Organization and Human Resources Department's Lecture

Theme：Wealth-based discrimination of entrepreneurs in funding allocation decisions: Exploring causes and potential remedies

Speaker：Tingting Lang（SMU）

Time：2019-11-27 14:00

Address：Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：English/Chinese

Abstract：

Entrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and poverty alleviation. Despite the promise of entrepreneurship for improving the material conditions of people around the world, low-wealth individuals are facing disadvantages when seeking funding. Discrimination against less wealthy individuals in funding allocation decisions represents a significant impediment to their ability to move upward via entrepreneurial endeavours. Such issues have consequential impact on the wellbeing of entrepreneurs, the development of nascent organizations, and societal equality and mobility at large.

In this talk, I present three studies to understand why less wealthy entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in funding allocation decisions and look for effective strategies to reduce this discrimination. Study 1 pit against each other the different mechanisms of taste-based versus statistical discrimination explanations potentially contributing to the discrimination, finding support for the theorized key role of statistical discrimination explanation (e.g., competence perception). Accordingly, study 2 and study 3 discovered strategies attempting to reduce discrimination by targeting at the competence pathway. Engaging in extensive coding and analysis of a large crowdfunding platform, study 2 found that emphasizing the social impact of projects can help attenuate discrimination against less wealthy entrepreneurs by aligning the perceived entrepreneurial task requirement with a trait stereotypically associated with poor individuals—prosociality. Also, highlighting entrepreneurs’ humble family background and financial progress attenuates the discrimination by improving the competence impression (study 3).

By understanding the psychological dynamics occurring in a major domain of economic activity, entrepreneurship, and looking for strategies to attenuate the disadvantages that less wealthy entrepreneurs are facing in funding allocations, this research connects micro and macro levels of thinking about entrepreneurship, decision making, equality of opportunity, and socioeconomic mobility.

Bio：

Tingting Lang is a doctoral candidate in Department of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources, Singapore Management University (SMU) - Lee Kong Chian School of Business. Before joining the Ph.D. Program of SMU, she received a B.A. degree in Economics from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and a M.S. degree in International Management from Telecom Ecole de Management (France). Tingting Lang’s research concerns psychological processes in organizing, focusing on entrepreneurial and high-reliability contexts where these microfoundations are particularly pronounced and especially consequential. For instance, she studies how entrepreneurs can attenuate the disadvantages stemming from their personal wealth and gender when seeking funding.  Moreover, she takes an inductive approach to propose theoretical models to understand the interacting process of employees, managers, and regulators to maintain work practices and cultures that culminate in safe and reliable performance. Upon understanding the microfoundations of such issues, her research aims to uncover and test interventions to provide generalizable and actionable insights for workers, managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers to initiate changes at their workplace.