Venue: 723, Building A, School of Management, Zijingang Campus
Speaker: Liao Zhenyu, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University
Abstract: This paper proposes that speakers of languages with strong honorific rules are more deferential to existing ideas and are less likely to initiate new ideas. Some languages require systemic grammatical encodings of social status (i.e., honorific rules) to express deference to the addresses or referents (e.g., Japanese, Korean), while others do not (e.g., English, Hebrew). We suggest that languages with strong honorific rules induce speakers to defer to existing ideas, thereby restraining them from engaging in new ideas. To empirically test this proposition, we first analyzed responses of more than 140 thousand individuals who spoke 166 distinct languages in the World Values Survey, finding that speakers of strong honorific languages were less likely to engage in new ideas. We then conducted a venture idea generation experiment with Korean speakers and found that using the same language, participants who adopted honorific expressions, as compared with those who adopted non-honorific expressions, were less likely to take initiatives to propose new venture ideas. This decreased the degree of novelty and business value of new venture ideas generated by them. Our findings cast light on how linguistic rules shape our social interactions and knowledge production.
Speaker's Profile: Zhenyu Liao is the Joseph G. Riesman Assistant Professor and Thomas E. Moore Fellow at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University. He earned his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore and completed his post-doctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies leadership, ethics, inequality, and entrepreneurship. He serves on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Applied Psychology and has reviewed for many other leading management journals.