Peter Younkin
Associate Professor of Management, University of Oregon
Do employees work less for female leaders?:
A multi-method study of entrepreneurial firms
Kacperczyk, A., Younkin, P., and Rocha, V.
Organization Science, Forthcoming, 2022
Do female founders have a harder time getting their employees to pitch in? One of the known challenges of startup life is the need to get a lot of work out of people without spending all your capital. Many studies have shown that employees accept this in exchange for a variety of other benefits (from future payouts to short-term perks). However, we propose that female founders are not equally able to use these devices to elicit extra effort from their employees. We test this proposition in a multi-method study that uses a longitudinal matched employer-employee data covering all founders of new ventures with personnel in Portugal between 2002 and 2012. This first study confirms that full-time employees contribute fewer regular hours and less overtime work to female-founded firms. Second, using a series of online experiments, we show that this variation in employee labor across female and male-founded firms is partly motivated by a difference in the employee’s expectations of work demands. Specifically, employees perceive female founders’ requests for additional labor to be unfair and more difficult than expected, and both of these perceptions explain the lower amount of employee labor supplied in female-founded ventures. Overall, our findings uncover a novel mechanism that helps explain the existence of a gender gap in entrepreneurship beyond the entry stage.
The relationship between high-salience events and variation in discrimination
Gorbatai, A., Younkin, P., and Burtch, G.
Organization Science, Online Ahead of Print, 2022.
To what extent are the organizational costs of bias affected by racially salient events? We propose that acts of discrimination and the individual biases that undergird them are sensitive to high-salience events and will oscillate with the salience of the focal attribute (here, race). In short, that the propensity to discriminate reflects both individual and environmental differences, and therefore a given person may become more prone to discriminate in the aftermath of a high-salience event. We test our hypothesis in three online experiments that examine how varying the salience of race affects the evaluation of in-group or out-group founders. We find that respondents evaluate their in-group members more favorably, and outgroup members less favorably, when exposed to a high-salience event, which translates into a significant disadvantage for the minority (African American) group. We complement these studies with an assessment of how police shootings affect fundraising outcomes on Kickstarter to confirm the external validity of our findings. Together, these studies indicate that racially salient events depress the quality evaluations and success odds of African American entrepreneurs relative to others. Hence, discrimination levels can be affected by salient yet unrelated events, and such events are consequential for the economic fortunes of individuals belonging to minority and disadvantaged groups.
How entrepreneurship affects the future employment of men and women
Kacperczyk, A. & Younkin, P.(equal authorship)
Organization Science, 33 (2), pp. 716-745, 2022.
Is founding a firm a good idea? The answer would seem to depend upon a careful weighing of the potential pros (autonomy, potential financial gains) and the costs (likelihood of failure, time lost). However our present accounting ignores one critical variable: the odds of getting a job after entrepreneurship. Our paper addresses the unanswered question of how employers evaluate ex-founders at the point of hire. We propose that employers penalize job candidates with a history of entrepreneurship because they believe them to be worse fits and less committed employees than comparable candidates without founding experience. However, we also argue that the penalty is contingent upon interpreting founding as indicative of undesirable attributes. Because women are often perceived as less legitimate or less competent founders, we propose that employers do not treat their entrepreneurial efforts as equally revealing of unwanted attributes and are correspondingly more likely to hire them than male ex-founders. We find evidence in support of these claims with data from both a resume-based audit and an experimental survey of Marketing and HR professionals.
Stay True to Your Roots?: Hierarchical Categorization and Returns to Spanning
Younkin, P. & Kashkooli, K.
Organization Science, 31(3), pp. 604-627, 2020.
New entrants in established markets face competing recommendations over whether it is better to establish their legitimacy by conforming to type or to differentiate themselves from incumbents by proposing novel contributions. This dilemma is particularly acute in cultural markets where demand for novelty and attention to legitimacy are both high. Drawing upon research in organizational theory and entrepreneurship we propose that the sales of songs by new preformers will vary with the perceived distance between the elements being combined and that this happens, in part, because more distant combinations encourage consumers to adopt superordinate classes (e.g. to classify and evaluate something as a “song” rather than a “Country song”). Using a sample of 144 artists introduced to the public via the U.S. television program The Voice we find a U-shaped pattern where consumers reward new entrants who pursue either familiarity (i.e. non-spanning) or distinctive combinations (i.e. combine distant genres), but reject efforts that try to balance both goals. Experimental tests further validate that manipulating the perceived distance an artist spans influences individual evaluations of product quality, and that distant combinations are more likely to be classified using a superordinate category, mitigating the potential confusion and legitimacy-based penalties that affect middle-distance combinations.
Consumer Discrimination and Hollywood Films
Kuppuswamy, V. & Younkin, P. (equal authorship)
Management Science, 66 (3), pp. 1227-1247, 2020.
The under-representation of minorities in cultural industries is a widely-publicized problem with far-reaching economic and social significance. It is also one of many industries in which employers suggest that the locus of bias is not within the organization but with the consumer. The empirical challenge of relating consumer behavior to employee composition has constrained prior efforts to test their claim and to test the theory of consumer discrimination more broadly. As a result, employers have gradually expanded the scope of the customer discrimination theory from one rooted in a direction interaction to include an aversion to simply seeing employees of a different ethnicity. We explore how consumers respond to employee composition by evaluating the performance of films released in the United States (between 2011 and 2016) as a function of the racial diversity of their cast. We find that films with a single Black actor do not differ from those with no Black actors, and that films with multiple Black actors in the principal cast achieve significantly higher domestic box-office revenues than either. To distinguish between competing explanations for this result, we complement these results with a vignette-based experiment that allows us to identify a positive influence of diversity on consumers’ assessments of quality, controlling for differences in film or actor appeal. Collectively these results help to discredit one rationale for unequal hiring in these industries and also suggest an important qualification to the theory of consumer discrimination – they show that in a setting where employee race is visible but the consumer is physically distant, diversity is more profitable than costly.
