Last year, USU professors Alison Cook and Christy Glass tested the glass cliff phenomenon—the idea that women are more likely to get promoted to leadership positions when a firm is struggling, placing them in a precarious position from the start. The glass cliff is back in the news with the recent firing of Jill Abramson as executive editor of the New York Times. Cook and Glass found that merit alone doesn’t give women and minorities the key to the executive suite and that the composition of the board of directors can affect whether or not they succeed. Their analysis confirmed that the glass cliff theory also applies to minorities, a phenomenon they dubbed “the savior effect.”
In the second half of Tuesday’s AU: a recent study showing that minority entrepreneurs face more obstacles to success and deal with rejection differently than their Caucasian counterparts. USU’s Sterling Bone collaborated with Glenn Christensen from BYU and Jerome Williams from Rutgers. They sent “mystery shoppers” to banks seeking information about loans. They also conducted in-depth interviews with small business owners. Their findings were published in the Journal of Consumer Research.