Trump Administration Policies Have Chilling Effects on Academia

Everyone Will Suffer in the Wake of Trump Administration’s Research Cuts

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By Paul Friedman

This year, the Trump administration has fired many government researchers, canceled scientific and medical research grants, and targeted leading universities, including Harvard, with debilitating funding freezes. Fear of reprisal has caused many scientists, doctors, professors, and university administrators to opt for silence instead of speaking up to defend the research that is getting the ax.

Academy of Management (AOM) Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University says much of the research produced by him and his colleagues, including many AOM members, has a day-to-day impact on industry practitioners, including organizational leaders and managers. Cuts in federal funding for research will have a negative impact on industry, as well as researchers, colleges and universities, and other research institutions.

“What we publish in our primary journals have to be both theoretically important and have practical relevance,” Bamberger said. “It’s got to be interesting from a theoretical perspective and intellectual perspective, and it’s got to have some sort of surprising element—going against conventional wisdom—but it also has to translate that surprising finding into something that managers can do something about.

“And there are thousands of organizational consultants who read the findings published in our journals and then translate that into actual practice in organizations,” he said.

Bamberger points out that a great deal of research is specifically aimed at examining current practices by managers and their efficacy. Recently, he published a study of the managerial approach called design thinking, which focuses on understanding clients’ needs and designing innovative solutions.

“Design thinking has been around for about 10 years,” Bamberger said. “It’s an approach to create more innovative ways of boosting learning and finding innovative solutions to common problems or sometimes even really wicked problems.

“It became a fad and a lot of organizations adopted it, but no one ever bothered to actually assess whether or not it has an impact and whether this impact is any greater than other types of learning-oriented interventions, like team building,” he said.

Bamberger and research colleagues designed a field experiment to test the impact of design thinking as a team learning intervention. They compared over time what happens in terms of the efficiency and productivity of teams using different interventions.

“Is design thinking more efficacious than an alternative?” Bamberger said. “And we found out that in fact it is, and we actually demonstrate the mechanism by which it operates and why it’s more effective than other mechanisms.

“So these types of practical implications are useful to managers and to the extent that we don’t have funding necessary to do this type of research, everybody suffers,” he said.

AI Is a Tool to Boost Efficiency, Not to Reduce Headcount

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By Paul Friedman

Artificial intelligence is often seen as a threat to employment, but it can be used to preserve jobs in times of uncertainty such as the current one when many economists are sounding the alarm about a looming recession.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said AI can be used to help businesses maintain skilled workforces when they may have to find ways to cut costs.

“What kind of jobs may disappear? What kinds of skills will you still need? What skills can we do without? There’s uncertainty there,” Bamberger said. “Perhaps you want to take that workforce and upgrade them over time.

“You have to know where your business is going and have a good sense as to what kinds of competencies you need,” he said. “There are clearly benefits to retaining your workforce as long as you can afford to train them to augment the AI and enhance its value.

“Increasingly organizations are doing this and using AI in this process.”

Bamberger said AI is now allowing organizations to better understand how to leverage and develop the talent in their workforce.

“Often we refer to something called the talent marketplace, something that organizations probably should have been doing decades ago, which is keeping inventories of their workforce’s competencies and skills,” Bamberger said. “AI is enhancing the ability of organizations to leverage the workforce they have in place by moving people around on short-term internal gigs in organizations and getting them prepared for positions that might open up in the future.

“These are systems that help organizations enhance the competency level of their workforce and limit the need to necessarily turn to the external labor market to secure the talent they need, which can be quite expensive,” he said.

“Ultimately it may offer a far more economical way to maximize the return from investments in human capital.”

There’s also a benefit of AI to employees, according to Bamberger.

“AI—having an understanding of the individual’s background and experiences and skills and competencies—can search through a wide range of projects that may require a month or two of work and then propose those to an employee during that individual’s slack time that they take on this additional project,” he said.

“And if they do enough of these projects over the course of two or three years, they’re going to be set to fill these new roles that they’re interested in doing and the organization needs them to fill.”

How Looming Stagflation May Affect Pay

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By Paul Friedman

At a time when some forecasts predict continuing or worsening inflation or stagflation and possibly a recession, pay transparency adds to the pressure on organizations’ decision-makers.

Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University, an Academy of Management scholar who published a book based on his research on pay transparency, said managers will need to build systems of compensation that are more justifiable and understandable to employees.

