Andrew Schnackenberg
Each week, Daniels is featuring a researcher who conducts meaningful research that impacts their field and the wider community. Learn more about their work in Q&As with the Daniels Research team and email them to nominate yourself or a colleague for a future Q&A.
Andrew Schnackenberg is a strategic management professor at Daniels, with a PhD from Case Western Reserve University. Before joining Daniels, he taught at American University’s Kogod School of Business. His research focuses on transparency in organizations, exploring how it’s understood and communicated to foster positive stakeholder relationships and social change. Drawing on theories like stakeholder and institutional theory, Schnackenberg employs both qualitative and quantitative methods, including content analysis and set-theoretic approaches. His work is published in top journals, including the Journal of Management and Academy of Management Annals. He also serves on the editorial review board of the Academy of Management Review.
What have you studied over the course of your career?
I study behavioral and non-market strategies, which are aspects of organizational strategy that are not related directly to financial returns. My work explores how companies navigate relationships, political challenges, and broader societal impacts, rather than solely concentrating on profits. I used to work in private equity and came to realize over time that we were far more often trying to overcome the human challenges – who had the most say in the room, what was their perspective, how often did others dissent, etc. – than the technical or analytical challenges that came with running numbers and looking at the net value of the investments themselves.
That led me to my PhD in Organizational Psychology. Specifically, I wanted to unpack the complex issues related to transparency. I came to find over the course of my career that making information transparent is actually more difficult and complicated than it sounds. A lawyer may think they’re being transparent when they send their client ten pages of disclosures, but all of the legalese in those documents renders the information really non-transparent to the non-lawyer. So during my PhD I tried to understand what the dimensions of transparency are, how transparency gets enacted in organizations, and what the positive and negative outcomes of transparency are.
Can you talk about how internal governance/organizational behavior has become more of a hot topic?
Stakeholder theory is not an ancient theory; it’s only been around a couple of decades. Twenty-five or thirty-five years ago, if you would have gone to a business school and said that businesses should probably be paying attention to their stakeholders and not just their shareholders, and that business ethics should be a course taught in the MBA curriculum, you would have been laughed out of the room.
Daniels spearheaded this change in content to include ethics, and we should be really proud to be a part of that. Theories have coalesced around more of a stakeholder mindset now. Even leadership theory, which used to be all about charismatic or transformational leadership that was bottom-line oriented, is coming around more to servant leadership, authentic leadership, ethical leadership. These moral approaches have taken more of a front stage recently.
What have you been studying recently?
I’m looking at the opposite side of the transparency spectrum, what’s called the transparency paradox. This is the idea that there is a turning point from where transparency can be really beneficial to organizations to where if you are too transparent, it can actually harm the organization and benefit your competitors or other stakeholders. So what does that balance look like?
How do you bring your research into the classroom?
These ideas of transparency and trust are generally misunderstood, so my students and I talk in-depth about them. You can walk into a board room and ask the C-suite what they think trust is and most of them will look at you puzzled. They don’t have a firm idea of what it is, and generally don’t think it’s worth their time to understand. The same deal with transparency, and I go through these exercises with my students to show them that it isn’t as clear as they might assume. These talks usually lead to pretty rich conversations.