Honoring the Leaders of Emory and Goizueta

The Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award is presented to faculty members from each of Emory’s four undergraduate schools during commencement every year. “The award celebrates the pinnacle of teaching excellence, honoring faculty who have profoundly impacted their students’ academic journeys,” says Wei Jiang, vice dean for faculty and research and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance. The award was established by Emory Williams, a 1932 Emory College alumnus and longtime trustee, to recognize a record of excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Emory College of Arts and Sciences selects three award recipients, drawn from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Each of the other undergraduate schools—Goizueta Business School, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, and Oxford College—selects one award recipient.

The 2024 honoree from Goizueta Business School is Richard Berlin, associate professor in the practice of organization and management.

The remaining 2024 honorees are:

• – Christopher Eagle, associate teaching professor in the Center for the Study of Human Health, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
• – Sarah Fankhauser, associate professor of biology, Oxford College
• – Gillian Hue, assistant teaching professor, Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program and senior faculty fellow, Center for Ethics, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
• – Brajesh Samarth, teaching professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
• – LisaMarie Wands, associate clinical professor, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing

The Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award

The Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education recognizes outstanding scholars who excel as teachers within formal and informal educational settings. “This award honors exceptional teaching and recognizes those who guide their students with passion and expertise,” says Alicia Sierra, director of human resources and diversity.

One faculty member in each of Emory’s seven graduate and professional schools receives the award in recognition of the important role of exceptional teaching in graduate and professional education. 

The 2024 honoree from Goizueta Business School is J.B. Kurish, professor in the practice of finance.

The remaining 2024 honorees are:

• – Lauren Christiansen-Lindquist, assistant teaching professor, Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health
• – Thomas W. Elliott Jr., professor in the practice of practical theology and Methodist studies, Candler School of Theology
• – George S. Georgiev, associate professor of law, Emory School of Law
• – Adriana P. Hermida, professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory School of Medicine
• – Lori A. Modly, assistant clinical professor, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing
• – David A. Steinhauer, faculty, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Program in the Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and associate professor, School of Medicine Department of Microbiology and Immunology, James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies

The Keough Awards

The Keough Awards for Service are named after Don Keough, the legendary President of The Coca-Cola Company and a symbol of business excellence. This award is the business school’s highest service award and is awarded to one faculty member and one staff member. Each recipient receives a $2,000 award. “The recipient is a long-term contributor to the school and makes a significant impact or contribution to Goizueta,” says Jiang.

Keough Faculty Award

The recipient of the 2024 Keough Faculty Award is Professor Kristy Towry. Towry has served in many roles within Goizueta over many years. She has served as vice dean and significantly impacted the culture and comradery at the school. Towry also served as the chair of the executive committee, where she initiated a governance structure that has enhanced decision-making and evaluation. She served as a mentor to numerous junior faculty and doctoral students. In addition, Towry has shown true leadership by appealing to others’ values in helping and supporting the school.

Towry is a top researcher and has trained numerous influential students. She is a favorite teacher of hundreds of MBA graduates and has made a lasting contribution to the school.

Keough Staff Award

The 2024 Keough staff recipient is Krystle Arnold-Moore, administrative assistant, BBA program office. She has consistently made an impact since she started at Goizueta in the summer of 2019. Faculty and staff across the school quickly noticed her creativity, as she served as an active division student advisory council member and on the committee to build morale after the pandemic. She has helped other units with programmatic support during staff vacancies, all while continuing to grow her expertise in the BBA program office.

Staff Excellence Award: Collaboration

The staff excellence awards recognize staff who have “gone above and beyond in collaborating with others, managing resources, and overall influence at the school,” says Sierra. Each recipient receives a $1,000 award.

The 2024 recipient of the Staff Excellence Award for Collaboration is Brandi Baker, director of registrar services. Baker has worked tirelessly to accommodate Goizueta’s exponential growth as a school. She collaborates with program offices to meet the needs of faculty, students, and administrators and proactively finds solutions that create a more positive learning environment. Baker is in a position where she has to answer to colleagues across numerous academic programs. She is limited in terms of building capacity, and yet she manages to fit all the pieces together. In her work, she maintains a positive attitude and a “get to yes” philosophy.

