Wei Wang

PhD Candidate, Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
wei.wang@Kellogg.northwestern.edu

Research Interests

Wei is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Management and Organizations in the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research centers around firms’ strategic decisions and actions concerning societal and natural environmental issues. These decisions and actions hold profound implications not only for firm performance but also for broader societal impacts. To explore these dynamics, Wei’s research is structured into two streams, both of which she constructs her own sample and employs international contexts, utilizes techniques of text analysis, and conducts rigorous statistical analysis to empirically test the theoretical arguments.

In the first research stream, she focuses on the relationship between organizational actions and communications concerning corporate sustainability and responsibility efforts. While existing studies often emphasize the prevalent gap between communication and actions in this domain, with a tendency to exaggerate firms’ efforts, Wei’s research seeks to extend existing studies in two ways: 1) she endeavors to identify the circumstances that can bridge the gap, and 2) she explores the opposite direction of the gap, where firms underreport their responsible activities. In terms of closing the gap, she highlights that an instrumental thinking approach to sustainability is not always superficial but can be beneficial in moving firms from commitment to action for firms in low negative impact industries, as it provides the framing to mobilize support from shareholders and investors. On the underreporting dimension, she brings in considerations in communication channels and the information context to explore and explain the puzzle of why some firms choose to withhold positive responsible information. She found that firms tend to segregate audiences by channels and are inclined to withhold their responsible information when they have adjacent information that can introduce extra concerns from the major audience in the channel. By examining these dynamics, Wei’s research challenges the notion that communications in sustainability and responsibility domains are symbolic-driven and emphasize that communications can introduce unsettlements to the present practice, which further creates possibilities for future actions and changes.

The second stream of Wei’s research investigates how firms are evaluated by external stakeholders and how firms strategically manage their social evaluation in the corporate social responsibility and sustainability domain. Specifically, from the audience perspective, She investigate how the formation and expression of social evaluation are emotionally triggered by broader socio-political context. Her study reveals that firms can face reputation costs when they are associated with attributions that drive animosity such as nationality, even when the animosity is not directly caused by the firms’ behaviors. From the organizational perspective, She focuses on how firms manage their responsible image through differentiation strategies, including the use of apologies, narratives, and other communication framings. She highlights that firms may employ strategies that are traditionally considered as costly to a competence image such as apologies to signal out their responsible character. Wei’s research in this line extends the existing studies by going beyond firms’ CSR or sustainability practices and investigating the affective and emotional elements of social evaluation management that influence the perceptions of responsibility towards firms.

Working Papers

From Pledges to Practice: Organizational Value Rationality and Firms’ Environmental Sustainability Practices

Building from Max Weber’s concept of rationality differentiation between instrumental rationality (or means-end rationality) and value rationality (or meaning-driven rationality), I explore how firms’ different rationality orientations shape their approach to commitment realization in sustainability. I uncover that firms exhibit diverse rationality orientations when framing their sustainability efforts. Instrumental rationality is rooted in utilitarian calculations and perceives sustainability as a means to enhance reputation and economic performance. On the other hand, value rationality goes beyond utilitarian calculations and is driven by a belief in sustainability as an ultimate goal. Importantly, I emphasize that a firm’s rationality orientation, when aligned with its environmental tightness, significantly influences its future actions. Specifically, I highlight that firms operating in industries that are tightly coupled with negative environmental impacts are more likely to translate their commitments into actions when guided by a value rationality orientation. Given the challenges they face in confronting existing practices within their industries, a value rationality orientation helps them overcome barriers and embrace sustainable actions. Conversely, firms operating in industries that are loosely coupled with negative environmental impacts are more inclined to enact emission reduction commitments with an instrumental rationality orientation. This allows them to address shareholder and stakeholders’ concerns while benefiting from favorable narratives. To empirically test these arguments, I analyze a sample of firms that have made carbon emission reduction commitments. I investigate how their rationality orientation influences their emission practices after making the commitment. Through rigorous analysis and statistical testing, I aim to provide robust evidence supporting the relationship between rationality orientation and firms’ sustainability actions. My study reveals that although value rationality orientation can lead to genuine and impactful practices, instrumental thinking can be feasible and provide a good starting point for firms that are loosely coupled with environmental concerns.

