the inherent risks and possibility of a catastrophic event like Lac-Megantic can’t be underestimated, even with rail’s favourable safety statistics, he notes.

Applying advanced data analysis techniques to rail traffic and incident data, Vaezi intends to shed light on risk factors that could lead to future rail hazmat incidents. He wants to use these insights to develop proper risk mitigation strategies that align with Public Safety Canada’s strategic framework to enhance public safety related to hazmat shipments by train.

Vaezi’s efforts stand to benefit more than Canadians, however. His findings, which will be useful to those in operations management, transportation, risk analysis and emergency management, can be applied to how dangerous goods are moved by train elsewhere in world, minimizing incidents and maximizing public safety globally.

“Our data-driven methodology would allow us to more accurately analyze and predict the risk associated with rail hazmat shipments, which would, in turn, form a solid basis for the development of risk reduction measures,” Vaezi says. “This is not a location-specific methodology and hence, it is capable of providing insights and suggesting measures in other contexts as well.”

Insight Grant: How to choose a charity: A data science-based investigation

The charitable sector in the US and Canada is a billiondollar industry. With so many charities competing for a limited number of funds, it’s hard to know who to support. Donors want to make sure groups they fund are using the money responsibly.

Professor of Accounting Hemantha Herath is among those challenging the conventional way charities calculate and report their program expenses.

With funding from the federal government’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant, Herath is researching how data science techniques can be integrated into current reporting methods to give a fuller picture of charities’ performances.

Herath will use his funding to research how to recalculate the program expense ratio, which measures costs incurred by programs, services and other activities fulfilling a non-profit’s mission compared to its total costs.

“This data-driven approach will generate more reliable information that will help donors, resource providers and the public evaluate the effectiveness of non-profit organizations so that they can make better funding decisions,” Herath said.

He is exploring how to integrate statistical techniques, including cluster analysis, which groups data that share similar properties, and text mining, which involves the process of examining large collections of documents to discover new information, into the accounting process.

“The public opinions of charities affect donor decisions and hence is why transparency in the charitable industry is so important,” he said. “The hope is to generate more reliable information in evaluating effectiveness of non-profit organizations."

Top 50 Papers

Technological entitlement: It’s my technology and I’ll (Ab)Use it how I want to

| Tejaswini Herath, Management Information Systems Quarterly

Employees who engage in the malicious misuse of their organization’s technology (computer abuse) pose considerable financial and reputational threats to companies. This can include abusing access to user data and commercially sensitive data files.

When it comes to predicting which employees might engage in computer abuse at work, technological entitlement was identified as a potentially valuable employee characteristic to study. This research examines the construct of technological entitlement as the persistent sense of a person being more deserving of technological resources, uses and privileges compared to other employees.

The team found that technological entitlement predicts computer abuse behaviour (beyond general entitlement), and that the relationship is stronger when employees perceive organizational restrictions on technology use. Restrictive remote-access policies also amplify the technological entitlement-computer abuse relationship.

Across three studies of working adults, the researchers found that technologically entitled employees pose a direct risk to the information system security of organizations. The overall findings provide insights into the psychological make-up of employees who can be considered malicious insiders supporting the argument that technological entitlement is a defining feature of people who commit deviant acts in a workplace setting.

Organizations that work toward establishing technology policies that are procedurally and informationally fair will better mitigate security risks associated with technological entitlement.

When discrimination is worse, autonomy is key: How women entrepreneurs leverage job autonomy resources to find work–life balance

| Dirk De Clercq, Journal of Business Ethics

For women entrepreneurs, finding work-life balance can add to their work motivation, job satisfaction, and improve the performance of their businesses. However, successfully meeting their goal of balancing both work and private life demands can be challenging, especially when work pressure spills over into their private lives. The primary objective of this project was to detail how and when women entrepreneurs’ sense of job autonomy might increase their work-life balance.