“The first step with pay transparency is not necessarily to disclose pay levels of one employee or another employee, but rather to disclose how pay is determined in the organization,” Bamberger said. “Most employees have no understanding whatsoever how their pay is determined in the organization and how other people’s pay is determined in the organization.

“Simply understanding pay processes and procedures, all the evidence suggests, has beneficial effects for both employees and employers with very few, if any, side effects—except that employers have to work harder to build these equitable and fair systems.”

Bamberger said pay transparency is always problematic for decision-makers.

“No one wants their decisions to be transparent to other people—transparency is great when we are the observers, but when we’re the observed, it’s a terrible thing,” Bamberger said. “It comes with potentially unintended negative consequences, especially when you have to think about what happens when people see that they are paid less than other people.

“It becomes problematic for the ones making the decisions, and it can be problematic for the organization,” he said. “So there are complications with pay transparency; there’s no question about it.”

Still, Bamberger said he believes that “sunshine is the best antiseptic,” and pay transparency can produce surprising positive results.

“What the evidence shows is that most employees underestimate how much their superiors are making, and when you think about that, it generates a tendency of individuals to think that they’ll do better by leaving their current organization,”

Bamberger said. “The grass is always greener; if I want a pay increase, I have to go outside, and that movement has costs to the current employer.

“So there’s merit, potentially, in letting people see what the potential income might be for moving up within the organization,” he said.

“I think organizations that are forced to be more accountable and hence build more effective pay systems—more explainable and justifiable pay systems—ultimately enhance the quality of the human capital they can bring in and hold to enhance their competitiveness, which becomes really important in a period of stagflation.”

Why We Love Time-Travel Tales

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By Daniel Butcher

People love stories that involve time travel, from books such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, and the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (adapted into a TV series) and shows such as Doctor Who and Quantum Leap to comedy movies such as Groundhog Day, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Hot Tub Time Machine and action/adventure films such as the Back to the Future and Terminator series.

What’s so universally compelling about the concept?

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that the appeal of time-travel stories is that people often imagine what it would be like to travel backward and forward in time.

“We live in any given moment, but in those moments as we mentally time travel, we can remember select things, we can forecast things, and so we can create whatever story we want,” Shipp said. “When we see it in movie or show form, it fascinates us to be able to move into the future and see, ‘How did that play out?’—there’s a little bit of certainty that comes with that, so that’s one element.

“Another part of that is that we forget how things change,” she said. “For example, we assume, ‘If I am in an accident and suffer an injury and I lose the use of my legs, I would be so unhappy,’ and there’s a lot of research on this; yet we know that people have happiness set points.

“We forget the resilience that we have over time.”

Popular fantasy

“I was just thinking about this today in terms of the weather,” Shipp said. “We’re having this really weird cold snap in Texas, and so, of course, my brain is thinking, ‘Well, if this is what the weather is going to be from now on, I’m going to move someplace else.’

“But that thought assumes this experience would be the same in another 10 years, rather than be temporary or change in another way,” she said. “What do I know about what the future holds?

“Some of those time-travel films get us thinking about the elements we’ve forgotten about the past or what might be in the future, so it’s as much a fantasy as it gives us something to sink our teeth into when we think about what’s continuous versus what’s changing.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Time-Management Hacks Don’t Work for Everyone

By Daniel Butcher

When it comes to time-management tips, people respond to work schedules and deadlines differently, and what works for an early bird might not be useful for a night owl.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that time management is a common headache for many workers.

“There’s still a really big push to better manage your time, and even right now, I’m still seeing elements of post-pandemic burnout,” Shipp said. “My theory is that many people struggle with time management because leaders have never gotten down to the meaning of people’s time at work and an individual perspective of how workers are currently managing—or would prefer to manage—their time.

“Time-management hacks that are so commonly prescribed might work for some people but not for others—for some people, it might make it worse,” she said. “For example, it is widely prescribed to block your workday to work on certain things at certain times—but that overlooks how some people work better in a state of flow, working based on events, not time.

“There’s a couple of time-management issues that have been around for a long time, but we’re looking at them too simplistically, without understanding how people experience and view time individually.”

Instead, experts and influencers are touting life hacks, including time-management strategies, that resonate with a percentage of the population but might not work for everybody.

