Peter Cappelli

• Liat Eldor and Peter Cappelli (2021), Agency Workers Hurt Performance, Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming (). Abstract

  The use of agency temps in the workplace has been the subject of considerable research interest, much of it focused on the effects that using temps have on the job attitudes of regular employees. We advance this stream of research by examining the effects of using agency temps on business performance. We find first that, when otherwise identical workplaces make greater use of temporary help provided by agencies, the identification of the employee or “regular” workforce with their workplace declines because the perceived status of the workplace declines. This, in turn, leads to lower store-level service quality and sales. This effect is independent of the notion suggested in earlier studies that temp workers threaten the job security and opportunities for advancement of regular employees. Finally, we find that these negative effects can be mitigated by workplace-level strategies associated with shared instrumental values and social integration practices. We examine these relationships using a range of employee- and store-level data sources over time from a retail chain.

• Peter Cappelli and Liat Eldor, “Contracting, Engagement, and the ‘Gig’ Economy”. In Research Agenda for Employee Engagement in a Changing World, edited by Ben Schneider and John Meyer. (London: Edward Elgar, 2021)
• Peter Cappelli and Martin Conyon (2020), A Social Exchange and the Effects of Employee Stock Options, ILR Review.
• Peter Cappelli (2020), Stop Over-Engineering People Management, Harvard Business Review.
• Peter Cappelli and Tracy Anderson (Under Review), Management Without Managers.
• Peter Cappelli and Shinjae Won (Working), How you Pay Determines How You Do: The Effects of Financial Aid on Student Performance.
• Peter Cappelli (Under Review), Contracting-Lite: The Conflict between Contracting and Employment Practices and the Implications for Theory.
• Peter Cappelli, Liat Eldor, Mical Hodor (Under Review), Never Too Much? The Nonlinear Effect of Psychological Safety on Professional service and Productivity at the Organization level.
• Prasanna Tambe, Peter Cappelli, Valery Yakubovich (2020), Artificial Intelligence in Human Resources: Challenges and a Path Forward, California Management Review. Abstract

  There is a substantial gap between the promise and reality of artificial intelligence in human resource (HR) management. This article identifies four challenges in using data science techniques for HR tasks: complexity of HR phenomena, constraints imposed by small data sets, accountability questions associated with fairness and other ethical and legal constraints, and possible adverse employee reactions to management decisions via data-based algorithms. It then proposes practical responses to these challenges based on three overlapping principles—causal reasoning, randomization and experiments, and employee contribution—that would be both economically efficient and socially appropriate for using data science in the management of employees.

  Web of Science Top-Ten most cited articles published in 2020.

• Rocio Bonet, Peter Cappelli, Monika Hamori (2019), The Advancement of Women in Executive Careers, Strategic Management Journal.
• All Research from Peter Cappelli »

Past Courses

• LGST8060 - Negotiations

  This course examines the art and science of negotiation, with additional emphasis on conflict resolution. Students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one-issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills. Cross-listed with MGMT 6910/OIDD 6910/LGST 8060. Format: Lecture, class discussion, simulation/role play, and video demonstrations. Materials: Textbook and course pack.

• MGMT2480 - How To Be the Boss

  Despite the press accounts about the "gig" economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that about 92 percent of the people working in the US are employees who are supervised by someone. That figure has remained roughly the same for decades. The term "supervisor" is sometimes used for the first-level of supervision in an organization, but in fact that role - and indeed the title ? goes all the way up to the very top of any employer organization. Even CEO's are the supervisor of their direct reports. When people talk about their "boss," they almost always are referring to the person who supervises them. Stepping into a supervisor position is challenging, exceptionally so the first time. Thattime comes relatively soon for Wharton grads. Undergrads pursuing consulting jobs typically find themselves supervising new hires by their third year, those working for corporations find themselves in those roles even sooner. Roughly three-quarters of our MBA students report that they had been required to supervise subordinates after college and before arriving here. In this class, we examine the role of the supervisor and the unique tasks associated with performing that role. We pay special attention to the unique challenges of taking on that role for the first time.

• MGMT3980 - Managing and Motivating

  People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult, asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-winning authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change the your organization's architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization. This course can also only be applied towards unrestricted electives at the undergraduate level.

• MGMT6110 - Managing Est Enterprise

  This course is about managing large enterprises that face the strategic challenge of being the incumbent in the market and the organizational challenge of needing to balance the forces of inertia and change. The firms of interest in this course tend to operate in a wide range of markets and segments, frequently on a global basis, and need to constantly deploy their resources to fend off challenges from new entrants and technologies that threaten their established positions. The class is organized around three distinct but related topics that managers of established firms must consider: strategy, human and social capital, and global strategy.

