Week8_Mani et al. Yiran
Captive centers are wholly-owned by the multinational corporations (MNCs) to conduct the R&D and new product development offshore, which also refers to captive offshoring. Previous research indicates that the performance of distributed work is adversely impacted by failures of cooperation, i.e., misaligned incentives, as well as failures of coordination. The authors analyzed survey data from 132 R&D CCs established by foreign multinational companies in India to understand how firms execute distributed innovative work.
There are two generic categories of coordinating mechanisms for building and maintaining common ground, namely, information sharing and modularization. The information sharing strategy involves ongoing communication between interdependent agents to dynamically update common ground. A modularization strategy involves limited ongoing interaction between the agents. The author aim to examine the moderation role of three task attribution: task routineness; task analyzability and task familiarity. The hypothesis are listed below:
Hypothesis 1A (H1A). With high interdependence,
higher levels of modularization will increase performance
only when task routineness is high; when task routineness is low, higher levels of modularization will decrease
performance.
Hypothesis 1B (H1B). With high interdependence,
higher levels of modularization will increase performance
only when task analyzability is high; when analyzability is low, higher levels of modularization will decrease
performance.
Hypothesis 1C (H1C). With high interdependence,
higher levels of modularization will increase performance
only when task familiarity is high; when task familiarity is low, higher levels of modularization will decrease
performance.
Hypothesis 2A (H2A). With high interdependence,
information sharing as a coordination mechanism will
increase performance only when routineness is low; when
routineness is high, higher levels of information sharing
will decrease performance.
Hypothesis 2B (H2B). With high interdependence,
information sharing as a coordination mechanism will
increase performance only when analyzability is low; when
analyzability is high, higher levels of information sharing
will decrease performance.
Hypothesis 2C (H2C). With high interdependence,
information sharing as a coordination mechanism will
increase performance only when task familiarity is low;
when task familiarity is high, higher levels of information
sharing will decrease performance.
Regarding the first set of Hypothesis. Hypothesis 1A and 1b are supported, showing that Modularization improves performance only when routineness and analyzability are high. In terms of the second set of hypothesis, results are consistent with the interaction plots, which show that on average, information sharing improves performance for R&D work. However, a significant difference in slopes between high and low levels of task attributes is observed only in comparing projects of low versus high familiarity. The difference in slopes for the other
task variables is insignificant. Only Hypothesis 2C is supported.
The key contribution of this study lies in the careful explication of the conditions under which choice of investments in modularization versus information sharing yield different performance outcomes.It shows that the success of this strategy has to be evaluated based on the nature of the underlying work.
Week8_Forman and Zeebroeck (2012)_Yaeeun Kim
The authors examined the basic Internet adoption for reducing the coordination costs of geographically dispersed firm teams. They hypothesized that adoption of basic Internet will be associated with an increase in the likelihood of collaboration for multi-inventor, geographically dispersed teams (hypothesis 1); Adoption of basic Internet will be associated with a smaller increase in the likelihood of collaboration for single-location multi-inventor teams than for geographically dispersed teams (hypothesis 2); and Adoption of basic Internet will be associated with a smaller increase in the likelihood of collaboration for single inventors than for geographically dispersed teams (hypothesis 3).
For analysis, they used fixed effects panel data model. Their findings suggest that there is no evidence of a link between Internet adoption and within-location collaborative patents. There is no evidence of a relationship between basic Internet and single-inventor patents. These evidences show that basic Internet adoption lowered the coordination costs of geographically dispersed research teams. This does not have to be interpreted as easier access to electronic knowledge systems or shared resources rendered an increase in research output of those who adopted basic Internet. .
The result suggests that IT can be used to integrate geographically dispersed operations, either obtained through acquisition or deliberately dispersed. The limitation of the study oriented from the sample data is one sample size and one period of time within U.S. When they design their international R&D organization, firms mostly regard the following options: a centralized organization that provides higher control and decentralized structure that enables local knowledge resources but increasing coordination cost. However, the study result supports that IT investments may substantially alter the trade-off and decentralized model more attractive, which encourages a more distant R&D activities within firms.
