Based on research Michelle "Mikki" Hebl, Enrica N. Ruggs and Amber WIlliams

• Over the past few decades, U.S. obesity rates have spiked. So has discrimination toward heavy people.
• Research about this prejudice abounds, but it centers on overweight women and overlooks overweight men.
• New research shows that obese males face significant discrimination in retail settings, both as clients and employees.

It's an American paradox: While more and more of us are obese — one-third of U.S. adults — discrimination against heavy people has spread. Studies show just how toxic this stigma is: Overweight people are judged to be less hardworking, less attractive and less conscientious. They get shabbier treatment in practice as well, and are more likely to be discriminated against in health care, interpersonal relationships and the workplace.

While decades of research have anatomized these issues, it has focused on overweight women. There's good reason for this. While heavy women and men report equal levels of mistreatment from friends, family and co-workers, heavy women report higher levels of mistreatment from strangers and the general public. Women are also badly treated at lower levels of heaviness than overweight men.

But overweight men face serious prejudice too, according to new research by Mikki Hebl, a professor at Rice Business, and two co-authors. To measure that prejudice in the workplace, Hebl and her colleagues launched a novel study at a mall in what they describe as a large southern city. Deploying researchers who presented themselves first as ordinary-sized men and then, with the use of prosthetics, as men who were obese, the researchers tracked how obese men fare in a variety of retail settings.  

Heavy men, the researchers found, face striking mistreatment in such environments. For their study, the team asked research assistants, also called confederates, to pose first as obese job seekers and then as obese shoppers. First the men visited stores wearing size medium shirts and pants with a 30-inch average waist. They revisited the same stores wearing special obesity prosthetics, size extra-large shirts, and pants with 40-inch waists.

Using formal training and memorized scripts, the men arrived at 112 stores pretending to apply for a job, and 111 stores where they headed to the center and waited for service. If no employee approached, the faux-shoppers followed a script in which they sought an employee, asked for help buying a present and then asked for a second recommendation.

The results? Whether asking for jobs or customer service, the subjects faced no weight-related difference in what is called formal treatment: overt and illegal actions such as giving unequal access to resources. But when the "heavy" men applied for jobs, they faced far worse interpersonal treatment than the ordinary sized men: That is, subtle behaviors such as hostility that aren't illegal but can still drive off workers and clients.

Heavy men, in other words, "are not immune to interpersonal discrimination in retail settings," the scholars wrote. These subtle aggressions, they pointed out, undercut not only people who are heavy — but the businesses that engage with them. Just as excluding women saps whole nations' economic vitality, driving off people who are heavy limits businesses' access to brainpower and dollars. Both types of loss are too heavy to make business sense.

Mikki Hebl is the Martha and Henry Malcolm Lovett Chair of Psychology at Rice University and a professor of management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Ruggs, E. N., Hebl, M. R., & Williams, A. (2015). Weight isn’t selling: The insidious effects of weight stigmatization in retail settings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(5), 1483-1496.

Based on research K. Ramesh, Bei Dong, Edward Xuejun Li and Min Shen

• New research uncovers an unfair trading advantage that skewed the playing field before Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) became effective in 2000. Before Reg FD, the SEC gave financial journalists early access to corporate press releases. Over time, this led to the creation of high-cost subscription services.
• The practice ended after the SEC released Regulation Fair Disclosure.
• This advance notice had as much impact on investing as personal contact from executives, a practice long criticized for its favoritism. 

It may be hard to believe, but as recently as 2000, an SEC-sanctioned rule gave financial news media a 15-minute head start on viewing firm press releases.

Today, just a fraction of a second of such early access can mean staggering profits. To grab that advantage, investment houses pour millions of dollars into ultra-fast fiber optic and microwave communication.

Before Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), financial media actually sold advance access to this information – by subscription. According to research co-authored by K. Ramesh, Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Rice Business, buyers used the information to move markets before the general public ever saw the releases. The policy strikingly disadvantaged regular investors.

Not that the SEC meant for the early bird information to be used this way. In fact, it was supposed to do the opposite: to level the playing field for regular investors. Sophisticated investors, after all, enjoy better resources and expertise for extracting valuable information from firm news. The SEC decided to give regular investors a 15-minute edge by granting financial reporters early access to firm press releases.