This study contributed to existing research by investigating job autonomy as a precursor for work-life balance and looked at the external conditions where job autonomy proves to be most useful. The project used multi-source data from 5,334 women entrepreneurs from 37 countries and examined the impact of several sources of macro-level adversity: socio-economic, institutional, and cultural.

The researchers found that the ability for women entrepreneurs to leverage their experienced job autonomy in efforts to achieve work-life balance increases when significant socio-economic and institutional adversity marks the surrounding macro-level context. Notably, the researchers also found that job autonomy enhances work-life balance to a greater extent when cultural discrimination is low.

Some discriminatory factors are slow to change. Job autonomy accordingly can play a critical role in facilitating work-life balance among women entrepreneurs, particularly in countries that are not as supportive in general to women in business.

De Clercq, D., & Brieger, S.A. (2022). When Discrimination is Worse, Autonomy is Key: How Women Entrepreneurs Leverage Job Autonomy Resources to Find Work–Life Balance. Journal of Business Ethics, 177, 665–682. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04735-1

Amo, L., Grijalva, E., Herath, T., Lemoine, J., & Rao, R. (2022). Technological entitlement: It’s my technology and I’ll (Ab)Use it how I want to. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 46(3), 1395-1420. DOI 10.25300/ MISQ/2022/15499

The following are papers from Goodman researchers and their collaborators that were published in journals listed on the Financial Times Top 50 list.

The performance of active investment positions in foreign markets

| Tatyana Sokolyk, Journal of International Business Studies

It is well known that when investing abroad, investors tend to concentrate their holdings in countries that are geographically close and have similar cultural characteristics and business climates as their home market. But what impact does that have on investment performance?

Using data that covered a timespan of 16 years and included more than 30 countries, the researchers analyzed the impact of cross-national distance between the home country of professional money managers and the foreign target market on investment performance.

What they found is that investors earn higher returns in culturally similar foreign markets when market conditions in these countries are favourable. The results also showed that culture-based patterns in foreign portfolio allocations are associated with an information advantage. The results imply that multinational corporate decisions influenced by culture increase firm value.

The analysis also showed that other cross-national distance dimensions such as geography, business climate and industry were not reliably related to investors’ returns in foreign markets. These findings are of particular interest to leaders of multi-national firms because many high-level decisions rely on cross-national distance considerations.

The team’s findings that global institutional investors can profitably exploit culture distance provides a rational explanation for culture-driven portfolio allocation decisions in foreign markets. The findings also confirm that the culture component of home-market information advantage extends beyond the home country’s border to less distant foreign markets.

Fedenia, M., Skiba, H., & Sokolyk, T. (2022). The performance of active investment positions in foreign markets. Journal of International Business Studies. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-022-00548-0

Welcome to the gray zone: Shades of honesty and earnings management

| Pascale Lapointe-Antunes (pictured) and Kareen Brown, Journal of Business Ethics

Everyone has varying shades of honesty, but what if people’s faces could tell more of the story than we thought? This research examined the influence of face-based judgments of CEO and CFO honesty on earnings management for the largest publicly traded companies in the United States.

Honesty in financial reporting is essential for building stakeholder trust and helping them make informed lending and investment decisions. Yet Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) leave room for significant managerial discretion, leaving a grey zone where firms can make opportunistic financial reporting choices.

CFOs perceived to be less honest in the study’s photo review engaged in higher levels of accruals earnings management and real earnings management. The results indicated that alignment between the CEO and CFO also has an impact. If the two are perceived to be less honest, the extent of earnings management is more significant. However, the beneficial impact of perceived honesty on earnings quality is the most pronounced when the CEO and CFO are both perceived to be more honest. In addition, female CEOs and CFOs were less likely to engage in earnings management. This paper contributed to literature by bringing in the honesty dimension of personality when evaluating opportunistic accounting choices.

Lapointe-Antunes, P., Veenstra, K., Brown, K. & Li, H. (2022). Welcome to the Gray Zone: Shades of Honesty and Earnings Management. Journal of Business Ethics, 177, 125–149. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04713-z

The impact of advertising creative strategy on advertising elasticity |

Filippo Dall’Olio, Journal of Marketing

When it comes to advertising, is what you say more important than how you say it? This paper shows that content is more important to style when it comes to influencing sales.