Week8_Mani et al. (2014)_Aaron
Technology advances in distributed work lead to a growing phenomenon that increasing number of firms set up offshore captive centers (CCs) to carry out R&D work. In this context, Mani et al. (2014) studies how organizations coordinate distributed knowledge intensive work (e.g., R&D).
Prior literature has suggested two generic coordination mechanism, information sharing and modularization, but do not reach any conclusion about the superiority of one of these mechanisms for any given task. This study address such research gap by raising a question, what combinations of task characteristics and coordination mechanisms yield high performance in the context of interdependent knowledge work?
The authors analyzed survey data from 132 R&D CCs established by foreign multinational companies in India to understand how firms execute distributed innovative work. They found that 1) modularization of work across locations is largely ineffective when the underlying tasks are less routinized, less analyzable and less familiar to the CCs; and 2) information sharing across locations is effective when the CC performs tasks that are less familiar to it.
The primary contribution of this study is to demonstrate high performance work configurations in offshoring of R&D and product development work, given that the tasks analyzed are highly interdependent. Its results expand studies on organization and coordination of distributed work as well as for practitioners who want to improve the performance of their distributed R&D strategies. This study has following weakness: the cross-sectional analysis may limit its ability to establish causality, the measures are perceptual and the unobserved heterogeneities are not controlled.
Week8_Forman and van Zeebroeck (2012)_Ada
From Wires to Partners: How the Internet Has Fostered R&D Collaborations Within Firms
Motivation:
Historically, collaborative work has been hampered by the existence of significant coordination costs that increase with team size, geographic dispersion, and heterogeneity of team composition. It is widely believed that the adoption of information technology increase the returns to collaborative work. However, little systematic empirical work on the implications of IT investment has been done for industrial research.
Research Question:
The main hypothesis of this paper is that by reducing the coordination costs of collaborative work, investments in IT will be associated with an increase in the likelihood of geographically dispersed, multi-inventor collaborative research teams relative to other types of research teams (including output from single location and lone inventors).
Main Findings:
They find that basic Internet adoption is associated with an increased likelihood of collaborative patents from geographically dispersed teams, which is in contrast with previous finding that IT adoption leads to a disproportionately greater increase in collaborations among researchers who are geographically close to one another. On the contrary, they find no evidence of such a link between Internet adoption and within-location collaborative patents nor single-inventor patents.
Hightlights:
The method they use to address the assumption that Internet adoption is exogenous.
- First, reverse causality. They utilize the timing of Internet adoption as the source of a falsification exercise. They find no evidence that the incidence of cross location research collaborations is correlated with a location pair’s future adoption of Internet technology; that is, location pairs who adopt Internet technology experience no increase in the likelihood of a collaborative patent prior to adoption.
- Instrumental variables. We employ two sets of instruments that capture local variance in the costs to adopting Internet technology. The first addresses cross-sectional differences in local regulatory conditions that will shape the costs of purchasing Internet access. The second captures cross-sectional differences in familiarity and expertise with the Internet in the local regions where the establishments reside.
Week 8_Setia et al. (2012)_Jung Kwan Kim
Setia, Rajagopalan, and Sambamurthy, and Calantone (2012) point out that the contribution of peripheral developers in open-source software projects has not been well understood. The authors in this study attempt to reveal the impact of peripheral developers, in comparison with core developers, on product quality and diffusion and the moderating effect of OSS product life cycle.
The authors find that peripheral developers endow a greater impact on the quality assessment because they supply independent, novel, and unique insights for detecting bugs in the projects. Peripheral developers also contribute to expedite the product awareness and adoption owing to their interpersonal network and word-of-mouth communication; since the personal network of peripheral developers does not suffer from institutional influences or corporate promotions, the information shared through the network tends to receive better credibility, leading better exposure and adoption for potential users.
Interestingly, the positive impact of peripheral developers is not supported for quality enhancement in the study’s empirical analysis. The authors suggest, a larger project may require complex coordination efforts which may prevent active participation of peripheral developers. Also, the lack of efficient coordination mechanism can be another culprit to accommodate geographically dispersed contributions from the developers.
