Category: Departments

From research scientists working in drug discovery to portfolio managers waiting for the markets to bear out their investment theses, how do certain types of professionals sustain their energy and enthusiasm over long periods?

That’s the question undertaken in a new study co-authored by Bruce Barry, the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management.

“Why and how do people stay motivated in their work when goal accomplishment is at best many years off and may never occur at all?” Barry and co-author Thomas Bateman, of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, ask in a paper for the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

Professionals who are able to sustain the long-term pursuit of their work goals start like anyone setting out to accomplish a set of tasks. They start by focusing on a specific goal, expending some initial effort and show some perseverance over the short term.

But then, these professionals enter “a complex set of cognitive and affective phenomena that implicate perceptions of self, the future, task activities, and a variety of other gratifications,” Barry and Bateman write.

To understand the psychological forces at play when pursuing long-term goals, the co-authors identified and conducted in-depth interviews with 25 professionals whose work goals included the following traits: Eventual success could take years, or perhaps generations; real progress comes very slowly; there is a significant chance of failure. While these conditions may define the most extreme cases of pursuing long-term goals, Barry and Bateman say the insights generated from the interviews have wide-reaching implications for both professionals and managers.

The researchers then distilled the key elements of the interviews into eight sources of motivation that provide “psychological sustenance” in the pursuit of long-term goals:

1. Allegory: figurative representations or abstractions that offer significant, consequential meaning (e.g., comparisons to the Wright Brothers or the moon landing)
2. Futurity: allusions to the long-term impact and possibilities associated with the ultimate outcomes that may result from the realization of a long-term goal (e.g., setting the stage for children and grandchildren)
3. Self: statements that invoke personal identity, reputation or personal belief systems (e.g., expressing personal creativity)
4. Singularity: references to the perceived uniqueness of the endeavor (e.g., the big exploration that nobody could have done before)
5. Knowledge: statements that refer to skill development, new understanding, acquiring truth and finding ways to control events (e.g., any knowledge that’s created is good)
6. The Work: allusions to the nature of the work, including challenges, methods, risks and uncertainties, as well as elements that are fun or surprising (e.g., like a puzzle that needs solving)
7. Embeddedness: ways in which individuals see their work situated within social contexts, as well as ways in which their work garners social legitimacy within their professions and in society (e.g., an enjoyment from disproving the skeptics)
8. Progress: statements that emphasize the notion of forward movement, often short-term, in the direction of long-term goal pursuit (e.g., advancements in tools and techniques that facilitate the work)

These motivational themes incorporate near-term (proximal) and long-term (distal) features that weave together immediate payoffs with a perception of doing important and lasting work. In addition, all the subjects interviewed by Barry and Bateman for this study mentioned the important role self-regulation plays.

“We saw [self-regulation] as an overarching process and set of strategies implicated in many of the motivating themes identified in our analysis,” they write. The co-authors highlight six forms of self-regulation that include maintaining focus on goal-directed actions, controlling emotions, and coping with failure—using it as a basis for improvement rather than an injurious setback.

While the sample size may have been limited, with no means to compare similar data sets, Barry and Bateman write that the study is meant to offer meaningful conceptual extensions to well-established theoretical areas, setting the stage for future investigations.

“Long-term goals arguably are at least as important as short-term goals in their ultimate consequences for individuals, organizations, and societies,” Barry and Bateman write. “Now, we believe, is the time to expand our field’s search for theories and strategies that can help people and organizations pursue and achieve important long-term goals.”

A version of this article originally appeared in VB Intelligence on July 25, 2012.

In a pivotal scene from the film The Social Network, the Hollywood retelling of Facebook’s founding, an exasperated Mark Zuckerberg exhorts business partner and Harvard classmate Eduardo Saverin to join him in Silicon Valley.

“You’ve gotta move here, Wardo. This is where it’s all happening,” the Zuckerberg character pleads.

Whether this piece of dialogue is true or not, the sentiment behind the statement is perhaps more accurate than Zuckerberg—or the movie’s writers—could have known.

In a recent paper examining performance differences within geographic business clusters, Assistant Professor of Strategic Management Brian McCann, MBA’04, finds that younger firms, as well as those with a “deeper knowledge stock” (i.e., more patents), gain the biggest boosts from geographic clusters.

By locating in a geographic cluster, “entrepreneurs may accrue particular benefits to agglomeration during the early phases of a firm,” McCann writes with co-author Timothy B. Folta of Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management. The paper was published recently in the Journal of Business Venturing.

While scholars such as Paul Krugman and Michael Porter have long written about the positive business effects of geographic clusters, this research is among the first to investigate which firms benefit the most from agglomeration.

McCann and Folta examined 806 biotechnology firms founded in the United States between 1973 and 1998. Although the firms were spread across 85 Metropolitan Statistical Areas, the co-authors found that the top 10 clusters in 1994 (the peak of the industry in terms of the number of companies operating during the study’s time frame) provided locations for nearly 75 percent of the firms in the industry.

