Research
Working Papers
Exploring the Role of Religion in How Organizations Create Firm-Specific Advantage in their Approach to the Labor Market
(Job Market Paper)
This paper proposes the novel construct of organizational religiosity (OR) and examines how it affects the employer-employee match. Prior research offers multiple theories, such as supernatural compensators, for why a firm emphasizing its religious identity should affect the match. In addition, in 2019, as much as 62% of the global population claimed that “religion plays an important role in their lives.” This evidence suggests that religion may be a plausible incentive for employees. However, it is understudied in the work on corporate purpose. Seeking to fill this gap, the paper first establishes OR as a form of corporate purpose. Then, it offers its main result that a firm incorporating OR into its statements presents it with a tradeoff: OR increases human capital attraction from certain marginalized groups but decreases attraction from high skilled labor. Overall, the conservative estimates from the field experiment in the paper imply that OR can increase applications by 0.74% - 2.4%, or by 0.21 – 0.68 additional applications per 977 workers. The paper concludes that the economic significance of OR for the firm will depend on the kinds of workers it employs and its demographic environment. The paper also offers evidence the employee- firm misalignment will negatively affect worker commitment but not task-based effort. Finally, the paper suggests that expressions of corporate purpose will not affect wage demands or commitment, but that workers need 8.1 – 9.1 months to assess the company culture before making any of these decisions.
Our Purpose is to Serve You: the Impact of Stakeholder Reinvestment Corporate Purpose on Employee Attraction
With Diana Jue-Rajasingh and Mijeong Kwon
(Under Review at Organization Science)
Corporate purpose has been experiencing a renaissance among both scholars and practitioners. Researchers have demonstrated that when corporate purpose is expressed in a prosocial manner, it enhances firm performance by positively impacting employees. However, these findings do not consider recent developments in stakeholder theory, which suggest that some workers are self-regarding. We propose a new expression of corporate purpose that emphasizes both profitability and benefiting specific stakeholders, including employees. We test how stakeholder reinvestment purpose affects employee attraction by partnering with a US-based care management firm to conduct a large-scale field experiment involving 4,874 job seekers. We find that stakeholder reinvestment purpose attracted the greatest number of job seekers, resulting in more job applications compared to prosocial purpose and financial purpose. Surprisingly, prosocial purpose did not attract more applications compared to no expression of corporate purpose. Additionally, we find that stakeholder reinvestment purpose was particularly effective in attracting blue-collar workers to the firm compared to white-collar workers. Our work implies that when firms recruit employees, specific expressions of corporate purpose have a greater impact on attraction than others. Moreover, firms hiring across different occupational levels may be able to attract blue-collar workers without alienating white-collar workers by leveraging stakeholder reinvestment purpose.
They Say a Little Faith Can Work Wonders: Developing a Taxonomy of the Religious Organization
(Target: Administrative Science Quarterly)
This paper asks the question: can an organization be religious? And with its introduction of the theoretical concept of organizational religiosity, the paper claims that not only can the organization be religious, but also that we can define the dimensions that make the organization religious. The paper proposes a taxonomy for the religious organization in two steps. First, drawing on the theoretical literature on the organization, the sociology of religion and the economics of religion, the paper proposes that the three core dimensions of the religious organization are: 1) its particular types of belief; 2) its routines; and 3) its boundaries. Second, to “confirm” that these dimensions do indeed form the theoretical construct of organizational religiosity, I distributed surveys to 269 members of “religious” and “secular” businesses throughout the United States. An confirmatory factor analysis, along with a brief qualitative review of respondents’ answers suggest that at least two of these dimensions form the basis of the theoretical construct of organizational religiosity.
Early Stage Projects
The Effect of Individual Religiosity on Entrepreneurial Entrance and Success
(Data analysis stage)
Do Elite Students Make Elite Workers? Evidence from a Global Consulting Firm
With Jordan Siegel
(Data analysis stage)
The Effect of Sharia Compliance on Firm Performance: Evidence from Public Firms in Saudi Arabia
With Jordan Siegel
(Data analysis stage)
Christian Certification Minimally Relates to Organizations' Glassdoor and Indeed Presences
With Reed Priest
(Data analysis stage)
Employee Location and Firm Sociopolitical Activism: Evidence from Firm Statements Supporting Israel After October 7th
With Andrew Foley
(Data analysis stage)
Other Publications
In the Midst of the War with Hamas, Why Has East Jerusalem Remained Relatively Quiet?
INSS Insight No. 1817, 2024
Social, Political and Economic Trends in East Jerusalem, 2010 - 2022: Informing Israel's Approach to Security
Strategic Assessment, 26(2): 69 - 89, 2023
Review of the Book A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam, by Thomas Bauer
Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, 14(1): 59 - 62, 2023
[url]
Reducing Budget Allocations for the Arab Sector May Harm Internal Security
With Ephraim Lavie, Meir Elran, Mohammed S. Wattad, Esteban Klor and Tomer Fadlon
INSS Insight No. 1753, 2023
Jordan's Summer of Discontent and Its Consequences
Tel Aviv Notes, 12(17), 2018
[url]
What Deters the Arab Population from the Protests
With Mohammed S. Wattad and Zhangyang Liu
INSS Insight No. 1746, 2023