Benjamin Kessler

Costello Research Careers

Research

The mindset shift that will move you from “manager” to “leader”

Katelynn C Hipolito — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:55:07 +0000

The mindset shift that will move you from “manager” to “leader” Katelynn C Hipolito Wed, 04/29/2026 - 13:55

Most managers are promoted because of their good individual performance. Such a mindset—that one’s own performance is the most important—is devilishly difficult to change, however, and employees suffer.

Kevin Rockmann. Photo by Jeffrey Porovich/Costello College of Business.

“It’s a hard lesson to learn, but the job of the manager actually is to help others do their job: Select them, guide them, help them, train them, but ultimately let them thrive and achieve. Not easy for someone who has reached the pinnacle by doing things themselves,” says Kevin Rockmann, assistant dean for research, professor of management, and the CGI Corporate Partner Faculty Fellow at Costello College of Business at 91��.

Rockmann’s research focuses on the brighter side of employee relationships—bonds that, without crossing any lines of propriety, promote trust and mutually beneficial collaborations. It is both common knowledge and common sense that organizations that prioritize such relationships benefit from greater employee engagement, higher retention, and enhanced productivity, among other positive effects.

No wonder business leaders wax rhapsodic about the importance of healthy working relationships between managers and employees. But Rockmann's research shows that in most cases, such talk exists in inverse proportion to the amount of attention managers actually devote to relationships and relationship dynamics. In the battle for managerial bandwidth, relationships routinely lose out to more immediate bottom-line issues (e.g., whether the "work" is getting done).

“It’s a hard lesson to learn, but the job of the manager actually is to help others do their job: Select them, guide them, help them, train them, but ultimately let them thrive and achieve. Not easy for someone who has reached the pinnacle by doing things themselves.”

— Kevin Rockmann, assistant dean for research, professor of management, and the CGI Corporate Partner Faculty Fellow at Costello College of Business at 91��

“Most of what bosses say about their ‘collaborative’ and ‘close-knit’ corporate culture is a form of gaslighting. And employees know it, which serves only to alienate them. That’s a major reason why disenchantment and disengagement are running rampant in today’s organizations,” Rockmann says.

In a recent executive development training involving a national fast-casual dining chain, Rockmann and his team took steps to address this. Participants were assigned to focus on the relational aspects of their job, intervene where necessary and document their results. Such outcomes not only were inspiring but also translate easily to any organization. “Giving systematic attention to relationships not only improved the interpersonal atmosphere in their units but also helped them personally and professionally in four main ways,” Rockmann says.

#1 Deeper, higher-level conversations. As Rockmann tells it, concentrating on relationships changed the nature of the participants’ conversations at work. “Instead of seeing things purely from their own individual point of view, they gained a more all-around perspective based on the input of others,” he says. Managers asked first for thoughts and ideas regarding problem areas rather than punishing or criticizing. This elevated their awareness from a limited focus on what most directly affected them to a broader mindset encompassing more of their context and environment.

#2 Less reactive decision-making. Relational attention separated stimulus from response, leading to less reactionary and more thoughtful responses during meetings and email exchanges. One regional manager was able to do this consistently with his people and found himself “not as angry” and that his people were taking greater ownership over their actions. As a result, decision-making became less knee-jerk, more deliberate, and ultimately more effective from a strategic standpoint.

#3 Reinventing restrictive roles. The new orientation enabled participants to engage in more intentional “relational job crafting,” whereby they began to embrace unprecedented partnerships and collaborations. One of the participants in HR connected with another in IT during the program and started to plan out trainings they could build together. Being together in a learning environment created possibilities for these types of solutions, simply by virtue of paying attention to interdependencies between individuals and teams.

#4 Escaping middle-manager entrapment. The participants were able to escape the trap that ensnares many a middle manager and prevents them from rising—namely, getting stuck playing caretaker or being the “answer man” for their teams. For example, one participant noted that her tendency was to solve problems right away, especially for other people. By relaxing this she was able to empower others in her team and grow their confidence. Forced to look outward and focus on how their teams were relating, they readily identified trusted and reliable team members who were natural candidates for greater responsibility. “This removed the sense of risk that often prevents managers from delegating day-to-day and, by extension, keeps them putting out fires instead of aiming higher. They moved from saying ‘fix things this way’ to asking ‘what do you think is the best way to address this issue?’, Rockmann says.

While these individuals in the exercise were in the food industry, Rockmann believes the leadership lessons to be learned here are universal.

Rockmann notes: “When managers take the focus off themselves and their own achievements so that they can pay close attention to others, they effectively step off the stage and enter the balcony. They remove themselves from the play and can see better what is going on around them. They become attuned and responsive to the complex relational environment and can confidently coach their people through it, ultimately bringing themselves, their teams, and their organization more success.”