A mature product may represent that its OSS product has been well managed with high quality. This signaling effect can be a good explanation for the authors’ findings: the participation of peripheral developers at a mature stage influences positively on quality assessment, product awareness, and product adoption greater than at earlier stages.
In conclusion, the authors show that the contribution of peripheral developers takes up a significant portion of an OSS outcome, especially combined with the moderating effect of project life cycle. Strategically using this dynamic is a mandate for an OSS organization or a corporate, which aims to leverage the synergy based on the volunteering dedication of peripheral developers.
Week 8_Setia et al. 2012_ Xue Guo
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development
This paper is motivated by the different contributions of Open-Source Software (OSS) Development made by core developers and peripheral developers. Authors of this article explore the role of peripheral developers in OSS product quality and diffusion and how these effects vary across the product life cycle of OSS projects.
Peripheral developers’ motivations and contributions are different from core developers of an OSS project. First, peripheral developers are motivated to contribute the product quality for their own consumption or demonstrate their adherence to the certain community. Second, software adopters rely on the information from their community, and peripheral developers can act as knowledge sources to help the spread information about OSS product. Thus, the paper argues that compared with core developer, peripheral developers have more contributions to the OSS product quality and diffusion. And these effects are more salient in the product mature stage than in the early stages.
Empirically, the paper collects 1966 monthly observations over 147 products. Because of the nested nature of the research design, the paper uses hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Model1 assesses the variability in diffusion and quality in each level. Model 2 identifies the direct impact of the predictors. And Model 3 tests the cross-level effects at the periodic and product levels. The empirical results showed that peripheral developers’ contribution to product quality assessment is more salient than core developers. And, the peripheral developers’ participation significantly influences product diffusion. Finally, their influences on product quality and diffusion are various across the product life-cycle stages.
Moreover, the paper examined the paradox of peripheral developers’ contribution and found that project size and coordination may moderate the effects of peripheral developers on product quality enhancement. In all, this paper revealed the different roles of developers and differentiated the contributions made by core developers and peripheral developers for OSS projects.
Reminder – Literature Review – 11:59pm tonight by email
This is to remind that a literature review is due by today, 11:59PM. Submit by email to minspang@temple.edu.
Week 08 – Innovation – paper assignment
| Forman and van Zeebroeck (2012) | Ada |
| Forman and van Zeebroeck (2012) | Yae Eun |
| Setia et al. (2012) | JK |
| Setia et al. (2012) | Xue |
| Kleis et al. (2012) | Vicky |
| Huang et al. (2013) | Xinyu |
| Mani et al. (2014) | Aaron |
| Mani et al. (2014) | Yiran |
Triumph of the City
We will begin reading Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser next week. When reading this book, please try to come up with new research ideas on cities, information systems, and business.
Update Syllabus with a new schedule
The syllabus has been updated with a slight change in the schedule.
Week7_Susarla et al. (2010)_Aaron
Firms are increasingly relying on IT outsourcing to improve services quality and to lower in-house IT spending. However, practitioners and academics have seen high rates of failure in IT outsourcing due to holdup problems, which are represented as underinvestment and inefficient bargaining because of contract incompleteness. There is a tension on the understanding of holdup problems. One stream emphasizes the importance of clearly designed contract whereas the other believes that the nature of contract is incomplete.
Drawing on the argument from latter stream, Susarla et al.(2000) argue that contract extensiveness, defined as the extent to which firms and vendors can foresee contingencies when designing contracts for outsourced IT services, can alleviate holdup. Moreover, they argue while extensively detailed contracts are likely to include a greater breadth of activities outsourced to a vendor, task complexity makes it difficult to draft extensive contracts. Furthermore, extensive contracts may still be incomplete with respect to enforcement. They therefore examine the role of non-price contractual provisions, contract duration, and extendibility terms, which give firms an option to extend the contract to limit the likelihood of holdup. Using a unique data set over 100 IT outsourcing contracts, they test and support those arguments in their research model.
As to their contributions, first, they support the argument that contracts are fundamentally incomplete and suggest that non-price provisions play a strategic role in contracts design. Second, to extend the literature of contractual solutions to holdup problems, their findings suggest payoffs from repeated interactions between parties reduces the probability of inefficient bargaining. Last but not least, this study also complements prior analytical work by providing empirical evidence to understand how parties anticipate and design contingencies ex ante that are important to manage potential problems ex-post.
