Author:

Alexandra C. Feldberg – Harvard Business School

Interviewers:

Pooja Khatija – Case Western Reserve University

Vanessa Hills – Western Michigan University

Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221124607

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1)    How did you settle on grocery stories as the environment for the study? Did you predict that specific settings, such as grocery stores, would provide more interesting data than others?

I will start by saying that I simply love grocery stores. This may partly have to do with how I grew up—I come from a family of foodies, where “I’m going to ‘the store’” really means “I’m going to the supermarket.” And so, I was thrilled to get to study and spend a lot of time in grocery stores!

As I was figuring out where I would do my dissertation research, I began to realize that grocery stores were an excellent context for studying managers, tasks, and gender. There were three reasons for this.

First, the products create unique managerial challenges. Grocery stores sell perishable products. Perishable products differ from products sold in many other retail settings because, unlike clothing or electronics, food can go bad. The fact that much of stores’ inventory is at risk of spoiling and therefore must be sold quickly adds urgency and complexity to managers’ work and means their performance hinges, in part, upon their ability to plan.

Second, stores collect a lot of data that can be linked to people’s activities. The typical grocery store has something like 40,000 SKUs, which is an enormous number of products to keep on hand! Because inventory management is essential to business success, grocery companies invest heavily in technology to track and monitor their products. This means there is a lot of archival data capturing product movement and, by extension, the behaviors of the people who handle these products.

Third, gender is extremely salient because of segregation that cuts across levels and product categories. Grocery stores tend to be gender balanced at the frontline and middle management levels and then, as people move up in store hierarchies, women’s representation plummets (to about 15 percent at FOODCO). At the same time, departments are highly gender segregated. Next time you go to a grocery store, look at the gender composition of each department. What you will likely notice is men staffing meat, grocery, and produce departments and women staffing bakery and deli departments. The extreme gendering by product category was a useful source of variation in my data because stereotypes about who is capable in the work are stronger in some parts of the business than others.

2)   At what point did you realize task bind would become the focus of the research?

I conducted two waves of interviews in stores—first with store managers and assistant store managers (i.e., store leadership) and second with department managers. It was early in the research process, when I was talking to store leaders, that I heard about the tension managers faced between working “on the floor” or “in the office.” And so when I went back into the field to interview department managers I really probed on how they spent their time. It was in these conversations that women’s concerns with leaving the floor became apparent: they wanted to disprove negative stereotypes about their ability to do floor work in front of their subordinates. At its core, the task bind is about these kinds of tensions—when people need to make tradeoffs between tasks, like floor or office tasks. The floor-office tension emerged early in my data collection; but, it was not until the paper was in the review process that I put a name to this dilemma with the “task bind.”

3)   Do you personally feel the task bind in how you conduct research or interact with others in academia? Is the task bind something you have noticed in your field more generally?

The task bind concept certainly resonates with me. The place I have felt it most in my work experience is when I worked in management consulting (many) years ago. I remember being staffed on teams as the only woman and feeling—as someone who majored in History in college—like I really needed to show I could do technical aspects of the job. I have a distinct memory of plugging away one night in my hotel room on quantitative models in Microsoft Excel. But what this meant was that I was removing myself from interactions that were happening over team dinners and team outings. I was missing out on conversations about the client, different aspects of our project, and learning from my more experienced colleagues. Even though I was working nonstop trying to build models, this behavior probably ended up undermining my performance. At the time I did not realize it, but I was trying to defy expectations I believed others had about me. This is an example of the task bind.

Task binds can affect anyone—not just women. The critical point is that tasks done to disprove negative stereotypes displace other tasks. In the context of our field, I could imagine a task bind happening for professors working in locations where they did not grow up speaking the language. For these faculty members, extra effort might be put toward teaching in the local language, perhaps at the expense of other activities, like research.

4)    Can you speak to the mixed methods approach you took for this work?  What was the review process like for a mixed-methods study? 

I used exploratory sequential mixed methods in this research. I started out with interviews and observations; through conversations and what I learned from shadowing managers as they went about their work, I was able to develop hypotheses. I then tested hypotheses using archival records from company databases.