“It’s really comparable right now to the research on nutrition—they’re finding customized diets that are optimized for different metabolisms and making individual prescriptions for workouts and what to eat,” Shipp said.

“We used to think of this as ‘calories in, calories out,’ but now we realize, ‘Wow, it isn’t that simple, because you could eat the same things as me, but we have different outcomes because we have different biological makeups,’” she said

The same thing goes for individuals’ cognitive makeup and their chronological perceptions of time.

“For example, are you an early-morning person or are you a late-night person?” Shipp said. “That can affect your performance as your time management and task prioritization needs to be shared to your energy level.

“Similarly, rigid work schedules of certain hours in the office may work for some employees but not others,” she said.

“There are so many things that we don’t yet incorporate into workforce discussions that that would help us to get away from these blanket hacks and one-size-fits-all recommendations.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

The Pitfalls of Thinking about Your Jobs Instead of Your Career

By Daniel Butcher

Far too often, workers either stay too long in a job that isn’t a good fit, or, at the other extreme, hop from job to job without a coherent plan for achieving their desired career path.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that when it comes to people deciding whether their current job is a good fit or which jobs to apply for, they shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Put another way, think of each job you apply for in the context of the career that you’d like to have over the long haul.

“Career-planning is a long-lived topic, but in many ways, people have moved away from thinking about careers and instead it’s just a string of jobs—maybe you have this job for a year and that job for a year, but none of them ties into a larger career path,” Shipp said. “One of the things that you may regret is accepting a job without thinking about your fit over time, for example.”

Over time, it’s crucial to plan for the career you want and articulate the story you’re telling yourself, the narrative of what that looks like, and whether the job you’re in or applying to fits that narrative, she said.

“If we aren’t doing long-term career planning and lose the ability to think of ourselves as the protagonist in a continuous story from past to present to future, then people can make job changes that don’t necessarily fit or work any better than where they were before,” Shipp said.

“Many companies in America seem to simply accept this job-hopping trend, recruiting constantly to overcome the short-term tenures that are now so common,” she said. “But individuals can create a better experience for themselves if they give some thought to their career narrative.

“If crafted thoughtfully, they may even find a better fit with an organization that values the same things.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Focusing on the Past vs. the Present vs. the Future at Work

By Daniel Butcher

Are you not seeing eye-to-eye with your boss or a colleague? It may be that you focus more on the past, present, or future than they do—and this could be both good and bad.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that talking with your boss and colleagues about your temporal orientations—how often you both tend to think about the past, the present, and the future—can be illuminating and may even enable better collaboration.

“I work with somebody that, when we compare these things, they’re very much present- and past-focused, and so they’re the person that is constantly telling me, ‘You’ve come so far; look at what you’ve done—do you remember this happened five or 10 years ago?’” Shipp said. “Whereas I’m saying, ‘You need to know that my future focus is really pushing me into the future, because things are uncertain, and I haven’t done enough yet—I need to do more.’

“I’m pushing, pushing, pushing, whereas they’re saying, ‘Wait, hold on, savor this, acknowledge where you’ve been,’ and vice versa; ‘I’ve helped that person with strategic planning and things that don’t come as naturally to them,” she said.

“As individuals, we need to understand where your mind naturally tends to go and understand too how other people’s minds might look different than yours.”

Although different temporal orientations or ways of perceiving time can be helpful, Shipp noted that they can also lead to conflicts among colleagues within a team or department or between bosses and their direct reports.

“Originally, I got into arguments with the person with whom I worked, because we didn’t realize what different world views we had—we were literally opposite,” Shipp said. “He would say, ‘Why are you always thinking about this thing going forward?’ and I would say, ‘What? Why can’t you think about something that’s so important?’

“Understanding yourself, making that temporal orientation explicit for yourself and for the people that you work with—that’s when you can start to see, ‘Oh, hey, you’re focused on this other period of time’ so that I might ask you to fill in the gaps of the things that I can’t see because I’m so future-focused,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

How Focusing on the Past, Present, or Future Affects Your Career

By Daniel Butcher

Ask yourself: In any given day, how much time do you spend thinking about the past, the present, and the future? That ratio has implications for:

• your performance at work
• how well you collaborate
• how you manage time

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that she and colleagues have measured how much people think about the past, the present, and the future for various research studies.

“A new research method we developed enables us to look at not just those three different dimensions separately or the interactions among them but also at prototypes—typical combinations of past, present, and future focus,” Shipp said. “For example, people high in all three are hyper-temporal individuals, whereas people low in all three don’t think about time at all.