Gopal and Koka 2012_ Yiran
The authors examine the interacting effect of formal contracts and relational governance on vendor profitability and quality in the software outsourcing industry. They focus on the presence of relations flexibility in the exchange relationship, a critical manifestation of relational governance. They hypothesize that 1.relational flexibility provides greater benefits to an exchange partner that faces the greater proportion of risk in a project, induced through the contract; 2. The benefits manifest on the performance dimensions that are of importance to the risk-exposed partner.
The proposed the following model to test their hypothesis. They proposed two sub model: the relational flexibility model and the profitability and quality model. To operationalize the focal variable relational flexibility, they measure it as an observed outcome that represents ex post, extra-contractual aspect of the relationship. They identify five areas, namely payment procedures, warranty and liability conditions, installation and testing procedures, disputes resolution and project management. In terms of the dependent variables, the project profit was measured using the data collected from the company data base for each project. The service quality is measured by a five-item survey.
The author used muli-pronged analytic strategy to test the hypotheses. To solve the problem of the endogenous interacting variables, besides the OLS and 3SLS, they also use the Treatment effect model. All the hypotheses are supported, showing evidence for the argument that asymmetric benefits from relational flexibility to different contracting parties in an outsourcing relationship. The results also indicates that relational flexibility positively affects profitability in only fixed price contracts, where the vendor faces greater risk, while positively affecting quality only in time and materials contracts, where the client is at greater risk.
Week7_Susarla et al. (2010)_Ada
Key Concept:
Hold-up problem: In economics, the hold-up problem is central to the theory of incomplete contracts, and shows the difficulty in writing complete contracts. A hold-up problem arises when two factors are present:
- Parties to a future transaction must make non-contractible relationship-specific investments before the transaction takes place.
- The specific form of the optimal transaction (e.g. quality-level specifications, time of delivery, what quantity of units) cannot be determined with certainty beforehand.[1]
The hold-up problem is a situation where two parties may be able to work most efficiently by cooperating, but refrain from doing so due to concerns that they may give the other party increased bargaining power, and thereby reduce their own profits. The hold-up problem leads to severe economic cost and might also lead to underinvestment.
Motivation:
To improve service quality and to lower information technology cost, firms are fueled to increase their use of IT outsourcing. However, practitioners and academics realized that IT sourcing is fraught with difficulties and high rates of failure. One of the underlying risks comes from the hold-up problem. This paper uses a unique dataset to empirically examine this question.
Main findings:
- Task scope is positively and significantly associated with extensive contracts;
- Task complexity is negatively associated with contract extensive ness;
- Task complexity is negatively associated with long term contracts, which suggests that firms might be wary of the greater threat of inefficient bargaining posed by the vendor in a longer term contract;
- Task scope is positively associated with the presence of extendibility clauses;
- Task complexity is positively associated with extendibility terms in contracts;
- Contract extensiveness is positively associated with duration;
- Contract extensiveness is positively associated with extendibility.
Contributions:
This paper highlights that contracts are fundamentally incomplete and that nonprice provisions play a strategic role in contracts structuring. Drawing on literature that describes contractual solutions to the holdup problem, they argue that parties are motivated by payoffs from repeated interaction to undertake specific investment and to reduce the likelihood of inefficient bargaining.
Week 7_Langer et al. (2014)_Xinyu Li
In this paper, Practical Intelligence (PI), a concept from cognitive psychology as a supplement of academic intelligence, is proposed to be a critical factor for Project Managers (PM) to make their projects successful in software offshore outsourcing. Based on an information processing perspective, the paper posits that the PMs’ PI is positively related to project performance. Meanwhile, it also hypothesize that the PI-performance relationship is positively moderated by project characteristics categorized as project complexity (software size and schedule compression) and team complexity (team size and team dispersion), and negatively moderated by task familiarity (PM-task familiarity and team-task familiarity) and stakeholder familiarity (team member familiarity and PM-client familiarity).
