September 8, 2005
Faculty Profiles: McCombs Welcomes Five New Professors
for 2005-2006
By Cory Leahy and Sandie Taylor
- Management: Caroline Bartel
- Management: Ethan Burris
- Management: Paul Martorana
- Accounting: Michael G. Williamson
- Finance: Ilan Guedj
Caroline Bartel
Today’s work environments are a far cry from the work groups of yesteryear.
Organizational structures are different; business moves at a much more
rapid pace; and individuals frequently work on multiple teams—sometimes
virtually, without coming into direct contact with colleagues. These
modern workplace realities can make coordination and collaboration difficult.
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Caroline Bartel, assistant professor of management, studies the challenge of how to enhance coordination in organizations. If an organization can cultivate strong relationships with employees, both individuals and work teams function better. Stronger “identification” with the organization means that—regardless of physical location or personnel structures—everyone is on the same page.
Employees who “identify” with an organization have a strong overlap between the values and characteristics that define the organization and those they use to define themselves, Bartel explains. This relationship is much more intense than simply being “committed” to the company, a connection that implies an endorsement of values rather than a total intersection.
“An organization has values, norms, and specific ways of doing things,” she says. “If you can cultivate identification, you have an implicit understanding about how to think and act” in workplace situations. This connection enables employees to develop, quickly and with limited information, a common set of expectations that allows them to synchronize their actions and make real-time adjustments to fit the situation at hand.
Bartel, who comes to McCombs from NYU’s Stern School of Business, looked at the effects of a community outreach program at Pillsbury. Many companies are increasing their involvement in community outreach programs for a variety of reasons, according to Bartel. “They’re interested in giving back to their communities, and it creates positive impressions in the eyes of potential customers,” she says.
But such community-oriented programs may also cause employees to more closely identify with their companies. Over time, the experience of working with other employees in a volunteer setting enhanced their positive perceptions of the organization and led them to feel a greater sense of esteem from their company affiliation. The end effect of greater identification was increased cooperation and work effort during normal working situations, Bartel says.
“Pillsbury hadn’t fully considered the impact of its community service initiatives on employees,” Bartel says. Cultivating identification can happen quickly and in unexpected ways. While the methods may not always be obvious, “companies recognize the benefits of identification.”
When something in your work situation isn’t going as well as it could, do you speak up or bite your tongue?
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One of the factors driving that decision may be the actions of your boss, according to research conducted by Ethan Burris, assistant professor of management. His current study, “Leadership Influences on Employee Voice Behavior: Is the Door Really Open?” examines the effect of leaders’ actions on subordinates’ willingness to offer constructive criticism or improvement-oriented suggestions.
“High-performing employees are in tune to their leaders’ behavior,” explains Burris, who is teaching Introduction to Organizational Behavior this year. So when the boss is closed or unwilling to act on suggestions, those ideas may stop coming to light—which can lead to lower productivity and morale.
On the other hand, a leader that creates a safe, non-threatening atmosphere is more likely to cultivate personal connections with his or her employees. While this can result in a tight “inner circle,” the leader must take care to pay attention to those on the outside so they will feel comfortable contributing ideas.
Burris, who grew up in Indiana and earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in May 2005, is interested in why teams make bad decisions. His research in this area involved data collected from employees of a national restaurant chain that had been experiencing 180 percent annual turnover. The company’s leadership wanted to know what drove their employees; they have used the study’s results to implement changes, such as a revised performance appraisal system and updated management training.
Burris says that while companies may not be able to use most ideas offered by people in the rank and file, one good idea could help a company in unexpected ways. “It’s a small cost to listen,” he says.
When employees in low positions are unhappy with their work situation, what is it that leads them to retaliate?
“It’s not just anger that motivates people to act,” Paul Martorana, assistant professor of management, says. “It’s also positive characteristics such as pride and self esteem. A sense of power creates resistance.”
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Martorana’s research focuses on normative and non-normative (i.e., extreme) approaches people in low positions take to challenge status hierarchies.
