Creating a More Inclusive and Sustainable Future
Conflicted About Coworkers: How Coworker Support Influences Engagement After Status Loss
Personnel Psychology, February 2025
People's needs for status and support are theoretically distinct, yet little research has considered how people cope with having one but not the other. We examine how people react to losing status as a function of whether they typically perceive their coworkers as supportive. Although social support is documented as a resource people can draw on to cope with failure at work, we argue that in the case of failures that implicate status (i.e., status loss), experiencing these events in a more supportive work group may not aid recovery and reengagement. Specifically, we predict that when the preexisting group context is one of more (rather than less) supportive coworkers, status loss may elicit greater ambivalence about those coworker relationships, triggering psychological reactions that undermine engagement. Consistent with this model, in a weekly experience sampling study of working adults (Study 1), having more supportive coworkers led to a stronger negative effect of weekly status loss on subsequent engagement. In scenario-based (Study 2) and high-involvement laboratory (Study 3) experiments featuring different manipulations of coworker support and status loss, we found that when individuals experienced status loss in more (rather than less) supportive work groups, status loss led to lower engagement because it heightened ambivalence about their coworker relationships, which triggered anxiety (Study 2), and self-threat and hurt feelings (Study 3). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Jennifer Carson Marr (UMD), Edward P. Lemay (UMD), Hyunsun Park (Georgia Tech)
Public Pension Contract Minimalism
American Business Law Journal, November 2024
The national pension debt and COVID crises have collided. Post-pandemic economic decline has escalated existing financial strains on state and local pension plans, impacting workers and the public welfare. With unfunded obligations exceeding one trillion dollars, many of these plans are in jeopardy. But the movement to reform government pension contracts has yet to adopt an anchoring idea, leaving judicial decisions in disarray and policymakers without guidance about how to shore up troubled retirement systems. The crux of the problem is the many meanings of contract under state and U.S. Contract Clauses that prevent pension reform. This Essay endorses a promising path forward—contract minimalism. “Contract minimalism” concentrates on the duration of government pension contracts. It posits that public and private employment law should be treated the same. Like its private law counterpart, public sector employment at-will ought to consist of a daily contract interval. A contract-a-day concept entitles employers to change the plan prospectively, with employees receiving a proportionate share of benefits for work performed. Just as several agreements safeguard salaries for labor, they should also mirror the protection afforded to deferred benefits like pensions. Contract minimalism additionally puts public and private sector employers on the same legal footing as to the authority to change pension plan terms. Thus, it aligns public pension benefits with overlapping fields of law, placing them on a firm conceptual foundation. The minimalist approach also has the advantage over approaches that are insufficiently attentive to scarce government resources or employee old-age security. By protecting pension benefits early and incrementally, it advances a middle path with fairer, more coherent results. In the present post-pandemic era of hard choices, minimalism provides an equilibrium between the over and under-protection of pension benefits.
T. Leigh Anenson, Professor of Business Law, University of Maryland and Hannah R. Weiser, Assistant Professor of Law, Bentley University
AI-powered Analysts
We explore how brokerage firms’ investments in artificial intelligence (AI) affect their analysts’ information production. We find that analysts employed at brokerage firms with greater AI integration issue more accurate earnings forecasts. Cross-sectional analyses reveal that AI’s benefits are more pronounced for analysts with less firm-specific experience and when the firm’s disclosures are more readable. Further tests indicate that a key mechanism driving the improvement in forecast accuracy is that AI adoption helps mitigate the adverse effects of analyst decision fatigue and optimism bias. Finally, we find that forecast revisions made by AI-powered analysts are more informative to capital markets. Overall, our evidence points to the advantageous impact of AI on information production capabilities of financial analysts.
Michael Kimbrough, Musa Subasi, Yang Liu