This research adopts a mixed methodology to conduct empirical analyses. It obtains PI data of 209 PMs in a software service company through case studies, combined with dataset from the company’s archive data containing characteristics for each of the PMs and the projects they led. Proposed moderators are derived from the dataset using different analytic tools and models. The dependent variable project performance is measured separately by cost performance and client satisfaction.
The results from an OLS and SUR model verify the main effect of PI on project performance as well as most of the moderating effects. With certain limitation such as a progressive learning bias of PI, the paper contributes to related literature by 1) introducing and conceptualizing PI as an important capability for PMs, 2) identifying the characteristics of project context that moderate the PI effect on project performance, and 3) providing sufficient empirical evidence.
Week7_ Gopal (2012)_Yaeeun Kim
In the vendor-client relationship, how to govern the relation is important, however, the effect depends on the hazard. The study mentions two gaps. First gap is the moderating effect of risk exposure on the benefit of relational governance. According to the prior studies, in the presence of formal contracting, relational governance has a significant impact on the outcomes of economic activities. On the other hand, relational governance provides symmetric benefits to all parties. In a way of understanding the contradicting findings, this study focused on the positive effect of relation on mitigating risk. This suggests that the parties who take larger risks might be more beneficial as a result. Second, the effect of relational governance on enhancing values differed by the dimensions of outsourcing (e.g. quality and profitability). However, it is important to understand that when there is not equivalently expected hazard size, why would the other party would accept the relational governance if the party is not be a beneficent as the other party. Relational governance highlights flexibility in the environment of projects, resulting in more beneficial to immediate project rather than long-run project.
To test hypotheses, 105 projects was collected from a software service frim. The relational governance is inherently required for this area since software service firms outsource, and the relationship between the vendor and developer is important. From the findings, the study shows that relational flexibility positively affects profitability in only fixed price contracts, where the vendor faces greater risk, while positively affecting quality only in time and materials contracts, where the client is at greater risk. Service quality was measured by question items.
Overall, relational governance (relational flexibility) is beneficial for profitability depends on the type of contract. As expected, the effect of relational flexibility on profitability is moderated by FP contracts. However, the effect of T&M contracts was insignificant on the effect of relational flexibility on project profit.
Week 7_Gopal and Koka (2012)_Vicky Xu
The Asymmetric Benefits of Relational Flexibility: Evidence from Software Development Outsourcing
Gopal and Koka (2012) examined how and when relational governance, operationalized as flexibility, provides benefits to exchange partners in the presence of formal contracts. They provided a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between formal and relational governance by contending. Gopal and Koka (2012) presented the conceptual model as the following (Figure 1, p. 559):
Gopal and Koka (2012) tested the hypotheses on a dataset of 105 software development outsourcing projects completed by an Indian software vendor. And they used a multi-pronged analytic strategy to test the hypotheses. The relational flexibility model included OLS, nonlinear 3SLS, and treatment effects. The Profitability and quality models include the interaction model, 3SLS, 2SLS, the non-interacted 2SLS, and the treatment effects.
Gopal and Koka (2012) found strong support for the hypotheses of asymmetric benefits from relational flexibility to different contracting parties in an outsourcing relationship. The findings in this paper highlight the need to establish risk exposure first, and then examine the effects of flexibility on performance contingent on risk exposure. And the findings also highlight the implications of relational governance for the performance dimensions of interest. The findings indicated that the need to incorporate a more nuanced, limited, and contingent view of relational governance and its benefits in extant theory, in contrast to the more expansive view of relational governance that predicts value for all partners to an exchange. What’s more, this paper also makes a methodological contribution.
However, this study has some limitations: (1). The data that from one vendor firm limits generalizability. (2). Dataset is small. (3). The measure of contract type is limited to the two extreme forms of contracts. (4). The measure of quality is perceptual and collected from the vendor. (5). The theoretical arguments used in this paper were based on the observed manifestation of relational governance in the specific exchange.
Week 7_Gopal et al.(2003)_Xue Guo
Contracts in Offshore Software Development: An Empirical Analysis
This paper is motivated by the tremendous growth of the offshore software development and the need to increase viability and profitability of vendor-client relationships. It empirically studies the determinants of contract choice in offshore software development projects and examines the factors that affect the project profits accruing to the software vendor.
