One of the key priorities in our College’s strategic plan is to elevate our research culture. An important part of our research culture is getting together as a College to learn from and celebrate one another’s scholarship. Our faculty do so regularly with their colleagues in their respective departments, and in seminars where particular papers are being presented by external visitors and by our own faculty. 

I’m glad to announce a new initiative where we hope to gather faculty from across all departments at Mendoza – together with staff as well as graduate and undergraduate students – to hear from the most accomplished scholars in the College who will share an overview of their research targeted to a broad audience. 

In particular, we are launching the University Chair Public Lecture Series featuring Mendoza faculty who are designated as “University chairs” – Notre Dame’s highest recognition of the impact of a faculty member’s research. We plan to host one University Chair Public Lecture event each semester. 

Mike Crant, the Notre Dame Professor of Management & Organization and the College’s newest University chair, will present the inaugural lecture on November 28 in the Jordan Auditorium. The lecture and Q&A will take about an hour, followed by a social in our atrium. Details as to the time will be sent to you as a calendar invitation. 

For his lecture, Mike will present “My Mendoza Journey: A Memoir,” where he will reflect on his personal and professional experiences since joining Notre Dame in 1990 – his first academic job after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earlier that year. He will present an overview of his body of research, the changes he’s observed in his field of organizational behavior and his contributions to the growth of the College and his field, all targeted to a broad audience. 

Mike researches workplace dynamics, focusing primarily on proactive personality and behavior at work. He is one of the creators of the proactive personality scale, the most frequently used measure of proactivity in the organizational literature. With nearly 23,000 citations to his research, he is one of the most highly cited scholars at Mendoza (top 5) and in the upper echelon of researchers at Notre Dame (top 30 among current faculty). His more recent work examines the frequency and impact of proactivity in Asian cultures, including exploring how proactivity helped Chinese hospitals deal with the early days of the COVID-19 crisis.

I think you will find Mike’s talk and the ones to follow to be meaningful, enjoyable and even inspiring.  I’m most grateful to Mike for his many contributions to Notre Dame, and his willingness to share his scholarship with all of us in the inaugural University Chair Public Lecture at Mendoza.

I hope that you will join us!

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

I’ve been using the term “ONE Mendoza” with increasing frequency. It reflects our desire to be a single college team with a unified purpose, aligned objectives and a common culture. There are two images that come to my mind when I think of ONE Mendoza.

The first is simpler and focuses on how our faculty, staff and students make up departments, functions and programs that are the Mendoza College of Business. Imagine looking down over a triangular pyramid with its three vertical sides rising up from the ground to meet at the apex. Metaphorically, each face is the primary “home” for each of our core internal constituencies, but there are three edges where the faces meet and a central apex where all three faces converge. 

To extend that metaphor, I envision these edges and apex are where much of our work actually happens and, when done well, we reach the peak (pun intended) of our mission as a college:

The second is a slightly more detailed and functionally centric organization graphic. It aims to show the relationship between an expanded list of internal and external core constituencies (the circles):

• Faculty
• Staff
• Students
• Student Prospects
• Alumni
• The Global Public

… and our functional groupings (the rectangles):

• Marketing & Brand Strategy
• Graduate Enrollment
• Graduate Career & Alumni Engagement
• Student Experience (Graduate & Undergraduate)
• Research
• Strategy & Planning
• College Operations

… in relation to the student journey and each other. It’s not a perfect representation but it’s helpful in what it communicates simply about who we are as an organization and how our work is associated with our constituents.

Since Dean Cremers announced organizational changes this summer we’ve been hard at work bringing that ONE Mendoza vision to life. We’ve drawn special inspiration from the new Strategic Framework for the University, where this opportunity can also be seen through a College lens:

“Becoming the Notre Dame the world needs will require the University to become better at thinking as an institution.”

We can practice thinking as an institution by first thinking as a College (beyond our immediate program, team or work function). Thinking as a College means moving toward a more unified, collaborative and organized way to achieve our goals. That has implications for almost every aspect of our daily work experience, including the tools that we use, the questions we ask ourselves and the way we help each other realize success.

I’ll devote time to these topics (and enlist the help of others) in future Mendoza Exchange entries. In the meantime, I would like to leave you with a reflection:

Have you ever been a part of a championship team? Or a team that did something very hard?

What did it look like? (From inside the team and from the outside?)

What did it feel like? (How would you describe the energy and emotion?)

What did it sound like? (What did you say to each other?)

Discuss this with your immediate team and your fellow Mendoza teammates. Share your experiences and reflect on how we can become a ONE Mendoza championship team.

Gratefully,

Rob

Rob Kelly
Chief Operating Executive

We have a lot going on in the College even as we head into fall break at the end of the week. Undergraduate and graduate student teams involved in Business on the Frontlines, Grow Irish, and Innovation and Design Thinking will travel across the globe — from Uganda and Appalachia to Honduras and Nevada — to work on a wide range of projects.

