Major oil companies are seriously looking into low-carbon energy sources, said energy management professor Bill Arnold at Rice University. And it’s no longer just for PR reasons like in the past. “Developing wind power, electric vehicle recharging stations,” Arnold said. “But I think what they try to do is to say where do we actually have known skillsets right now and how can we apply them that’s compatible with this new interest.”
How to get your company to buy in for your cause.
Based on research by Scott Sonenshein, David M. Mayer, Madeline Ong and Susan J. Ashford
How To Get Company Buy In For Your Cause
Consider the parade of brands that have taken up social activism in the past few years. Stella Artois’ “Buy a Lady a Drink” campaign drove awareness of the global water crisis. Apple’s Tim Cook advocates for LGBTQ rights. Airbnb launched its “We Accept” campaign just nine days after President Trump signed an order temporarily closing U.S. borders to refugees.
These companies’ plunge into social issues marks a profound change in the historic relationship of business to U.S. society. In the old days, firms tended to measure value strictly in terms of profit and loss. Even when they launched charitable projects, those projects were sold to management as good for the bottom line. Today, it’s not just money that matters, but also a company’s sense of identity.
So there’s a pressing need for research to guide managers on how to pitch activist projects in this new environment. To investigate, Rice Business professor Scott Sonenshein joined colleagues David M. Mayer and Susan J. Ashford of the University of Michigan and Madeline Ong of Hong Kong University to analyze how business managers should frame projects that don’t conform to traditional notions of profit and loss. Businesses are most willing to take a stand, they found, when managers frame a project in language the businesses understand — language, that is, that speaks to a company’s vision of the world and its own values.
To draw these conclusions, Sonenshein’s team considered years of research showing that when managers only consider the bottom line, they quickly drift from a team-oriented approach to one in which individuals behave less ethically and more selfishly. In some studies, merely looking at money increased selfish behavior. In contrast, managers who view issues through an ethical lens tend to foster cooperative and pro-social behavior among their employees — behavior that happens to be highly desirable for a high-functioning firm.
As part of their investigation, Sonenshein and his colleagues created an online survey of 141 working adults, asking them to recall a time when they spoke to a superior about a major social issue. The issues raised included everything from local charity giving to gender and racial issues in the workplace to disaster relief. There was a significant interaction, the scholars found, between the use of language invoking morals and what they called “fit.” Moral language, they discovered, had much more firepower when used in an argument that fit an organization’s values.
A second survey of 176 people involved both employees and the managers they hoped to convince. To find their participants, Sonenshein’s team tapped the World Business Alliance (a pseudonym for a real company), which works with hundreds of business organizations, including Fortune 500 companies in North America, Asia and Africa. The employees were asked how much they used moral arguments and business language to make a case to managers to participate in a social project. The managers, for their part, were asked how successful the employees were in making those pitches.
The researchers found that moral language tended to be more successful in ginning up company action when it related to a firm’s core mission. When employees made moral arguments for action on issues that didn’t fit their firm’s goals, their efforts faltered. It’s easier, for example, to get managers at a water utility to join a campaign for clean drinking water than to get similar support from managers of a paper mill or an IT company.
In a sharp digression from traditional business culture, talking about social issues at work is no longer taboo. In fact, major companies now crave a voice in the public conversation. To turn your cause into a company talking point, however, it’s critical to use the right references to describe it. Listen closely, Sonenshein advises, to what your company tells itself and others about its values. In 21st century business, it’s no longer necessary to pitch social action as a dollar-printing machine. Even so, when pushing a particular moral stand, it’s still key to echo the values of the institution writing the checks.
Scott Sonenshein is the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.
For learn more, please see: Mayer, D. M., Ong, M., Sonenshein, S., & Ashford, S. J. (2019). The money or the morals? When moral language is more effective for selling social issues. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(8), 1058-1076.
The stock market has a measurable influence on how people who own shares vote — potentially a big one — according to a new study by finance experts at Rice University and the University of Pittsburgh.
The stock market has a measurable influence on how people who own shares vote — potentially a big one — according to a new study by finance experts at Rice University and the University of Pittsburgh.
The study, which compared electoral preferences with levels of dividend income, suggests that had stocks rallied instead of plunging in 2008, then-presidential candidate John McCain may have won key states like Florida and Ohio, said coauthor Alan Crane, associate professor of finance at Rice Business. He is available to discuss the study, a working paper, with the news media.
Crane and his coauthors don’t say equity returns determine elections, but there’s reason to think stock performance affects decisions at the margin, and in certain circumstances could turn the tide.
“The story is, if you’ve got a lot of money invested in the stock market, and the stock market has been going up, then you’re going to support that incumbent party, because that’s good for you personally,” Crane said. “You have an opportunity for politicians to cater through this particular channel.”
From an academic standpoint, there is a generally accepted principle: A good economy is good for the incumbent. “The problem is, it’s very hard to show,” said Crane, who wrote the paper with Pittsburgh professors Andrew Koch and Leming Lin. “What we’re trying to do in this paper is nail that down. Say, ‘Look, the stock market does have this causal effect going in that direction, and we can identify that.'”
