Research

Under Review

Exploring the Role of Religion in How Organizations Create Firm-Specific Advantage in their Approach to the Labor Market

(Revise & Resubmit at Organization Science)

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.

Working Papers

Our Purpose is to Serve You: the Impact of Stakeholder Reinvestment Corporate Purpose on Employee Attraction

With Diana Jue-Rajasingh and Mijeong Kwon

(Target: Strategic Management Journal)

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

With Tobias Brüegger

(Target: Strategic Management Journal)

Researchers have defined the entrepreneur as someone who views and acts upon the world differently than others. As such, they have tried to better understand the motivations, mindsets, personal values and belief structures of entrepreneurs. They have considered a range of variables related to individual identity including family wealth, gender, and race. Since 2007, researchers have also devoted more time to exploring the relationship between religiosity and entrepreneurship. This makes sense because there are correlations between a religious orientation and mental health, psychology and sociological and political opinions. Still, research at the intersection of religion and entrepreneurship demonstrates a limited theoretical foundation and a reliance on small probability samples which has prevented it from achieving a meaningful presence in mainstream journals. This paper aims to account for these. It does so by first theoretically distinguishing between inward-looking intrapersonal religiosity and outward-looking interpersonal religiosity. Then, it offers two main results based on a nationally representative sample of 2,367 workers and data from the United States Census. The first is that it is interpersonal religiosity, and not intrapersonal religiosity, that drives entrepreneurial orientation. Second, it demonstrates that the social networks from interpersonal religiosity are especially helpful in times of crisis. These results offer a more well-defined theoretical foundation for future research at the intersection of religion and entrepreneurship.

Early Stage Projects

Human-AI Collaboration in the Evolving Landscape of Workplace Learning

With Hadar Ram

(Data collection stage)

People as Contract Provisions: How Organizations Manipulate Social Networks to Bond Strategic Alliances

With Hagay Volvovsky, Lisa Bernstein and Forrest Briscoe

(Data collection stage)

Other Publications

In the Midst of the War with Hamas, Why Has East Jerusalem Remained Relatively Quiet?

INSS Insight No. 1817, 2024

[English] / [Hebrew]

Social, Political and Economic Trends in East Jerusalem, 2010 - 2022: Informing Israel's Approach to Security