Hoping for A While Achieving B: How Unexpected Positive Performance Spillovers Set the Agenda
Abstract
How organizational decision-makers allocate attention among multiple goals has been an important topic in organizational studies. This paper explores surprise as a mechanism to activate goals within the context of product development, where multiple goals often share task environments. We propose that unexpected positive performance spillovers—where efforts to improve performance on certain goals result in improvements on other, previously unpursued goals—invoke a sense of surprise. This surprise directs organizational attention to opportunities to achieve complementarity between the original and unexpectedly affected goals, consequently activating these affected goals in subsequent product development efforts. Analyzing data on product development projects from a large Chinese social media company with hundreds of millions of users, we find support for our theoretical arguments. This paper contributes to the behavioral strategy literature by elucidating the surprise mechanism of goal activation in organizations.
Speaker Biography
SubrinaShen is an assistant professor of management in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. She teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at the University. She has also taught in the business and sociology departments at Cornell University. Her research examines the creation and evaluation of innovative ideas in contexts with high complexity and uncertainty, specifically in two contexts: product development empowered by A/B testing, and firm innovation strategies with deep learning as a multi-purpose technology. In studying these issues, Shen examines both the evolutionary process and the underlying social interaction that drives idea generation and selection. Methodologically, she relies on large-sample statistical analysis, lab experiments, and computational methods. Shen has been published in Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. Her research has won several awards, including the 2021 Conference Theme Best Paper Award from the International Association of Chinese Management Research. She holds a Ph.D. in management and organization and an M.A. in sociology, both from Cornell University. Shen also has a M.Ph. degree in sociology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a B.A. in journalism and communication from Tsinghua University in Beijing.