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• Managing labor on and off platforms

  • When
    30 Oct 2025
  •  
    9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
  • Location
    Zoom Webinar
  • Spaces left
    168

  Registration is closed

   ODC Webinar

  Managing labor on and off platforms

  Maggie Zhou
  Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan,           

  ---   30^th Oct. 2025, Thursday at 9am EST/2pm CET   --- 

  In this webinar, I will talk about two of my recent studies. One is about temporary opportunity assignment as a source of labor productivity improvement in restaurants. Leveraging detailed transaction data, we find that temporary assignments of restaurant servers to a high-opportunity section led to an increase in their hourly sales in subsequent periods after they returned to low-opportunity sections, and this increase appears to be caused by a combination of skill learning and motivation enhancement. Our findings highlight opportunity assignment as a valuable managerial tool for fostering employees’ skill development, maintaining their motivation and improving long-term productivity. The second study is about platform workers (or complementors) oscillating their resources (e.g., time and assets) following platform diversification. Using datasets on the rideshare and food delivery businesses in New York City, we find that the launch of Uber Eats reduced Uber's and Lyft's rideshare trip volumes. Additional theoretical and empirical analyses suggest that, while platform diversification enables rideshare drivers to share some resources across businesses, it may also create opportunities for them to oscillate other complementary resources, thereby diverting their resources in the existing business from both the diversifying and competing platform firms. Such sharing-enabled resource oscillation may be due to resource exclusivity at the transactional level and the lack of control by platform firms over complementor resources at the organizational level.

   

  About the Speaker: 

  Maggie Zhou is a professor of strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Her research is in the areas of corporate strategy, competitive strategy, institutional strategy and organizational structure.  Her recent studies investigate the role of task complexity and competing institutional demands in setting limits to firm growth, the use and effects of competitive strategies between firms on and off digital platforms and within technological ecosystems, as well as organizational design for domestic and multinational corporations. In addition to theoretical models, she has examined these issues in a broad range of empirical settings including air transportation, commercial spaceflight, electricity, fintech, healthcare, manufacturing, oil and gas, restaurant, rideshare, soft drink, and solar photovoltaic installation industries. Her work has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategy Science, Journal of Corporate Finance, and Advances in Strategic Management. She is an Associate Editor for Management Science and Strategic Management Journal, a Contributing Editor for Strategy Science, and an editorial board member for Organization Science.

  Last date for registration is 29th Oct 2025 9 am EST

  Hope you will be able to join us!

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• ODC-IDW "Studying Organization Design with Text Data "

  • When
    19 Nov 2025
  •  
    11:40 AM - 12:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom Webinar
  • Spaces left
    289

  Register

   ODC Idea Development Workshop

  Studying Organization Design with Text Data

  A Panel Discussion with Oliver Baumann, Vivianna He, Sameer Srivastava, and Massimo Warglien

  Facilitated by: Marco Minervini, as part of the ODC Idea Development Workshop

  November 19, 2025, From 8:40am PST/ 11:40 am EST / 5:40 pm CET  To  9:30am PST / 12:30 pm EST / 6:30 pm CET

  Join us for an engaging panel discussion exploring how computational text analysis and natural language processing are transforming our understanding of organizational design. Our distinguished panelists will discuss cutting-edge methods for analyzing language in organizations—from emails and Slack messages to meeting transcripts and company reviews—to uncover insights and theorize about organizational culture, coordination, decision-making, and adaptation. Discover how these innovative approaches are opening new windows into how organizations actually work and revealing patterns that traditional methods could not detect.

  This panel is part of the ODC Idea Development Workshop. While particularly valuable for junior scholars developing research projects using text-based methods, we welcome any ODC members interested in computational approaches to studying organizations.

  Panelist Biographies

  Oliver Baumann is Professor of Strategic Organization Design at the University of Southern Denmark and co-editor of the Journal of Organization Design. His research investigates how organizations learn, adapt, and innovate in complex environments, focusing on the behavioral micro-foundations of organizational decision-making. He employs computational modeling, experiments, and field studies to understand how organizational structure shapes collaborative problem-solving and knowledge management.

  Vivianna He is Associate Professor at the School of Management, University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on collaborative organizing in innovation and entrepreneurship contexts, employing methods ranging from grounded theory to machine learning. She pioneered the use of algorithm-supported induction for theory building and has published influential work on analyzing multimodal data—including text, audio, and video—to understand team dynamics, leadership emergence, and human-AI collaboration.

  Sameer Srivastava is the Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and co-directs the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture Lab. He uses computational methods and natural language processing to study organizational culture, analyzing millions of emails, Glassdoor reviews, and earnings calls to understand how language reveals cultural dynamics, cultural fit, and organizational performance. His work has fundamentally changed how scholars measure and understand workplace culture.

  Massimo Warglien is Professor at the Venice School of Management, Ca' Foscari University. A pioneer in computational organization theory, his research spans organizational routines, language and coordination, and the experimental study of how communication codes emerge in organizations. He has made foundational contributions to understanding language as an organizational phenomenon, combining mathematical modeling, experiments, and field research to study how shared meanings and communication practices shape organizational behavior.

  Marco Minervini is Assistant Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at IE Business School. His research investigates how the spatial and temporal distribution of employees impacts organizational dynamics, design, innovation, and performance. He employs quantitative methods combined with computational techniques, including text analysis, simulation methods, and social network analysis. 

  Last date for registration is November 18, 2025

  If you know of junior scholars who might benefit from our mentorship sessions, please encourage them to apply to the workshop by November 1^st 2025

  Hope you will be able to join us!

  Organizational Design Community

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• ODC-IDW "What mistakes do junior scholars make that more experienced academics do not?"

  • When
    20 Nov 2025
  •  
    11:40 AM - 12:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom Webinar
  • Spaces left
    143

  Register

   ODC Idea Development Workshop

  What mistakes do junior scholars make that more experienced academics do not?

  A Panel Discussion with Oliver Alexy, Sendil Ethiraj, Karin Hoisl, Srikanth Kannan, Tobias Kretschmer, and Gurneeta Vasudeva Singh

  Facilitated by: Özgecan Koçak, as part of the ODC Idea Development Workshop

  November 20, 2025,

  From: 8:40am PST/ 11:40 am EST / 5:40 pm CET 

  To: 9:30am PST / 12:30 pm EST / 6:30 pm CET

  Join us for a panel discussion focused on career advice from mentors studying Organization Design. Our distinguished panelists will reflect on what mistakes they see their junior collaborators or students make when doing research, writing papers, or revising papers based on reviewer feedback. We hope the panel will generate useful insights and recommendations for junior scholars in attendance.

  This panel is part of the ODC Idea Development Workshop. While particularly valuable for junior scholars, we welcome any ODC members interested in joining.

  Last date for registration to the panel is November 19, 2025

  If you know of junior scholars who might benefit from our mentorship sessions, please encourage them to apply to the workshop by November 1^st 2025.  

  Hope you will be able to join us!

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