We also have a high level of ongoing research activity, as described in Ken Kelley’s excellent guest column last week. I’m pleased to highlight five recent research papers published in top academic journals:

Chris Bechler, Assistant Professor of Marketing
“Working Hard for Money Decreases Risk Tolerance” (Journal of Consumer Psychology)
The research finds that working harder to earn money increases valuation of earnings and aversion to losing them, resulting in lower tolerance for investment risk. This can help explain why consumers don’t invest enough, especially when times are hard, and provides support for new interventions that facilitate consumers’ accumulation of overall wealth (e.g., those that automatically invest consumers’ income).

Casher Belinda, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
“A Spillover Model of Dreams and Work Behavior: How Dream Meaning Ascription Promotes Awe and Employee Resilience” (Academy of Management Journal)
Most explanations for the link between sleep and employee behavior are grounded in physiology. However, people also navigate psychological experiences during sleep, and these experiences are often recalled shortly before the start of the workday. This research shows that dreams often spill over to affect employee resilience and goal progress at work, in part due to their capacity to elicit attributions of meaning and waking awe.

John Donovan, Gerspach Family Associate Professor of Accountancy
“Does Recognition versus Disclosure Affect Debt Contracting? Evidence from SFAS 158” (The Accounting Review)
Donovan and co-authors study how recognition of previously disclosed pension liabilities under SFAS 158 affects debt contracting. They find that pension underfunding is associated with a higher cost of debt and a lower use of covenants when underfunding is disclosed. Following recognition, these effects reverse. This evidence contributes to the accounting literature by examining the contracting effects of recognition versus disclosure.

John Shim, Assistant Professor of Finance
“A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation: Will the Market Fix the Market?” (Journal of Political Economy)
This paper studies how U.S. stock exchanges compete in the modern electronic era. Exchanges earn profits by selling speed to high-frequency traders, which ultimately come at the expense of investors through higher trading costs. Because of these profits, exchanges are not willing to adopt new, more efficient designs that reduce the value of speed. While implementing such a design would benefit investors, high-frequency traders would not purchase speed: exchange speed profits stand in the way of market design innovation.

Sriram Somanchi, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
“Exploiting Discovered Regression Discontinuities to Debias Conditioned-on-observable Estimators” (Journal of Machine Learning Research)
Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are widely used to estimate causal effects in the absence of a randomized experiment. Rather than relying on known discontinuities, the researchers developed a method (DEE – discover, estimate and extrapolate) to automatically discover regression discontinuities in observational data. Their method integrates information from multiple discovered discontinuities with an observational estimator and extrapolates away from discovered, local RDs using Gaussian Process regressions. The research demonstrates the performance of their method on two synthetic datasets and shows real-world applicability by estimating spatially heterogeneous treatment effects in the context of a recent economic development problem.

Thank you to Chris, Casher, John D., John S. and Sriram for their work.

I also want to recognize our colleagues who provided tremendous support in managing the aftermath of Monday’s fire in the lower level. They helped to put out the fire, evacuate the building, retrieve and return students’ belongings, relocate classes and communicate with students. Thanks to Kyle Way, Chad Harms, Hank Gettinger, Morgan McCoy, Ron Grisoli, Chad Deweese, Tabitha Kingsbury, Jennifer Brewer, Andy Wendelborn, Lisa Heming, Teresa True and Kari Friestad. (Here’s The Observer story, in case you missed it.)

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

Research that is publishable in the top academic journals, where it will have the most scholarly and reputational impact, often necessitates five things before being further considered: important questions, interesting data, properly designed studies, rigorous analyses and high-quality writing. 

Additionally, the research must also tell a compelling story and help advance the literature in that area, which usually requires a novel finding. Publishing in top-tier journals is challenging, to say the least. It is an incredibly time-consuming process in order to make a significant contribution to the field. Research published in top journals is a valuable but difficult to achieve goal for the College -- one that requires a great deal of our time, talent, and funding resources.

Our faculty who conduct research embrace the challenges of publishing at the highest levels, even though, on any given day, it's easier to find reasons not to work on research. Perseverance is key when working toward successful publication in top-tier journals, which often take multiple rounds of revision with reviewers and editors being critical of the work throughout the process. Indeed, it is easier to recommend rejecting a manuscript under consideration than to provide detailed and helpful feedback on potential improvements for the author(s). From this detailed feedback and editorial guidance, revisions are made so as to improve the contribution. The changes are often documented in a separate document that only the reviewers and editors see explaining how changes were made or why they were not made. Sometimes, responding to reviewer comments leads to a response document that is longer than the manuscript itself! 

Thus, there is an entire “behind the scenes'' effort involved in gaining acceptance at top-tier journals. (Much of this is done after the bulk of the research was done.) All that said, it is also very difficult to publish in good journals that are outside of what the field considers “top-tier.” Many of these “good” journals have similar criteria as the top-tier, often with the goal of being recognized as a top-tier journal themselves. The point is that publishing research in high-quality outlets is not easy. This is a precious resource but one in short supply. 

