Webinar
Research in Progress in Organization Design and Human Capital
Thursday, June 27, 2024 at 3PM CET
In this ODC "Research in Progress" (RiP) webinar, organized and moderated by Julia Bodner (Copenhagen Business School), two PhD students - Kathrin Heiss (University of Vienna) and Elaine Pak (Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania) - working on research at the intersection of organization design and human capital present their working papers on “How human capital resource composition and organizational design shape firm performance” and “How firms balance internal and market forces when determining employee pay“ (each about 20 mins). The presentations will be followed by a commentary by Tomasz Obloj (Kelley School of Business, Indiana University). The webinar will end with feedback/comments from the audience. Please see below for the abstracts of the papers and the bios of the participants.
Julia Bodner [Organizer and Moderator]
Julia is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School. Her research examines corporate strategy and business unit and resource reconfiguration and has been published in the Journal of Organization Design. In particular, she investigates employee reconfiguration and redeployment in corporate strategy—that is, employee mobility within and across organizations. In a second stream of work, she focuses on corporate strategy and organization in the healthcare sector. Julia is an SRF scholar and obtained her Ph.D. in Management from INSEAD.
Kathrin Heiss [Presenter]
Presentation Title: Innovative Personalities in Structured Spaces: How Human Capital Resource Composition and Organizational Design Shape Firm Performance
Abstract: Human capital resources (HCR), encompassing individuals’ skills, knowledge, abilities, and other attributes, are well-recognized drivers of firm-level outcomes, including financial and creative performance. This study investigates the impact of different firm-level compositions of HCR on firm-level outcomes, with a particular emphasis on the deep-level employee attributes of personality traits. Addressing a gap highlighted in recent meta-studies, it is examined how the architectural component of organizational design influences this relation. Utilizing an archival dataset from a professional social network comprising observations from over 150 firms, preliminary empirical results point towards the importance of creating an alignment between firm-level HCR composition and organizational design to achieve successful firm-level outcomes.
Bio: Kathrin is a fourth-year PhD student in Management at the University of Vienna. Her research explores the intersection of organizational design and strategic human capital, using large-scale empirical analyses. Specifically, she examines how organizations can leverage organizational design to influence the behavior of their human capital resources, relating to both individual-level decisions and organization-level outcomes. Prior to academia, Kathrin worked as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group.
Elaine Pak [Presenter]
Presentation Title: Internal and Market Benchmarks, Employee Compensation, and Innovation Outcomes
Abstract: How do firms balance internal and market forces when determining employee pay? This study uses nearly 22 million U.S. employee records to investigate the relative influence of internal and market benchmarks on pay setting. Results show that employee pay is more sensitive to internal benchmarks (pay of coworkers with the same skill level but in a different role) rather than to market benchmarks (pay of external workers with the same skill level and role). Second, the relative sensitivity to internal over market benchmarks increases with the knowledge intensity of firms and the skill level of employees. Finally, firms that rely more heavily on internal benchmarks generate a higher quantity and quality of patents, as well as more breakthrough patents. These patterns suggest that market-oriented pay practices are not uniformly adopted across labor markets, industries, and firms. Instead, market orientation is influenced by employee skill level and knowledge intensity of the firm, with firms prioritizing internal benchmarks exhibiting superior innovation performance.
Short Bio: Elaine is a PhD candidate in Management at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the interplay between strategy and labor markets, particularly how firms design incentive systems to attract and retain talent. Before her PhD, Elaine received MS from Seoul National University and AB from Duke University, and worked as a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Tomasz Obloj [Discussant]
Tomasz is an associate professor of Strategy and a Weimer Faculty Fellow at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Before joining IU in 2022, he was a chaired associate professor of Strategy and HEC Paris. He earned his PhD from INSEAD in 2011 and was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in 2019. His research interests include organizational design, equity theory and inclusive economy, organizational incentives, pay transparency, and competitive and corporate strategy. He is a Senior Editor at Organization Science and Contributing Editor at Strategy Science. Previously he served two terms as Associate Editor at Strategic Management Journal. He has published his work in journals such as Nature Human Behavior, Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, and Organization Science. His research was featured, among others, in the New York Times, Forbes, CNBC, Washington Post, WIRED, Yahoo! Finance, or LinkedIn News and in Financial Times’ Working It and Workplace Perspectives podcasts. He is a winner of the Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award and finalist of the INFORMS / Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition and was selected by Poets & Quants as one of the Best 40 Under 40 Professors.
Live webinar is open to all.
Registration closes 25th June, 2024 at 10 am (eastern time)
Hope you will be able to join us!