Rice has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7.
To schedule an interview with Crane, contact Jeff Falk, associate director of national media relations at Rice, at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.
Follow the Jones Graduate School of Business on Twitter @Rice_Biz.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.
Related materials:
Study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3460209
Crane bio: https://business.rice.edu/person/alan-crane
Jones Graduate School of Business: https://business.rice.edu
In a new study from Rice University, researchers found the outcome of presidential elections at the county level from 1992 to 2016 were directly influenced by stock market performance. The researchers unearthed this gem of a stat: a one-percentage-point higher dividend income ratio is associated with an increase in incumbent vote share by 2.4 percentage points.
Utpal Dholakia, the chair of marketing at Rice University who specializes in pricing strategies, noted that analyzing tweets about crypto to invest in crypto could contribute to a cycle, making it easy for traders to drive up prices.“Crypto are niche markets, they are made up of a specialized group of investors and participants,” he said.
New academic research finds that the market has a measurable influence on how people who own shares vote -- potentially a big one. The study, which compared electoral preferences with levels of dividend income, suggests that had stocks rallied instead of plunging in 2008, John McCain may have won key states like Florida and Ohio.
A Texas-wide initiative will bring 150 school district and campus leaders to Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business for one weekend every month between now and March to advance the administrators’ and educators’ leadership skills.
A Texas-wide initiative will bring 150 school district and campus leaders to Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business for one weekend every month between now and March to advance the administrators’ and educators’ leadership skills. The Jones School is partnering with Leadership Partners and the Texas Education Agency to provide the programming for the Executive Education Academy. Collectively, the 33 districts represented in the program’s three cohorts serve 21% of the 5 million students in the state.
Brent Smith (pictured below), senior associate dean for executive education and associate professor of management and psychology at Rice Business, is one of the Rice faculty involved with the academy, and he taught a kickoff session on “Leading Self” Oct. 4 in McNair Hall.
(Photos by Jeff Fitlow)
A new study shows that two key factors can make freshly appointed CEOs more vulnerable and raise the odds they’ll get fired. The job security of a new CEO tends to suffer when the stock market reacts badly or when the previous CEO stays on as board chair, according to the study by Rice University and Peking University management experts. But the study found that the new CEO can overcome these challenges with what researchers call “social influence behaviors.”
A new study shows that two key factors can make freshly appointed CEOs more vulnerable and raise the odds they’ll get fired.
The job security of a new CEO tends to suffer when the stock market reacts badly or when the previous CEO stays on as board chair, according to the study by Rice University and Peking University management experts. But the study found that the new CEO can overcome these challenges with what researchers call “social influence behaviors.”
The study’s authors used computer programs to analyze transcripts of new CEOs’ conference calls with securities analysts. They found that CEOs who ingratiated themselves with their predecessors reduced the adverse impact of the old boss remaining as board chair. At the same time, the study concluded CEOs who engaged in self-promotion mitigated the negative impact of poor stock market reactions.
But the authors also found evidence that new CEOs’ social influence behaviors can backfire. “A new CEO’s commitment to strategic continuity — as originated by the predecessor CEO — can amplify the adverse impact of the initial negative stock market reaction,” the authors said. “Moreover, a new CEO’s self-centered expression may turn off the retained predecessor CEO, thus amplifying the adverse impact of the predecessor’s staying on as board chair on the new CEO’s early survival prospect.”
The study will be published in the Academy of Management Journal.
Yan “Anthea” Zhang, professor and the Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Chair of Strategic Management at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, along with co-authors Xiwei Yi of Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and Duane Windsor, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Management at Rice Business, focused their study on a sample of 440 successions that consisted of newly appointed CEOs in S&P 500 companies who took office between 2001 and 2012.
The language used by new CEOs in conference calls is public language, the authors said. “Public language is endemic to public corporations,” the authors wrote. “It is very difficult for a leader to communicate privately with one group while making contrasting statements publicly.”
“Taking charge is challenging for new CEOs,” they wrote. “Predecessor CEOs remaining as board chairs undermines the authority and discretion of the new CEOs. Negative stock market reactions reflect shareholders’ doubt about the new CEOs’ job fit.”
Social influence theory suggests that people can convey information in such a way as to manage relationships and influence the attitudes of others, the authors said.
“Ingratiation and self-promotion are two important social influence tactics,” the authors wrote. “Ingratiation focuses on a target individual with the aim of evoking interpersonal attraction by complimenting that individual or agreeing with that individual. Self-promotion focuses on highlighting one’s own experiences and accomplishments in order to generate a perception of competence. Both ingratiation and self-promotion can improve outcomes such as hiring recommendations, promotion and performance appraisal ratings.”
Both types of behaviors aim to improve a new CEO’s approval by the board of directors and shareholders, but they rely on different mechanisms, the authors said. Ingratiation increases perceptions of similarity and likability, while self-promotion elicits the attribution of competence.
“In brief, while new CEOs’ social influence behaviors may alleviate the adverse impact of targeted audiences, such behaviors may amplify the adverse impact of non-targeted audiences on their early survival prospects,” the authors wrote.