The idea was that the press would use that 15-minute window to distill tradable information and release it prior to the full press release going out to the public. Instead, the plan backfired. Media outlets charged subscriptions for the special access, effectively making investing a pay-to-play game. The good news is that this practice ended in August 2000, after Reg FD reinforced the importance of fair access to public information.

Interestingly, the SEC had meant for its early-access plan to democratize investing. It was Business Wire and PR Newswire, firms hired by companies to publicize their business news, that first shed light on the practice.

To study what happened before this policy change, Ramesh and his co-authors used intra-day data to analyze the flow of information into the stock market. The team compared the 15-minute market activity before earnings press releases went public before Reg FD and after its implementation.

They found that traders with advance access were moving markets before the public got the same information. The effects were especially lopsided for firms with institutional investors that base their stock positions on short-term earnings. Subscribers also had a striking edge after good-news press releases, which are easier for traders to use in investing.

The early peeks also increased information uncertainty, which they measured by bid-ask spreads. The bottom line: Giving traders early access to firm information gave sophisticated investors an edge. After the SEC changed its policy, the study raises a new question. Do traders now get an unfair advantage when they can snatch just a few seconds’ advance look at information? If so, it may take both policy and technology to reconcile these current practices with the spirit of Reg FD.

K. Ramesh is the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Dong, B., Li, E. X., Ramesh, K., & Shen, M. (2015). Priority dissemination of public disclosures. The Accounting Review, 90(6), 2235-2266.

Based on research Erik Dane and Bradley J. Brummel

• People are mindful when they attune to their environment and thoughts while staying in the present moment.
• Research shows employees who are more mindful may perform their jobs better and want to stay with their employers longer.
• From a management perspective, this highlights the importance of helping employees develop greater mindfulness.

Research has demonstrated that mindfulness positively relates to academic performance, judgment accuracy and problem solving. Mindfulness also has been associated with a host of psychological and physical benefits, including increased life satisfaction and relationship quality, decreased depression and stress and more effective self-regulation of thoughts and emotions.

So mindfulness is always good, right? Well, while mindfulness has certainly been explored in a wide range of contexts, the effects of mindfulness in the workplace largely remain a matter of intuition and generalization. After all, a classroom is not an office, and students are not employees. We shouldn’t generalize between contexts in the absence of empirical evidence.

Erik Dane, a former management professor at Rice Business, and his co-author Bradley J. Brummel of the University of Tulsa sought to fill this research gap by studying mindfulness in a dynamic workplace setting. Doing so allowed them to explore the effects of mindfulness on two important work outcomes: job performance and turnover intention. They specifically chose a dynamic workplace, the restaurant industry, because it requires workers to make a series of interdependent decisions in real-time – or in the present moment – and would thus be ripe to reveal the impacts of mindfulness.

And indeed, the survey-based study of 98 restaurant servers revealed a positive association between mindfulness and job performance. The more mindful the employees were, the more highly their managers rated their job performance.

Surprising? Perhaps not, but the researchers didn’t stop with this confirmation of the beneficial effect. They delved further into the association between mindfulness and job performance by disentangling it from a close conceptual cousin of mindfulness: engagement. This distinction has important implications for managers.

Dane and Brummel suggest that mindfulness differs from engagement in a subtle but important way. Whereas mindfulness is a cognitive construct, engagement is an affective construct. In other words, mindfulness involves a person’s mental processing of the multitude of events in the work environment, whereas engagement involves a person’s feelings about the work environment that ultimately drive his or her motivation to perform. For example, a mindful restaurant server may perform well because she constantly scans the expressions of her guests, how full their iced tea glasses are and the status of their orders in the kitchen. In contrast, an engaged server may perform well because she is absorbed by and dedicated to her job, which drives her to succeed.

But is it possible for a high-performing employee to be highly engaged in the workplace, yet not be highly mindful? Yes. Dane and Brummel found that mindfulness had a positive effect on job performance independent of engagement, which means managers should strive to nurture employees who are both engaged and mindful. Engaged employees may be high performers because they are enthusiastic and passionate, but they may become even higher performers when their attention is focused mindfully.