• MGMT6120 - Managing Emerg Entrprse

  This course is about managing during the early stages of an enterprise, when the firm faces the strategic challenge of being a new entrant in the market and the organizational challenge of needing to scale rapidly. The enterprises of interest in this course have moved past the purely entrepreneurial phase and need to systematically formalize strategies and organizational processes to reach maturity and stability, but they still lack the resources of a mature firm. The class is organized around three distinct but related topics that managers of emerging firms must consider: strategy, human and social capital, and global strategy.

• MGMT6130 - Manag Estab Enterprise

• MGMT6910 - Negotiations

  This course examines the art and science of negotiation, with additional emphasis on conflict resolution. Students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one-issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills. Cross-listed with MGMT 6910/OIDD 6910/LGST 8060. Format: Lecture, class discussion, simulation/role play, and video demonstrations. Materials: Textbook and course pack.

• MGMT7480 - How To Be the Boss

  Despite the press accounts about the "gig" economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that about 92 percent of the people working in the US are employees who are supervised by someone. That figure has remained roughly the same for decades. The term "supervisor" is sometimes used for the first-level of supervision in an organization, but in fact that role - and indeed the title - goes all the way up to the very top of any employer organization. Even CEO's are the supervisor of their direct reports. When people talk about their "boss," they are almost always referring to the person who supervises them. Supervisors are the central actors in accomplishing work tasks, especially in projects where they also have autonomy over what is done and how it is done. They have an extraordinary amount of power and influence over their direct reports and considerable responsibility toward them. There is considerable truth to the aphorism that people quit bosses, not organizations, as employee dissatisfaction with supervisors rates as one of the leading causes of turnover. There is little doubt that a bad boss can make the life of a subordinate miserable, while a good boss can do the opposite, i.e. improving job design to make work more motivating, providing support during difficult periods of learning new tasks and facing performance pressures, helping chart a career path, and mentoring in organizational realities. Being a supervisor is not the same as leading a team of peers. Supervisors have formal authority over subordinates that we never have with peers. Supervisors also have decisions they cannot delegate, and are personally accountable for them. Stepping into a supervisor position is challenging, especially so when it comes with a promotion in the same organization having to manage direct reports who were peers. In this class, we examine the role of the supervisor and the unique tasks associated with performing that role.

• MGMT7980 - Managing and Motivating

  People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult, asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-winning authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change the your organization's architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization. This course can also only be applied towards unrestricted electives at the undergraduate level.

• MGMT8160 - Bldg. Hum Assets

  The success of entrepreneurial endeavors depends, even more so than in larger more bureaucratic organizations, on the ability to locate and manage talent effectively. Specifically, on the need to find the right people and keep them engaged in working on the organization's goals. We focus in this course on leading, building, and maintaining human assets in start-up and small, growing operations. The course is designed with several key components, these are: conceptual and practical readings relevant to the topic; case studies illustratng key concepts and issues; lecture on practical application and examples; and lastly every class will also feature a presentation by and conversation with an outside expert whose work is relevant to guiding or advising start-ups and fast-growing small firms. We will focus on the following objectives: identifying the talent needed to initiate and sustain an entrepreneurial endeavor; structuring human resource policies and corporate culture to prepare for and facilitate firm growth; assessing the human aspects of valuing entrepreneurial companies; and responding to conflict and organizational threats within nascent firms. This course will apply recent research from strategic human resource management, personnel economics and organizational behavior to the practical issues of building and managing human assets in new ventures.

• MGMT8920 - Adv Study-Organ Effect

  Business success is increasingly driven by a firm's ability to create and capture value through innovation. Thus, the processes used by firms to develop innovations, the choices they make regarding how to commercialize their innovations, the changes they make to their business models to adapt to the dynamic environment, and the strategies they use to position and build a dominate competitive position are important issues facing firms. In MGMT. 892, you will learn to address these issues through an action learning approach. MGMT. 892 is a 1.0-credit course conducted in the spirit of an independent study. By working on consulting projects for leading global companies, you will develop and then apply your knowledge about innovation management and help these firms better understand the challenges and opportunities posed by emerging technologies and markets.