Topics

Costello Research Teams

Costello Research Evaluating Performance

ESG - Costello

Management Faculty Research

Future of Work and Leadership - Costello

Research

In This Story

Kevin Rockmann

Explore the Costello College of Business

Learn more about Research at George Mason

Can machine learning make the world a fairer place?

Katelynn C Hipolito — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:08:00 +0000

Can machine learning make the world a fairer place? Katelynn C Hipolito Wed, 04/22/2026 - 11:08

A paradox hovers over our increasingly AI-dependent world. On the one hand, artificial intelligence can make the world a better place (or so we’re told). On the other hand, algorithms have no imagination or consciousness, and thus can know only the status quo—as reflected in the data they are trained on. And our current world is far from perfectly meritocratic or fair.

Jingyuan Yang. Photo by Jeffrey Porovich/Costello College of Business.

Jingyuan Yang, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Costello College of Business at 91��, suggests that the paradox is compounded by conventional thinking around AI. “The standard view is that fairness is a tax on efficiency. The way conventional systems are structured, fairness checks are added almost as an afterthought that is assumed to negatively impact system performance,” she says.

Is the “better,” optimized world of AI destined to replicate, or perhaps even exacerbate, existing inequalities? Yang’s ongoing research—in collaboration with Pengzhan Guo of Duke Kunshan University and Keli Xiao of Stony Brook University—points to an appealing alternative. It uses AI systems as a proving ground for a theorized “fairness-performance complementarity”—the idea that, under certain conditions, fairness and performance reinforce one another.

“Our 'fairness-by-design’ framework utilizes reinforcement learning, which is a type of machine learning (ML). But unlike most machine learning algorithms, ours includes multiple agents competing for finite resources in a dynamic environment, not a static one,” Yang says. “That makes our paradigm much more structurally similar to many real-world environments in which various people compete over time for finite resources.”

Fairness was integrated in two stages. First, the framework was designed to “nudge” high-performing agents towards exploratory choices that might maximize their rewards. As Yang explains, “In this framework, high-performing agents are held in an exploratory mode for longer, while lower-performing agents settle into stable paths sooner.” Second, options that were abandoned as a result of agents’ reward-seeking behavior were redistributed, with lower-performing agents getting first crack at the best opportunities.

As Yang summarizes, "The exploratory activity of the high performers releases opportunities that the system channels down toward the weaker performers. Theoretically, this increases fairness while retaining individual choice and without constraining performance.”

“Our ‘fairness-by-design’ framework utilizes reinforcement learning, which is a type of machine learning (ML). But unlike most machine learning algorithms, ours includes multiple agents competing for finite resources in a dynamic environment, not a static one. That makes our paradigm much more structurally similar to many real-world environments in which various people compete over time for finite resources.”

—Jingyuan Yang, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Costello College of Business at 91��

To test out the framework, the researchers used a data-set comprising detailed information on the job histories of 6.5 million professionals across a 20-year timeframe. “In the real-world data, we see a high degree of disparity, without very much redistribution of elite opportunities from relatively advantaged to disadvantaged employees,” Yang says.

The algorithm converted the real-world job information into opportunities offered to hypothetical agents. The resulting career paths were analyzed in terms of both performance and fairness. Performance was defined by aggregate rewards earned by all agents across all periods. Fairness was defined by the degree to which initial performance disparities were resolved over successive decisions.

The “fairness-by-design” framework’s results—for both fairness and performance—were better than those of eight alternative ML methods drawn from three different methodological families.

The researchers also adjusted the system to account for people’s changing preferences. Early-career professionals tend to value employer reputation and advancement potential; in late career, rewards pertaining to job stability and security are more salient. Even with these restrictions implemented, the framework functioned as intended—improving the average quality of overall career paths while fueling upward mobility.

In a follow-up study utilizing the New York Yellow Taxi Trip record database, the framework was tasked with generating route recommendations to hypothetical “agents,” i.e. cab drivers, with varying performance records. In this domain, the choice-set was much smaller (263 locations, as compared to 4,282 companies), and the timeframe far shorter (two hours as opposed to 20 years). As with the career-planning example, the taxi study found that more equitable distribution of high-quality routes led to higher average income per minute for the system as a whole.

“Because the framework proved adaptable to different domains and agent preferences, we think it could be used in future as a governance mechanism for a variety of AI contexts,” Yang says. Health care scheduling, course registration in higher education and provision of digital services are a few areas Yang sees as likely candidates.

While emphasizing that her research is still ongoing, she argues that it poses a serious challenge to standard ways of thinking about AI. “Our formal proof establishes the conditions under which fairness and performance reinforce each other, and our experiments show those conditions are achievable in realistic settings. That gives our work both theoretical and experimental grounding," Yang says.