The study revealed a more complicated relationship between mindfulness and turnover intention. Considered without regard to how engaged employees were, the study found that highly mindful employees are less likely to want to leave their jobs than less mindful employees. Mindfulness may enhance self-regulation, which in turn helps people cope with stress in a dynamic workplace. When examined together with engagement, however, mindfulness did not predict employees’ intention to leave their positions.

Here again, the ultimate takeaway for managers is that both mindfulness and engagement matter in the workplace, whether they facilitate beneficial work outcomes separately or in combination.

While some people may simply be more mindful than others, evidence exists that mindfulness can be enhanced through practice, training and experience. Meditation-based programs such as mindfulness-based stress reduction, for example, may help employees focus attention on the present. With the empirical evidence of positive work outcomes associated with mindfulness now in hand, managers should continue to be mindful of this emerging scholarship as other important organizational outcomes and workplace contexts are examined.

Erik Dane is a former professor and was the Jones School Distinguished Associate Professor of Management in organizational behavior at Rice Business.

To learn more, please see: Dane, E., & Brummel, B. J. (2014). Examining workplace mindfulness and its relations to job performance and turnover intention. Human Relations, 67(1), 105-128.

Based on research Erik Dane, Heather C. Vough, M.Teresa Cardador, Jeffrey S. Bednar and Michael G. Pratt

• When clients lack a complete understanding of your professional role and the complexity of your work, it can lead to unmet expectations and diminished trust.
• Solutions include providing information, demonstrating your work and building personal relationships with clients.
• Start talking with your clients ASAP about your work and connect with them on a personal level to garner goodwill.

Clueless clients are aggravating. Worse, they can cost professionals money and hinder productivity, according to research co-authored by Erik Dane, a former management professor at Rice Business. Dane’s team devised a model that more precisely explains what some clients are clueless about — and the costs of their ignorance.

Perhaps more importantly, the model describes tactics you can use to mitigate the consequences of dealing with clients who don't get what you do.

Analyzing interviews with 85 professionals from four different fields let Dane and his co-authors go beyond theory to gain in-depth knowledge from real work experiences. In other words, rather than imposing a preconceived model upon the professionals’ experience with clients, they allowed the model to emerge directly from the mouths of the professionals themselves. As a result, their research provides managers with a valuable understanding of problematic professional-client interactions that is grounded in reality.

The researchers’ first step was to understand exactly what the professionals thought people didn’t fully grasp about their work. Two clear themes emerged in the study, which the researchers call role-based image discrepancies. These discrepancies arise when professionals think that outsiders’ idea of what they do differs considerably from the reality of what they do. Firstly, professionals think outsiders lack a complete understanding of the scope of the work they do. Secondly, they think outsiders may not completely understand the level of complexity or difficulty of their work.

These discrepancies become problematic when someone who doesn’t understand becomes a client. Clients may devalue the profession because they underestimate the importance of the work, or they may have impractical or skeptical expectations about timelines, services and the intentions of the professional.

The researchers discovered that these misalignments result in unmet expectations and diminished trust, which can impede productivity on three fronts. First, collaboration may be impaired if clients don’t give necessary information to professionals or if they unintentionally slow the progress of projects. Second, clients may question the amount they are being charged, which may make professionals feel pressure to complete their work without adequate time or not bill for hours they worked if they suspect the client will object. Finally, productivity (and income) may suffer when clients bypass professionals for some tasks because they don’t understand the true value of their work.

But Dane and his colleagues discovered several tactics that can help — and they stressed the importance of employing these tactics before the detrimental effects of clueless clients rear their ugly heads. If a professional does nothing to prevent these effects, Dane warns, she may find herself in a vicious, self-reinforcing spiral of unmet expectations, damaged trust and impaired collaboration.

One tactic is to inform clients about the work process right from the start. Once things go awry, it can be difficult to regain trust or repair the relationship. Professionals should give their clients a big-picture overview of their work and its value, as well as its scope and complexity. They should not, however, try to convey the nitty-gritty technical details of their work, which could confuse and alienate clients.

When possible, professionals should also demonstrate their work for clients. Doing so may reassure clients not only that complex work is getting done, but also that the professional is a capable expert. Of course, this tactic is easier to accomplish in some professions than others, notably those in which tangible objects can be manipulated in front of the clients’ eyes.

