Professor Michelle Rogan, a strategy scholar at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, talked with Anita about her research on how social networks shape entrepreneurship, innovation, and firm performance.

Anita asked Michelle about her recent paper called "Up to No Good: Gender, Social Impact Work, and Employee Promotions" written Christiane Bode and Jasjit Singh, both Pi2 veterans.  The paper examines promotions among participants in corporate social impact projects.   Michele and colleagues find that men who participate subsequently experience a promotion penalty, whereas women do not.   Michelle explains that social impact work is culturally coded as feminine.  As a result, men who volunteer for CSI projects are perceived internally as violating gender-role expectations.  Evaluators assess men as less appropriate for promotion more often than their male peers who did not participate.   After testing for mechanisms, Michelle and her collaborators find that this has less to do with worries about commitment than with perceptions of “fit” with leadership roles. For women, participation in social impact work carries no such penalty.

Anita asked if the promotion disparity reflects pre-existing biases against women that are reflected in lower promotion rates for women overall.   Michelle draws on qualitative interviews to suggest the dynamic is better understood through belief updating: when a woman takes on social impact work, evaluators do not revise their assessments of her much because the behavior aligns with existing gender expectations.  In contrast, when a man does social-impact work, it triggers a more significant and negative revision to prior beliefs. Rogan invokes a quote attributed loosely to Gloria Steinem that we encourage our daughters to pursue the same opportunities as our like sons, but we do not encourage our sons to act like our daughters.

The conversation then turns to Michelle’s seminal 2015 paper in Organization Science, also written with Christiane and Jasjit, which found that employees who participated in CSR projects were more likely to be retained by their firm.   Anita observed that this paper was influential because it points to the ways in which employee retention depends on the social-impact projects offered by employers.  This idea has been interpreted in some companies as a “business case” for engaging in social impact as it suggests that there’s a payoff to social impact in the core business through employee retention.

Anita asked Michelle whether this finding conflicts with the newer promotion-penalty result.  How can it be that male employees are retained longer if engagement in social impact work actually harms the career trajectories of men?  Michelle suggests that answering this question conclusively requires new research that considers a range of possibilities.  She suggests two that might be important.  First, the employees in the retention study may not have been aware of the promotion penalties that arise from participation in social-impact projects. A lack of understanding of the consequences might influence their retention.  Second, she argues that many employees may be motivated by genuine purpose and meaning rather than promotions.  She pointed to qualitative evidence that employees who contribute to social impact work feel better about working at a for-profit firm.  It research were to show that this sense of fulfillment is widespread, then it may drive retention despite the adverse impact on promotion.  Of course, if this mechanism were supported, it would raise new questions about the business case that has been inferred as important from the 2015 results.  Michelle reflected that there are many open questions that need to be investigated rigorously, and that we must be careful not to make assumptions about the relationships between social-impact projects and employee behavior without testing them rigorously.

As the conversation unfolds, Anita asks Michelle a broad question about how research in this area is changing, especially given the current U.S. political climate and the rise of new technologies like AI that are changing the nature of work.  Are these cultural changes eroding employee retention and promotion along traditional career trajectories?  Michelle  acknowledges this possibility through the lens of Coleman's macro-micro model: the original retention study was conducted during an early wave of rising enthusiasm for CSR and a favorable macro environment that shaped individual-level motivation. If that macro context has since shifted — and if the backlash makes employees reluctant to take on social impact projects for fear of reputational risk — the micro-level retention effect may no longer hold in the same way.   She cautions against interpreting weakened retention  as evidence that employees care less about doing meaningful work.  This outcome may simply reflect the chilling effect of institutional pressures on traditional work arrangements.

In the closing portion of the conversation, Michelle identifies two promising frontier areas of network research. The first is the effect of generative AI on how people form and maintain social ties. Our relationships with each other are less supported by continuing personal interactions as individuals increasingly turn to AI for advice, information, and even emotional support.  Michelle wonders if this is affecting the nature of communities and the social fabric of human interaction.   She calls for research in this area.

Second, Michelle sees opportunities for extensive research on network agency and the psychology of networking behavior, especially for women. She describes an ongoing field experiment in Kazakhstan conducted with PhD student Madina Nurghuzina and Imperial faculty HeeJung Jung and Anne ter Wal.   This work draws on Claude Steele's self-affirmation theory to test whether psychological exercises that bolster self-affirmation can increase women entrepreneurs' willingness to reach out to high-status contacts and build stronger networks. Preliminary results suggest that self-affirmation does meaningfully enhance these network-building behaviors.

Anita asks Michelle how she sustains her excitement for doing this work.  Michelle offers a thoughtful meditation on the word "impact."   She suggests that our current focus on impact evokes the image of an external, unexpected force striking an unwilling subject. She prefers the language of inspiration, suggesting that what she hopes to do as a scholar is not impact others but move them toward something they might not have reached on their own. Anita closes the discussion with warm praise for Michelle's scholarly rigor, care, and intellectual generosity.