Gina Dokko
Assistant Professor of Management
Research Expertise: Organizational theory, organizational behavior, social networks, job mobility, technology and innovation
Assistant Professor Gina Dokko’s research focuses on organizational theory and behavior, social networks, and technology and innovation. Recently she’s been examining the consequences of job mobility, especially in light of today’s high unemployment rates. “As employment relationships become increasingly fluid, we need to understand what individuals carry with them as they join and leave organizations,” she said. “I think about how portable experience is, and how peoples’ job mobility and career histories enable and constrain learning, innovation, performance and social capital for both themselves and their employers.” For example, although firms hire people based on related experience, Dokko’s research finds that having a diverse career helps an employee’s innovative performance.
Dokko’s current projects include an investigation of how corporate venture capital managers’ work backgrounds affect investment strategies in the IT sector, and how the range of jobs an entrepreneur has had affects their ability to secure venture capital funding as well as the performance of their ventures.
Dokko received her Ph.D. in management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a master’s in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University and earned a bachelor of science in economics, also from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a former assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Dokko has published in the journals Organization Science, Research Policy and the Best Papers Proceedings of the Academy of Management. She has presented her research several times at the Academy of Management Meetings; the Wharton Organizational Behavior Conference; Teachers College, Columbia University; the Israel Strategy Conference in Tel Aviv; McGill-Cornell Conference on Institutions and Entrepreneurship in Montreal; and the 25th DRUID Celebration Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2006 she received a Berkeley-Kauffman Research Grant.
Before starting her doctoral studies Dokko worked in strategy and marketing at American Express and 3M.
Room 3211
Hiring for Experience?
Skills are not the Whole Answer
When firms decide to branch out into a new area of business, they might feel the need to hire new employees from outside the organization as most hiring managers assume that the best candidates are those who have performed the exact role before. The reasons for that are perfectly sensible—they want an identical skill set so the new hire will hit the ground running.
Gina Dokko Awards
Help for Disabled Vets
Community Consulting Group Provides Road Map for The Pathway Home
by Professor Paul Griffin
Nestled among the world-renowned vineyards of the Napa Valley is The Pathway Home, an innovative therapeutic community for U.S. soldiers returning from the frontlines of Afghanistan and Iraq who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI).
201A The Individual & Group Dynamics
Examines basic psychological and social psychological processes shaping human behavior and applies knowledge of these processes to the practice of working with and managing others in organizations. Topics include motivation, job design, commitment, socialization, culture, individual and group decision making, and team building.
Social Capital for Hire? Mobility of Technical Professionals and Firm Influence in Wireless Standards Committees
Organization Science, 2010
The movement of personnel between firms has been shown to have important implications for firms, yet there has been little direct investigation of the underlying mechanisms. In this study, Assistant Professor Gina Dokko and co-author Lori Rosenkopf from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, propose that in addition to their human capital, mobile individuals carry social capital, affecting the outcomes of the firms they join and leave by altering the patterns of interaction between firms.
Negotiation Unlocks Potential for Technological Change
Assistant Professor Gina Dokko, who joined the School’s faculty in July, spent the summer presenting her latest research in the U.S. and Europe, traveling to the 25th EGOS Colloquium in Barcelona, Spain, and the Academy of Management conference in August in Chicago.
Unpacking Prior Experience: How Career History Affects Job Performance
Organization Science, 2009
As individuals change jobs more frequently, it is increasingly important to understand what they carry from their prior work experience that affects their performance in a new organizational context. So far, explanations about the imperfect portability of experience have primarily been about firm specificity of knowledge and skill. In this study, Assistant Professor Gina Dokko and co-authors Steffanie L. Wilk from Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University and Nancy P. Rothbard from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania draw on psychological theory to propose additional sociocognitive factors that interfere with the transfer of knowledge and skill acquired from prior related work experience.