Emerging Markets Theme Research Seminar: Subrina Shen

Subrina Shen is an assistant professor at the Department of Management at the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin.

When having a higher-status follower promotes exploration: Hierarchical inconsistency, goal alignment, and exploration in product development teams

A burgeoning stream of work views organizational internal inconsistency as an impetus for innovation and strategic change. Building on this literature, this paper examines an important yet under-studied aspect of internal misfit/inconsistency: global-local hierarchical inconsistency in product development teams, or the situation in which team members have misaligned rank orderings in the global (organizational) and local (within-team) hierarchies. In contrast to prior research which shows hierarchical inconsistency to increase conflict and thus hurt performance, we argue that the conflict induced by global-local hierarchical inconsistency could spark explorative search–an important antecedent for innovation and strategic change–when team members have aligned goals. We propose a novel mechanism–goal-aligned social rank enhancing behavior–to explain the positive effect of global-local hierarchical inconsistency. We empirically tested these arguments with data on A/B testing experiments around a social networking app product in a Chinese internet company between 2019 and 2021. The results show that hierarchical inconsistency encourages search and exploration when departmental goals are aligned in a team. Our study contributes to the burgeoning discussion around the impact of organizational internal misfit on innovation and strategic change as well as the literature on consequences of status inconsistency.

Subrina's research examines the creation, evaluation, and commercialization of innovative ideas in emerging technology sectors, with a contextual focus on artificial intelligence technologies. It is informed by both organizational sociology and strategy research. 

Subrina's work has been published in Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. Subrina's research has won a number of awards, including the 2021 Conference Theme Best Paper Award from the International Association of Chinese Management Research and the Best Paper Award from the 2018 International Conference on Innovation Studies.