Learn more about AI at George Mason

Dive into Research at George Mason

In This Story

Jingyuan Yang

Topics

Costello Research Artificial Intelligence

Costello Research Machine Learning

Costello Research Digital Platforms

ESG - Costello

Accounting Faculty Research

Inside the competition for capital at some of the world’s biggest banks

Katelynn C Hipolito — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:08:43 +0000

Inside the competition for capital at some of the world’s biggest banks Katelynn C Hipolito Wed, 04/08/2026 - 12:08

As the U.S. economy becomes more consolidated, the strategic decisions of senior leaders at leading companies carry ever-greater weight. A lot is riding on how these companies are run, yet their day-to-day decision-making remains, in most cases, obscure.

Barbara Su. Photo by Jeffrey Porovich/Costello College of Business.

But the banking industry is an exception. As Barbara Su, assistant professor of accounting at Costello College of Business at 91��, notes, “Because the banking industry is heavily regulated, it allows us to have access to subsidiary banks’ financial information. We can observe how much money parent companies take from each subsidiary, as well as the internal capital allocation between subsidiaries by headquarters.”

Su’s forthcoming paper in Management Science finds that in multi-bank holding companies (MBHCs), especially those with multiple subsidiary banks or geographically dispersed operations, it’s essential to bridge the information gap between HQ and local subsidiaries. That is why corporate leaders strongly rely on internal accounting information, as a complement to financial performance, to help them make intramural investment decisions.

Su says that although recent rounds of deregulation and interstate banking consolidation have reduced MBHCs’ economic profile, studying their behavior is relevant “because they provide a clean empirical setting. With multiple legally distinct bank subsidiaries, we can directly observe how the parent allocates capital across units.”

“We often hear that bank holding companies should act as a ‘source of strength’ for subsidiaries. There is some truth to the ‘source of strength’ idea, but our paper also observes that holding companies don’t just allocate funds to save subsidiaries from failing. They’re also allocating funds for the better-performing ones, when the accounting reporting quality is good, to help them thrive.”

—Barbara Su, assistant professor of accounting at Costello College of Business

The paper was co-authored by Scott Liao of University of Toronto and Allison Nicoletti of University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers zeroed in on the subsidiary banks’ loan loss provision—an accounting adjustment reflecting anticipated loan defaults—as an especially meaningful indicator.

Their dataset included financial statement information from 3,031 bank subsidiaries affiliated with 799 bank holding companies, for the period 1996 to 2019.

Su’s hypothesis was that “the accuracy of the loan loss provision coming from the subsidiaries will, or should, guide the internal capital allocation at the holding company level.” In other words, HQ would be wise to interpret valid accounting information as a general quality index, helping them identify worthy targets for investment.

The evidence confirmed Su’s suspicions. The average accuracy of subsidiaries’ loan loss provisions was positively associated with HQ’s ability to pick winners, i.e., to invest in subsidiaries that would go on to achieve relatively high ROA or return on assets.

A follow-on study showed that this association was strongest for two subsets of holding companies: those more dependent on lending for their revenue, as well as those where HQ was most distant (either geographically or economically) from the local branches. Banks with troubled subsidiaries saw the weakest association between accounting information accuracy and wise internal investments. This amounts to further supporting evidence for the utility of loan loss provision as an in-house investment index for dispersed organizations, assuming the investment thesis has to do with picking winners rather than subsidizing struggling subsidiaries.

For Su, this research complicates commonly held beliefs about bank consolidation producing slow-moving behemoths getting by on sheer market power. “We often hear that bank holding companies should act as a ‘source of strength’ for subsidiaries,” she says. “There is some truth to the ‘source of strength’ idea, but our paper also observes that holding companies don’t just allocate funds to save subsidiaries from failing. They’re also allocating funds for the better-performing ones, when the accounting reporting quality is good, to help them thrive.”

Su also surmises that the decision-making method covered in her paper—HQ referencing internal accounting information as a gauge of quality—could apply outside banking. For example, it could come into play when evaluating subsidiary managers’ performance prior to a turnover decision.

Nonetheless, Su recommends that leaders maintain a balanced informational environment. Internal accounting information should be used to augment, not replace, standard performance metrics such as ROA. “I guess we could roughly think about it in a two-by-two matrix,” she says. “The ideal scenario would be high ROA, with high information quality. You could also have high ROA and low information quality—that means you’re cooking your numbers.”

Explore Costello's College of Business

In This Story

Barbara Su

Topics

Accounting - Costello

Costello Research Risk Management

Costello Research Corporate Finance

Online ad fraud is a feature, not a bug

Katelynn C Hipolito — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:26:46 +0000

Online ad fraud is a feature, not a bug Katelynn C Hipolito Tue, 03/17/2026 - 13:26

With print media circulation and broadcast television viewership in free fall, a lot is riding on the online advertising space being able to take up the slack. The good news is, digital ad spend is booming: The global total for 2025 is expected to surpass $678 billion, at an annual growth rate of nearly eight percent.