For a copy of the study, “You are Great and I am Great (too): Examining New CEOs’ Social Influence Behaviors During Leadership Transition,” email jfalk@rice.edu.
For more information about and insights from Rice Business faculty research, visit the school’s Rice Business Wisdom website, https://business.rice.edu/wisdom.
Follow Rice Business via Twitter @Rice_Biz.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Related materials:
Windsor bio: https://business.rice.edu/person/duane-windsor
Zhang bio: https://business.rice.edu/person/yan-anthea-zhang
Brandi Downey, a 2011 graduate of Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, couldn’t find anything, so she accepted a short-term consulting gig. Six months later, she was hired to help start up a real estate brokerage. She remains in real estate and now owns a boutique brokerage firm in Houston.
How to bring your best game to the application process, in ten manageable steps.
How to Apply for a Rice MBA in Ten Steps
Updated from original post that was published in 2019.
Interview with Sofia Cormack, assistant director of recruiting and admissions at Rice Business
If you're planning on applying to Rice Business you're likely a high achiever – and showcasing all your qualifications to best effect, in one application, while meeting your other responsibilities, may seem daunting. Don't let it be: Sofia Cormack, assistant director of recruiting and admissions, outlines ten manageable steps to master the business school application process.
Before diving into the application process, take the time to thoroughly research business programs and gain a comprehensive understanding of the MBA application journey.
Here's a curated list of questions for MBA candidates to keep in mind:
Once you open your online application account, it will be a work in progress. Please check this page for up-to-date information on MBA application requirements. You'll be able to add to and edit it as much as you want in the days before submitting. Rice Business reviews applications comprehensively, which means that no one piece of your application carries more weight than any of the others. Instead, quantitative credentials – such as work experience, GMAT or GRE score and grades – will be assessed alongside qualitative achievements such as leadership, community involvement and career progress. This ensures a range of ways for you to show why you belong here. Keep in mind you don’t need to fill out the application all in one sitting; many successful candidates work on their application as a study break from their GMAT or GRE test preparation.
Determine if you want to take the GMAT, GRE or Executive Assessment (EA). All candidates, except ones for Deferred Enrollment, are eligible to take the EA. We don't have a preference for which test you take. However, some applicants tend to perform better on one of these tests than the other. You should research which type of test you do best on.
A few industries tend to prefer one test over the other. Depending on your career goals, you may want to choose a particular test. During the application process, please submit the official test score report.
Gather unofficial copies of your higher education transcripts. We advise doing this early on, because you may need to reach out to your former schools for these documents. The application process only requires unofficial copies, such as scans. For enrollment, you'll need to submit official copies.
Select your recommenders, and let them know they should expect an email from our admissions office. It will contain a link to the form for the GMAC Common Letter of Recommendation. We suggest having a conversation with your recommenders beforehand, explaining why you are interested in an MBA program. It can be helpful to remind your recommenders of a couple of projects you have worked on.
A maximum of two letters of recommendation are allowed. Only one is required if it comes from your current or previous supervisor. Two are required if your current or previous supervisor will not be submitting a recommendation on your behalf. Recommendations highlighting your professional abilities are preferred.
Now it's time to prepare your resume. A tip for your Rice Business application is to follow a 70-10-20 rule. This means that about 70 percent of your resume should focus on your work experience, 10 percent should describe your education and 20 percent can inform on everything else relevant to your profile as a Rice Business candidate. Make sure to focus on what you’ve actually accomplished rather than simply describing your role at work or at school, and quantify your achievements wherever you can.
This is a multiphase step, because you'll want to think deeply about what you want to say about yourself and your goals. The Full-Time, Professional MBA and Hybrid MBA programs require two essays and the Executive MBA requires one.
It’s important to be clear and concise. Tell us your story and not what you think we want to hear. Be authentic. Don't simply list the facts. We want to hear your voice, get to know you and understand what will make you unique as a student and a member of the Rice Business community. Finally, don't forget to check your spelling. Feel free to reference the most updated information about our essay requirements here.
Now it's time to upload anything that you haven't already put online: your scanned transcripts, the names of your recommenders, the final version of your essay. Double-check that you've filled out all requested biographical and practical questions, such as your birth date, address and contact information. Proofread – and submit!
The Rice Business application process includes other assessments with candidates who are selected as finalists during our review. We have a tight-knit, collaborative learning environment and these assessments are an opportunity to learn why you belong here. Please reference the MBA admissions guide to learn more.
Give yourself a treat: take yourself to dinner or enjoy some time in nature. You've applied to one of the top business schools in the country and made a substantive stride toward the future.
Ready to start your application?
Learn from Rice Business how to ask for employer support for your EMBA, including employer sponsorship options, other types of financing and negotiation.
Curious how new federal aid changes will affect you? Read about how MBA programs are impacted — and why our students are finding smarter, more competitive ways to fund their futures.
Rice students bring an average of five years of experience to the Full-Time MBA program. From stronger cohorts to high-powered networking, here’s why work experience is important for top business programs in the U.S.