Title: “Diversity, Newcomers and Team Performance in a Dynamic Setting”
Improvement in technology, changes in cultural norms, and the expansion of opportunities has diversified American workforce. Small teams have become an integral part of how organizations accomplish tasks and achieve their goals. Many work teams are dynamic in their compositions with new members often being added to preexisting teams. However, our understanding of how teams function generally assumes a static setting with limited changes in group compositions and fails to capture the fluidity in group dynamics in the real-world workplaces. Our research bridges this gap by investigating whether and how a team, including old and new members, responds following an addition of a newcomer. Understanding how newcomers’ social identity affects their coordination and cooperation, and those decisions by the old team is relevant to organizations at all levels. Our work will shed light on how organizations could integrate newcomers from different backgrounds more successfully, thus improving teams’ performance and boosting productivity. This research also expands the frontier of our knowledge on how to forge a diverse workforce that will operate more efficiently on an aggregate level. It thus has direct implications for the output of the U.S. economy and that of the world economy.
Title: “Do investors show team composition preferences in funding Startup teams? An analysis of Venture Funding”
In this paper, I investigate the role team gender composition plays in venture investor interests and fund realizations for early stage startups. I find that having a women-founded startup increases interests from venture organizations. However, this does not translate into higher funding for women-founded startups.
Using the state-level mandated maternity benefits as an instrument for percentage of women in the startup, I show that there is a significant negative premium on being a women-founded start-up. However, increasing the percentage of women entrepreneurs increases funding amount. Further analysis show heterogeneity in funding realizations within industries. Women-founded startups are concentrated in industries like government, healthcare and utilities that tend to raise less money. Additionally, women-founded startups under-raise the all-men-founded startups in these industries.
On the contrary, women-founded startups tend to represent a smaller percentage of startups in industries that tend to raise higher mean amounts. Furthermore, the women-founded startups tend to perform as well as the all-men-founded startups and in some cases outperform the all men-founded startups in these sectors.
Title: “When the Modes of Interactions Matter: Virtual and in-person Integration of Newcomers in a Dynamic Setting”
The 2020 Corona Virus pandemic has ushered in an era of remote work. At many organizations, newcomers are introduced to existing teams and start working on a virtual or hybrid platform. In this study, we address to what extent the means of introduction and integration of a newcomer – virtual or in-person – affects the group performances as well as the performance of the newcomer. We exogenously vary the means of introduction of the newcomer to teams to understand the extent to which this affects the newcomer as well as the group.
Title: “Anticipated discrimination, group membership and means of performance measurements”
Discrimination has been extensively documented in economic literature, and a growing body of research explores its impact on work outcomes, such as performance measurement (Bohren et al., 2019) and actual performance (Dylan et al., 2017). One crucial factor influencing discriminatory behavior is people’s beliefs, whether about themselves or others, which have been found to play a significant role (Coffman, 2014; Bordalo and Coffman, 2019).
While it is known that beliefs influence how individuals treat others, little is understood about the effect of beliefs regarding how different individuals will treat the subject on their own performance. Beliefs can be accurate, but they can also be subjective perceptions rather than objective truths about a person. In various situations, perceptions about behavior, regardless of their accuracy, can impact decision-making. For instance, consider a Christian employee working under a Muslim boss and being evaluated by someone perceived as outside their own group. Does the Christian employee perceive differential treatment from their outgroup evaluator, and to what extent does this perception affect their performance? Additionally, how does this perceived treatment influence the employee’s investments in the workplace?
George Agyeah 