Geopolitical Disruption and Creativity: Evidence from War-struck Artists during World War II

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Creativity, a core micro-foundation of innovation, accompanies challenges in its pursuit because novel ideas or products can create friction with pre-existing standards or traditions. In addressing this dilemma, research has primarily focused on the strategies that enhance the receptivity of creativity in a given normative context. However, norms are rarely permanent. In the face of geopolitical disruptions, such as wars, established structures and standards are fragmented, eroding the traditional normative boundaries that typically constrain creativity. This norm erosion creates a space where individuals are no longer bound by conventional limitations, which may offer a unique opportunity to explore new configurations for creativity. I test this conjecture by exploiting the timing of German invasions of European countries during World War II and examining whether these invasions affected the creativity of war-afflicted painters. To delve into the multidimensional nature of creativity in this artistic context, I employ image processing techniques on over 39,000 paintings, extracting core creative dimensions of paintings such as color spectrums, brushstroke patterns, and overall structural features. I find a dual-faced effect of war: afflicted artists experience temporary drops in creative output, but they also produce more novel artworks by combining different features that push the boundaries of the artistic paradigm. The novel paintings produced by the war-afflicted artists were subsequently more likely to be exhibited in the top galleries around the world. I discuss implications for creativity and innovation research.

Linguistic Disruption: Language Reform and Identity Penalties during Vatican II

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In an increasingly globalized and linguistically diverse world, organizations often adopt linguistic pluralism as a strategy to enhance local legitimacy and thereby gain a competitive advantage. Two dominant theoretical perspectives, the communication view and the identity view, support the prediction that accommodating diverse language use can benefit an organization’s localization efforts. This study abductively examines this conjecture in the historical context of the Catholic Church’s language reform during the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) in 1963, which permitted vernacular languages to replace Latin in the liturgy. Using a unique dataset of retrospective survey responses, we test whether the reform achieved its intended outcomes in countries where the spoken language is linguistically distant from Latin, precisely the countries the reform sought to strengthen in terms of Catholic adherence. Contrary to expectations, we find that countries with greater linguistic distance experienced more pronounced declines in Catholic adherence. To explain this paradoxical pattern, we revisit our theoretical framework and draw on qualitative data to explore alternative explanations. Our abductive analysis suggests a “distinctiveness view,” in which promoting the reform conflicted with the organization’s distinctive identity. Efforts to promote linguistic inclusivity may have undermined the Catholic Church’s traditional identity, particularly in contrast to Protestantism, a religious rival that was seeing rise during the time of the reform. These findings underscore the complex trade-offs inherent in language policy and offer new insights for research on both language strategy and organizational authenticity.

Muddying the Waters: The Threat of Human Capital Loss and the Obfuscation of Employee Identity with Olenka Kacperczyk

Revise and resubmit at Strategy Science

Retaining valuable human capital is central to a firm’s competitive advantage. While most studies have focused on strategies that constrain employees’ pursuit of outside options, surprisingly little research considered strategies that constrain competitors’ provision of outside options. In this study, we propose that when faced with the threat of human capital loss, firms will strategically reduce employees’ visibility in the external labor market to limit the outside options. We test our predictions in the mutual fund industry from 1991-2007, exploiting exogenous state-level variation in the enforcement of non-compete agreements which indicates barriers to interfirm mobility. We find support for our predictions using difference-in-differences estimators that leverage non-compete abandonments and adoptions.

Dual Impact Patience: Understanding Investor Short-Termism for Financial and Social Objectives with Donal Crilly & Cedric Gutierrez

Reject and resubmit at Strategic Management Journal

Firms increasingly integrate social and environmental objectives with financial goals, yet achieving financial profitability and social outcomes takes time. This creates challenges for organizations facing investor pressure for short-term returns. Existing research primarily frames investor impatience as uniform and focused on financial outcomes. We introduce the concept of dual impact patience, suggesting that investor short-termism is multidimensional, varying between financial and social domains and shaped by their interaction. Across three studies—a within-subject experiment, crowdfunding data analysis, and a policy-capturing study—we find that investors exhibit greater patience for social returns, while remaining more sensitive to financial return timelines. The interplay between objectives is critical: near-term financial returns can mitigate concerns about distant social goals. By revealing the domain-specific nature of short-termism, we advance understanding of investor short-termism, offering insights for managers in aligning capital allocation with societal impact. 

Afterlife Beliefs and Donation with Donal Crilly & Anna Szerb

Work in Progress

Many challenges that organizations face require initiatives that reach into the distant future and extend beyond conventional strategic planning horizons. The fact that leaders and their stakeholders potentially care about the well-being of society very far into the future, perhaps even after their demise, is a puzzle for research on intertemporality. This study extends the theories of intertemporal discounting beyond the timeframe of one's mortality. We find that the degree of temporal discounting reverses when the returns are materialized surely after one's death, especially when the individual is reminded of the collective afterlife (the life of people on earth after one's demise), compared to individual afterlife (the afterlife state of oneself).

• Supported by the Wheeler Institute: wheelerinstituteresearch.org/project/between-hells-flames-and-heavens-lights/

Resume Inflation in the Labor Market with Santiago Campero Molina & Olenka Kacperczyk

Work in Progress (Presented at: People and Organizations 2023)

Prior studies document gender differences in job application behavior. For instance, women apply for jobs when they are qualified, while men apply regardless of their qualifications. However, when comparing job candidates, women do not appear more qualified than men, neither in experience nor credentials. This introduces a puzzle: If the average quality of women applicants is higher due to the gender difference in the application behavior, why don’t women candidates appear as more qualified than men? We attempt to resolve this puzzle by providing evidence from a hiring simulation that men are more likely to deceptively inflate their credentials above their true credentials.  The gender difference is most salient amongst young and inexperienced employees.