Interviews in three countries and a survey of 417 U.S. service workers show that going off script is a routine part of frontline work. Confidence, a customer focus, and room to act are what drive it.
Steven W. Rayburn, Sidney T. Anderson Five TakeawaysInterviews in three countries and a survey of 417 U.S. service workers show that going off script is routine. Here is what managers should know.
Steven W. Rayburn, Sidney T. Anderson
Bayesian models that account for how neighboring areas influence each other show that worsening poverty, income, and inequality went with higher COVID-19 mortality across the phases of the pandemic. The study, focused on California, also tracks how changes in those factors over time played out across places.
Rasim M. Musal, Tahir Ekin
Employees who accept personal responsibility for reporting fraud are more willing to blow the whistle internally. That effect vanishes when an excuse for the fraud is offered. Rationalizations neutralize a sense of duty.
Randall Frederick Young
Local governments whose finance officers are deeply involved in budgeting show fewer control weaknesses, better compliance, and timelier audits. The link is strongest for female officers and for officers without a CPA license.
Binod Guragai
A book chapter traces Barbie's history of taking positions on social issues and analyzes the brand's Instagram and TikTok accounts. It asks whether that activism reads as authentic and how consumers shape the causes the brand adopts.
Fernanda Muniz
Open source developers who make their technical skills visible on digital platforms are more likely to be promoted. Interpersonal skills work differently: what counts is other people vouching for them through recommendations.
Renzhi Zhao
A new set of models picks locations for traffic sensors while accounting for two facts planners usually ignore: trip demand across a road network is connected across places and times, and sensors wear out. The result is a placement plan with lower estimation error and a faster path to a solution.
Emily Zhu
A going concern opinion is meant to flag a company at risk of collapse. New evidence shows auditors hold back when the warning is expected to push a client over the edge, and that clients pick auditors with that in mind.
Mikhail Sterin
Analysts who model yes-or-no outcomes, ratings, or counts have lacked good tools to check whether the model fits. A new framework replaces the usual single-number residual with a function, and yields plots that reveal missing variables, interactions, and other misspecifications.
Zewei Lin
Researchers built and validated a short survey scale that measures how much thought, emotion, and action consumers put into climate change when they buy. It gives marketers and policymakers a standard way to track that engagement and target it.
Linda Alkire
A classroom case has students use Python to run thousands of simulated outcomes for a cost-volume-profit model instead of a single best guess. The approach shows how much uncertainty sits behind a break-even number.
Mina Pizzini, Mark E. Vargus
Consumers asked to picture the climate future say personal action alone will not change its course. They want a shared responsibility model in which government, companies, and consumers each carry part of the load.
Steven W. Rayburn, Sidney T. Anderson, Gail Zank, Anna M. Turri, Jeremy J. Sierra
Salespeople who redesign their work to seek out growth act more ethically and find more meaning in the job. Those who redesign it to avoid threats do the opposite. Supportive organizations and empowering managers tip the balance.
Aditya Gupta, Vishag Badrinarayanan, Linda Alkire, Indu Ramachandran
A study of 961 sponsored posts finds that agreeable language lifts engagement while product photos and heavy hashtag use lower it. Which tactics work best shifts with the size of the influencer's audience.
Holly A. Syrdal
Employees who help set their own budget targets aim higher, hit the target more often, and make fewer errors when pay rewards output rather than input savings. The two pay plans were worth the same money; the difference came from how risky each one felt.
Jake Andrassy
Interviews with 20 sanctioned auditors and 13 former PCAOB enforcement staff point to the same weaknesses: one-sided public orders, no assessment of investor harm, and incentives to sanction small firms that cannot afford to fight.
Nate Cannon
During the 2024 election, betting odds on a Trump win and the stock of his media company tracked each other closely. The odds adjusted at once. The stock lagged by several days, a sign that investors process political news slowly.
Matthew James Flynn, Augustine Tarkom
Analysts usually estimate a private firm's market risk by borrowing from similar public companies. Four McCoy College finance faculty show that machine learning does the job with far less error, especially for small, young firms.
Emmanuel Alanis, Vance Lesseig, Janet Payne, Margot C. Quijano
A study of 620 Kickstarter campaigns finds that campaigns which name and show the brand raise more support. Brand prominence also makes good storytelling and graphic design pay off more.
Fereshteh Zihagh, Masoud Moradi, Vishag Badrinarayanan
Some customers go beyond buying. They help other customers use a product and solve problems with it. A study of a technology firm's online support community maps what these customer-partners give and receive, and what firms must do to bring them into value creation.
Corey Fox, Steven W. Rayburn
Charities with larger, more independent, and more active boards build bigger cash reserves. But when reserves grow beyond what the organization needs, future donations fall. Donors appear to prefer that their money be spent now.
Mina Pizzini, Mikhail SterinShort summaries of new faculty work, with what it means for managers.