Staff Excellence Award: Influence

The 2024 recipient of the Staff Excellence Award for Influence is Ron Harris, director of research computing. Harris has been the backbone of faculty research projects for decades. He helps faculty as a thought partner, sharing the work and thinking through choices. This ability requires a deep understanding of the datasets and faculty research challenges. He uses his data manipulation skills to clean data and make it serviceable for research. He also trains the next generation of scholars, our PhD students, in the use of statistical software. It would be fair to claim that the considerable pace of our research is due to Harris’s support.

Staff Excellence Award: Resources

The 2024 recipient of the Staff Excellence Award for Resources is Robin Dittmann, chief business, analytics, and operations officer. Dittmann has been instrumental in helping strengthen school finances. She has worked toward more efficient staffing levels, streamlined processes, and new policies to facilitate efficient resources by faculty and staff. She does so with expertise and transparency that instills confidence in the community.

Department Distinguished Teaching Awards

Emory and Goizueta also award those of exceptional academic excellence in each department. These awards go to individuals who represent their departments with outstanding education and lead the professionals of tomorrow. We would like to recognize them here.

• – BBA Distinguished Educator: Emily Bianchi, Goizueta Foundation term associate professor of organization and management.
• – Evening MBA Distinguished Core Educator: Omar Rodríguez-Vilá, professor in the practice of marketing.
• – Evening MBA Distinguished Elective Educator: Kevin Crowley, associate professor in the practice of finance.
• – Full-Time MBA Distinguished Educator: JB Kurish, professor in the practice of finance.
• – Full-Time MBA Distinguished Educator: Marina Cooley, assistant professor in the practice of marketing.
• – MS in Business Analytics Distinguished Core Educator: Rajiv Garg, associate professor of information systems and operations management.
• – MS in Business Analytics Distinguished Elective Educator: Emma Zhang, associate professor of information systems and operations management.
• – Master of Finance Distinguished Educator: Kevin Crowley, associate professor in the practice of finance.

We are immensely proud to celebrate the accomplishments of our faculty. Through their transformational work, they push industries forward, prepare the next generation of business leaders, and solve today’s toughest business problems.

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The jury for many remains out, though there are enough clouds forming on the horizon to cause consternation for firms eyeing the next financial quarter. But while recessions invariably spell belt-tightening, are they always plain bad for business? Could there be some kind of silver lining to hard times?

New research led by Goizueta Business School’s Emily Bianchi suggests there is in fact an upside to economic downturns: higher employee job satisfaction. Bianchi and colleagues from Oglethorpe and Hong Kong Polytechnic Universities have found that in times of increased financial uncertainty, people tend to think less about other opportunities or openings, and focus more on the jobs they actually have. This in turn makes us see our jobs and workplace more favorably, says Bianchi.

“It might feel counter-intuitive because there’s reason to think that tumultuous times make the workplace and workplace relations more tense or challenging. But we wanted to explore whether the security of having a job in an economic slump might positively impact the way people think about their roles and employers,” Bianchi says.

Our hunch was that fewer available jobs outside the organization may translate into greater satisfaction with the jobs we have in hand when there’s a recession.

Emily Bianchi, Goizueta Foundation Term Associate Professor of Organization & Management

To test this possibility, Bianchi and co-authors ran three studies. The first looked at almost 50 years of data from the U.S. General Social Survey, a cross-sectional barometer of people’s attitudes and opinions, including their assessment of the economy and satisfaction with the work they do. Through analyses of respondents’ answers between 1974 and 2016, Bianchi et al. found compelling evidence to support their hypothesis: at both the national and state level, job satisfaction rose during recessions and fell off again when the economy did better.

A second study analyzed data from the U.K. where recessions tend to hit at the same time as the United States, but can be more or less severe. Two surveys conducted by the University of Essex followed the same respondents between 1991 and 2013, allowing Bianchi et al. to measure how individual job satisfaction fluctuated with macro-economic changes. Limiting their analysis to those people who remained employed over the time period and controlling for things like age, gender and income, the researchers were able to isolate the impact of recession based on the way that a group of just over 8,500,000 employees felt about their jobs. They found the same pattern.

“By looking at the same individuals over time, we’re able to eliminate any impact coming from changes in the composition of the workforce across economic cycles,” says Bianchi.

The same pattern emerged: during bad economic times, people reported greater job satisfaction even within the same group.

Bianchi

Unlocking the Upside of Downturns

To dig deeper into the psychological mechanisms undergirding these patterns, Bianchi et al. ran an experiment. One group was shown “bad news” about the economy, while the other read a report on economic growth and “plentiful jobs.” Both groups were then asked to self-report on job satisfaction.