The paper examines the adoption of the two prevalent forms of contracting in the software industry—fixed-price contract and time-and-materials contracts. The main risk will be borne by the vendor under a fixed-price contract, and the client under a time-and-material contract. Based on prior theories in contract, this paper presents four possible factors that may affect contract choice: software development risks, client knowledge set, bargaining power and market conditions. Empirically, most of the variables adopt measures from previous literature. In order to assess the reliability of the measurements, the paper uses multiple questionnaire items for one variable. The results show that project-related characteristics such as requirements uncertainty, project team size, and resources shortage significantly explain the contract choice in these cases.
Then the paper studies the efficiency of the contract by examining the effect of the information known during contracting on project profits and add three development factors to improve the fit of the regression analysis. The corresponding results show that vendor does make higher profits from time-and-materials contracts when control for other characteristics of the projects.
The contributions of the paper are that it empirically tests the determinants of contract choice in software industry and addresses the linkage between contract choice and project profits. However, the paper’s limitations are the restricted data set and measurement problem of some variable.
Week 7_Langer et al (2014)_Jung Kwan Kim
Langer, Slaughter, and Mukhopadhyay (2014) examine the impact of practical intelligence (PI) on project performance and the moderating effects of project complexity and familiarity. While the prior studies tend to specify formalized and widely-recognized management skills, knowledge, and experience of project managers, the authors bring up more subtle but dynamic capability, linking to the outcome of project.
Based on the in-depth data analysis on project progress and results in a leading software outsourcing vendor in India, the field study supports the following arguments:
- PM’s PI is positively associated with the increase in both cost performance and client satisfaction.
- The interaction of complexity with PI is significantly positive on the two types of project performance. In other words, when complexity of a project is higher, the impact of PI becomes stronger, leading to better performance.
- The interaction of familiarity with PI is significantly negative on the two types of project performance. That is, a project with low familiarity can harvest more benefits when a PM with high PI manage it.
Indeed, the supported arguments are intuitive and straightforward when we ponder upon the role of PI in a project management. The software outsourcing projects inevitably suffer from various factors that cause uncertainty and potential failure: requirement ambiguity, stakeholder conflicts, cultural misunderstanding, to name a few. PI basically helps a project manager resolve the critical, situational, and contextual problems, a capability that cannot be easily found or trained. A PM with high PI may be able to address the difficult problems, eventually bringing a higher chance of successful project results.
In conclusion, I think this study contributes much to the literature by finding the significant impact, the decent data source, and the parsimonious measure of PI.
Week 07 – Outsourcing – paper assignment
| Gopal et al. (2003) | Yea Eun |
| Gopal et al. (2003) | Xue |
| Susarla et al. (2010) | Aaron |
| Susarla et al. (2010) | Ada |
| Gopal and Koka (2012) | Vicky |
| Gopal and Koka (2012) | Yiran |
| Langer et al. (2014) | JK |
| Langer et al. (2014) | Xinyu |
Week 6_How to become a good teacher?
Discussion topic: How to become a good teacher?
Prof. Pang: I want to talk about teaching. I told you that teaching may not be as important as research in research schools, but it is still very important. I want you to think about your favorite teacher that you’ve met one by one and why that professor in your previous institution was a good teacher.
Student 1: One of my favorite teachers is from my master degree. He teaches data mining. He uses a lot of good examples to let us know how to use the different models; he also did surveys in our class.
Prof. Pang: So it’s like his class is more interactive. He lets you get involved in class.
Student 2: I want to share a story of one of my favorite teachers. He was also an advisor of mine. Beside he is knowledgeable, he is trustable, and he set a good example for us. He helped us solve problems not limited in academic but also in our life. We couldshare our study ideas and experience with him.
Prof. Pang: So he cares about students’ life and personal interests, beyond the classroom.
Student 3: My favorite teacher is from my undergraduate studies. He taught a supply chains analytic course. I think he is good in that he made many good examples to demonstrate some complex models. I took a very impressive course of his at the end of the semester. In that class, we did not have any real material. He told us why supply chain analytic is important pretty much like what you are doing in our seminar. I think at least that course did deeper teaching style than any other courses. Not only the class materials are important but also the philosophy of ideas is important.
