Barbara Zepp Larson
Barbara Zepp Larson is a doctoral candidate in the D.B.A. in Management program at Harvard Business School. She received her M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and her B.A. from the University of Virginia. Barbara's research examines the processes, mechanisms and institutions that influence the effectiveness of organizational interactions between societal sectors (business, government and civil society.) Much of this research is situated in empirical contexts related to sustainable business practices.
Prior to joining the doctoral program at HBS, Barbara worked for 15 years in a variety of international finance and operations roles, most recently as Director of International Finance at R.R. Donnelley (NYSE:RRD). She has extensive work experience in Latin America, East Asia and Europe, and has lived in Mexico City, as well as Beijing and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Barbara speaks fluent Spanish, and elementary French and Mandarin Chinese. She lives in London, UK.
Interest Area: Management
Published Papers
Siegel, Jordan I., and Barbara Zepp Larson. Labor Market Institutions and Global Strategic Adaptation: Evidence from Lincoln Electric." Management Science 55, no. 7 (September 2009): 1527-1546. (Abstract: Although one of the central questions in the global strategy field is how multinational firms successfully navigate multiple and often conflicting institutional environments, we know relatively little about the effect of conflicting labor market institutions on multinational firms' strategic choice and operating performance. With its decision to invest in manufacturing operations in nearly every one of the world's largest welding markets, Lincoln Electric offers us a quasi-experiment. We find that Lincoln Electric performed significantly better in countries with labor laws and regulations supporting manufacturers' interests and in countries that allowed the free use of both piecework and a discretionary bonus. Furthermore, we find that in countries with labor market institutions unfriendly to manufacturers, Lincoln Electric was still able to overcome most (although not all) of the institutional distance by what we term flexible intermediate adaptation.)
HBS Course Materials
Chu, Michael, and Barbara Zepp Larson. "ACCION in Nigeria." Harvard Business School Case 305-079.
Chu, Michael, and Barbara Zepp Larson. "JA Worldwide: Managing Change in a Multi-governed Environment." Harvard Business School Case 306-025.
Chu, Michael, and Barbara Zepp Larson. "Pegasus Capital: The Musimundo Decision." Harvard Business School Case 305-093.
Research Summaries
Overview
My research examines the processes, mechanisms and institutions that influence the effectiveness of organizational interactions between societal sectors (business, government and civil society). My work is motivated by the belief that more study of what makes these cross-sector interactions work can not only contribute to several bodies of management research, but can also help to unlock further value in the practical implementation of these interactions.
Much of my research is situated in the empirical context of markets that are grappling with the business implications of environmental sustainability. As sustainability of environmental resources increasingly becomes an issue of business strategy - as opposed to corporate social responsibility - firms will be increasingly challenged to interact effectively and productively with the government bodies that govern the use of these resources and the social movement organizations with decades of expertise in the issues surrounding these resources. The ability to engage productively across sector boundaries is already a means of competitive differentiation and increased value capture for a private firm; this strategic lever becomes even more critical in the context of sustainability.
Strategic participation of social movement organizations
Social movements and related social movement organizations (SMOs) play an important role in the formation of new industries and market niches, as well as the emergence of new organizational forms. I argue that as SMOs become more sophisticated and professionalized, and the boundary between social movements and the businesses they seek to influence becomes increasingly blurred, there is a level of strategic decision-making in SMOs that is not adequately accounted for in existing social movement theory. I use quantitative and qualitative data to examine the strategic trade-offs made by thirteen SMOs in their efforts to influence two US Department of Agriculture meat labels.
I show that the SMO actively seeks to position its activities relative to others in its issue field and relative to others (possibly cross-movement) that are interested in the same campaign. The aim of the SMO's positioning work is two-fold: like for-profit firms, SMOs seek to differentiate themselves in the eyes of supporters. However, SMOs also seek to complement the work of other SMOs, in order to maximize the overall impact of a campaign. Thus, the SMO is different from the for-profit firm in having the simultaneous (and potentially conflicting) goals of strategic differentiation and complementation.
I am also developing a second, theory-only paper in this work stream, which broadens the SMO strategic decision-making framework to show the larger relationship between inputs and outputs, as well as the different type of resource investments made by SMOs, and their respective returns on investment.
The role of the manager in cross-sector interactions
My second stream of research takes the individual manager as the unit of analysis in examining cross-sector interactions. Two papers explore processes and mechanisms that allow managers to cross sectoral boundaries more effectively.
The first paper utilizes a unique dataset of individual-level communications between 43 large companies and a consultant for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding a very simple energy-saving innovation, to analyze some of the less-understood determinants of innovation adoption at the level of the individual manager. Results indicate that adoption of the EPA's monitor power management innovation was predicted by the involvement of managers from two functional roles, but in a particular order - the communications department as the first contact and the environmental/energy function as the last contact. This suggests that two key skills required of boundary spanners (internal/external network star and ability to muster organizational resources) may be split between two managers.
In a second project (with Amy Edmondson), I study the interactions between government and business in the context of sustainable urban development efforts in the United Kingdom. One of the most common examples of cross-sector boundary crossing occurs with the creation of a partnership between the public and private sectors, often known as a public-private partnership (PPP). Our aim in this paper is to extend the existing theory of PPPs to more fully account for the underlying factors that enhance managers' ability to cognitively access the partnership and work more effectively across the societal boundary.
Institutional influences on the firm: cross-country comparisons
A third stream of work examines the influence of country institutions on firms in a cross-country comparative context. In a paper co-authored with Jordan Siegel (published in Management Science in 2009), we employed a quasi-natural experiment: a representative multinational entering almost all large markets regardless of institutional difference, and relying on incentive pay-for-performance as a source of competitive advantage. With a comprehensive empirical assessment of distance factors from a range of institutional dimensions, we found that labor market distance was crucial to performance, but that the multinational was able to systematically overcome more than 75 percent of this distance through a creative form of adaptation (mixing and matching intermediate-level subsets of their practices to both maintain consistency with local institutions while delivering competitive advantage).
In a new cross-country comparative project, I examine the relationship between governance institutions and private-sector participation in multi-stakeholder initiatives. I have developed contacts with leaders of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)'s Market Transformation Initiative, a global group within WWF that works to transform key agricultural commodity markets using a unique business-focused multi-stakeholder model of market transformation. I am currently designing a study that will analyze the private-sector participation in WWF's multi-stakeholder councils and boards worldwide, relative to facilitating and inhibiting institutions in each country. I focus not only on formal institutions (laws, government bodies), but also on informal institutions (local practices, enforcement of laws, informal power structures), which is critical in the developing markets that make up these important agricultural markets. This study seeks to add not only to the work on cross-country comparisons of institutions, but also to the body of work connecting local sustainability issues in agriculture to the supply chains of some of the world's largest corporations.
