Five scholars from across USC Marshall departments will present their recent research at the 2023 Research Fair, to be held March 10, 2023, from 11:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. in the Ronald Tutor Center Grand Ballroom located on USC Hotel Grand Ballroom.

The Research Fair originated in 2016 and has been a well-attended event since then, even during the pandemic when the fair was held remotely. This year’s fair will also be streamed live.

This year’s participants share research that takes a deep dive into how technological innovation is impacting everything from market demand to information sharing, digital platforms, and business education.

“From its inception, the Marshall Research Fair has been an opportunity to showcase the exciting research done by our faculty and make it available to a wider community,” said PEER FISS, associate vice dean for research at Marshall and the Jill and Frank Fertitta Chair of Business Administration and professor of management and organization. “It has quickly become a key event for our research community, and this year we again have a terrific lineup of first-class scholars who will share their cutting edge work.”

Following are titles and summaries of the research each faculty member will discuss, in order of their scheduled appearance:

OMAR A. EL SAWY,Administration & Professor of Information Systems in the Data Sciences and Operations Department

My published work demonstrates how AI-provided workplace training can enhance employees’ job performance beyond that provided by human managers, suggesting a threat of replacement faced by human managers from AI. Yet, this boost in efficiency comes with a caveat: the impersonal nature of AI may trigger negative perceptions among employees, underscoring the irreplaceable value of human touch in management for sustaining morale and trust.

This “human touch” is exemplified by the findings of an ongoing study, in which I demonstrate how leadership that enables managers to enhance their “people skills” can create a stronger synergy with AI. In the context of workplace training, I show that managers with strong “people skills” can leverage AI assistance to help employees achieve higher performance than when employees are solely trained by AI or these managers alone. Consequently, managers with strong “people skills” foster a complementary relationship between AI and themselves. In contrast, managers with weak “people skills,” even with AI assistance, cannot enable the employees they train to outperform those trained by AI alone. Therefore, managers with weaker “people skills” continue to face the threat of being replaced by AI.

In sum, the prevalent media narrative—that AI will render humans obsolete—is a gross simplification. My findings advocate for a more nuanced approach: by leveraging the distinct strengths of AI and humans, we can craft organizational and team structures that foster complementary relationships. This synergy, which neither AI nor humans can achieve on their own, holds substantial promise for enhancing the workforce and society at large."

Nan holds a PhD in Strategic Management from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Her research interests include business-governance relationships and applications of Artificial Intelligence technologies in management. Nan’s research has been published in multiple top journals in strategic management. She currently serves as an associate editor for the Strategic Management Journal and on the editorial boards of multiple leading academic journals

SHELLEY XIN LI, Assistant Professor of Accounting

In today’s workplace, we see trends toward continuous tracking of employee activities, deeper quantification of work, and the rise of enterprise social networks. How should organizations use these information sharing technologies to drive performance? Below, I summarize three field experiments we conducted with collaborating companies.

In the first field experiment, we examined how providing frontline employees with direct access to performance data (compared to getting feedback through managers) affected work performance. In the second field experiment, we examined the effect of sharing work itself. In a retail chain in India, we developed an app that salespeople could use to share hand-made sales posters and evaluated the effect of sharing creative work on the creativity, employee engagement, and sales performance. In the third field experiment, we worked with a large grocery chain in Europe and examine whether structured sharing of best practices would alleviate information overload in enterprise social networks and lead to better offline performance.