HKUST Annual Report 2016-17

26 HKUST 2016-2017 Annual Report Team Crises and Creativity Prof Gong Yaping (Management) and his researchers departed from the dominant focus of what benefits creativity to examine an often negatively viewed occurrence: team crisis. They posit that in R&D teams, a crisis can benefit creativity through stimulating employees’ engagement in the creative process (for example, problem identification and solution generation) when transformational leadership is high. The study represents a theoretical breakthrough in developing the concept of team crisis and revealing when and how it benefits creativity. The practical implications are also significant. As more teams experience crises in a turbulent global environment, the researchers demonstrate when and how corporate R&D managers can turn such crises into an opportunity. Impact of Gender in Online Hiring Prof Wang Jing (Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management) and her coauthor investigated the impact of gender-based stereotypes on hiring outcomes in online labor marketplaces. By employing a quasi-experimental technique on data from a leading online labor platform in the US, they found evidence of a positive hiring bias in favor of female workers. The observed bias stems from the consideration of applicants from developing countries, and diminishes as employers gain more hiring experience on the online platform. The researchers conducted a further experiment to uncover the underlying gender-specific traits that could contribute to this bias. The paper is forthcoming in Management Science . The Bright Side of Over-Optimism Human estimation and inference are subject to systematic biases, such as overconfidence and over-optimism. In contrast to prior research that has identified multiple negative consequences of these biases, Prof Charles Hsu (Accounting) and his researchers focused on positive effects. They empirically showed that over- optimism was a related but different bias from overconfidence, which could emerge dynamically in a rational economic framework and generate higher managerial effort. Importantly, this additional effort was found to improve a firm’s profitability and market value. The research was published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics .