Management & Organization Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2789
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Item Competition and Prosocial Incentives: Essays on the Role of Gender When Choosing to Compete for Others(2021) King, Benjamin Charles; Agarwal, Rajshree; Starr, Evan P; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines how prosocial and selfish incentives affect individuals' willingness to compete as a critical behavioral choice, and the role of gender in this relationship. Understanding more about this connection is key, as men are more competitive than women, on average, and higher levels of competitiveness are correlated with positive career outcomes. Using insights from economics and psychology, I test and expand theory that individuals become more willing to compete when the rewards benefit a charity or another individual. I suggest practical implications for organizational designers who seek to reduce gender gaps in wages and achievement.Item PEER EFFECTS IN ORGANIZATIONS: THE ROLE OF INFORMATION, COMPETITIVE, AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS(2020) LEE, HYEUN Jung; Beckman, Christine M; Ding, Waverly W; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation seeks to answer questions about how peers influence performance in organizations. Specifically, my research investigates the information environment in which firms operate, competition among peers, and the social environment in which organizations are embedded. These organizational conditions shape the extent to which peers share information and influence one another. Empirically, I examine my research questions in an educational setting and a corporate setting, featuring datasets collected from multiple years of fieldwork. In the first part of the dissertation, I focus on security analysts and explore reasons why female analysts reap systematically lower returns from peers compared to male analysts. I argue that women face challenges in accessing and processing information from their male peers due to segregation of information within organizations. I explore this information mechanism using a policy (Regulation Fair Disclosure) that changed the information environment among security analysts. In the second and third parts of my dissertation, I focus on how performance is evaluated among peers and the broader social environment in which organizations are embedded. Specifically, I ask: 1) What is the role of competition in predicting the direction of peer effects? 2) How do gender stereotypes in the social context influence the magnitude of peer effects? In exploring these questions, I leverage random roommate assignment as well as teacher assignments in an educational setting.