The bad news? A good chunk of that money is chasing a mirage.

Online ad fraud—where ad publishers falsely inflate engagement metrics (impressions, clicks, etc.) to boost revenues—is a growing problem that eats upwards of 20 percent of global ad spend.

(Left to Right) Abhishek Ray and Min Chen. Photo by Hannah Patterson/Costello College of Business.

Min Chen and Abhishek Ray, both professors in the information systems and operations management area at Costello College of Business at 91��, are researching how online ad networks, such as Google Ads, can improve upon existing anti-fraud methods. Their recently published paper in Management Science explores deep-rooted dynamics of the online ad ecosystem that make eliminating fraud even more complicated than it may seem at first glance. The paper was co-authored by Subodha Kumar of Temple University.

The researchers used a game-theoretic model to replicate the interconnected decision-making of the three players involved: advertisers, publishers, and the networks that serve as go-between.

“The way the ecosystem works is that the platforms in the middle, the ad networks, shares the benefit from the transaction,” Chen explains. “People have been arguing whether the network is incentivized to put their best efforts behind deterring fraud, since the fraudulent traffic benefits the networks too. So we tried to create a model to capture this.”

“If the advertisers rely solely on the reports from the ad networks, they may be at risk. They should use third-party tools to audit the performance better.”

—Min Chen, information systems and operations management professor at the Costello College of Business at 91��

In addition, the model incorporates the two main fraud deterrents that networks routinely use. One is technological—platforms can adopt tougher standards for fraud detection, widening the scope of suspicious activity that gets flagged. The other is economic—lowering payments to all publishers so as to disincentivize large-scale fraud.

Surprisingly, the researchers find that the online ad economy works best when the two approaches seem to be working at cross-purposes. A tightening in fraud detection technology, paired with high payments for publishers, may sometimes produce the best outcomes for advertisers, publishers, and networks, as the market evolves.

The reason is rooted in the imperfect nature of fraud detection. To be sure, detection systems are improving all the time, especially with the advent of AI. But fraudsters do their best to blend in and adapt, using technological tools that often outpace those of their pursuers. “You cannot catch all the fraud, and if you try, you are going to mis-detect a lot of non-fraud,” Chen says.

Tougher fraud detection, then, will always mean more false positives, no matter how good the technology gets. To counter this inherent unfairness that penalizes good and bad actors alike, the ad network’s payment to publishers need to go up. Otherwise, publishers may take their business elsewhere—especially those most valuable to the system, i.e. those that are trustworthy— thereby decreasing the advertisers’ valuation on ad traffic.

“These ad networks are kind of a unique system where you can be monetarily rewarded for being honest, or punished for being dishonest,” Ray says. “What we discover for this system is there can be a way in which we can give carrots to people, not just sticks.”

On a similar note, the researchers find that an attempt to purge “bad apple” advertisers from the system can backfire due to false positives. In fact, fraud can sharply increase if networks, believing they have solved the problem, relax their fraud detection standards and raise incentives for the remaining advertisers. “Since the publishers who produce the fraudulent traffic are fewer now, the ad network may no longer need to maintain a strict detection policy. This can encourage the remaining ones to commit much more fraud,” Chen explains.

To Ray and Chen, online ad fraud is, in at least one sense, no different from older forms of malfeasance that are found in all free societies. “We need to have some kind of mechanism for managing the level of fraud, because the fraud detection method is never going to be perfect, whether it’s financial fraud, accounting fraud, etc.,” Chen says.

But as an example of the contemporary platform economy, the online advertising ecosystem is also distinctive, in that its de facto regulatory authority has skin in the game. The ad networks’ mixed incentives—as both beneficiaries and inhibitors of fraud—can undermine integrity and trust within an already-compromised system.

“If the advertisers rely solely on the reports from the ad networks, they may be at risk,” Chen says. “They should use third-party tools to audit the performance better.”

Learn more about the Costello College of Business

Discover Research at George Mason

In This Story

Min Chen

Abhishek Ray

Topics

Costello Research Data Analytics

Costello Research Digital Platforms

Costello Research Retail

Operations - Costello

It takes three types of thinking to be smart

Katelynn C Hipolito — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:07:24 +0000

It takes three types of thinking to be smart Katelynn C Hipolito Tue, 02/10/2026 - 14:07

Balancing and combining different kinds of intelligence may be even more important than how much you know, or how you think.

