Gina Dokko
Faculty Profile

Gina Dokko
Associate Professor

Management and Organizations Ph.D., Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Research Expertise: Organizational theory, organizational behavior, social networks, job mobility, technology and innovation

Associate Professor Gina Dokko’s research focuses on organizational theory and behavior, careers, 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. She studies 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 has published in the journals Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Studies and Research Policy. She has presented her research internationally at the Academy of Management Meetings; the Strategic Management Society Meetings; the Wharton Organizational Behavior Conference; the Organization Science Winter Conference; the Israel Strategy Conference; and the European Group on Organization Studies.

Before starting her doctoral studies Dokko worked in strategy and marketing at American Express and 3M.

Dokko received her Ph.D. in management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a M.S. in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University and earned a B.S. in economics, also from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a former assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Research

Learning to Let Go: Social Influence, Learning, and the Abandonment of Corporate Venture Capital Practices
Strategic Management Journal, 2016

Gina Dokko

When do firms shut down practices? Prior research has shown that firms learn from the actions of other firms, both adopting and abandoning practices when their peers do. But unlike adoption decisions, abandonment decisions need to account for firms’ own experiences with the practice. We study the abandonment of corporate venture capital (CVC) practices in the U.S. IT industry, which has experienced waves of adoption and abandonment. We find that firms that make more CVC investments are less likely to abandon the practice, and are less likely to learn vicariously from other firms’ abandonment decisions, such that they are less likely to exit CVC when other firms do. Staffing choices also matter: hiring former venture capitalists makes firms less likely to abandon CVC practices, while hiring internally makes abandonment more likely. Plus, staffing choices affect how firms learn from the environment, as CVC managers pay attention to and learn more from the actions of firms that match their work backgrounds; i.e., firms that staff CVC units with former venture capitalists are more likely to follow exit decisions of VC firms, while those that staff with internal hires are more likely to follow their industry peers. Our results suggest that firms wanting to retain CVC practices should think carefully about the implementation choices they make, as they may be inadvertently sowing seeds of abandonment.

Research

One of Us or One of My Friends: How Social Identity and Tie Strength Shape the Creative Generativity of Boundary-Spanning Ties
Organization Studies, 2014

Gina Dokko

Social ties to colleagues on other work teams can spur creative ideas and workplace innovation by exposing an individual to diverse knowledge. However, for external knowledge to be recombined into innovation, the knowledge must first be recognized as potentially valuable. Going beyond traditional structural explanations, we predict that the use of diverse knowledge to generate creative ideas and solutions will depend in part on employees’ psychological attachment to the organizational groups to which they belong, i.e., their social identity, and the strength of their social ties. We test our hypotheses in an R&D division of a global high-technology firm, finding that social identity influences the creative generativity of boundary-spanning ties. Specifically, stronger team identity renders interactions with colleagues on other work teams less generative of creative ideas, while identification with an overarching, superordinate group (e.g., a division) enhances creative generativity. We also hypothesize and find that tie strength attenuates the negative effect of team identity.

Research

Venturing Into New Territory: Career Experiences of Corporate Venture Capital Managers and Practice Variation
Academy of Management Journal, 2012

Gina Dokko

When organizations adopt new practices, the practices are often modified to fit the new context. We argue that managers who implement new practices modify them, and that the extent of practice variation is determined by two types of these managers’ career experience: experience with the practice itself and experience that enables assessment of the fit between the practice and the adopting firm. We test these arguments by observing information technology firms’ modification of venture capital practices in corporate venture capital units. This study contributes to diffusion research by developing and testing a framework for understanding the role of individuals in practice variation.

Research

Keeping Steady as She Goes: A Negotiated Order Perspective on Technological Change
Organization Studies, 2012

Gina Dokko

A central idea in the theory of technology cycles is that social and political mechanisms are most important during the selection of a dominant design, and that eras of incremental change are socially uninteresting periods in which innovation is driven by technological momentum and elaboration of the dominant design. In this essay, we overturn the ontological assumption that social order is inherently stable, drawing on Anselm Strauss’s concept of negotiated order to analyze the persistence of a dominant design as a social accomplishment: an outcome of ongoing processes that reinforce or challenge a socially negotiated order. Thus, we shift focus from battles over standards to periods of normal innovation. We extend the technology cycles model to explain social dynamics in periods of incremental change, and to make predictions specifying how contextual conditions in standards-setting organizations affect social interaction, leading to reinforcement or challenge to a socio-technical order.

Blog

Hiring for Experience?
Skills Are Not the Whole Answer

Gina Dokko Gina Dokko
Gina Dokko is an assistant professor of management. Her research focuses on organizational theory and behavior, social networks,

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.

News Release

Venture capital managers affect firms’ success, UC Davis study finds

Gina Dokko UC Davis News

Corporate venture capital investment strategies, goals and outcomes vary greatly depending on the background of the investment manager, a new University of California, Davis, study shows.

In an analysis of the corporate venture capital units of 93 U.S.-based information technology firms, UC Davis researchers found that if managers had private venture capital backgrounds, they tended to invest in start-ups with high-growth prospects — and had less regard for the start-ups’ technological or strategic “fit” with the corporate parent.

New Territory
Strategies of Corporate Venture Capital Managers Vary Greatly

Gina Dokko

Faculty Focus • by Robert Preer

Starting in the 1990s, many large U.S. companies started setting up in-house investment units to gain a stake in promising start-ups, which have the potential not only to make money but also to give the larger corporation access to important new technologies, patents and intellectual property.

By 2001, more than 300 U.S. firms had established corporate venture capital units. The corporate share of venture capital rose from 2 percent in 1994 to 17 percent in 2000 at its peak, with a total of $100 billion invested in venture capital. In the years 2002 to 2006, the share leveled off at 6 to 8 percent.

Award

Gina Dokko Awards

Gina Dokko
Research

Social Capital for Hire? Mobility of Technical Professionals and Firm Influence in Wireless Standards Committees
Organization Science, 2010

Gina Dokko

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.

Research

Unpacking Prior Experience: How Career History Affects Job Performance
Organization Science, 2009

Gina Dokko

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.

Award

Gina Dokko Awards

Gina Dokko