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David Hekman_CV  –  Research

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About Me:
My research goal is to improve organizational health.  Although there are hundreds of ways to accomplish this goal, my approach is to improve organizational health by examining sources of worker withdrawal, sources of professional workers’ (e.g. doctors, lawyers, and professors) motivation,  sources and outcomes of virtuous leadership, and workplace racial and gender biases.

Improving Organizational Health by Reducing Worker Withdrawal

• As I began my academic career, I was interested in understanding why worker job dissatisfaction is at an all-time high, and continues to increase.  My coauthors and I examined one source of worker job dissatisfaction and withdrawal – stagnant worker wages. Specifically, we examined the underlying mechanisms leading managers to favor resource distributions to stockholders over workers (Reynolds, Schultz & Hekman, 2006). Across two experiments, we found that managers tended to distribute a greater proportion of corporate resources to the stakeholder whose claims on corporate resources were viewed by managers to be most urgent.  In this regard, we found that when stockholders were the “squeaky wheel,” they were rewarded with a greater share of corporate profits.  However, we also found that managers desired to balance the interests of stockholders and workers, and thus felt constrained by having to choose between the two groups.  This set of studies indicates the need for workers to be vocal if they want a greater share of organizational profits. 
• Because a key outcome of worker dissatisfaction and withdrawal is turnover (i.e. employees quitting their jobs), and turnover is viewed to be a major problem by managers, I next turned my attention to understanding factors that motivate workers to quit their jobs. My coauthors and I examined whether coworkers’ withdrawal attitudes (job embeddedness) and behavior (job search behavior) could be socially contagious within organizations (Felps, Mitchell, Hekman, Lee, Holtom & Harman, 2009). Our article developed and tested a model of turnover contagion in which coworkers’ perceived job embeddedness (or lack thereof) and job search behaviors influenced employees’ decisions to quit. In a sample of 45 branches of a regional bank and 1,038 departments of a national hospitality firm, multilevel analysis revealed that coworkers’ job embeddedness and job search behaviors explained variance in individual “voluntary turnover” over and above that explained by other individual and group-level predictors. Broadly speaking, the results suggest that coworkers’ job embeddedness and job search behaviors play critical roles in explaining why people quit their jobs. Simply put, worker turnover appears to be socially contagious and workers learn how to quit their job by watching coworkers go through the job search and quitting process. 