And last but not least, Dane and his team advise professionals to build friendly relationships. By developing personal connections and rapport with their clients, professionals can garner goodwill that may overcome misconceptions about their roles and work. Moreover, the conscious effort to nurture these personal relationships promises to streamline the working relationship and sidestep the productivity costs associated with problematic client interactions.

The takeaway? Get out from behind the curtain and start talking with your clients as soon as possible. Give them an overview of what you do, how you do it and why it is valuable. When you can, let them watch you do some of your work so that they can see for themselves how complex and specialized it is. And perhaps most importantly, connect with them as people, not just as clients.

Erik Dane is a former professor and was the Jones School Distinguished Associate Professor of Management in organizational behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Vough, H. C., Cardador, M. T., Bednar, J. S.,  Dane, E., & Pratt, M. G. (2013). What clients don’t get about my profession: A model of perceived role-based image discrepancies. Academy of Management Journal, 56(4), 1050-1080.

Based on research Constance Elise Porter, Sarv Devaraj and Daewon Sun

• As virtual communities have boomed in recent years, businesses are pondering the best way to work with them.
• Two important models have emerged: virtual communities sponsored by firms, and those where consumers are the driving force behind community creation.
• Which works better for firms? And should a company invest resources in sponsoring a community? Analysis across a range of communities reveals that both models have value — but there is good reason for companies taking an active role, especially when it comes to building trust.

Businesses have always known that word of mouth matters. If customers, or people in general, say nice things about you, other people listen, and may be inspired to buy your products.

In the past, though, word of mouth was fairly limited because it depended on person-to-person contact. Now, with the rise of the Internet and social media, what was once chatter around the neighborhood has become national and even international. Virtual communities can bridge not just distance, but social class and other barriers, creating a near-dizzying power to share information.

For both consumers and companies, this means opportunity. The former can learn from peers about a firm and its products; the latter can build brands, nurture client loyalty and glean marketplace insights. But how to best make use of this virtual new world? Do customer comments rule, or can firms make a difference by investing resources to sponsor their own communities?

Virtual communities come in three basic forms: groups created by a third party (think Epinions.com, which tags itself as “unbiased reviews by real people”); those created by consumers with a shared interest (say coffee, or a type of car); and those created by a firm, which tend to be found on a firm’s website. While the first type of community has sparked a lot of interest among information system researchers, the latter two have garnered far less attention, with no researchers exploring consumer-initiated and firm-sponsored communities comparatively.

To help fill this gap, Constance Elise Porter, an assistant professor of marketing at Rice Business, and two co-authors surveyed a selection of two types of consumers – those who were members of a virtual community that was sponsored by a firm and others who had only visited a virtual community run by consumers. The researchers asked the former about experiences in a firm-sponsored community and the latter about their experiences in a consumer-driven community. Both sets of subjects were queried about how information from community members, also known as Member Generated Information (MGI), shaped their decision-making process. However, those on the firm-sponsored side were also asked how effective those firms were at offering quality content as well as fostering interaction and member embeddedness.

The researchers measured "value" by a subject's willingness to share personal information and spread positive word of mouth.

Not surprisingly, MGI had major sway with both groups, particularly when it was consistent, showed consensus and was distinctive. But there was good news for those managers who wonder if spending time and money on a firm-sponsored virtual community is a waste of resources. Where trust is concerned, those in the second group said, a firm's effort toward customers can have an even greater influence than MGI.

In the end, then, both firm-sponsored and customer-initiated virtual communities matter. Managing customer relationships online makes a real difference; virtual communities of both types can be crucial, their benefits hinging on external marketplace conditions and a firm's internal resources. By exploring two types of virtual communities, Porter and her co-authors found empirical evidence about how trust and value is created and opened new avenues of research into the ways these worlds affect business. That's worth a little word of mouth.

Constance Elise Porter is an assistant clinical professor of marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Porter, C. E., Devaraj, S., & Sun, D. (2013). A test of two models of value creation in virtual communities. Journal of Management Information Systems, 30(1), 261-292.