Do you know what it means to be smart? It’s a more complicated question than it may seem. There are several ways to think about intelligence—as the well-known “book-vs.-street smart” binary illustrates. By most people’s definition, a truly smart person would be someone who not only thinks well but is also able to translate thought into concrete steps toward positive and practical goals. Balancing and combining different kinds of intelligence may be even more important than how much you know, or how you think.

Matthew A. Cronin. Photo by Hannah Patterson/Costello College of Business.

In a recently published technical note, Matthew A. Cronin, professor of management at Costello College of Business at 91��, and his co-author Lillien M. Ellis of the University of Virginia, deconstruct intelligence into three modalities, which they label the Scientist, the Artist and the Judge (or “SAJ,” pronounced “sage”).

As Cronin says, the Scientist is about “logic and evidence…how we know stuff.” The Artist stands for imagination, the ability to conceive possibilities outside what we are given. The Judge is responsible for weighing the morality, appropriateness, etc. of an action or direction.

Cronin contends that we all have a Scientist, Artist and Judge in our minds, but they are often out of balance. “Most people have one of the three that they like the most, and they have that guy command everybody else. And that’s when you have problems,” he says.

As an example, Cronin’s technical note cites Judge-heavy cybersecurity protocols—they valued security but did not account for how memory worked—that forced users to create passwords that were impossible to remember. People wrote them down near their computers, defeating the whole purpose of security. Adding the Scientist and Artist into the mix resulted in innovation, e.g. long passphrases that more easily stick in the mind without needing to be noted down.

“AI can tell you whatever you want to know. But that doesn’t guarantee it’s correct—that’s the Scientist. It doesn’t tell you what you should do—that’s the Judge. And it will predict only from the most likely outcomes—definitely not the Artist.”

— Matthew A. Cronin, professor of management at Costello College of Business at 91��

According to the SAJ framework, the Artist-Scientist pairing produces discoveries about the world, by relating novel information or situations to what is already known. Collaboration between Artist and Judge is required to formulate a vision, or an imagined realization of desires or ideals deemed worth pursuing. The Scientist and Judge can work together to build skill, or the productive application of knowledge toward a chosen objective.

“You cycle through these roles,” Cronin says. “We can start with what we want, which is the Judge, and how things work, which is the Scientist—but that’s likely only to maximize what we’re already doing. So we have to find a vision that might be better, but we’re almost certainly not going to be able to get that to work without some discovery.”

Building upon Cronin’s 2018 book (co-authored by Jeffrey Loewenstein) The Craft of Creativity, the SAJ framework formalizes how creativity (the Artist) works alongside other cognitive tools to help us think, work, and live better. “People think of creativity as this magical ability. No, it’s a skill that can be developed. If you can think about a subject, you can think creatively about it,” Cronin says.

By extension, there’s hope for anyone striving to achieve intellectual balance by strengthening their Scientist, Artist, or Judge—whichever might be a bit undernourished. “Step one is just to make people aware,” Cronin says. “They think either thinking is one undifferentiated blob, or the three are totally remote and separated from one another.”

The SAJ framework can also be an active tool for structuring decision-making in a balanced way. “If I have an idea for the way things could be, I know that I need to also know how they actually work…And when you encounter unbalanced thinking, like a bureaucrat who lacks the imagination (i.e. Artist) to conceive that there may be other ways to deal with a situation, you can remind that person how everything we now take for granted was once thought impossible.”

Cronin has been teaching the SAJ framework in his management courses for more than five years, and he feels it will only grow more impactful as AI challenges organizations to define the value-add that human minds can bring to a problem set.

“AI can tell you whatever you want to know,” he says. “But that doesn’t guarantee it’s correct—that’s the Scientist. It doesn’t tell you what you should do—that’s the Judge. And it will predict only from the most likely outcomes—definitely not the Artist.”

In This Story

Matthew A. Cronin

Topics

Costello Research Innovation Strategy

Management Faculty Research

Costello Research Strategic Management

Costello Research Managing Change

Costello Research Careers

Costello Research Evaluating Performance

Are salespeople more effective when they’re being monitored?

Katelynn C Hipolito — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:28:57 +0000

Are salespeople more effective when they’re being monitored? Katelynn C Hipolito Tue, 12/16/2025 - 10:28

How employees respond to being under surveillance depends on a number of factors, including how good they are at their jobs.

Digital and online technologies have made our workplace routines faster and easier. They have also made it easier for managers to keep tabs on workers, via monitoring apps designed to capture whether employees are “working hard, or hardly working.”

Brad Greenwood. Photo provided.

But for researchers such as Brad Greenwood and Ioannis Bellos, professors in the information systems and operations management (ISOM) area at 91��’s Costello College of Business, the jury’s still out on whether the latest worker surveillance tech actually benefits performance, productivity, efficiency, etc., especially in certain key sectors.

“Prior research has identified both harms and benefits stemming from worker surveillance,” they state. “But very little research has been done in the retail or sales space, especially in a real-life sales environment as opposed to the lab.”