Improving Organizational Health by Increasing Professional Workers' Motivation

• My second stream of research examines work motivation of members of my chosen field – professional workers (e.g. professors, doctors).  I was struck by the rampant distrust between organizational administrators and my professional colleagues and wanted to understand sources of that distrust.  My coauthors and I argued that the distrust arose from professional workers' identification with their employing organization as well as their identification with their chosen profession (Hekman, Bigley, Steensma & Hereford, 2009). Specifically, we believed that the norm of reciprocity – repaying favorable treatment with favorable treatment and retaliating against unfavorable treatment with unfavorable treatment – was not so straightforward among professional workers. We found among a large sample of physician employees, that when professionals felt supported by administrators they tended to only reciprocate the favorable treatment with increased productivity when they strongly identified with their employing organization and weakly identified with their profession.  Likewise, we found that when professionals felt betrayed by administrators, they avoided retaliating with reduced productivity when they strongly identified with their employing organization and weakly identified with their profession.  In fact, it seemed that in the short run at least, such professionals tended to actually repay the unfavorable administrator treatment with increased productivity – a stronger result than we anticipated. However, for professionals whose identities were strongly tied to their profession and weakly tied to their employing organization, we found that these workers tended to reduce productivity in response to administrators' favorable treatment and also in response to administrators' unfavorable treatment. The results suggest that highly organizationally identified and weakly professionally identified workers tend to trust administrators regardless of how they are treated at work, whereas weakly organizationally identified and strongly professionally identified workers tend to distrust administrators regardless of how they are treated.
• Building on this intriguing finding, my article on professionals' resistance to organizational change examined why professional employees resist administrative social influence, which is a principal tool for motivating employee behavior (Hekman, Steensma, Bigley & Hereford, 2009). We argued that the compliance of professional employees (e.g., doctors) with administrative social influence also depends on the degree to which these employees identify with their profession and organization. We found that professional employees were most receptive to administrator social influence to adopt new work behavior (i.e. they sent more emails to their patients) when they strongly identified with the organization and weakly identified with the profession. In contrast, administrator social influence was counterproductive when professional employees strongly identified with the profession and weakly identified with the organization. In short, the results highlight the importance of professionals' self-concepts in determining their workplace motivation and behavior, and also highlight how administrators might benefit by customizing their social influence efforts to individual professionals.
• In conducting these studies, I couldn’t help noticing that on average female and nonwhite physicians earn 40% less than their male and white counterparts.  My coauthors and I examined whether the market might be partially motivating this wage gap – particularly if patients/customers were more satisfied with white male than female or nonwhite physicians.   We began work testing this idea and conducted three studies (including one field study in a hospital context) that showed that patients/customers tended to be significantly more satisfied with employee performance when they were served by white men, rather than nonwhite men, white women, or nonwhite women (Hekman, Aquino, Owens, Mitchell, Schilpzand, & Leavitt, 2010). In the experiment, we were actually able to measure customer racial and gender biases (using the Implicit Association Test) and show that these non-conscious biases were driving the superior customer satisfaction ratings awarded to white men. Because customer satisfaction greatly impacts organizational profits and employee pay, perhaps the main contribution of this article was that it helps solve the puzzle of why white men continue to earn 25% more than women and ethnic minorities. This article caught the attention of my peers as it was chosen as the best article published in our flagship management journal in 2010 (AMJ) and was also highlighted in some of the world's leading news outlets.
• While I was working on the race and gender project, I was also busy trying to improve the organizational identification construct, which my coauthors and I viewed to be lacking because it ignored the emotional component of identification.  In our paper, we argued that individuals often identify with groups in order to either reduce perceived uncertainty or to feel better about who they are as individuals (Johnson, Morgeson & Hekman, 2012). This suggests that organizational identification is not only cognitive, but also has an affective dimension.  We argued that cognitive and affective identification are two distinctive forms of social identification in organizational settings. We further argued that because neurotic individuals are highly motivated to reduce perceived uncertainty, they will tend to identify cognitively with groups. Extraverted individuals, on the other hand, are highly motivated to enhance how they feel about themselves and thus we argued that they would tend to identify affectively with groups. Across three studies, we developed measures of cognitive and affective identification and then showed that neuroticism was positively related to cognitive identification, whereas extraversion was positively related to affective identification. We also found that affective identification provided incremental predictive validity over and above cognitive identification in the prediction of organizational commitment, organizational involvement, and organizational citizenship behaviors.