“Some people don’t act extremely, but they act within their roles,” he says.
Martorana combined lessons learned while earning his bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley with research conducted for his May 2005 Ph.D. in management and organizations from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He hopes his work studying the implications of employee retaliation at the corporate level will help employees find ways to make changes in normative (non-extreme) ways and help companies prevent loss.
“I really think business people can change the world,” Martorana says, describing why he entered management research after obtaining his psychology degree. “What professors research can influence popular culture. I would like to have an impact on MBAs.”
He will begin teaching negotiations at the MBA level this spring. In July 2005, he presented his work on varieties of action to change status hierarchies at the 14th Tri-Annual General Meeting of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology in Wurzburg, Germany and offered “Women and Work: Perspectives for the 21st Century” to the Academy of Management in Honolulu.
His research on female mentorship and women and work also earned Martorana a faculty fellow position for the Center for Women and Gender Studies Faculty Development Program. Martorana’s research has been published in a variety of scholarly journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Social Judgements: Implicit and Explicit Processes, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Michael G. Williamson
Before setting foot on The University of Texas at Austin campus, Michael
Williamson already knew he would fit in well at the McCombs School.
As a doctoral student last year, he met several McCombs faculty members
at various conferences outside of Texas and got a taste of the open
and supportive academic culture at McCombs.
The quality of the faculty convinced him to join the McCombs School
as an assistant professor in the Department of Accounting this fall.
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Before obtaining his doctorate in accounting at the Kelley School
of Business at Indiana University, Williamson completed his bachelor’s
degree in accounting at Louisiana State University and worked as a senior
consultant for Ernst & Young for four years. He went on to earn his
master of information systems degree from Carnegie Mellon University
and a master in business degree from the Kelley School.
“Since my undergraduate work, I wanted to be a professor,” Williamson
recalls. “But I wanted to get some experience first.”
While Williamson says he enjoyed working as a consultant, his first
love is the classroom. This spring, he will teach honors management
accounting for undergrads—the same course he taught for five years as
an associate instructor at the Kelley School.
Williamson’s main research interests include studying how to design
reward systems that allow employee authority in an organization.
In his dissertation, “The Effects of Expanding Employee Decision Making
on Firm Value in an Implicit Contracting Setting,” Williamson found
that giving employees more authority in the workplace increases performance—to
a certain point. As you continue to allow more of this responsibility,
the performance begins to drop off.
“Some people don’t like to play the full role,” he says.
In November 2004, his paper, “The Evolution from Taylorism to Employee
Gainsharing: A Case Study Examining John Deere’s Continuous Improvement
Pay Plan,” co-authored by Geoffrey Sprinkle, was published in Issues
in Accounting Education
As a new arrival from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Ilan Guedj, assistant professor of finance at McCombs, is looking forward to continuing his research examining how the organization of a pharmaceutical firm affects the company’s financial decisions.
Guedj completed his dissertation, “Ownership vs. Contract: How Vertical Integration Affects Investment Decisions in Pharmaceutical R&D” and received his doctorate in financial economics in May 2005.
Born in Courbevoie, France in 1974, Guedj and his family later moved to Israel where he served as a lieutenant in the Israeli Army for four years. In 2000, he completed his undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and management at the Israel Institute of Technology and moved to the United States to continue his education.
This spring, he will teach entrepreneurial finance, which looks at how young firms finance themselves. “One of the things I try to understand is if the background of an entrepreneur will affect their likelihood of success with venture capitalists,” he explains. For example, Guedj examines whether the entrepreneur has previously worked in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries or if the person is an academic. He also studies which universities academic entrepreneurs come from and whether the school’s location (say in Cambridge or San Diego) figure in to pharmaceutical ventures.
Guedj is nearly finished collecting data for his upcoming paper, “What Makes Successful Entrepreneurs?” with Professor David Scharfstein of Harvard Business School.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