In contrast, Bellos and Greenwood’s forthcoming academic paper in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management homes in on one China-based company, an online supplier of baby products (diapers, formula, etc.) to physical retail stores. This B2B company employs hundreds of salespeople to partner directly with small-business owners, not only on promotion and upselling but also helping solve marketing and operational challenges related to the product line. Naturally, the sales force’s job description includes a lot of in-person, on-site collaboration.

The paper was co-authored by Yingda Lu of University of Illinois at Chicago and Liqiang Huang of Zhejiang University.

In 2019, the company issued phones equipped with GPS technology to track the frequency and length of salespeople’s site visits. This was not a secret program; sales teams were told they would be tracked via GPS. Due to a technical glitch, not all salespeople received the phones at the same time. The erratic rollout allowed the research team to draw clean comparisons between monitored and unmonitored employees within the same timeframe.

Almost immediately, monitored salespeople began making more client visits, spending longer at each store and engaging in a wider variety of tasks each time. As a result, overall sales performance—i.e., the gross merchandise value (GMV) of goods sold to clients—rose about 4.75 percent over the pre-surveillance average.

Ioannis Bellos. Photo by Office of University Branding

But that wasn’t the whole story. The GMV for top-performing salespeople went down once they knew they were being monitored, despite the fact that they—like the rest of the sales force—ramped up their sales activity to look good for the GPS. The critical difference was that top performers had successful routines before the GPS came in. Once they started performing for Big Brother, rather than continuing with their familiar working patterns, their outcomes started to suffer.

“If you tell underperformers ‘We’re going to monitor you,’ it lights a fire under them,” Greenwood says. “But if you tell high performers the same thing, they try to guess what they think you want them to do and do that rather than just doing their job.”

The researchers discovered that engaging in more sales calls resulted in diminishing returns for the best salespeople, because they were spreading their skills too thin across a less profitable pool of clients.

Bellos and Greenwood envision that declining commissions and a disrupted work routine for top performers could lead to negative outcomes for the company. For example, some star salespeople could become disengaged and even start looking for work elsewhere.

“When it comes to these sorts of MVPs, anything that harms their relationship with the firm opens the door to some very real negatives,” Greenwood says.

For Greenwood and Bellos, this speaks to the need for companies to be nuanced and strategic in their approaches to worker surveillance. “Whether monitoring works or doesn’t work will have a lot to do with individuals,” they state. “When we treat people like monoliths, it’s hard to understand what’s really going on. You can improve high-level performance while at the same time sub-optimizing other aspects of the firm.”

Sometimes, proper communication and clarity can make monitoring less problematic, the researchers contend. If employees are fully briefed on the goals and uses of monitoring programs, they won’t have to rely on guesswork as they adjust their routines. This is especially true for workers with a diverse and complicated portfolio of tasks, such as the sales force in Bellos and Greenwood’s study.

“In our study, salespeople had a high degree of freedom in that within each store, they have several tasks to perform. Plus, each salesperson services multiple stores,” says Bellos. “Managers and platforms need to factor [task diversity] in on the implementation side.”

“In our study, salespeople had a high degree of freedom in that within each store, they have several tasks to perform. Plus, each salesperson services multiple stores. Managers and platforms need to factor [task diversity] in on the implementation side.”

— Ioannis Bellos, Director of Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Management Programs, and Business Certificates

In This Story

Brad Greenwood

Ioannis Bellos

Topics

Costello Research Innovation Strategy

Costello Research Retail

Operations - Costello

Costello Research Brand Management

Environmental sustainability pays off—but mostly for media-savvy firms

Katelynn C Hipolito — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:42:57 +0000

Environmental sustainability pays off—but mostly for media-savvy firms Katelynn C Hipolito Tue, 11/18/2025 - 09:42

To please both the planet and shareholders at the same time, firms must travel a triangular path.

Whatever else they may be, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives are very often an image-building exercise. Business leaders hope that by being seen to put ethical responsibilities over profits, they will reap profits anyway as a byproduct of reputational gains. It stands to reason, then, that no conversation about the “business case” for ESG would be complete without involving society’s chief reputational brokers—i.e. the media.

Saurabh Mishra. Photo by 91��.

New published research from Saurabh Mishra, area chair and professor of marketing at the Costello College of Business at 91��, confirms the media’s pivotal role in influencing ESG profitability.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Business Research, the paper was co-authored by Shekhar Misra at University of Galway, Ireland.

The researchers analyzed ESG performance from the Sustainalytics database, media sentiment from the RavenPack news analytics database, and financial data (including advertising budgets) for 452 firms over the period 2009-2018.

This data-set allowed them to chart the triangular path by which “doing good” (for society and the planet) resulted in “doing well” for the firms in question.