Improving Organizational Health through Virtuous Leadership

• My third research stream examines sources and outcomes of virtuous leadership. The unfortunate reality of leadership is that people who feel superior to others tend to seek out leadership roles (Kernberg, 1979; Emmons, 1987), leading Narcissists and Machiavellians to tend to emerge as group leaders (Van Vugt, 2006). One study even found that CEOs are more egocentric, grandiose, and narcissistic than patients suffering from psychopathic personality disorder (Board & Fritzon, 2005). And these egocentric personality traits can harm organizations as CEO overconfidence leads companies to make the same mistakes over and over (Chen, Crossland, Luo, 2014), and increases corporate social irresponsibility (Tang, Qian, Chen & Shen, 2014).
•  In response to this widespread leadership problem, I wanted to study how the small minority of humble leaders behaved, and how those humble leaders affected their followers and organizations. My paper with Brad Owens on leader humility used qualitative data to understand whether and how leader humility influenced followers (Owens & Hekman, 2012). Although a growing number of leadership writers argue leader humility is important to organizational effectiveness, little is known about the construct, why some leaders behave more humbly than others, what these behaviors lead to, or what factors moderate the effectiveness of these behaviors. Drawing from 55 in-depth interviews with leaders from a wide variety of contexts, we developed a model of the behaviors, outcomes, and contingencies of humble leadership. We uncovered that leader humility involves leaders modeling to followers how to grow and produces positive organizational outcomes by leading followers to believe that their own developmental journeys and feelings of uncertainty are legitimate in the workplace. We discussed how the emergent humility in leadership model informed a broad range of leadership issues, including organizational development and change, the evolution of leader-follower relationships, new pathways for engaging followers, and integrating top-down and ground-up organizing. A key insight from this paper was identifying the specific behaviors leaders could perform if they desired to behave more humbly in the workplace.
•  I also published a paper regarding courageous leadership. The recent string of high-profile and highly-preventable corporate failures (e.g., Enron, Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae), inspired my co-authors and me to try to understand what might motivate leaders to courageously detect and deflect organizational problems before they harm the entire organization (Schilpzand, Hekman & Mitchell, 2014). Using a biological metaphor of “organization as organism,” we viewed leader courageous actions as a type of organizational immune response that promotes organizational health and protects organizations from harm. Based on 94 interviews we conducted with a wide variety of business executives and military officers who witnessed or undertook courageous actions, we inductively developed a model using leaders’ accounts of the unfolding sequence of events. We learned that leaders report engaging in courageous workplace actions when they feel responsible for dealing with a challenging situation such as a workplace error, an abuse of power, an ambiguous situation, or someone in need. We interpreted the courage stories as suggesting that workplace courage is a two-stage process where actors first determine their level of personal responsibility to respond to the challenging situation, and then determine the potential social costs of acting. Our model of the courageous workplace action process challenges the conventional wisdom of courage as being attributed to a person’s disposition, enriches theories of intrinsic motivation, and helps clarify the role of cognition in courageous action.  Our findings also help to resolve some of the contradictory evidence regarding the antecedents of the many organizational constructs related to courage including whistleblowing, voice, speaking up, taking charge, positive deviance, and organizational dissent.

Improving Organizational Health by Removing Racial and Gender Biases

• My most publicized stream of research examines workplace racial and gender biases. My paper examining customer bias as a source of the wage gap was selected as the best article published in the flagship management journal (AMJ) in 2010. 

o    The Washington Post, June 1, 2009

o    The Chicago Tribune, June 2, 2009

o    The NY Times, June 23, 2009

o    The Boston Globe, July 6, 2009

• Likewise, my paper identifying one source of the glass ceiling was reported widely in the media.
• business news daily  http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6788-fostering-workplace-diversity.html
  financial times http://blogs.ft.com/businessblog/2014/07/women-promoting-women-damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-dont/
  AOM http://aom.org/News/Press-Releases/Women-and-minority-corporate-executives-are-penalized-for-fostering-diversity,-study-finds.aspx
  AOM http://aom.org/News/AOM-in-the-News/The-glass-ceiling-just-got-more-complicated.aspx
  WSJ http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2014/07/21/women-penalized-for-promoting-women-study-finds/
  TIME http://time.com/3014683/women-promotion-study/
  Mashable http://mashable.com/2014/07/18/hiring-diversity/
  Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2014/07/23/for-women-and-minorities-advocating-for-diversity-has-a-downside/
  KVOR http://www.kvor.com/common/more.php?m=58&ts=1406034303&article=9ABFB9BA119C11E4B51EFEFDADE6840A&mode=2
  jezebel http://jezebel.com/attention-women-and-minorities-leave-diverse-hiring-to-1609649160
  NPR http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/why-its-so-difficult-break-glass-ceiling
  Daily camera http://www.dailycamera.com/science_environment/ci_26203688/cu-boulder-study-women-minorities-penalized-and-white
  Care2 http://www.care2.com/causes/equality-on-the-job-is-trickier-than-we-thought.html
  Philadelphia Inquirer http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20140805_Why_women__minorities_have_trouble_advancing.html#disqus_thread 
  Glamour http://www.glamour.com/inspired/blogs/the-conversation/2014/07/women-penalized-for-promoting.html
  Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/25/diversity-study_n_5620839.html
  Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/07/29/women-and-minorities-penalized-for-promoting-diversity-study-says/
  PBS http://www.pbs.org/to-the-contrary/watch/3424/arresting-parents-promoting-diversity-what-women-want