In June, Notre Dame was welcomed into the American Association of Universities (AAU), a consortium of the nation’s leading research universities, in recognition of our progress as a research university. This significant achievement is a result of the University’s sustained focus on research, which was embraced and accelerated by Father Hesburgh who, among many things, established a research library and increased research funding by a factor of 20. The focus on research is deeply rooted in the College’s history as well, as evidenced by the mission statement created by Dean Jack Keane, which read in part: “Our quest is to advance knowledge through distinguished scholarship and research balanced with inspirational teaching and spirited service.” 

The University’s new strategic plan states, “Notre Dame must be the leading global Catholic research university, on par with but distinct from the world’s best private universities.” The threat to Notre Dame fulfilling this vision is complacency – a point made during the recent President’s Address to Faculty in which Provost McGreevy interviewed the President of the AAU and Duke’s longtime provost. Although our research is strong and our prominence growing, we cannot rest on our laurels. 

The best private universities in the world are the universities with top researchers. These top researchers are thought leaders in their fields and bring their knowledge and what they have contributed to the field into their classrooms. Mendoza aims to be on par with the best business schools in the world and that means we must have the research bonafides that come from thought leaders contributing new findings to existing fields. In fact, Mendoza’s strategic plan has as its first stated goal to “elevate the quality and quantity of impactful research with relevance to business and society.” Mendoza is thus well-aligned with the University’s goals. 

Fulfilling our research mission requires that we hire promising tenure-track faculty in every open assistant professor position or already impactful researchers in tenured positions. Recruiting, hiring and retaining top faculty talent is an ongoing challenge. Conducting faculty searches every year is not the problem: The problem is that every year top schools have searches! We are thus in a competition year in and year out with the best schools in the country. 

For senior faculty hires, usually, there has to be a push from one’s home university and a pull to attract someone to Notre Dame. These researchers are likely already well-ensconced at their home university and potentially deeply embedded in their communities. Just how hard it is to find and then hire top researchers has been one of the most humbling aspects of my role as senior associate dean for faculty and research. Even if Notre Dame is thought of highly by these faculty, even getting to the point of an offer takes considerable effort as we do not want to offer a position to someone unless we are comfortable that they will contribute in meaningful ways. Some hires have taken years of engagement and there is a natural cycle to the hiring cycle closely tied to the academic year. 

A successful research program also requires the use of data in most cases, and accessing high-quality data is another ongoing challenge. At Mendoza, faculty primarily use data from one or more of the following four sources: data vendors that sell archival data, the Mendoza Behavioral Lab, our Data Science Team (e.g., scraping data from online), and partnerships with firms.  

Each data source carries a considerable cost, either monetarily or in effort. Maintaining a behavioral lab requires a full-time professional to manage all aspects of the training, equipment, pay-for-participation; to oversee the institutional review board approval for human subjects research; to work with faculty who require lab participation of students in certain classes; to partner with faculty to ensure the methods implemented are those necessary for the project: and to run the studies themselves and with a team of research assistants. 

Our Data Science Team often is involved when we collect our own data. The team consists of three professionals who work one-on-one with faculty to understand and then implement their unique data needs, often requiring data engineering skills combined with an understanding of the particulars of the research question and data structures. These types of collaborations between faculty and our Data Science Team can lead to more novel datasets for publications. Such efforts are a competitive advantage, as not all universities have such resources available. Alternatively, we can purchase data from data vendors, which is expensive. In the past five years, the College has spent $1.88 million on datasets for research, some of which are also used for teaching. Even using data from firms is not easy. That often takes a champion in the upper echelons of the company as well as legal and non-disclosures agreements. 

Our efforts to improve research have been tremendous, and so, too, has been our success. We will continue to invest heavily in research and we will not become complacent. Our faculty of 150 members consists of 90 tenured, tenure-track, and research professors. Each of our departments is deeply committed to research and I work closely with the department chairs to hire the best researchers that we can for each opening.

I am immensely appreciative of the effort of the department chairs, search committees, and department faculty for their deep engagement when candidates are on campus. For almost every opening, we winnow down more than 100 applications to a small number of viable candidates who are brought to campus to give a research talk and in-person interviews. These campus visits involve substantial faculty time and effort putting our best foot forward. Arrangements are graciously made by our departmental administrative assistants, creating as easy of a visit for our candidates as possible. 

The amount of time we devote to hiring faculty is considerable, but it is of the utmost importance, as making the wrong hire can be incredibly costly. Every open position is an opportunity to elevate our research and departments by bringing in thought leaders. As former Provost Tom Burish would say, “No university can be better than its faculty.” The world is always changing. Our students need to be influenced by those at the forefront of the various disciplines that combine to form a holistic program with formative experiences and innovation throughout.  

Ken Kelley
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research
Edward F. Sorin Society Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations