Missing Links: Referrer Behavior and Job Segregation

How does referral recruitment contribute to job segregation, and what can organizations do about it? Current theory on network effects in the labor market emphasizes the job-seeker perspective, focusing on the segregated nature of job-seekers’ information and contact networks, and leaves little role for organizational influence. But employee referrals are necessarily initiated from within a firm by referrers. We argue that referrer behavior is the missing link that can help organizations manage the segregating effects of referring. Adopting the referrer’s perspective of the process, we develop a computational model which integrates a set of empirically documented referrer behavior mechanisms gleaned from extant organizational case studies. Using this model, we compare the segregating effects of referring when these behaviors are inactive to the effects when the behaviors are active. We show that referrer behaviors substantially boost the segregating effects of referring. This impact of referrer behavior presents an opportunity for organizations. Contrary to popular wisdom, we show that organizational policies designed to influence referrer behaviors can mitigate most if not all of the segregating effects of referring

Stakeholder Relationships and Social Welfare: A Behavioral Theory of Contributions to Joint Value Creation

Firms play a crucial role in furthering social welfare through their ability to foster stakeholders’ contributions to joint value creation, i.e., value creation that involves a public-good dilemma due to high task and outcome interdependence - leading to what economists have labeled the ‘team production problem’. We build on relational models theory to examine how individual stakeholders’ contributions to joint value creation are shaped by stakeholders’ mental representations of their relationships with the other participants in value creation, and how these mental representations are affected by the perceived behavior of the firm. Stakeholder theory typically contrasts a broadly-defined ‘relational’ approach to stakeholder management with a ‘transactional’ approach based on the price mechanism - and has argued that the former is more likely to contribute to social welfare than the latter. Our theory supports this prediction for joint value creation, but also implies that the dichotomy on which it is based is too coarse-grained: there are three distinct ways to trigger higher contributions to joint value creation than through a ‘transactional’ approach. Our theory also helps explain the tendency for firms and their stakeholders to converge on ‘transactional’ relationships, despite their relative inefficiency in the context of joint value creation

Common Method Variance in IS Research: A Comparison of Alternative Approaches and a Reanalysis of Past Research

Despite recurring concerns about common method variance (CMV) in survey research, the information systems (IS) community remains largely uncertain of the extent of such potential biases. To address this uncertainty, this paper attempts to systematically examine the impact of CMV on the inferences drawn from survey research in the IS area. First, we describe the available approaches for assessing CMV and conduct an empirical study to compare them. From an actual survey involving 227 respondents, we find that although CMV is present in the research areas examined, such biases are not substantial. The results also suggest that few differences exist between the relatively new marker-variable technique and other well-established conventional tools in terms of their ability to detect CMV. Accordingly, the marker-variable technique was employed to infer the effect of CMV on correlations from previously published studies. Our findings, based on the reanalysis of 216 correlations, suggest that the inflated correlation caused by CMV may be expected to be on the order of 0.10 or less, and most of the originally significant correlations remain significant even after controlling for CMV. Finally, by extending the marker-variable technique, we examined the effect of CMV on structural relationships in past literature. Our reanalysis reveals that contrary to the concerns of some skeptics, CMV-adjusted structural relationships not only remain largely significant but also are not statistically differentiable from uncorrected estimates. In summary, this comprehensive and systematic analysis offers initial evidence that (1) the marker-variable technique can serve as a convenient, yet effective, tool for accounting for CMV, and (2) common method biases in the IS domain are not as serious as those found in other disciplines.common method variance, method biases, marker variable, logit analysis, path analysis