This study provides a comprehensive assessment of the impact of advertising creative strategy on advertising elasticity by focusing on an integrative framework that distinguishes between the form and function.

To understand how marketers can leverage creative ads to increase marketplace performance the researchers developed an integrative framework that captures the fundamental aspects of creative strategy: content (form) and execution (function). The project analyzed 2,251 creatives from 91 consumer packaged goods brands across a period of four years and revealed that function is the main driver of marketplace performance.

Function was evaluated using a three-dimensional representation of content (experience, affect, cognition) where form was examined for both executional elements and the use of creative templates. The results revealed that for function, experiential content has the greatest effect on elasticity, followed by cognitive and affective content.

The researchers found strategic thinking in advertising pays off and marketers should leverage the synergies between content and execution by focusing content on one specific dimension, matching it with consistent executional elements and varying the composition of the creative over time. Managers should focus on the big picture and base creative strategy on more than just tactics.

Dall’Olio, F., & Vakratsas, D. (2023). The Impact of Advertising Creative Strategy on Advertising Elasticity. Journal of Marketing, 87(1), 26–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221074960

Configuring relational political resources to navigate host-country institutional complexities: insights from anglophone sub-Saharan Africa

| Magnus Hultman, Journal of International Business Studies

When operating in countries with weak formal institutions, knowing what ties with host-country political entities are beneficial to help multinational enterprises find success can be extremely useful.

This study used survey and archival data from 604 multinational enterprise subsidiaries in 23 anglophone sub-Saharan African countries to examine what the ideal configuration of ties to the three political resources –host-country government actors, local chieftains, and religious leaders – contributes the most to multinational subsidiary performance.

Researchers found that forging relationships between subsidiaries and host-country government actors, local chieftains and religious leaders generates regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive political resources. The study indicated the closer a subsidiary comes to an ideal configuration of the three political resources obtained from corporate political activity, the higher the sales growth.

The study found that local chieftains wield significant authority in many African societies and ties with them can be enlisted to strengthen the legitimacy of a subsidiary and provide protection for its investments. An ideal configuration of political resources features ties to all three political institutions.

The performance benefits of relational political resources are amplified when market conditions are dysfunctional. Having an ideal configuration of relationships with political resources enables multinational enterprises to grow sales and profits in dysfunctional environments.

Boso, N., Amankwah-Amoah, J., Eussman D., Olabode, E., Bruce, P., Hultman, M., Kutsoati, J., & Adeola, O. (2022). Configuring relational political resources to navigate host-country institutional complexities: insights from anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa, Journal of International Business Studies. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267022-00594-8

The role of space and place in organizational and institutional change: A systematic review of the literature

| Asma Zafar, Journal of Management Studies

As organizations are responding and reacting to the broader environment that encapsulates them, how does the role of place and space inform that change?

This project is a systematic review that identified 290 empirical articles published between 1979 and 2020 that attended to organizational or institutional change and also engaged with space or place.

The analysis generated four archetypal perspectives that represent qualitatively different ways of viewing the role of place and space in how organizations and institutions change: functional perspective, situated perspective, experiential perspective, and mutually constituted perspective.

These four perspectives were synthesized into a typology that reveals different levels of attention to change as process and to place and space as lived or physical phenomena, and shed light on different assumptions about the relationships between change and place or space that can guide future research.

The review found that place and space have the potential to inform and be informed by organizational change. When people inhabit space, they come to really affiliate with it so any organizational change process should be informed by it. Researchers hope that this will facilitate further research in the area by integrating the two topics together.