Based on research Vikas Mittal, Vanitha Swaminathan, Christopher Groening and Felipe Thomaz

• Managers should forgo choosing between efficiency and customer satisfaction goals in a merger and instead pursue a dual-goal strategy.
• A dual-goal strategy pays off in the long run.
• When executing a dual-goal strategy, take the firm’s unique resources and industry dynamics into account.

Mergers are making a comeback, but fewer than half actually create financial value. Take the 2008 merger between Delta and Northwest Airlines, for example. Initially, it was declared a success because of management’s disciplined approach to cost control. But later on, the newly merged firm suffered earnings shortfalls and a lackluster stock price. So, if the success of a merger is driven purely by cost efficiency, what went wrong with Delta? Well, anyone who flew Delta just after the merger knows the story. Late arrivals and rising customer complaints caused customer satisfaction to plummet.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that things might have turned out differently had Delta’s executives focused simultaneously on cost efficiency and customer satisfaction. But, truth is, having a dual-goal strategy has always been frowned upon by senior managers. After all, it’s what many of them learned in business school: “Successful firms must choose a dominant strategy: cost leadership or customer focus. Trying to do both well is just too difficult because the two strategies are in conflict about how to grow the bottom line.” But a lot has changed since those business school days, and we now know that managers don’t always have to choose between two strategic goals. A dual-goal strategy is feasible for many firms.

But is there anything about a merger environment that makes a dual-goal strategy especially attractive? Yes, according to a study co-authored by Vikas Mittal, J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at Rice Business. In fact, findings from the study show that a dual-goal strategy actually maximizes long-term value for a merged firm.

Prior research already confirms that a dual-goal strategy could boost the bottom line — merger or no merger. Why? Because the income statement math works: customer satisfaction increases sales and efficiency reduces costs. Another way to think about the power of a dual-goal strategy is that the extra revenue generated by higher customer satisfaction could be redeployed to shore up efficiency-enhancing initiatives. So, a dual-goal strategy could be synergistic.

What makes the merger context uniquely suited to the pursuit of a dual-goal strategy? Mittal and his co-authors argue that while mergers can be disruptive and financially challenging early on, a dual-goal strategy pays off in the long run because it provides management the opportunity to make beneficial changes: strengthen organizational systems, bolster capabilities and increase market power. For example, mergers provide managers the flexibility to reallocate human resources most productively, across both firms, in line with the new strategic direction. Also, mergers give managers a chance to access new markets and pursue profitable customers with differentiated offerings, both of which could sustain satisfaction and grow profits. Finally, from a cost-efficiency standpoint, mergers help managers take advantage of economies of scale and scope, streamline (often through downsizing) and invest wisely in new resources such as efficiency-driven information technology systems.

Mittal and his co-authors analyzed secondary data spanning nine years (from 1995 to 2003) and 429 firms (54 percent involved a merger). This sample of mostly large companies was tracked by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and represented a mix of firms in services and goods industries (e.g. Ford, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Kroger). Firms varied in terms of ACSI customer satisfaction ratings as well as efficiency ratings, as measured by an index created for this study. The change in the so-called Tobin’s q metric — the market value of a firm’s stock divided by the replacement costs of the firm’s total assets – was used to measure the change in a firm’s long-term performance. Tobin’s q is a forward looking measure that points to investor expectations of a firm’s future success.

Findings from the study were clear. With mergers, especially those that are horizontal, an increase in customer satisfaction coupled with an increase in efficiency results in the highest change in a firm’s long-term performance. There is evidence that efficiency gains could improve long-term performance, even in the face of a dip in customer satisfaction. But take note: The performance gains under those conditions are smaller (and in Delta’s case nonexistent) in comparison to those achieved when efficiency and satisfaction are increased simultaneously. And, importantly, when no merger has taken place a dual-goal strategy does not enhance long-term performance in comparison to other strategies, such a focusing on either increased customer satisfaction or efficiency.

Taken together, these findings suggest that mergers provide a uniquely beneficial environment in which to pursue a dual-goal strategy. But if you are contemplating a merger, take heed: The findings don’t tell you exactly how to improve customer satisfaction or efficiency in your business or industry. Context matters. So, in the end, take into account your firm’s unique resources and industry dynamics to execute a dual-goal strategy, knowing that maximum long-run performance gains are at stake.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Management in Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

To learn more, please see: Swaminathan, V., Groening, C., Mittal, V., & Thomaz, F. (2014). How achieving the dual goal of customer satisfaction and efficiency in mergers affects a firm’s long-term financial performance. Journal of Service Research, 17(2), 182-194.

