The study of social commerce is enjoying something of a growth spurt of late, and the Telfer School’s Morad Benyoucef thinks the surge in research interest is happening at just the right time.

“Social commerce found its legs in the era of social networks, microblogging applications, and recommendation systems, reconfirming for everyone the power of word-of-mouth,” says Professor Benyoucef.

With more than a decade of progress in e-commerce and exactly ten years of Twitter (since July 2006) and Facebook status updates (March 2006), the field currently recognizes two categories of social commerce platforms. The first add “commerce” features to social media, such as applications that enable e-commerce on Facebook. The second add “social” features to e-commerce platforms (e.g., having a button on Amazon for the customer to share her purchases with her Facebook friends.)

Using a grant from NSERC, Professor Benyoucef seeks to determine which kind of platform makes more sense, from a systems analysis and design perspective, to build. “In other words, is there more efficiency in getting people to socialize where they shop or to shop where they socialize?”

To answer that question, understanding how communities form on social commerce platforms is essential, as is the development of innovative algorithms -- “tools for predicting the creation of social ties over time online.” While there is a decade of experience to learn from, “a missing piece of the puzzle” is the need for empirical studies on the next generation of tools that can further e-commerce by making the most of social ties between users.

The upside is that what researchers learn today about social commerce has greater potential for impact than it had just a few years ago. “There’s recognition and acceptance of a dramatic shift in the interactions between business and consumers. So researchers are working with a more mature environment, where harnessing social ties has truly become a marketing strategy of choice.”

A new study led by Professor Magda Donia from the Telfer School of Management suggests that merely engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) may not be sufficient for employees: it must also be perceived as substantive in order to inspire positive employee attitudes and behaviors.

“We already knew that a company's corporate social responsibility engagement produces positive outcomes. Now, however, we see that a company jumping on the corporate social responsibility bandwagon just for show or greenwashing doesn't fool its employees,” said Professor Donia of the research, which developed and tested a measure of substantive and symbolic corporate social responsibility using three samples aggregating more than 1000 working adults.

View the press release from Wiley, the publisher of Applied Psychology: An International Review.

View the study online. 

Barbara Orser was the keynote speaker at Startup Canada’s Canadian Entrepreneurship Institute on September 1st. The event, titled “Unlocking Feminine Capital: Canada and the World,” explored how public policy can be better leveraged to support women entrepreneurs in Canada. Barbara Orser currently co-chairs a grassroots committee, comprising 18 leaders from women’s enterprise centres, networks and SME support organizations. The mandate of the Ontario Women’s Enterprise Committee is to improve business support infrastructure for Ontario women entrepreneurs.

Full Professor/Deloitte Professor at the Telfer School, Dr. Orser is the Canadian representative on a team of 13 international scholars examining SME policy associated with women’s enterprise. Collaborative entrepreneurship studies in development focus on financial literacy, technology literacy and the efficacy of public procurement policies. Professor Orser is the author, with Professor Catherine Elliott, of Feminine Capital (Stanford University Press, 2015). 

Peer feedback could hold the key to improving virtual collaborations

Culturally diverse and geographically dispersed, the realities of today’s work teams have led to much more complex work arrangements and questions for leadership.  Magda Donia’s new study, “Leading multicultural global virtual teams,” provides a new foundation to address these challenges.

“For well over a decade, we've heard that fluency in virtual teamwork is rapidly becoming a must-have skill for job-seekers, even as cross-cultural competencies have also become very important,” says professor Donia of her project, which was recently awarded a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. “The implications for leadership in this trend towards ‘multicultural global virtual teams' have not yet been fully explored."

For a look at some of those implications, Donia and her colleagues will analyze data of teams working virtually, beginning with data from the X-Culture Project founded at the University of North Carolina. Every year as part of this project, randomly assigned teams of 4-5 MBA students from around the world are responsible for producing a group report based on a real business challenge.

Donia explains: “There are obviously some limitations in making strong comparisons between students and actual workers. However, the work design, communication tools, performance evaluation system and incentive structure used in the project nonetheless have a lot of comparability with real work settings.”

The researchers will identify leadership characteristics that encourage effective interdependence and cooperation as the teams work towards securing rewards and avoiding losses. Much as in an actual work setting, the researchers are also interested in how those attributes can evolve over time.

To this end, group leaders will provide self-report assessments of their behaviour and attributes, and team members will also rate the leader on these measures. An intervention centering on “upward feedback” from the team to the leader will also be introduced to enable study of the benefits of feedback on leadership and team performance over time.

While contributing to theory, the research also offers the potential to shape practice. “If we find, for example, that our intervention can reduce communication break-downs or encourage higher-performing teams, that would have relevance to global leader selection and training initiatives,” says Donia.

“We’re just at the beginning of an exciting phase of studies on what it means in practice for leaders to steer a team, communicate and adapt to change in this new environment.”