Discounted: Founder race and the price of new products
Younkin, P. & Kuppuswamy, V. (equal authorship)
Journal of Business Venturing, 34 (2), pp. 389-412, 2019.
Best Paper in JBV in 2019
Winner of the Bradford-Osborne Award
Best Paper on Minority Entrepreneurship
This paper introduces the claim that consumer bias helps to explain the underperformance of minority ventures. And, in particular, that minority founders suffer from 'price discounting' whereby consumers discount the price they will pay for a good depending upon the race of the founder. Using three experiments to assess how a founder's race affects a consumer's willingness to pay, we provide the initial evidence of significant post-entry forms of bias and how they limit minority-backed ventures even net of funding differences. This complements prior work on pre-entry barriers (i.e. bias by resource providers) to generate a richer understanding of the various ways that minority founders face adversity. In addition, the paper extends prior work on consumer bias to show that respondents are not merely averse to interacting with outgroup members but can also exhibit subtler, but equally pernicious, forms of bias.
The Colorblind Crowd? Founder race and performance in crowdfunding
Younkin, P. & Kuppuswamy, V. (equal authorship)
Management Science, 64 (7), pp. 2973-3468, 2018.
The dearth of minority entrepreneurs has received increasing media attention but few academic analyses. In particular, the funding process creates challenges for either audit or correspondence methods, making it difficult to assess the role, or type, of discrimination influencing resource providers. We use a novel approach that combines analyses of ~7,000 crowdfunding projects with an experimental design to identify whether African-American men are discriminated against and whether this reflects statistical, taste-based, or unconscious bias on the part of prospective supporters. We find that African-American men are significantly less likely to receive funding that similar white founders, and that prospective supporters rate identical projects as lower in quality when they believe the founder is an African-American male. We conclude that the reduction in perceived quality does not reflect conscious assumptions of differences in founder ability or disamenity but rather an unconscious assumption that black founders are lower quality. In a final pair of experiments we show that the racial penalty can be removed by providing prospective supporters with additional evidence of quality via third-party endorsements (i.e. awards, evidence of prior support) or picture arrays of recently successful founders that also include African-Americans.
Paradox of Breadth: The tension between legitimacy and experience in transitions to entrepreneurship
Kacperczyk, A. & Younkin, P. (equal authorship)
Administrative Science Quarterly, 62 (4), pp. 731-764, 2017.
Complicating Abandonment: How a multi-stage theory of abandonment
clarifies the evolution of an adopted practice
Younkin, P.
Organization Studies, 37 (7), pp. 1017-1053, 2016.
We focus on the paradox generated when prospective entrepreneurs accumulate broad functional experience. On one hand, broad functional experience may facilitate an individual’s pursuit of new ventures, as breadth enables the mastery of different skills and access to heterogeneous information and resources. On the other hand, such broad experience might hinder transition into entrepreneurship by imposing the threat of devaluation by key resource providers and thus undermining the legitimacy of entrepreneurial claims. To resolve this paradox, we introduce the notion of multiple category systems, which explains how a potential legitimacy discount of categorical membership can be avoided, when individuals are classified according to multiple categorical schemas simultaneously. Using the context of the music industry between 1990 and 2013, in which artists can launch independent record labels, we find that transition to entrepreneurship is most likely to occur when functional experience is broad but market experience is narrow: individuals have mastered a variety of skills but solicit few audiences. We further document that the paradox of breadth is attenuated when alternate methods of signaling legitimacy reduce the potential penalty of functional breadth and the corresponding need to develop narrow market experience.
This article presents a process-model for the abandonment of a practice. This complements earlier research on adoption and abandonment by allowing for fluctuations in the level of commitment across time and by demonstrating the persistent role for both institutional pressure and performance-based concerns on the maintenance of a practice. It also provides a novel means for identifying differences in the method of abandonment through the introduction of a concept of decommitment. Further, it helps resolve the question of how firms respond when faced with conflicting internal and external evidence of the success of an adopted practice. Using the divestiture of unrelated business segments by 100 U.S. firms between 1970– 96, I estimate post-adoption commitment to a practice and the likelihood of a given firm decommitting. I find that treating abandonment as a process clarifies the evolving role of institutional and performance-based concerns and helps identify when a given firm is more subject to either source of pressure. The implications of this approach and these findings for current research on resistance to adoption and de-institutionalization are explored in the conclusion.
What Problems Does Crowdfunding Solve?
Younkin, P. & Kashkooli, K.
California Management Review, 58 (2), pp. 20-43, 2016.
The expansion of crowdfunding raises two related questions: what type of platform suits each project and how should existing platforms expand? The answer lies in analyzing the field of crowdfunding as a solution to four specific problems: gatekeeping, coordination, inexperience, and patronage. Using an inductive analysis of the largest U.S. sites, this article identifies the range of problems crowdfunding addresses and their performance to date. Crowdfunding succeeds in raising money within and across networks, but efforts to use crowdfunding to educate or to generate recurring revenue are less successful.