Based on research by K. Ramesh, Edward Xuejun Li, MinShen and Joanna Shuang Wu

View the cartoon here: Roller Coaster

• Analysts’ revisions offer authentically new information.
• Analysts’ revisions don’t duplicate corporate news. More than 50 percent of these revisions offer information contrary to recent firm news.
• After-hours revisions are more common and provide even more new information than regular-hours revisions.

Issued on the heels of company news releases, analysts’ stock recommendations are often dismissed as repackaged PR. In-house forecasts, skeptics say, exist only to peddle a brokerage house’s other services. Yet the houses themselves spend real money in court defending their analysts’ copyrights. The reports, the houses insist, add value. It turns out that the houses are right.

A new study co-authored by K. Ramesh, a professor at Rice Business, reveals that analysts do not simply rehash the company line: They not only help investors with stock valuation by issuing confirming revisions, but also reverse prevailing market beliefs by issuing contrary revisions.

In the past, academic research yielded mixed results on the topic. Researchers typically focused on daily stock market reaction to analysts’ recommendations, which often are released around corporate news, and tended to overlook analyst revisions that were released after hours. Both methods blurred the picture. They made it difficult to parse the effects of stock recommendations versus corporate news and drew an incomplete conclusion of information contained in analyst revisions.

To correct these distortions, Ramesh and his co-authors used fine-grained, intra-day data that separate stock market reactions to company news releases from reactions to analyst revisions. They then compared how much new information each source provided. Although the timing of analysts’ revisions often coincided with that of news releases, the movement of stock prices showed that investors did indeed value the analysts’ information.

Intriguingly, the authors also found a striking difference in the content of revisions published during regular trading hours and revisions that came out after hours. Exploiting this previously ignored area, Ramesh and his co-authors showed that the number of revisions released after regular trading hours was much greater than the number during regular trading hours. The spike reflected a greater demand for the information from the institutional investors that dominate after-hours trading. These after-hours revisions, the researchers found, also carried more information than revisions published during regular trading hours.

If analyst revisions were simply repackaged corporate news, you would expect them to be positive when firm news was positive and negative when it went sour. However, Ramesh and his co-authors found, only 28 percent of revisions actually dovetailed with the corporate news they followed. These revisions, moreover, actually offered more information than did the corporate releases. The rest of the time analysts either made recommendations independently or issued revisions contrary to firm news releases.

Contrary to skeptics’ complaints, in other words, the study’s findings strongly suggest that analysts not only don’t rehash the corporate line — they give investors new and useful information. But the skeptics may still be right about something: The new findings don’t indicate that analysts’ revisions are necessarily correct. They simply offer authentically new information. Investing is still risky business, even when the analysts do their part to inform.

K. Ramesh is the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

To learn more, please, see: Li, E. X., Ramesh, K., Shen, M., & Wu, J. S. (2015). Do analyst stock recommendations piggyback on recent corporate news? An analysis of regular-hour and after-hours revisions. Journal of Accounting Research, 53(4), 821-861.

Based on research by Otilia Obodaru (former Rice Business professor)

• Contrary to previous thought, most people construct a sense of self using more than a past/present/future timeline. We also imagine the selves that would be possible if some event or decision had caused a different outcome. 
• These imagined alternative selves affect the workplace because we attach meaning to them that, for good and ill, affects employee performance.
• Researchers should expand their current understanding of the self to include these imagined realities. And managers should consider employees’ alternate selves as a part of successful planning.

Social psychologists and behaviorists have traditionally used a concept of self based on an individual’s “temporal,” or past/present/future, view of her life. It makes sense, after all, to think about ourselves in terms of who we were, who we are now and who we may be in the future.

But according to Otilia Obodaru, a former assistant professor at Rice Business, there is more about the self than the experts are factoring in. Most people, her research shows, live their daily lives alongside alternative selves in a separate reality concurrent with their chronological lives.