Prof. Pang: He must have a very good ability to explain difficult stuff to students especially for undergraduates. That’s would be your job to explain technical or IT stuffs in the IS field to undergraduate students.
Student 4: I’d like to share my favorite teacher. He has a different background. I have some background with a history major during my undergraduate. I kind like the editor of the class. I remember a course named invisible city. He was facing a group of undergraduate. But he never stopped with half of class a break. He used one slice by another; it seems like the knowledge inserted into your body. This motivates me to be a professor. I want to be a professor that is knowledgeable like him.
Prof. Pang: So, I hope that you are going to become professors/teachers like them. Teaching is important. You won’t get tenured for becoming a super fantastic teacher. However, you still have to be a good teacher to survive.
Here is a kind of the criteria in most of the business schools. You have to get at least 4.0 out of 5.0 in your teaching evaluation. 4.2 to 4.3 out of 5.0 is good enough for tenure and a job market.
We are multi-taskers. We have to do many different works such as research, teaching, etc., and as our Dean says, we have to solve optimization problems every day. Here is an optimization problem(just consider research and teaching) to evaluate your value to get a job (or tenure):
Max V(R, T), R+T ≤ 24.
This illustrates that your value (in a job market or tenure) V depends on your Research and Teaching, but you don’t have unlimited time to spend in both. So you have to split your limited time between two. How you do it? It depends on the marginal returns from R and T, which is that the marginal return from R is much higher than from T. Therefore, we have to spend much more time on research to get more publish while spending not too much time on teaching, enough to get 4.2 out of 5.0 (at least 4.0 out of 5.0) in teaching evaluation.
The problem is however, that it is NOT easy to get 4.0! Let us think about an example where 10 students give you 4, 7 students give you 3, and 3 students give you 5. Then, your evaluation is 3.8. It looks like a good evolution but actually is not. You need to have more students who give you 5 than 3. We all know that we don’t go extreme (1 or 5) in filling out surveys. This is why it is not easy to get a good point like 4.0. And it is even more challenging for us, because we are not native speakers. You students won’t like your accent.
The bottom line is it is not easy to become a good teacher. Thus, it is very important to have teaching experience during your doctoral studies and to make efforts to become a good teacher.
There are several useful resources:
http://tlc.temple.edu Teaching and learning center
http://www.fox.temple.edu/cms_research/institutes-and-centers/center-for-innovation-in-teaching-and-learning/ Center for innovation in teaching and learning
http://tlc.temple.edu/teaching-certificates/teaching-higher-education-certificate-teachers-and-professionals Teaching higher education certificate teachers and professionals
Think about how to be a good teacher from now. I think it is a good idea to teach one course in your 3rd year after passing a comprehensive exam and becoming a candidate. I don’t think it is a good idea to teach in the 4th or 5th year, because you have to prepare your job market and dissertation. So the 3rd year is the best time to teach, and you have to prepare for that from now. You can sit in your professors’ class to take some of skills about how to teach, how to manage a class, how to interact with students, etc. Any question about teaching?
A few practical advices. We cannot get 4.0 when we just deliver lectures. My advisor said: “the more you talk in your classroom, the less evaluation you get”. So good teachers make students get involved. In my classroom, I ask a lot of questions. I want my students to talk more. It is more fun for them than to just listen what a teacher talks for the whole one hour or two. Good teachers care about students’ life, career, and interests beyond the classrooms. Good teachers have to have an ability to explain difficult stuffs to students. You have to get such a skill. That’s why I want you to share your favorite teachers because you have to become like them.
Also, there is a misconception that teaching and research are two separate things. I don’t agree with this. So my teaching approach is to use my research in my classroom and to deliver some theoretical perspectives/foundations to students. I think that’s our job as an academically qualified teacher.
Student 3: So if research can benefit our teaching, in what case can teaching benefit our research?
Prof. Pang: I got one of my research ideas from my class, which was about how to make balance between new IT development and IT maintenance. You can get research ideas from teaching. Teaching helps you keep the idea fresh.
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