RESEARCH

Research Interests: Stakeholder Management, Social Evaluation, Strategic Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Job Market Paper

The Myth of Media: The Impact of Early-Stage Media Attention on Strategic Change in Startups

Research suggests that media attention provides substantial benefits for startup fims, particularly in the early stages of their development. Yet, the costs associated with such attention remains underexamined. This study delves into the relationship between early-stage media coverage and startups’ propensity for strategic change, focusing on technological pivots in their patenting strategies. While early media attention can enhance legitimacy and provide access to critical resources that can enable change, excessive attention may lead to strategic inertia, hindering timely adaptation due to pressure from stakeholder expectations and entrepreneurial overconfidence. Analyzing data from 1,339 IT startups founded between 2000 and 2020, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between early media coverage and the likelihood of strategic change. We also examine two key sources of heterogeneity among startups: venture capital (VC) affiliation and founders’ entrepreneurial experience. Our findings show that VC-backed startups are more sensitive to the effects of media attention, which amplifies strategic inertia at high levels of coverage, while experienced entrepreneurs are less prone to such constraints. These findings contribute to research on media and entrepreneurship, shedding light on the dual role of early media attention as both a facilitator and inhibitor of strategic change.

• Best Paper Proceedings: 2025 Academy of Management (OMT division)

• Presentation: 2025 Academy of Management

• Supported by Emerging Scholar Grant - Gies College of Business-UIUC 

Works in Progress

1) CEOs as Prism: How CEO Self-Promotion Affects Journalist Evaluation of Controversial Firm Events (with Michael Bednar)

There has been a rising debate that CEOs serve as lenses through which external stakeholders construe firm actions and outcomes. We explore how CEO self-promotion—an impression management tactic that signals competence and confidence—affects media evaluations of controversial firm events, specifically layoff announcements. CEO self-promotion mitigates negative media reactions by fostering cognitive trust and positive affect among journalists. However, the effectiveness of self-promotion depends on contextual, personal, and relational factors that lay foundation on journalists’ expectations. Our findings show that CEO self-promotion reduces negative media coverage, but this effect is weaker for overcompensated, female, or newly tenured CEOs. These results advance understanding of the ‘CEO effect,’ demonstrating that CEOs serve as interpretive lenses for external audiences and that audience expectations are critical boundary conditions shaping the success of impression management tactics.

• Under Review, Strategic Management Journal

• Presentations: 2023 Academy of Management, 2025 Strategic Management Society 

• Supported by Zwisler Doctoral Fellowship - Gies College of Business-UIUC 

2) Multicultural managers and competitive advantage: Replicating the effect of managers’ multicultural backgrounds on team performance (with Mike Szymanski)

Successful organizations have dynamic capabilities that are aligned with their competitive environments. As competitive environments globalize, the dynamic capabilities driven by managers with multicultural backgrounds are increasingly relevant. These managers are more likely to seize cognitively distant opportunities than monocultural managers. Using panel analysis of multilevel data from 355 elite football (soccer) teams, we find support for a moderated relationship among the degree of globalization in the competitive environment, the multicultural background of team managers, and team performance. When the competitive environment is highly global, managers with a multicultural background positively affect performance. When the competitive environment is less global, monocultural managers positively affect performance by seizing cognitively proximate opportunities. The same effect holds when tested both cross-sectionally and longitudinally.

• R&R, Journal of International Management

• Presentation: 2025 Community of Organization Scholars at Illinois-UIUC

3) Strategic Use of Low-Quality Patents: Beyond Value Appropriation to Impression Offsetting after Reputational Crises (with Eunkwang Seo, Haram Seo, and Jonathan Bundy)

This study explores how firms strategically use low-quality patents as impression management tools following reputational crises. While patents are conventionally seen as mechanisms for protecting valuable innovations, many patents offer little commercial utility. Prior research justifies these filings within a value appropriation framework—such as real options or portfolio bundling—but this overlooks their potential symbolic value. We propose that low-quality patents serve as strategic noise to deflect stakeholder attention from scandal. In the aftermath of a reputational crisis, firms face a narrow window of heightened scrutiny but often lack the time or resources to generate new, high-quality innovations. Instead, they mobilize marginal inventions from their R&D backlog, producing a short-term spike in patent filings. Due to the opacity of patent content and stakeholder reliance on quantity-based signals, even low-quality patents can enhance perceptions of innovativeness and competence. Using panel data on U.S. public firms and media-reported scandals, we find that firms increase both the filing and publicity of low-quality patents after scandals. These findings contribute to research on innovation, symbolic management, and reputational strategy by revealing the tactical use of patents beyond value creation.

• Preparing Submission

• Presentations: 2023 Strategic Management Society, 2024 Academy of Management

4) Hardworking But Myopic? Shareholder Revolution and Transformation of Innovation Activities in the U.S., 1980-2020 (with Yusaku Takeda)

The shareholder paradigm, which gained prominence in the 1980s, has been theorized to hamper firms' innovation efforts. But empirical evidence shows that innovation activities, as measured by R&D investment and productivity, have continuously increased among U.S. businesses over the past few decades. This apparent rise in innovation efforts has been cited as evidence that a focus on shareholder value creation enhances managerial efforts for innovation, known as the "lazy manager hypothesis." We offer an alternative theory—"hardworking but myopic manager hypothesis"—which holds that shareholder capitalism has increased innovation efforts and systematically altered how businesses innovate, pushing them toward more predictable exploitative activities rather than exploratory innovation. In this historical research, we analyzed a large volume of data to document how U.S. businesses have transformed their innovation efforts, moving from exploration to exploitation, driven by changes in regulatory environments, the rise of institutional investors, and the dissemination of shareholder ideology. Our findings challenge the sustainability of shareholder capitalism as a driver of long-term breakthrough innovation by revealing an overlooked historical transformation of the nature of innovation activities. By examining deeper systemic channels, we show how historical and institutional changes have reshaped U.S. businesses with potentially far-reaching societal implications.

• Finalizing Manuscript

• Presentation: 2024 Academy of Management