Alternative selves in a parallel reality? It may sound like science fiction. But consider the following scenario.

Suppose your mother always wanted a doctor in the family. You headed to college bound and determined to make her dream come true, only to find, after nearly bombing a biochemistry final, that you preferred accounting instead. Now suppose, 10 years into your accounting career, that you routinely muse about what your life might have been like as an MD instead of a CPA.

According to Obodaru, you have an alternate self, one that is part of your current self-concept. And if you believe your life as a doctor would have been better than the life you have now, this alternative self can wreak havoc on your “self-concept” — that is, your essential sense of who you are.

It’s common for people to engage in “counterfactual thinking,” or considering alternatives to past decisions or behavior. “If I’d gotten up when the alarm went off instead of hitting the snooze button, I’d have missed this traffic jam and arrived at work on time,” is one such example.

But constructing an alternative self involves more than counterfactual thinking. One component is reflection on a turning point in one’s life. Turning points are usually emotionally intense events that alter a person’s path — a job change, birth of a child or that D in biochemistry. They are ripe for reflection and provide learning opportunities for people to consider.

People can also use turning points to engage in “undoing” that event and reweaving an alternative narrative. When that reweaving becomes part of a person’s life story that he or she tells and retells, “If I’d passed that biochemistry final, I’d probably be a doctor today,” it becomes an alternative self and part of that person’s self-concept.

A man who wishes he’d become a doctor instead of an accountant may be less satisfied and engaged with work and likely less content with life in general. Years after the fact, that choice — and the alternative self it created — can alter his performance at work and even his quality of life.

We may be witnessing a rise in these alternative selves, Obodaru argues. In part, she writes, this is because so many people have unprecedented freedom to make choices, and instant access to unlimited information regarding those foregone choices. According to one study, the number of people who report harboring long-term regrets has grown from about 42 percent in the 1950s to nearly 100 percent today.

That’s why managers should strive to understand employees’ current and alternative selves. For better or worse, these alternative selves help shape job satisfaction, commitment and motivation. While managers can’t change the past, awareness that their employees travel there, in the form of alternative selves, can make it easier to guide the present.

Otilia Obodaru is a former management professor at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Obodaru, O. (2012). The self not taken: How alternative selves develop and how they influence our professional lives. Academy of Management Review, 37(1), 34-57.

Based on research by Yan Anthea Zhang and Hongyan Qu

• A change in CEO gender amplifies disruption inherent in the leadership change process.
• These outcomes don’t reflect on personal performance.
• Having other women in leadership positions – on the board, in top management – reduces the disruption in the status quo.

You've got to put yourself in the newcomer's shoes. You're the first female CEO at your firm. You beat all your fellow competitors from outside, plus everyone inside company ranks. And you got your job on the merits, at a corporation without one other woman in upper management or on the board of directors.

After blasting through such barriers, you'd be forgiven for thinking any future obstacles would be just as manageable. But a study co-authored by Yan Anthea Zhang, a strategy professor at Rice Business, and Hongyan Qu, an assistant professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics, suggests otherwise. The unique research on gender and CEO succession in China showed that when a female CEO succeeded a male CEO, it amplified the disruption inherent to the corporate leadership change process. That disruption correlated to lower performance for the company.

Furthermore, the authors found, in any succession with gender change, male-to-female or female-to-male, chances rose that the new CEO would make an early exit.

Strikingly, these outcomes didn't reflect a difference in male and female CEOs' performance. Men and women do seem to lead differently: Male executives, one study showed, made more acquisitions and issued greater debts; female executives placed wider ranges on earnings estimates and exercised stock options earlier than men.

But there is no clear evidence of a difference in male and female CEOs’ performance. And in Zhang's study, the gender of a new CEO alone, if not considered alongside the predecessor’s gender, had no impact on either company performance or the likelihood the newcomer would leave early.

Instead, lower company performance after a male-to-female succession was linked to disruption of the status quo – that is, the predecessor CEO’s leadership style. Hiring a CEO from within, they found, markedly softened the disruption of a male-to-female succession.