I knew at the outset of this study that I was interested in gender and knowledge, but before I began my fieldwork, I really had no idea what gender dynamics (and stereotypes) or tasks would look like on the ground in this setting. It took visiting many stores and talking to many people to understand the nature of what people knew, what it meant to use company systems, and how they experienced their gender and their work.

The review process was integral to the development of this paper and the review team was especially helpful in guiding my approach to qualitative and quantitative analyses. For instance, the first round of reviews encouraged me to elaborate on my analysis of and be more transparent with the qualitative data. To incorporate this feedback, I expanded my discussion of my analyses and added quotations to tables for the appendices. Doing so not only improved the methods and results sections of the manuscript but also enriched my theorizing. Also during the review process, I learned new quantitative methods. Initially, moderated mediation was not in the paper, but the review team advised me to develop an integrated model. I believe this, too, enhanced my theory and ultimately made it much more cohesive.

5a)    How do you think about the future of task binds? Are you interested in exploring this further in future research or different contexts?

Developing approaches to mitigate task binds is on my radar for future research. The study points to some ways organizations might help resolve these binds, but there is much more work to be done to test organizational-level interventions and so this is a direction I could certainly see my research going.

I am also interested in trying out different exercises or techniques to see if they help individuals navigate the bind. (My colleague, Jeff Polzer, and I wrote a case that covers the task bind. Each time I have taught the case, my students—understandably—ask how to fix it. And so in the future I am excited to be able to tell students about some solutions!) With that said, one challenge with individual level remedies is that the bind is really a phenomenon rooted in structure.

5b) Can you share more about how we can start to identify task binds, particularly at an organizational level?

For an organization, it might mean thinking about what people are doing—especially when there is a lot of discretion in the job—and the potential drivers of their activities. Are employees doing what the job actually demands? Or are they doing what they perceive is necessary to showcase their competence? To get at this kind of question, you could potentially just ask people where they feel like they need to prove themselves and why. Are there systematic differences? How do any differences map to the organization’s demographic composition or prevalent stereotypes about who is best suited to doing certain tasks?

I love that you phrase this question at the organizational level because again, at the end of the day, tasks binds are structural phenomena and context is essential in shaping them. It is therefore important not to interpret the bind as a choice women make or its remedies as something individuals alone can implement.

6) From our perspective as newer researchers, this is a really big solo-authored paper. There is so much to do, from collecting data and brainstorming to writing and incorporating feedback. Can you talk about your experience working as a solo author, and do you have any advice for handling solo-authored projects better?

Well, it’s hard, and it can take a long time. If you are not working on the paper, no one else is! When you get reviews back, there is also always the emotional piece of having to manage or figure out how to proceed and that can be hard to do on your own. The flip side is that you drive all of it. It is you making the final decisions.

I would encourage anyone working on solo-authored research to look for points of accountability and opportunities for feedback. Having generous colleagues and mentors and people whose work I read and who read my work has been critical. I rely particularly on writing groups, which can be fantastic sources of accountability—especially if you are meeting with others also doing solo-authored work. And then it’s also just comforting to have friends going through the highs and lows of the same academic journey and asking things that you inevitably forget, like, “Where is that thing you mentioned last time we met?” or “You talked about that idea four months ago, and it didn’t make sense for X, Y, and Z reasons.”  Another great resource is programming through AOM. During the pandemic, I participated in virtual “coffee chats” with senior scholars through OMT. I felt fortunate to be matched with some amazing researchers and at least one of them read the manuscript and gave me feedback on it.

Interviewer bios:

Pooja Khatija is a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses on the impact of gender, race, social class, and their intersectionality mechanisms on leadership attainment in organizations. Pooja’s current research examines stereotypes associated with south and east Asians in organizations and the intersectionality of gender. She studies various intersectionality mechanisms using quantitative and qualitative research methodologies.

Vanessa Hills is a PhD student in Organizational Change Leadership at Western Michigan University. Her research is focused on Dialogic Organizational Development in virtual environments. She is interested in examining and improving computer-mediated leader-member exchange in the wake of increased remote work.