Research Roundup: Holiday Parties, CEO Announcements, Low-Trust Negotiations, and More

Fresh insights from academic research, consultancies, and other sources can help give you and your company the information you need to make smart, strategic decisions. Adapted from the November-December issue of our magazine, we’ve pulled together some surprising and practical findings you can put to use, including: A simple way to encourage more women to apply for top jobs. Why some corporate parties help build community—and others backfire. How low trust can be a competitive advantage when it comes to negotiations. For some of these writeups, we’ve also included links to HBR.org articles that offer an opportunity to look deeper into the ways these findings may impact your business. Why Your PR Team Should Go All Out for a New CEO Press releases and social media announcements can introduce your new CEO’s strengths and expertise to the public and your stakeholders. They can also provide financial benefits to your firm and its new leader, a new study shows. The study examined 551 CEO successions at S&P 1500 companies that occurred between 2009 to 2013, looking at how frequently and centrally new CEOs were mentioned in firm communications in the year following succession. It also tracked analysts’ ratings in the year following succession, and CEOs’ pay, turnover, and the number of directorships each executive held over several years. The researchers found that frequent, significant messaging about new CEOs increased analysts’ ratings. Drawing on previous research about analyst ratings and abnormal returns, the researchers estimated that an increase in communication of one standard deviation above the mean was associated with an increase in market capitalization of roughly $213 million. CEOs also saw benefits. Above-average communication was associated with a bump in CEO pay—relative to peers—of 184%, a 40% increase in board seats at other companies, and 40% decrease in turnover. The researchers say that their study provides evidence that devoting early resources to publicizing a change in leadership may pay dividends for the firm in the short term and its new leader in the years to come. How to Get More Women to Apply for Top Jobs It’s well known that women are underrepresented in both leadership roles and the candidate pools companies select from. Now new research reveals one thing that could help shift the imbalance: citing the gender gap explicitly. In one experiment 1,002 U.S. participants solved puzzles to earn money. After a few rounds of puzzles, they were asked to choose the payment structure for the final round: They could either earn money for each puzzle completed, or compete against other players in a tournament that offered a higher payout to the winners. Before making a decision, half the participants were shown a message stating that women were less likely to enter competitions than men, which could give men an advantage. Among those who didn’t see the message, 24% of women (and 46% of the men) chose the tournament option. In contrast, 56% of the women who saw the message opted to enter the contest. The researchers then conducted a field experiment with 4,245 U.S. women in partnership with a large executive job-search platform. After logging into it, half the participants saw a banner saying that a study had found that people underuse job resources, which gave an advantage to candidates who applied to many jobs. The other half saw a banner explaining that women were less likely to compete for jobs, which gave men the upper hand. The researchers found that women who saw the second banner applied to over 20% more jobs on the day they viewed it than the women who saw the message about job resources did. The researchers believe this happened because women were resisting stereotypes suggesting they were expected to behave a certain way. Learning about the gender gap in competition encouraged women to defy the stereotype and take action, the researchers write. “Our work demonstrates that women’s willingness to compete is shaped by and malleable to perceptions of societal and cultural norms,” they say. Their research provides one method of harnessing those norms to encourage top talent to apply for jobs. When Team Traditions Backfire Lots of research shows that team rituals help boost employee engagement and loyalty. But when they move from the simple, like a team cheer, to the complex, like an annual holiday party, their value becomes less clear. In a new study researchers asked U.S. participants to describe their experiences with complex rituals, including corporate off-sites, onboarding events, award ceremonies, and holiday gatherings. They discovered patterns in the responses: On the plus side, people said they enjoyed the social connection, the perks (like free food), and the energetic and positive environment those events could create. But people also reported that complex rituals could be time-intensive, eating up working hours and requiring personal sacrifices to attend. What’s more, some participants noted that these events encouraged inauthenticity and made them feel undervalued or excluded. The researchers then examined the effect that complex rituals had on employees’ engagement and behavior in the weeks and months after an event. Studies conducted in the United States and Germany found that when employees reported mostly positive experiences at an event, they became more engaged, more helpful toward coworkers, more likely to feel upbeat about the organization, and less likely to search for a new job. However, when employees had mostly negative experiences at an event, those benefits disappeared. This has important implications for organizational event planning, the researchers say. “It may be easy to focus on a great location, awesome food, and a fun atmosphere…But it is equally important to make sure that negative experiences…are prevented. Otherwise, organizations risk getting zero return on their investment of time, energy, and money,” they write. Go deeper: “New Research on How to Get Workplace Rituals Right,” by Junhyok Yim et al. Music Can Help You Focus—to an Extent The right tunes can make a party lively or a commute more relaxing. But what impact does listening to music have on serious tasks, like focused work? It depends on how much of it you listen to—and on your willpower. In a lab study 252 U.S. participants created playlists on Spotify and then completed 19 rounds of proofreading, doing the first five rounds in silence and the next 14 while listening to their playlists. Initially, the music boosted their proofreading scores, but after the seventh round of listening to it, their performance began to dip, eventually becoming worse than when they worked in silence. Another study tracked 247 U.S. employees over three weeks. Each week, participants were randomly assigned to listen to either little to no music, one hour more than usual per day, or three hours more than usual per day. They were also asked about their willpower (whether they felt energized or drained by mentally demanding tasks) and filled out daily surveys about their focus and performance. People who listened to music reported having better focus and performance than people who did not. But when the researchers looked closer, they found