Those who had read the news article on recession and unemployment reported greater contentment with their current jobs. Moreover, when reminded of recessions, they reported that alternative jobs became less salient, which in turn led to greater job satisfaction. In other words, their own jobs were “more satisfying.”

One implication of these findings is that they challenge the notion that job satisfaction is exclusively dictated by what happens inside the organization.

We tend to think of businesses as bubbles that are somehow impervious to the outside world. But these studies show broader societal events can affect us in surprising ways.

Bianchi

A Silver Lining for Employers

Recessions are rarely welcome news. And for employers, they can engender feelings of hopelessness, says Bianchi. The insights shared in her paper should provide some reassurance, nonetheless, that even when the chips are down, they might have one less thing to worry about. But there’s a caveat.

Our findings suggest that there might actually be a bright side to recessions for employers; that greater job satisfaction during these difficult times might help people psychologically weather an otherwise challenging situation.

Bianchi

“Of course, this does not mean that employers should take advantage of this surprising goodwill by asking more of their employees. Rather, while employers likely believe that there is little they can do to bolster job satisfaction during tough times, our research suggests that satisfaction-boosting efforts may be even more effective. Moreover, our findings suggest that employers should be more attuned to bolstering satisfaction when times are good and employees are particularly apt to be looking at other opportunities.”

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta.

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Do recessions stoke racial tension? When there’s an economic downturn, are White Americans more likely to feel distrust or even animosity towards their Black peers?

Researchers have long wondered about the broader societal impact of financial recessions, but until recently their effects on race relations have been unclear.

In a recent paper, Emily Bianchi, associate professor of organization and management, Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization and management, and Sarah Lee 19PhD, assistant professor of management, Dominican University of California and visiting professor of organizational behavior, Pepperdine University, find that there is indeed a subtle uptick in hostility towards Black Americans during bad economic times. Their paper, Reexamining the Link Between Economic Downturns and Racial Antipathy, examines publicly available data on attitudes, political trends, and behavioral patterns in the US.

While businesses tend to cut diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts during economic downturns, Bianchi and Hall underscore that these efforts may be even more critical during these times.

To study this phenomenon, the researchers analyzed more than 20 years of data from the American National Election Survey (ANES), a biannual survey capturing political affiliations and perceptions of political candidates from 1964 until 2012. They analyzed how White Americans’ attitudes towards Blacks changed depending on the state of the economy and found that in worse economic times, Whites felt more negatively about Blacks.

As Bianchi notes: “we were able to analyze the responses of more than 30,000 individuals who identified as White. And we do find that for decades – between the 1960s and the first part of the 21 century – White Americans feel less warmly about Black Americans during times of financial hardship.”

In a second study, Bianchi, Hall, and Lee examined data from Project Implicit, a popular website that allows people to test their own implicit bias and also gauges racial attitudes. Again, the authors found that in worse economic times, White Americans held more negative implicit and explicit attitudes about race. In particular, during the Great Recession, they found that White’s attitudes towards Blacks became substantially more negative in states that were hard hit by the economic crisis compared to states in which the economic downturn was less severe.

Having established that economic conditions affected fluctuations in attitudes towards race, the authors then examined whether these emotional shifts translated into actual behavioral outcomes. In other words, if Whites felt more negatively towards Blacks during recessions would this mean that Black professionals were less likely to be successful when the economy floundered? They tested this possibility by looking at two domains of public activity: record sales and voting patterns.

First, they examined data from the Billboard Top 10 American songs between 1980 and 2014 and recorded the race of each musician who secured a Billboard hit. They found that in bad economic years, Black musicians were 90% less likely to have a top 10 hit, presumably because White consumers (by far the biggest consumer group during this period) were less likely to support them. Next, they examined the results of more than 8000 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives over the same period. They found that in bad economic times, Black politicians were 21% less likely to win elections.

Interestingly, the converse also appears to be true. In good times, Black musicians and politicians fared much better in the polls and the charts – pointing to a certain fluidity in attitudes, says Bianchi.

“Across these very different domains, studies, and sample sizes, we find the same consistent pattern: when times are tough, White Americans feel more animosity towards Black Americans and are less likely to support Black musicians or politicians. When things pick up, White Americans have more positive attitudes towards Black Americans and are more likely to endorse Black musicians and Black candidates.”