Hidden Information Matters: Why Do Firms Withhold Responsible Communications?

In this paper, I investigate why firms that engage in responsible actions, such as corporate philanthropy, sometimes choose not to publicize this information. I argue that organizations may strategically withhold responsible activity information due to the fear of potentially misleading the audience and influencing the interpretation of adjacent information in different communication channels. They may choose to tailor their communication strategies across channels to reach specific target audiences and avoid potential misinterpretations. To examine these dynamics, I analyze communication data from listed companies in both their formal reporting channels and social media channels. The findings provide support for my arguments. In channels primarily serving investors, firms tend to communicate their social initiatives in a manner that addresses concerns about resource allocation and capital allocation toward socially responsible endeavors. Two dimensions of findings emerged from our analysis. First, I find that firms are less likely to highlight their social performance to investors but more likely to the general public when they have concerns about their overall performance. This suggests that firms are cautious about exacerbating concerns by drawing investors’ attention to their social initiatives. Second, I highlight that firms are more inclined to communicate their socially responsible efforts to investors but not the general public when they are in a resource-privileged stage. This indicates that firms may leverage their favorable resource positions to showcase their commitment to social responsibility to investors but not the general public. These findings contribute to understanding why firms selectively communicate responsible information that is supposed to be positive information and shed light on the importance of considering information context and audience targeting channels in communication strategies.

Expressive Apologies: Being Socially Responsible Firms (with Klaus Weber, under review)

Studies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are mostly concerned with firms’ behaviors – their routine practices and social performance. In contrast, in this paper, we emphasize that being perceived as a responsible actor extends beyond behaviors to also include audience evaluations of a firm’s competence and moral quality. We study public apologies for perceived harm caused by a company as a communicative means to influence audience evaluations of responsibility. We propose that companies can use apologies either reactively or expressively, depending on whether they are more concerned about evaluations of competence or moral character. When concerned with projecting an image of competence, companies use public apologies reactively to protect their status and independence. When concerned with projecting an image of moral warmth, companies use public apologies expressively, to differentiate themselves as a benevolent moral entity. Using an empirical examination of Fortune Global 500 companies’ apologies, we find that companies vary in their orientation towards either the moral or competence dimension of their public images, which influences their decisions to apologize in public. The study contributes to the literature of CSR by highlighting alternative bases of audience evaluations of responsibility, and by unpacking the role of public apologies in managing corporate responsibility.

When West Turns South: how attribute animosity impacts evaluators’ reputational judgments of organizations (with Weiliang Zhang and Michael Etter, under review)

We challenge the assumption that individual evaluators surrounding firms as socially isolated agents that form and express reputational judgments about organizations based on a rational assessment of organizational attributes. In this article, we investigate how evaluators’ reputational judgments are influenced by emotions that are triggered through changes to the broader socio-political context. Concretely, we study how national animosity impact evaluators’ reputational judgment expression online. We argue that national animosity elicits a group of evaluators’ negative emotions that influence their rational assessment of organizations. Reputational judgment expression, then, becomes a motivated act through which evaluators sanction organizations and signal alignment with a social ingroup. We test our theoretical arguments and hypotheses with a natural experiment based on the trade-war between the US and China. We show how this shock to the socio-political context negatively impacts reputational judgments expressed in online ratings of organizations that belong to the outgroup. We further find that this reputational animosity cost affects organizations that are only loosely associated with the outgroup. We explain this spillover effect with evaluators’ simplified heuristics due to ingroup-outgroup constellation within the socio-political context. We therewith contribute to the understanding of the important influence of the socio-political context on reputational judgments within increasingly polarized environments.