“There are also people that only think about the present moment—they don’t really think about where they’ve been or where they’re going,” she said. “It’s just ‘carpe diem.’

“What was neat about that method is that we could use data to show that despite all the different combinations that could result from being high or low on each of the three different dimensions, there really were just a couple of different prototypes, and they’re differentially related to outcomes.”

Shipp and colleagues found that people with a strong future focus see certain benefits, but there are also drawbacks if they ignore the past and present altogether.

“Much of the literature has looked at future focus as positive given that it helps you to plan and anticipate events. But what we found is that future focus on its own doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all good—it can make you more anxious because it can highlight uncertainty,” Shipp said.

“So although future focus can make you more successful because you plan ahead, also having a stronger present focus tends to make people a little bit happier,” she said.

Shipp also found some other unexpected findings for other dimensions of temporal focus.

“We didn’t really find that people were only past-focused, nostalgic types,” Shipp said. “However, these were limited samples, so we called for more profile research to study this in more depth.

“It really extends the findings of prior research and takes them in new directions,” she said.

In addition, Shipp said that such a profile approach is important for collaboration at work.

“When we start to look at, ‘What’s your profile versus my profile?’ as opposed to just saying, ‘We’re both high on future focus; we should have the same outcomes,’ that could help people regulate their own work schedules and productivity, and it could have implications for managers and leaders in terms of recognizing how different team members perceive time,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

RTO Has a Steep Learning Curve for Young Workers

By Daniel Butcher

Many young employees, some of whom graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic or took on a fully remote role after graduation, never experienced integrating with—and thriving in—an office culture. Pandemic or no, young professionals often experience a learning curve in transitioning to becoming a professional. They have to figure out how to bond with fellow employees, make a good impression on management, and act professionally in an office.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter said that many early-career workers haven’t been fully socialized into their employer’s culture. The quality of organizations’ onboarding procedures varies widely.

“One of the concerns that we’ve been hearing a lot from newer employees is they weren’t onboarded effectively,” Methot said. “They’re brought into a new role, but they don’t get a chance to meet the team, develop a rapport with their boss, or form relationships with this team to build trust and learn how to collaborate effectively with them.

“Maybe they worked remotely when they were hired into the organization, and then—all of a sudden—they’re brought back to the workspace, and now they have to reevaluate how they were interacting with these individuals and almost create new relationships with them,” she said. “The pandemic created this disruption to our understanding of how to interact, and so it calls into question what types of information do recent hires require?

“How are we socializing these new employees to help them navigate the social norms and political landscape of the organization? How do they build a relationship with their supervisor or their direct reports when they never meet in person, and then, what does that look like if a group of them is required to come back to the office? It’s really disruptive.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Email Jokes Fail

By Daniel Butcher

Most people seem confident in their ability to get their point across in emails. Few realize that writing an email is actually a minefield, and common errors can blow up in the sender’s face.

Academy of Management Scholar Kris Byron of Georgia State University said it’s important to remember your audience, especially if you’re trying to be funny or ironic. She published a research article on this topic in Academy of Management Review.

“I would hope that the people who I communicate with the most know I’m a sarcastic person; I joke around a lot, but I still try to make sure that there’s little ways indicating that,” Byron said. “If I am joking around, I’ll try to make sure they know; I might even just say, ‘Of course, I’m just joking,’ or I’ll add a smiley face or another emoji just to make sure that people know that I’m joking it or being sarcastic.

Including humor, irony, or sarcasm in an email can be risky, especially for work-related messages. Depending on the stakes and how well you know the recipient, it may not be worth the risk of being misunderstood and potentially offending that person.

“If you don’t know a person really well and you’re sending them an email, then usually I would not even try to be sarcastic or funny, just because they don’t know you, and they don’t have a way to tell from your facial expression or tone of voice if you’re joking,” Byron said. “They don’t have the context or knowledge about you—they lack sufficient personalized information about you to know how to interpret it, and they might not appreciate your sense of humor.

“I get it: Everyone is not everyone else’s cup of tea, so you have to proceed with caution when making a joke or using sarcasm,” she said. “I do think that you want to be careful—if you don’t know someone, I would not try to attempt humor generally.

“That’s the big takeaway: Know your audience.”