• MGMT9200 - Sem in Hum Res Research

  The class is organized around understanding labor and work. For management students trained in social science disciplines, there is a considerable gap between what we can learn about the workplace from economics, which relies on markets and incentives for its explanations, and psychology, which relies on dispositional attributes and social interactions. Managing people is arguably the biggest topic in the social sciences each with its own subgroups: labor economists in economics, I/O and personnel psychologists in psychology and organizational behavior researches use the work place as their central research context, work and occupations and career students in sociology. For the most part, these fields talk past each other and are largely unaware of what the others are doing. We try to bridge that gap a bit in this class, although by no means do we attempt to span the range of topics represented across these quite different fields. In most contexts, the employer has considerable discretion as to the arrangements that are chosen for influencing the behavior of workers and, in turn, their outcomes and subsequent attitudes. The management practices they choose are our main focus. They drive many of the most important outcomes in society - who gets access to the most important and powerful jobs, how much income will people have and how it is distributed, whether and to what extent we have control over our lives at work, and so forth. Most of the attention still goes to employment, but it is not the only arrangement for doing work, though. We consider others, especially various forms of contracting and the gig work organized around electronic platforms. To the extent that there is a common conceptual orientation across the class, it is analysis at the organization-level, typically used for independent variables although often for outcomes and dependent variables as well, and power as a mechanism. Many of the most important and exciting topics in public discourse are in our focus, from remote work to gig work to the influence of artificial intelligence. The range of new issues to explore is enormous. A caveat: the phrase "human resources" is a contemporary business term that began as a description of the set of management practices coming out of the "great corporations" and the lifetime employment model for managing non-union employees. Many of these are within the domain of I/O and personnel psychology, such as employee selection tests, succession planning exercises, and so forth. The use of these practices has declined dramatically and are now only one approach to addressing the practical problems that lie

• OIDD6910 - Negotiations

  This course examines the art and science of negotiation, with additional emphasis on conflict resolution. Students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one-issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills. Cross-listed with MGMT 6910/OIDD 6910/LGST 8060. Format: Lecture, class discussion, simulation/role play, and video demonstrations. Materials: Textbook and course pack.

• Michael R. Losey Excellence in Research Award from the Society of Human Resources, 2022
• Honorary Doctorate, Liege University, Belgium, 2020
• Next Avenue | PBS Top 50 Influencers in Aging, 2015
• Lee Kong Chain Fellow, Singapore Management University, 2015
• HR Magazine’s list of “top 5” Management Thinkers in the World, 2014
• Ranked fifth on HR Most Influential 2012 Top 20 International Thinkers, 2012
• Member, World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Employment, 2012
• Core teaching Award WEMBA East, 2011
• HR Magazine's list of top international thinkers, 2011
• Received 2009 PRO award from International Association of Corporate and Professional Recruiters for contributions to human resources, 2009
• Member of Business Roundtable “Springboard” Commission of Workforce Training & Development, 2009
• Distinguished Visitor Board, Ministry of Manpower, 2008
• Elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources, 2003
• Named by Vault.com in 2001 as one of the 25 most important people working in the area of human capital, 2001

• Why does an entry-level job now require three years of experience? Here’s how that hurts workers and companies alike, MarketWatch - 06/04/2024
• Deeming Mass Layoffs a ‘Failure of Leadership,’ One Company Fine-Tunes a Strategy to Avoid Them, The Wall Street Journal - 03/20/2024
• States With the Highest Job Resignation Rates, WalletHub - 03/19/2024
• Hardest-Working Cities in America, WalletHub - 02/20/2023
• How much do you make?, WHYY - 05/30/2019
• The Big Jobs Myth: American Workers Aren’t Ready for American Jobs, The Atlantic magazine - 07/25/2012
• If There’s a Gap, Blame It on the Employer, New York Times - 07/09/2012
• Mind the Gap, The New Yorker - 07/09/2012
• Why It’s Up to You to Manage Your Career (video), The Globe and Mail - 07/04/2012
• Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane - 06/11/2012
• Software Raises Bar for Hiring, Wall Street Journal - 05/31/2012
• McDonald’s Recipe for Success Brought New CEO to the Table, Forbes - 03/22/2012
• Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need – the Author Follows Up, Wall Street Journal - 10/26/2011
• Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need, Wall Street Journal - 10/24/2011

Knowledge @ Wharton

• Football & Motorsports with Brian Burke, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/27/2024
• How Much Do Corporate Carbon Emissions Cost?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/26/2024
• Malcolm Gladwell on Diversity, Success, and Changing His Mind, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/26/2024
• Learning from Japan: A New Leadership Model, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/26/2024
• The Best Time to Ask for Donations | Katy Milkman, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/26/2024
• How to Protect Precious Personal Data from the Growing Danger of Cyber Attacks, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/26/2024
• The Regulatory Challenges of AI in Finance, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/25/2024
• Building Stronger Family Offices by Sharing Knowledge and Securing the Future, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/21/2024
• Sara Pollack, Pinterest’s Global Head of Consumer Marketing, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/21/2024
• State of the NBA with Seth Partnow, Knowledge @ Wharton - 11/20/2024