As of this week I have officially joined the Organization Studies department of Tilburg University as an Assistant Professor! I am very grateful to the department for giving me this opportunity and look forward to continue my current research here, collaborate with new colleagues, and engage with the students of the Organization Studies programs.

The job market was long and exhausting, hence remaining so ‘close’ to my former colleagues of the department of Management is a great additional benefit to me and my family. I want to thank former and current heads of department Niels, Carol, and Aswin for the many opportunities they provided me as a member of their department. For an (attempt of an) exhaustive list of who I want to thank for bearing with me all these years I would like to refer to my dissertation’s acknowledgements ;).

As a subtle reminder, next week Friday at 10AM I will defend my dissertation in the aula of Tilburg University. Feel free to attend the ceremony or watch it via the livestream (see https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/nl/actueel/agenda/promotie-jlm-berns). For those interested, the link includes a brief summary of the dissertation. If you have any questions, send me a PM!

On November 25th at 10AM (GMT+2) I will publicly defend my PhD dissertation in the aula of Tilburg University, which is titled “Managerial Attention, Emotion, and Communication in Corporate Financial Distress”. I am incredibly excited and proud to have reached this milestone! For those interested, more information regarding the defense can be found in the link below, including a link to the livestream.

Why do so many organizations fail to respond timely when they are confronted by an all-encompassing crisis? Especially when your survival is at stake, and if the crisis at hand is so evident, why wouldn’t you respond immediately?

For this dissertation project, I examined U.S. commercial banks’ ability to shift their focus of attention when the U.S. was hit by the economic crisis in 2008. Crises of such magnitude can be so devastating that failing to respond, or simply failing to respond timely, can be the difference between bankruptcy and survival. One would expect that because the 2008 crisis began with the bankruptcy of one of the largest banks in the U.S., (nearly all) banks would be inclined to shift their attention towards making some kind of strategic change. But what is so baffling, is that many failed to act timely, causing dozens of bankruptcies in the months following.

I argue and empirically find that ‘mental schemas’ are an important factor that explain these differences in the banks’ ability to shift their focus. Mental schemas are individual’s beliefs about what information is important to consider and can be helpful for decision-makers to distinguish between valuable and invaluable information.

This relationship between being able to respond to crises and mental schemas should not be too surprising after having been through the COVID pandemic. The last few years it became time and again clear that there were many differences across organizations (and governments) in how timely they were able to respond. It begs the question what mental schemas were beneficial and which ones detrimental in adapting to this ‘new reality’. This is just one of many fascinating parallels between the pandemic and the 2008 crisis. An important takeaway from my study is that how humans deal with crises is not always a matter of ‘did we learn anything from the last crises’, but also that (occasional) failure to respond is a matter of human nature, and therefore can be explained by our psychological biases and heuristics.

If you have questions or would like to know more about my work, feel free to send a PM!

What does it mean to ‘own’ an organization? This question guided me in the development of the next dissertation project I want to highlight.

In most large corporations, there is a separation between ownership and control. The shareholders own the organization and the management team controls it. If unaddressed, this separation may lead managers to enrich themselves instead of behaving in the shareholders’ interests. This is the premise of Agency Theory, one of the staple theories in Corporate Governance, and part of most curricula in business education. A straightforward solution to align managerial and shareholder interests is to reward managers (partly) in shares, making them (minor) shareholders in the process.

Although receiving some ownership over their firm will likely affect CEOs, it is difficult to posit that the monetary dimension (‘formal ownership’) is the sole reason why CEOs may want to behave in the organization’s (and by extension in the interest of the shareholders’) interests. Owning anything, but especially an organization, is also about the emotional value. This is called ‘psychological ownership’. Spending most of one’s waking hours at a job and having a part in deciding the organization’s trajectory leads employees to develop feelings of ownership.

In my project, I study the relationship between formal ownership, the monetary aspect of ownership, and psychological ownership, feelings of ownership. When organizations struggle financially, we can expect that CEOs express more negative emotions, which we can understand as a proxy of how much CEOs ‘care’ for their organization. I find that both ownership types strengthen this relationship, but more importantly, that the effect of formal ownership is requires the presence of psychological ownership.

Although arguing that ownership involves both money and emotions is almost like stating the obvious, both scholars and practitioners tend to ignore the importance of how the two types are intertwined. The bottom-line is simple: ownership is not only bred through possessing equity, it is also a highly emotional experience.

For the first ‘blog’ about my dissertation, I would like you to consider the picture below depicting a parent and child.

By saying “it was fine alright”, you would believe that the child had a good day at school. But now consider the sentence was said in a negative tone. Because this tone is opposite to the words’ implied positivity, the communication’s overall meaning changes drastically. In determining its meaning, not only the tone of voice is an additional source of information, so is the incongruence between the words and tone of voice. Why did the child use incongruent communication? Is the child hiding information or trying to give of a signal?

Verbal communication is an important source of information for researchers and practitioners across fields and industries. Among others, investors study the positive and negative language of managers to improve trading algorithms, interview transcripts are the primary source for any qualitative scholar, and telemarketing companies look at a prospective client’s words to gauge their state of mind. However, if we know that one’s tone of voice, and the relationship between tone and words, may alter a communications meaning, how valid are approaches that solely rely on a type of ‘word analysis’?

In a big data study of the incongruence in managers’ words and tone of voice, I find that this incongruence significantly influences analysts, and show that verbal communication is about so much more than the words themselves. As a former debater, these findings corroborate my own experiences, in that certainly words are important, but an argument is nothing without a proper delivery.

If you have questions or would like to know more about my work, feel free to send a PM!

Dear network,

As my PhD is nearing its completion, and because fatherhood has given me some much-needed time to rest (when there is no diaper to replace, belly to fill, or cuddle to give), I feel that this is a good opportunity to communicate what I have been up to these last six years. The short answer: A LOT, and possibly, too much.

Being a ‘management scholar’, I am interested in research questions that involve organizations and people in organizations. In particular, I study the behavior of lead managers (e.g., CEOs) which are in charge of organizations that face financial distress. This topic is super interesting, as the managers’ decisions may alleviate the distress, or make it even worse, possibly dooming their organization in the process. In my dissertation, I studied psychological processes that explain why managers (fail to) respond to crises, how managers strategically use verbal communication to influence their stakeholders to prevent their organzation from being downgraded, and whether managers also feel psychologically attached to their organization when it is faltering.

I learned many things during my PhD, ranging from skills in teaching and presenting to advanced data science methods. Although I had some minor experiences in programming before entering the PhD, I have learned a variety of techniques to collect, process, and analyze big data projects. Among others, I have built a massive database of conference calls, for which I developed a suite of tools and algorithms that allow me to analyze the textual content of these calls (e.g., emotions, identification with the organization), link this content to different audio dimensions (e.g., what is the speaker’s emotional tone of voice?), and give me the opportunity to understand how these aspects interact in the dynamic context of a conversation.

At least to me, doing this work is exciting, as it is at the academic frontier of my field, but also because my insights, data, and tools are important to companies that work with communication-based data to, among others, improve financial trading algorithms, customer support tools, or voice-controlled software applications.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to publish regularly a small blog of each project I have been working on during my PhD and reflect on my journey. As I have yet to find an academic/industry/hybrid opportunity from September onwards, I hope that writing these blogs may also help me to reflect, decide, and find my next career move!

Also, if you have any questions regarding these mini-blogs, feel free to comment or send me a PM!

Joris