To start with, only the “E” in ESG had any direct positive impact on financial performance—and a muted one at that. Of the three metrics examined—idiosyncratic risk, abnormal returns and Tobin’s Q—only idiosyncratic risk responded favorably to raw, unmediated environmental performance.

The “S” and “G” had either no direct positive effect, or a negative effect upon financial performance.

“You can imagine the E, S, and G would not have the same effect on all stakeholders,” Mishra observes. “Governance, being a little more internal, might have more positive impact on employees, but not necessarily on the outside world. Social kind of falls in the middle—it could be either internal or external.”

With media sentiment, there was a similar disparity. “Greening” efforts tended to drive more positive media coverage for the firm, which translated into higher financial performance. Social and governance initiatives made no significant difference to the media conversation.

But not all eco-conscious firms benefited equally from this media-made halo effect. Those that spent more money on advertising—not necessarily promoting their ESG activity, but advertising in general—saw a greater improvement in media sentiment.

Crucially, Mishra’s data-set included neither specific examples of media coverage nor information about the recipients of advertising spend. The research, therefore, does not suggest the presence of an ethically problematic quid pro quo.

“It’s possible that media simply follow firms [with high advertising budgets] more closely,” Mishra says. “They recognize their efforts more. Everything they do becomes more visible, which kind of magnifies the effect that we’re seeing.”

For Mishra, the findings help clarify contradictions about ESG and its potential payoffs. “If you look at some of the meta-analyses that have been done, the consensus is that ESG’s effect on shareholder wealth is not there, or it’s weakly positive. At the same time, there is a lot of variation. Some firms see a lot of upside and some don’t.”

It’s not, then, that there isn’t a good “business case” for ESG activity. But that case may be more contingent on external factors (such as media sentiment) than many previous researchers believed.

If so, ESG may be most financially successful as part of a diverse strategic portfolio that could encompass advertising spend and possibly other areas ostensibly unrelated to environmental sustainability.

“Advertising researchers talk about a stock effect,” Mishra explains. “Advertising stock builds over time. You have to continually advertise, otherwise that stock starts going down. So if you’re advertising substantially, you get more bang for the buck from investing in the environment.”

But because so much remains unknown about the various factors that help determine ESG’s profitability potential, Mishra cautions against dismissing the “S” and “G” too quickly, despite their apparent irrelevance in this particular study.

“I would hate to say that firms should not invest in social and governance,” Mishra says. “Maybe if you look at some other stakeholder measures—employee productivity measures, for instance—they move the needle there. Because, after all, there is variation in the data, and no one paper can look at every relevant factor. But if your objective is to move media to be more positive towards you, environmental focus is your best bet.”

“I would hate to say that firms should not invest in social and governance. Maybe if you look at some other stakeholder measures—employee productivity measures, for instance—they move the needle there. Because, after all, there is variation in the data, and no one paper can look at every relevant factor. But if your objective is to move media to be more positive towards you, environmental focus is your best bet.”

— Saurabh Mishra, area chair and professor of marketing at the Costello College of Business at 91��

In This Story

Saurabh Mishra

Topics

Marketing - Costello

Costello Research Social Influence

Costello Research Sustainable Operations

ESG - Costello

Marketing Faculty Research

How consumers react when they feel ‘betrayed’ by a brand

Katelynn C Hipolito — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 14:52:41 +0000

How consumers react when they feel ‘betrayed’ by a brand Katelynn C Hipolito Mon, 11/03/2025 - 09:52

A pair of 91�� marketing professors have unpacked the surprisingly intense and complicated emotional consequences of brand inauthenticity.

We all know what it’s like to discover—either gradually or all at once—someone else’s insincerity. Jessica Hoppner and Russell Abratt, marketing professors at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at 91��, have found that an encounter with an inauthentic brand produces much the same effect.

Jessica Hoppner. Photo by 91��.

“Authenticity is defined within the context of the brand-consumer relationship,” Hoppner says. In other words, it’s in the eye of the beholder—or in this case, the consumer. Inauthenticity occurs when a brand behaves in a way that appears to go against its perceived core values, or the consumer’s baseline expectations for that particular brand.

“This kind of inauthenticity causes problems for brand managers because for each person it’s a little bit different, and that makes it really hard to navigate,” Hoppner says.

In their recently published paper in the Journal of Product & Brand Management, Hoppner and Abratt trace the emotional cause-and-effect of brand inauthenticity, offering rare insight into this slippery phenomenon.

The paper was co-authored by Ryan White of Winona State University.

The researchers recruited 218 survey participants using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Respondents were asked to write about an experience of brand inauthenticity and answer a series of questions about that experience and steps they took afterward. The results were analyzed in light of concepts drawn from psychological research, such as appraisal theory and balance theory.