Grooming other female leaders also made a difference. In firms with women already in top management or on the board of directors, the negative impact of a male-to-female CEO change on company performance dropped. And the presence of top-echelon women leaders entirely eliminated the higher chance that the new CEO, if female, would leave early. The more common it becomes to see a woman in power, in other words, the less disruptive a male-to-female CEO succession becomes to the whole company.

But how much does a study of companies in China tell about workplaces in the United States? To perform the research, Zhang collaborated with Hongyan Qu, of China's Central University of Finance and Economics, using data from 3,320 CEO successions listed in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 1997 to 2010. Like the U.S., China has a small but rising proportion of women CEOs. In both countries, hiring a female boss still breaks with tradition. By hiring from within and deploying women in top echelons, Zhang and Qu write, companies can hire new CEOs on the merits rather than fear of disruption.

Yan Anthea Zhang is the Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Professor of Management in Strategic Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

To learn more, please see: Zhang, Y. A., & Qu, H. (2015). The impact of CEO succession with gender change on firm performance and successor early departure: Evidence from China’s publicly listed companies in 1997-2010. Academy of Management Journal, 59(5), 1845-1868. 

Based on research by Brian Akins, Jeff Ng and Rodrigo Verdi

• Does the information environment shape the cost of capital? According to conventional wisdom, the fewer people with useful information, and the bigger the gap between these informed investors and less informed investors, the more that this information can be used to advantage.
• It’s also been thought that as the number of informed investors rises, and competition among those investors increases, such advantage is reduced, as is the price of capital.
• An analysis of activities of institutional investors supports this thesis, and suggests that the more informed investors there are, the better for everyone.

It’s hardly surprising that good investing information can lead to increased returns. But can competition over that information by knowledgeable investors also be good for people who don’t have the same inside access? Can it mean a fairer market for all and a reduced price of capital? 

Conventional thinking says yes. But conventional wisdom, and providing proof, are two very different things. Economic theories have argued that, for any given level of information asymmetry — that is, the difference in the number of people who know useful facts and details and those who don’t — the degree of exploitation by informed traders is lower when there is more competition. The reasoning is simple: The more the knowledgeable investors compete with each other, and the more knowledgeable investors there are to join in that competition, the more quickly the private information is reflected in equity prices.

If just one person or group of people has the inside scoop, they can take advantage of their knowledge of the difference between the underlying value of a firm and its market price through strategic trades. Because they know something about fundamental value that others don’t, at least yet, they can, as the old adage goes, buy low and sell high, or do whatever makes the most economic sense. But as more people know that real value, it gets harder to sell or buy at anything but a fair price.

A simple enough idea, perhaps, but how do you test it in the real world? Investors with an inside scoop aren’t prone to announcing themselves. Brian Akins, an associate professor of accounting at Rice Business, and co-authors Jeff Ng, an associate accounting professor The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Rodrigo Verdi, an accounting professor at Sloan School of Management, realized that you could look at the actions of large institutional investors as a proxy for informed investors. The assumption was that investors with more holdings in a given firm are more likely to have access to private information, or at the very least more incentive to seek out private information. By studying the concentration of shares owned by different institutional investors, the researchers reasoned, you can come up with a rough idea of the concentration of private information, and how much competition there will be among those who have that information.

Using this proxy, Akins and his co-authors then looked at what is known as post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD), or the changes in a company’s stock price following the announcement of earnings. The notion is that earnings announcements are a time when those with inside knowledge can best make use of it. By looking at the fluctuation in prices, and how long it takes before those values settle, and then comparing that against the concentration of institutional investors, one can get an idea of how competition among informed investors impacts stock values, which impact the cost of capital.

The researchers found what they expected: Firms with more institutional investors had less fluctuations in PEAD, and established a stable price, one that likely reflected a firm’s value accurately, faster than those with fewer institutional investors. PEAD was reduced as the competition among informed investors caused their information to be impounded into price more quickly.

So competition is, in fact, good. A not surprising finding, perhaps, but one that could have implications for firms whose assets are held by too few investors. For these firms, encouraging rivalry by widening the pool of informed investors might help reduce their cost of capital.

Brian Akins is an associate professor of accounting at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

To learn more, please see: Akins, B. K., Ng, J., & Verdi, R., (2012). Investor competition over information and the pricing of information asymmetry. The Accounting Review, 87(1), 35-58.