McCann and Folta also measured the “knowledge richness” of each cluster by totaling the number of patents held by all the biotech firms in each cluster. Statistical analysis of these data sets yielded several findings of note:

• Locating in a cluster is beneficial for firms: Firms in larger and more knowledge-rich clusters have a higher probability of patenting in any given year.

• For each firm that’s added to a cluster, companies within that location have a 1 percent higher increase in the odds of patenting. While that figure may seem small, the effects add up quickly. Increasing a cluster size by 10 firms raises a firm’s patenting probability by nearly 10 percent.

• Within clusters, the increased patenting probability is even higher for firms that already have a richer knowledge base—that is, a higher number of patents. “Our conjecture is that such firms are better able to benefit from knowledge spillovers,” McCann and Folta write.

• Younger firms enjoy a similarly higher patenting probability within clusters, according to the analysis. “This result is consistent with prior scholars who have speculated that young firms might more effectively draw benefits from their clustered regions,” the co-authors write. This is because younger firms tend to have more flexible organizations and a greater need to rely on outside knowledge sources because of their limited resources.

McCann and Folta write that these findings hold relevance for researchers, business practitioners and policymakers.

The evidence regarding what types of firms benefit most from clustering “should be of principal importance to scholars of entrepreneurship or strategic management wondering about the relationship between location and competitive advantage,” they write. “For those deciding whether to locate in an agglomeration or for those attempting to recruit firms to an agglomeration, it provides advice on those firms that are most likely to benefit.”

A version of this article originally appeared in VB Intelligence on July 25, 2012.

From Bob Hope’s hawking American Express Travelers Cheques in the 1950s to quirky actress Zooey Deschanel’s selling the latest iPhone today, celebrities have long served as the advertising industry’s not-so-secret weapon.

As consumers, we want the same services and products as the good-looking, glamorous set—or if nothing else, we tend to remember the famous associations these figures bring to whatever they’re endorsing.

And while these celebrities may be among the most commonly familiar and well-liked people, the vast majority of the population knows very little about their political and religious attitudes and values.

In fact, the less that is known about a famous figure, the more the public views them in a favorable light, according to new research co-authored by Steve Posavac, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Marketing.

“As perceivers learn more, there is an increased likelihood that the evidence will indicate that celebrities have middling attributes” that show just as many flaws as other people, Posavac and his co-authors write in a paper for Basic and Applied Social Psychology. “Perhaps more significantly, evidence may reveal to perceivers that celebrities’ political views, religious practices and social attitudes are different from their own, leading to less liking.”

So carefully controlled are the images of most celebrities that the researchers in this study found it difficult to compile reliable information on possible test subjects in preparation for their experiments. For one of the main experiments, however, they did find two famous figures whose personal viewpoints are well-known and diametrically opposed: Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson.

With 131 undergraduates participating in the study for extra credit, the students were randomly given descriptions about Hanks and Gibson—one innocuously detailing each actor’s film career, the other discussing specific political and religious points of view.

When asked about the likability of each, “liberals and conservatives did not differ in their evaluations of Hanks and Gibson when information was not presented,” according to the study. “However, when descriptions of the practices and attitudes of the celebrities were provided, liberals and conservatives diverged in their evaluations of the actors, particularly Gibson.” (It should be noted that the study was conducted prior to widespread news coverage of Gibson’s domestic conflicts.)

In another experiment, student participants were chosen based on the results of a pretest in which they favorably rated six celebrities: Will Smith, Jennifer Aniston, George Clooney, Natalie Portman, Johnny Depp and Scarlett Johansson. They were then asked a series of questions about the celebrities’ political and religious views.

For the researchers, this served as a mental prompt that allowed them to compare attitudes for celebrities prior to thinking about how much participants knew of them personally, versus after completing the questionnaire. What Posavac and his colleagues found is that, “participants perceived the celebrities to have significantly less credibility” when they were made aware of how little they knew about them.

This dynamic can be seen in many real-world contexts. Tom Cruise, Lindsey Lohan and Tiger Woods, to name but a few, all experienced sharp declines in popularity (and celebrity endorsement deals) after personal shortcomings were revealed. Posavac and his colleagues also point to the case of Rashard Mendenhall, an NFL running back who posted unpopular views about the killing of Osama Bin Laden on Twitter. The backlash led the apparel manufacturer Champion to end its endorsement deal with him and endangered his spot on the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“People appear to be taken by celebrities, in part, because they are highly familiar while being simultaneously unknown,” the researchers write. That is, in the absence of information, people fill in the personality blanks of celebrities with their own views and values.

What’s more, distinct groups differ in how they perceive celebrities once they have more information about their views. In the experiment with Hanks and Gibson, liberals and women tended to rate Gibson less favorably with more information. Similarly, likability ratings among conservatives and men dropped as they learned more about Hanks’ views.

“The findings reveal one of the important foundations underlying the adoration of celebrities: ignorance,” Posavac and his co-authors write. “Unless celebrities harbor mainstream attitudes that have widespread appeal, they are probably better off financially keeping their opinions and practices private.”

A version of this article originally appeared in VB Intelligence on July 25, 2012.