The authors attribute these effects to innate human feelings of fear in the face of threat. Economic threats or shocks tend to evoke uncertainty and fear about what is to come. This translates into greater distrust of others, particularly those perceived as different in some way. And it’s an effect, they argue, that should be very much on the radar of businesses and decision-makers.

The research cites, “Anecdotally, we know that when times are good, organizations will tend to prioritize their efforts in the area of diversity and inclusion. But while this is critically important at all times, our research suggest that these efforts are probably even more important when times are tough.”

All of this points to a need to attend to these issues more acutely when there’s a downturn, says Bianchi. And she cautions that this is likely to be counterintuitive to most leaders, who are likely more inclined to sideline diversity efforts when the economy slides.

In terms of the current debate around race relations in the US, however, Bianchi stresses that the economic dimension is just one piece of a “very complicated puzzle.”

“What we have seen and are seeing in 2020 and 2021 is a confluence of many major factors: a pandemic that has put a lot of people out of work, and that has put everyone on edge, punctuated by some horrific and well documented instances of violence against Black citizens,” Bianchi said. “So many of these things are in the mixing pot, that it’s hard to pinpoint one specific cause behind the current race crisis in the U.S. So many things coming together at once that have put us in this moment.”

Only time will tell how this might play out compared to what we saw in the 80s and 90s, which were economic fluctuations rather than a complete drop off a cliff, she says. It will be more difficult to tease apart the effect of the economy versus the effect of the pandemic versus the effect of police violence on America’s race relations – a situation that Bianchi describes as a “cauldron of mess.”

That said, she stresses that for business leaders, now is a good time to double down on efforts to drive diversity and inclusion.

“I’d suggest leaders be especially mindful that at times of economic stress such as we are currently experiencing, there is a very real danger of heightened racial animosity.”

To gain more insight into the prevalence of racial bias, listen to The Goizueta Effect podcast episode by Erika Hall. To learn more about how recession changes our behavior, listen to The Goizueta Effect podcast by Emily Bianchi.

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Recessions also hurt race relations

Economic downturns aren’t just bad for businesses and households. Recessions tend to spur heightened animosity towards Black Americans in the U.S., and this not only drives social inequality but can significantly impair the outlook for Black professionals. These are the troubling findings of research published in Psychological Science by Goizueta’s Emily Bianchi, associate professor of organization & management, and Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization & management. They ran a number of studies to capture people’s responses and shifts in attitude during periods of recession. They also looked at the impact on professional success for Blacks in areas like the arts and politics. What they found is that when times are hard, White people feel more negatively towards Black people and are more likely to stereotype or compartmentalize them. They’re also more prone to seeing racial inequity as acceptable and even “natural.”

Similarly, Black politicians and musicians were less likely to fare well in congressional elections and in the Billboard charts. Bianchi and Hall’s research is striking in that it explores the more nuanced and subtle forms of racism that manifest when communities face financial downturns. It suggests there is a certain fluidity in attitudes towards race that can be shaped by changes in our economic and social context — which may also help explain, at least in part, why Black people are particularly hard hit in times of recession.

Whose side are you on?

Protest marches grab headlines. But while heightened visibility for a cause might be good news for the social movement in question, the trade-offs for other affiliated organizations may not stack up so positively. So says a recent article in Organization Science by Giacomo Negro, professor of organization & management at Goizueta. Together with Stanford University’s Susan Olzak, he put together a data set of pro-LGBTQ protest events staged across a range of U.S. cities over 20 years to gauge how these events impacted local organizations — social movement groups on the one hand, and on the other, more loosely affiliated organizations like local businesses with customers and stakeholders both in and outside of the LGBTQ community. What they found was that greater participation in pro-LGBTQ protests lowered the market viability of these neutral organizations. Negro puts this down to having to “choose sides” and being less effective at addressing the needs of multiple audiences in the presence of polarizing events such as protests. Protests by nature pose a type of challenge to society, so people associated with the cause motivating the protest have to take a clear side or stance, explained Negro. And the visibility protests generate comes at a price for any participating organization that engages distinctly different stakeholder groups, from customers or clients to employees. If one group endorses a controversial issue, another can shun it. These insights come at a time when U.S. firms are increasingly involved with social causes, from human rights to race and gender issues. They will need to balance the pros of visibility against trade-offs in terms of their stakeholders.

