Sameer Srivastava, Professor of Business Administration & Public Policy, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Thursday, April 4, 2024 - 1:30pm - 3:00pm
Abstract
From the interview room to the press room, much of organizational life unfolds in evaluative contexts wherein evaluatees present information that positions themselves in a favorable light, while evaluators ask penetrating questions to evaluate these claims. Although some questions are readily addressed, others are surprising in ways that can unsettle even a carefully crafted presentation. The authors propose that questions can be surprising in two analytically distinct ways: when they are off-topic and when they are unexpected. They argue that questions that are on-topic but unexpected are most likely to be disruptive. They refer to such questions as curveballs and examine the situations under which they arise. Whereas prior work on interpersonal evaluation focuses on actor- and interaction-level explanations, the authors consider the role of a structural property: the information environment. They theorize that evaluators are more likely to pose curveball questions when there is a dearth, rather than abundance, of public information about the evaluatee. To evaluate these ideas, they develop a novel measure of curveball questions using natural language processing techniques. Using a corpus of quarterly earnings calls and data on newspaper closures, which induce exogenous variation in a locally headquartered firm's information environment, they find support for their theory.
Biography
Sameer B. Srivastava is the Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is also affiliated with UC Berkeley Sociology. His research uses computational methods to: (1) unpack the complex interrelationships between group culture, individual cognition, and interpersonal networks; and (2) examine how they jointly relate to individual attainment and organizational performance. His work has been published in such journals as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and Organization Science. He currently serves as Organizations Department Editor at Management Science and was previously a Senior Editor at Organization Science. Sameer co-directs the Berkeley Culture Center and the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture Lab.