Business School Research Roundup: June 10 2015

In news that will surprise no one bar those who have been trapped in carbonite, Han Solo style, for the past 42 years, the so-called ‘queen bee syndrome’ – the idea that women in power will do their utmost to keep other women out of power and first put forward in a 1973 study – has been disproved.

A research team from Columbia Business School looked at 1,500 companies over a 20-year period, finding that female-led companies were more likely to bring more females into senior positions (The Guardian reports). Who’d have thought it? However, when a woman was given an executive role below CEO-level, the chances of others following them to executive level fell by 50%. “Women face an implicit quota, whereby firms seek to maintain a small number of women on their top management team, usually only one,” the researchers commented.  “While firms gain legitimacy from having women in top management, the value of this legitimacy declines with each woman.”

Research from Chicago Booth professor Ayelet Fishbach and Rutgers Business School professor Oliver J Sheldon has found that people are more likely to act in ethical ways if they anticipate that there will be a temptation to act unethically in the first place, or if they understand how the act can be likened to other unethical acts. When not connecting the act to others, or being made to think in an ethical frame of mind, people are more likely to transgress. Simple, isn’t it?

In an experiment in which participants were divided into buyers and sellers of a New York brownstone, buyers were told to conceal their aim of destroying the building, while sellers were told they should aim to preserve it. Half of the sellers were told to think about a time they had cheated before. This half were found to be less likely to conceal the truth, with 45% utilizing duplicity to close the deal, while 67% of those who weren’t connecting the sale to previous ethical quandaries were happy to lie.

Another experiment found that participants were less likely to steal pens and other office supplies if they considered a handful of ethical dilemmas at the same time, or were made to anticipate an ethical dilemma in a writing exercise. “Unethical behavior is rampant across various domains ranging from business and politics to education and sport. Organizations seeking to improve ethical behavior can do so by helping people recognize the cumulative impact of unethical acts and by providing warning cues for upcoming temptation," said Fishbach.