Wright, A. L., Irving, G., Zafar, A., & Reay, T. (2022). The role of space and place in organizational and institutional change: A systematic review of the literature. In Journal of Management Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12868

The disparate economic outcomes of stigma: Evidence from the arms industry

| Wesley Helms, Strategic Management Journal

This paper represents one of the first attempts to explicitly flesh out the relationship between stigma targeting the firm or its affiliates, and the economic penalties associated with it. The research provides evidence that the use of stigmatizing labels can lead to the economic sanctioning of firms.

Researchers present a mixed-methods study of stigma and its negative economic impact on firms in the global arms sector. The study provides an initial framework for future studies on the conditions under which the economic consequences commonly associated with stigma are likely to materialize.

The research advances knowledge on whether and when stigmatizing judgments materialize in stigmatized industries. On average, audiences’ stigmatizing judgments have material economic consequences that vary based on judgment attributes and the audience delivering it.

The findings also suggest that audiences have – at least in theory – some degree of strategic control over the economic consequences that organizations suffer because of stigmatizing judgements. Interest groups could seek to strategically fine-tune their condemnation to inflict economic harm on their targets. Civil society actors could strategically choose to frame their vilification attempts in terms of harm, rather than illegality, in order to inflict greater economic penalties, while market actors could direct their attention to the exchange partners of firms engaged in controversial activities – pushing them to withdraw from transactions.

Organizational stigma: Taking stock and opening new areas for research

|

Wesley Helms, Journal of Management Studies.

Why do some deviant firms get away from deviating from norms and rules and others don’t?

Organizational stigma has become central to explaining how organizations or industries become tainted, and how they overcome and manage the taint. This editorial introduces a Special Issue journal edition on organizational stigma and explores the origins of the concept, provides basic definitions and reviews the existing research on stigmatization, stigma transfer and experienced stigma.

As new contested industries emerge – from medical cannabis and artificial meat – organizational stigma could be mobilized to understand entrepreneurial intention, entry, and growth in tainted markets.

The authors hope that this editorial and issue can help consolidate existing research on organizational stigma and open new areas for contribution, both conceptually and empirically. From more traditional contexts such as international business operations and banking to less traditional ones such as television reality shows on drag queens, martial arts or kink associations, studies of organization stigmas have shown the polyvalence and theoretical usefulness of the concept.

The literature on organizational stigma is still evolving and is beginning to reach a maturation phase. Historical and multi-level perspectives have the potential to further our understanding of the precursors and outcomes of organizational stigma while in return organizational stigma could enlighten new phenomena and contexts.

Hudson, B. A., Patterson, K. D., Roulet, T. J., Helms, W. S., & Elsbach, K. (2022) Organizational stigma: Taking stock and opening new areas for research. Journal of Management Studies, 59(8), 1899-1914. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12875

Getting away with it (or not): The social control of organizational deviance

| Wesley Helms, Academy of Management Review

Organizations breaking laws and norms in the pursuit of a strategic advantage is far from new, but it has received significant attention in recent years in academic literature.

Why do some deviant firms get away with deviating from norms and rules and others don’t? These firms know how to navigate the process of social control to improve their outcomes and find people that are willing to cooperate with them.

These transgressions generally elicit the intervention of social control agents seeking to curb deviant behaviour being suppressed; in other occasions, however organizational deviance can persist and even be accepted into the very system of rule that was being challenged.

This paper advances a structured view of this process by formulating a theory of the social control of organizational deviance. The research builds upon sociological literature and classifies forms of social control based on their cooperativeness and formality and sheds light on the outcomes of social control by illustrating the conditions under which they are likely to be more or less accommodative of deviant behaviour as well as more or less permanent.

This work contributes to the scholarly understanding of the role of social control in organizational fields, as well as the advantageousness of deviant behaviour as a strategic option for organizations.

Piazza, A., Bergemann, P., & Helms, W. (2022). Getting away with it (or not): The social control of organizational deviance. Academy of Management Review https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2021.0066

Sadri, M., Piazza, A., Phung, K., & Helms, W., (forthcoming). The Disparate Economic Outcomes of Stigma: Evidence from the Arms Industry, Strategic Management Journal

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