By Author:
Letian Zhang – Harvard University
Shinan Wang – Northwestern University
Interviewers:
Ashley M. Flowers – University of South Carolina
Ejian Zhou – Erasmus University
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241233257
- In this paper, you examine societal trust and the influence it has on organizations hiring based on foundational skills versus advanced skills. Also, you mention the various ways management scholars have studied the role of trust in organizations and hiring but not investigated from a sociological perspective as you did. What inspired this research question and examining trust at this level of analysis?
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking how organizations’ design choices shape outcomes like inequality and performance. But a question that’s always stuck with us is—why do organizations make such different choices in the first place? The more we looked into it, the more we felt that the usual explanations, which focus on formal institutions and markets, don’t fully capture the whole picture. we wanted to highlight the role of culture and societal norms. While there’s research on individual-level cultural traits, like Hofstede’s measures, I think broader societal culture—like generalized trust—also plays a big role. This study is one step toward showing how societal norms shape hiring preferences and job design.
We’ve also wanted to take a more global perspective in my research. A lot of what we know about management comes from single-country studies, usually from the U.S., and we don’t always know how those insights hold up in different contexts. I hope to do more cross-country studies in the future to fill in those gaps.
- Your choice to center the study around one single hypothesis is quite unconventional in the current research landscape. What prompted this decision, and were there any other unexpected patterns or anomalies, especially at the country level, that emerged?
This just comes down to personal preference. We like sticking to a single hypothesis because it keeps the argument clear and easy to follow. Of course, we explore several moderators and additional analyses, so we could have easily broken it into five or six hypotheses. But in the end, we felt that keeping it simple made for a stronger, more memorable argument. It’s really just a stylistic choice.
- Analyzing over 50 million job postings across 28 EU countries in multiple languages must have been complex. What were the main challenges you faced during the data processing and analysing process? Particularly, how did you handle multi-language situations in such a large data set, and what are your recommendations to students when examining such large data sets?
One of the biggest challenges in cross-country research is ensuring that the data is both high-quality and comparable across different contexts. The World Management Survey by Nicolas Bloom and his team is probably the gold standard for international organizational data, but we thought job postings could offer a compelling alternative. They’re more cost-effective, provide broad coverage across occupations and industries, and allow us to track changes over time. Of course, job posting data isn’t perfect—it doesn’t always reflect what’s happening on the ground—but overall, we felt the benefits outweighed the limitations.
Handling multiple languages in such a large dataset was another challenge. In this paper, we relied on Google Translate, though today, with the advancements in large language models, we would likely explore other options. Working with large datasets has also changed a lot—what used to feel like ‘big data’ now seems small compared to things like cellphone or video data. So, we’re always learning and adapting as datasets continue to grow in scale and complexity.
- Considering your research and findings, are there any additional areas of management or constructs you would like to examine or would encourage others to examine through the societal lens?
We think there’s a huge opportunity to explore cross-country differences in management. Organizations operate in such different ways across countries, yet we still don’t fully understand why. One of the biggest challenges is data quality and causal inference. Unlike other areas of research, it’s really hard to run experiments on these big macro questions. And because societal norms change so slowly, it’s tough to find natural shocks that would allow for stronger causal claims. That might be one reason why these questions are still relatively unexplored. But we think that just makes them all the more interesting.
Interviewer bios:
Ashley M. Flowers: Management Department, Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina
Ejian Zhou: Organization & Personnel Management Department, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University