Surprisingly, participants named a wide range of brands (156 in all), only 25.2 percent of which appeared on Interbrand’s Top 100 Best Global Brands List. “It covered large brands, small brands, all different sectors,” says Hoppner. “It’s not constrained to consumer products or the brands that we would normally think about.”

The survey responses showed that customers experienced brand inauthenticity as a betrayal of sorts, with emotional implications comparable to those of human-to-human betrayal.

Brand inauthenticity triggered a complex mix of emotional responses in consumers. Anger, anxiety, and disappointment were the principal motifs across the sample, but individual reactions could include one, two, or even all three. The strength of reactive emotions varied according to the perceived severity of the betrayal.

Further, the researchers found that the three main emotional responses led to different behaviors in consumers.

Abratt and Hoppner describe anger as a “hot emotion,” causing consumers to lash out at brands deemed inauthentic, through retaliation, complaints, and withdrawal of loyalty.

Anxiety inspired a less accusatory and more questioning response, as consumers groped for the deeper truth about this apparently two-faced brand. “Anxiety is very ambiguous,” Hoppner says. “When we’re anxious, it’s often because we don’t really know what happened, why it happened, who’s to blame, etc.” Consumers made anxious by brand inauthenticity actually increased their loyalty to the brand, and sought out more information to resolve the ambiguity.

Finally, disappointment led consumers to lapse into a self-protective passivity. Their central concern became not closure or redress, but rather avoiding further disappointment by turning their back on the offending brand.

Russell Abratt. Photo by 91��.

Abratt and Hoppner advise brand managers to think twice before launching a rote response in hopes of winning back consumers alienated by perceived inauthenticity. Anger and anxiety show up very differently, and disappointment may not show up at all in any conventionally measurable way. When addressing inauthenticity after the fact, a brand’s best bet may be to ask questions and listen closely before attempting to fix the problem.

Of course, the ideal approach would be to avoid being seen as inauthentic in the first place. That would mean understanding the actual relationships consumers have with the brand, which may differ from how managers view the brand’s value proposition. It may also entail intentional, proactive reshaping of those relationships.

“I think the real issue for firms is to understand who they are,” Abratt says. “In other words, brands have to talk about their identity. And once they have figured that one out, they have to have training amongst their employees and say, ‘this is what we stand for. This is what we do.’ Communicate that to your markets and your community, and make sure that you allow the community and customers to talk back with you.”

“I think the real issue for firms is to understand who they are,” Abratt says. “In other words, brands have to talk about their identity. And once they have figured that one out, they have to have training amongst their employees and say, ‘this is what we stand for. This is what we do.’ Communicate that to your markets and your community, and make sure that you allow the community and customers to talk back with you.”

— Russell Abratt, marketing professor at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at 91��

In This Story

Jessica Hoppner

Russell Abratt

Topics

Marketing - Costello

Costello Research Brand Management

Costello Research Market Research

Costello Research Social Influence

Marketing Faculty Research

George Mason marketing professor receives prestigious research funding

Katelynn C Hipolito — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:56:59 +0000

George Mason marketing professor receives prestigious research funding Katelynn C Hipolito Wed, 10/08/2025 - 10:56

Jessica Hoppner

Jessica Hoppner, associate professor of marketing at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at 91��, has been named a recipient of Academy of Marketing Research Funding for 2025.

According to the submitted proposal, the awarded project—entitled “Bridging the Digital Divide: The Paradox of Sales and Marketing Collaboration on Social Media”—“will contribute to both academic research and industry best practices, guiding B2B firms toward more effective digital engagement strategies.”

The Academy of Marketing’s research sub-committee chooses a mere handful of recipients each year for grants of up to £5,000. Funding is offered in collaboration with Marketing Trust, an independent charity dedicated to supporting marketing projects serving the public good.

Hoppner’s co-PI on this project is Severina Cartwright, senior lecturer (associate professor) in marketing at University of Liverpool.

Hoppner and Cartwright plan to use the grant money to carry out an in-depth practitioner survey leading to the creation of a unique and granular data-set. Anticipated final output will include an academic article submitted to a top marketing journal, as well as a whitepaper and other translational content for a practitioner audience.

As per the proposal, the project will unfold in three phases: survey development and pre-testing, data collection and analysis, and dissemination and knowledge transfer. Hoppner and Cartwright aim to complete their project within a twelve-month timeframe.

Saurabh Mishra

“Congratulations to Prof. Hoppner on this well-deserved funding award—an achievement that underscores the excellence of her work and exemplifies the innovative and managerially meaningful research being conducted within the marketing area in Costello.”

— Saurabh Mishra, marketing area chair

In This Story

Jessica Hoppner

Saurabh Mishra

Topics

Marketing - Costello

Costello Research Social Influence