IoT boosts online sales

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of smart devices or objects that are connected to the internet — objects that “talk” to each other and that can be combined with automated systems to gather and analyze information. IoT technology is making waves in business today because of a slew of benefits that range from rich data collection, enhanced security and reduced operation costs to enhanced customer-centricity. One space benefitting from the use of IoT is e-commerce. And a forthcoming article in Information Systems Research by Goizueta’s Panagiotis “Panos” Adamopoulos and Vilma Todri, both assistant professors of information systems & operations management, suggests that forward-thinking retailers would do well to understand the advantages of using IoT as an alternative purchase channel for consumers.

Together with NYU’s Anindya Ghose, they tracked sales data from a major multinational online retailer using IoT to automate purchasing and consumers’ convenience. They found that implementing the new technology led to significant statistical and economic gains for the company thanks to increased automaticity and more favorable mental accounting that made these products “easier to consume.” Interestingly, these gains were particularly associated with certain product characteristics, helping retailers determine effective future IoT strategies. As businesses continue to waiver about adopting IoT because of technical challenges that surround its implementation, these findings should provide interesting food for thought.

Learn from experience (just make sure it’s someone else’s too)

Businesses and business managers grow and develop because we learn. We learn from our performance metrics and KPIs — they tell us what we do well and not so well. But it’s challenging. For a start, there’s the issue of the metrics themselves. In today’s complex, fast-changing environment, it can be hard to pin down our KPIs with total accuracy. Then there’s the question of how we learn. Is it better to learn from our own firsthand experience — or from others’? Kristy Towry, John and Lucy Cook Chair and professor of accounting, and colleagues Jongwoon “Willie” Choi 11PhD, Gary Hecht, and Ivo Tafkov 09PhD have explored the science behind learning and decision-making in heightened complexity, and their new paper in The Accounting Review finds that when KPIs are messy, managers learn far better when that learning is vicarious, in other words, when we learn from each other and share our learning. And that’s because vicarious learning helps us to see the bigger picture, the trends and the patterns, Towry said. Learning from our own experience alone tends to make us over-focus on what’s happened most recently and what’s immediately in front of us and miss the greater scheme. The challenge, then, to businesses that want to accelerate their growth is to break through the silos and proactively look for ways to share knowledge, explained Towry. Learn from experience by all means. Just make sure it’s other people’s experience too.

Putting a value on peer pressure

Our colleagues can exert some influence over different aspects of our careers and even our private lives. There’s nothing too surprising about that. However, new research published in The Review of Financial Studies by Associate Professor of Finance Gonzalo Maturana should give households and businesses alike pause. When it comes to making big purchasing decisions — whether or not to refinance our mortgage, say — we could be more susceptible to positive peer influence than we realize. Maturana and Jordan Nickerson from MIT Sloan School of Management leveraged publicly available employment records — public school teachers from Texas — and unearthed something stunning: where there was notable mortgage refinancing activity in a peer network, individuals within that network were 20.7% more likely to refinance their own mortgage and access positive savings. And that’s not all. The peer effect also helped shape individuals’ choice of mortgage lender. And critically, the more savings they were likely to make by refinancing, the more of this activity there was across the peer group. These peer dynamics should be on the radar of policy makers looking to incentivize mortgage refinancing and to drive household liquidity, said Maturana, as well as banks who want to drive their customer base growth responsibly. The latter could leverage the multiplier effect of peer dynamics to make sure that valuable information on mortgage rates reaches more households more efficiently.

Is breakthrough innovation always a team sport?

If you’re looking to innovate, conventional wisdom says you need to build a team. You only get the breakthrough ideas when you have different people working together, collaborating and sharing knowledge, right? Not necessarily, says Tian Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management at Goizueta. Chan and colleagues put together a study, published in IdeaWatch, that reveals something striking: in certain circumstances, individuals can be just as effective as teams in creating breakthrough innovations. It all depends on how easy it is to break down your invention into different components or modules, he said. With design patents that cover innovations on the way something looks — think the iconic curved bottle of a Coca-Cola or Apple’s sleek iPhone — innovations tend to be holistic and don’t easily divide into chunks, and a team might get bottlenecked by coordination or communication issues. With utility patents that cover innovations on the way a product functions, you can have inventions that are very modular (such as the Dell PCs) to inventions that are hard to break into components (such as the internal combustion engine). So here, teams do tend to do better than individuals. His advice to business? If you want to increase your chances of a breakthrough, align your human resources and collaboration structures around the type of invention in your sights. But don’t assume you always need a team.

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