that music’s effect on performance wasn’t the same for everyone. Participants who appeared to have strong willpower (they felt energized by hard tasks) maintained their focus and performance regardless of how much music they heard. But for those whose willpower seemed limited, listening more than usual was associated with significant declines in focus and performance. The researchers say that this is likely because listening to music makes demands on cognitive resources, “siphoning attention away from work tasks and leading to performance declines.” That can be especially pernicious for people who feel they are easily depleted by strenuous tasks. Such people should pay attention to how much music they listen to, say the researchers. If the amount starts to tip beyond the usual, it may be time to hit the off button. To Find Great Ideas, Try Lowering the Bar Many firms host hackathons or run idea incubators to spark innovations. But what if the criteria used to pick winning pitches prevents the best ones from moving forward? That was the question explored by a study that tracked what happened when AppCampus, a tech accelerator run by Microsoft, Nokia, and Aalto University in Finland, altered how it decided which mobile-phone apps to fund. Over its three years of operation, AppCampus employed three different sets of selection criteria. First, it emphasized novelty and was open to all applicants. Then, it focused on mass-market appeal and developers’ success with previous apps. Later, the program became invitation-only and prioritized developers who had already worked with Microsoft or had qualified at prescreening events. As the criteria became stricter, the accelerator’s ability to pick winning apps didn’t increase, and in fact, in the last round it got worse: There were more “false negatives” (apps that were rejected by AppCampus but were developed independently and became successful) and “false positives” (funded pitches that either never materialized or had very few downloads) than in the previous rounds. To determine why, the researchers conducted 126 interviews with the AppCampus staff and board. They identified two causes: First, a developer’s past success wasn’t a good predictor of their ability to produce a future hit. Second, in the latter rounds experienced developers knew they’d be favored, so they presented their lower-priority projects, saving their best for other investors. The researchers say that instead of ensuring better investments, additional criteria may cause evaluators to over rely on simple metrics and miss great ideas. Who Embraces AI? You may think that tech-savvy consumers are the most willing to try AI products and services, while those without know-how are slower adopters. The opposite is more likely. Across seven studies involving thousands of U.S.-based participants, researchers found that the less people knew about AI and how it worked, the more receptive they were to using it. In one study 234 undergraduate students were given an AI literacy test and then asked whether they’d use AI tools to do their homework and, if so, how (for generating ideas, writing a first draft, or producing the entire assignment). The researchers found that the worse students performed on the literacy test, the more likely they were to say they’d use AI tools extensively. That was true regardless of whether an assignment was research-based, like a history paper on World War I, or creative, like a poem about falling in love. In follow-up experiments the researchers examined the relationship between AI literacy and people’s feelings and assumptions about the technology: Did participants fear it? Did they think it was unethical? Awe-inspiring? Surprisingly, the researchers found that people with lower AI literacy believed that AI was less capable and less ethical than did people who had more knowledge—and yet they were still more open to using it. That’s because people with low AI literacy were more likely to be dazzled by what the technology could produce. AI’s “magical” quality—that it can create highly polished, detailed content from thin air—fueled their interest in trying it. “These findings challenge a core assumption in tech adoption: that more education will naturally lead to greater adoption,” the authors of the studies write. “In reality, as knowledge about AI grows, interest in AI-powered products and services may diminish.” Go deeper: “Why Understanding AI Doesn’t Necessarily Lead People to Embrace It,” by Chiara Longoni et al. Low Trust in Negotiations Can Lead to High Gains Building trust is key to forging successful business partnerships. But a new study found that for first-time negotiations, a shared sense of skepticism may be even more valuable. Researchers divided 160 MBA students from India into pairs, randomly assigning one person to play a job recruiter and the other a candidate for an open position. Each pair had to negotiate eight issues simultaneously: vacation days, insurance coverage, bonus, moving expenses, salary, start date, job location, and department. The two parties’ priorities were likely to differ on some issues, requiring trade-offs; with others one party would directly lose while the other gained; and on others the two parties were likely to be compatible. Before each negotiation began, both parties were surveyed regarding their level of trust in other people, for example, by being asked how strongly they agreed to statements like “I believe most people are basically well-intentioned.” The researchers found that when both members of a pair scored low on trust, their negotiations had the highest joint gains—producing up to 15% more value than other pairings. The researchers say this is likely because dual skepticism inspired more rigorous questioning and fewer assumptions, which produced smarter agreements. While low-trust pairs scored the best across the negotiations, pairs with two highly trusting people also performed well on compatible issues, suggesting that being trusting may benefit deals in which both parties have similar aims. The researchers caution that their study examined negotiators who hadn’t collaborated before, so it’s possible that for longer-term negotiation partners, trust may play a different, more important role. However, their work provides evidence that strategic caution, when shared, can help create mutual value. A Smile Could Win You More Business In a study of more than 9,000 hosts on Airbnb, researchers found that people who smiled in their profile photos were 3.5% more likely to have their properties booked than people who didn’t. The effect was even larger when hosts were men or new to the platform. (“Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile,” by Shunyuan Zhang et al.) People Won’t Pay for New AI Features Companies have been making big bets about the benefits AI might have for their customers—and spending a lot to develop them. But a survey of 2,354 U.S. adults found that only 8% would be willing to pay extra for additional AI capabilities in the products they use. (ZDNet-Aberdeen March 2025 survey) These research write-ups are adapted from the November-December 2025 issue of our magazine.

Research Roundup: Holiday Parties, CEO Announcements, Low-Trust Negotiations, and More

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