Research

[1] Fišar, M., Greiner, B., Huber, C., Katok. E., Ozkes, A., and the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration (2024), Reproducibility in Management Science. Management Science 70(3): 1343-1356. 

Note: Authorship as a member of a consortium (peer-reviewed) 

[2] Yoon, S. & Leung, M.D., [title omitted for peer-review] Revise & Resubmit at Organization Science (Org Sci)

• Presented at Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (2025), People & Organization (2024),  East Coast Doctoral Conference (2023), Medici summer school (2023), AOM Annual Meeting (2022)

This paper explores how a gig worker’s reputation functions as an antecedent to category-spanning decisions, shaping whether and how individuals pursue work across diverse job categories.

[3] Yoon, S. & Leung, M.D., [title omitted for peer-review] Reject & Resubmit at Organization Science (Org Sci)

• Presented at AOM Annual Meeting (2025), European Group for Organizational Studies (2025), All Aboard the Entrepreneurship Conference (2025), Columbia University (Re)Production of Inequality in Evaluations Conference (2025)

This paper introduces the concept of a “glass trap” to show how women in the gig economy are confined to undervalued roles and penalized for non-linear careers. 

[4] Kim, S., Lee, H., Yoon, S., & Pak, Y.,  [title omitted for peer-review]  Reject & Resubmit at Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ)

• Presented at PROS (2024)

This paper explores how organizations remobilize innovative ideas amid cascading crises like COVID-19.

[5] Yoon, S. "Beyond Financial Capital: Employee Retention Challenges in Women-Led Ventures " (Drafting Manuscript)

• Job Market Paper

• Presented at People & Organization (2025), Academy of Management Annual Meeting (2025), European Group for Organizational Studies (2025)

This paper examines how founder gender shapes employee retention in entrepreneurial ventures. While entrepreneurship is often seen as a way for women to bypass workplace inequality, women-led startups face distinct challenges in sustaining their workforce. Drawing on a dataset of over 55,000 U.S. startups founded between 2000 and 2023, I find that ventures led by women experience higher levels of employee turnover than those led by men. These disparities stem from gendered perceptions of founder legitimacy that undermine women’s ability to build and maintain stable teams. Post-hoc analysis shows that elevated turnover has significant downstream consequences for venture outcomes, such as lowering the likelihood of IPO exits. By shifting attention from financial capital constraints to the human capital dimension of retention, this study highlights how gendered dynamics in organizational practices reproduce inequality and create enduring disadvantages for female founders. 

[6] Lee, H., Kim, S., Yoon, S., & Pak, Y. "An Inevitable Failure of “Infallible Entrepreneurship” for North Korean Refugees." (Analyzing Data)

• Presented at Academy of Management Annual Meeting (2024, 2023, 2020), European Group for Organizational Studies (2024, 2020)

This study examines the complex entanglement between refugee entrepreneurship and host-country social entrepreneurship by analyzing the sudden collapse of a prominent South Korean training program for North Korean refugees. 

[7] Yoon, S., Leung, M., Bellavitis, C., & Park, U. D., "Visibility vs. Credibility: Evaluation Differences for Generalists across Multiple Hiring Stages." (Manuscript under preparation for Strategic Management Journal)

• Nominated for the 2025 Strategic Management Society Annual Conference Best PhD Paper Prize

• Presented at Strategic Management Society Annual Conference (2025, scheduled), Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (2025), People & Organization (2024), Academy of  Management Annual Meeting (2024), East Coast Doctoral Conference (2024)

Scholars in organizational studies have long explored how career specialization impacts labor market outcomes, noting that generalists often face disadvantages. However, the specific stage of the hiring process where this penalty occurs remains unclear. This study examines the relationship between career specialization and labor market outcomes, focusing on the stages at which generalists face disadvantages in the hiring process. Using data from an online networking platform (2016-2020) involving 1,554 high-tech organizations and 8,899 candidates, we find that generalists are more likely to be initially selected but less likely to receive job offers at the evaluation stage. Our research clarifies mechanisms in social category theory and explores the modern hiring process, particularly outbound recruiting, highlighting the influence of online platforms on career outcomes.

[8] Yoon, S. "Venture Capital and Talent Acquisition Strategy: Unpacking the Shift from Generalists to Specialists in Startup Hiring for Innovation" (Drafting Manuscript)

• Presented at Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (2025)

The tension between specialization and generalization has long shaped debates in organizational theory, yet little is known about how startups manage this trade-off as they evolve. This paper investigates how hiring strategies shift across venture capital (VC) funding stages, drawing on a novel dataset that combines employee-level records from Revelio Labs, startup profiles from Crunchbase, and financing data from PitchBook for over 87,000 early-stage U.S. startups from 2005 to 2023. I develop a theory linking VC financing stages to human capital strategies, showing that startups initially favor generalists for their flexibility, but increasingly prioritize specialists as operational complexity grows. Importantly, this shift is stratified across organizational levels: early-stage startups hire generalists into lower-level roles and specialists into leadership, while later-stage startups reverse this pattern—deploying generalists in integrative leadership roles and specialists in technical functions. By unpacking how funding stages and role levels jointly shape the generalist–specialist balance, this study advances our understanding of how entrepreneurial firms adapt human capital strategies in response to growth pressures. 

[9] Yoon, S. & Joseph, J.,"Centralization, Screening Adjustment, and Idea Evaluation: Evidence from Online User Communities" (Manuscript under preparation for Strategic Management Journal)

• Presented at Wharton Innovation Doctoral Symposium (2024), Strategic Management Society Annual Conference (2023), Academy of Management Annual Meeting (2023, 2022)

Well established is the idea that organizational structure plays an important role in the evaluation of new ideas. However, prior studies in the organization design and user community literature have offered contrasting findings. In this study of online user communities, we theorize and examine the extent to which a centralized decision-making structure increases the recognition of new ideas for their quality. Our primary thesis is that it does so because the vertical hierarchy influences what we call screening adjustments—behavioral changes to the evaluation of ideas which increase the likelihood of their acceptance. In extending this work, we suggest that this relationship between centralized decision-making structure, screening adjustments, and evaluation behavior is conditioned by idea creators’ reputation and community engagement. We also examine whether creator or community screening adjustments have a bigger impact. We test our hypotheses in online workshop communities on a platform referred to as Steam, one of the largest digital distribution platforms for video games. Using a coarsened exact matching approach, we compare communities with and without a game developer to make the final decisions on what ideas or “mods” to accept for a game. Our study contributes to theories of organization design, information processing, and the literature on online user innovation.

[10] Daviss, D., Leung, M.,& Yoon, S. "An Uphill Battle: Contextual Category Learning and the Persistence of Gender Bias in Hiring" (Manuscript under preparation for Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ))

While prior research shows that employers update beliefs about individual workers based on performance, evidence is mixed on whether these experiences generalize to social categories. We propose contextual category learning as a theoretical explanation: employers are more likely to revise beliefs about a social group when their experiences involve individuals who are stereotypically incongruent with the job context. Using longitudinal data from two online labor platforms and employer fixed effects models, we find that employers grow more favorable toward women after positive experiences with female workers—and similarly for men. Crucially, belief updates are stronger when the worker’s gender defies the job’s gender-typing (e.g., men in feminine-typed jobs, women in masculine-typed jobs). These findings shed light on the conditions under which gender biases may be reinforced or disrupted in platform-based labor markets.