Research Roundup: September 2025

Dive into our monthly Research Roundup, showcasing the latest insights from the business education community to keep you informed of new and noteworthy industry trends. Here are this month’s selections:

Ethics That Inspire or Exhaust

• Researchers: Suzanne van Gils, BI Norwegian Business School; Ingvild Muller Seljeseth, Kristiania University of Applied Sciences
• Output: “Ally or Antagonist? Moral Identity Determines the Curvilinear Effect of Ethical Leadership on Employee Stress,” Journal of Business Research, 2025
• Overview: How much ethical leadership is too much? This study investigates a crucial but often overlooked question: can leaders be excessively ethical in ways that increase stress among employees? Researchers looked at how employees react when leaders enforce ethical standards at different levels—low, high, and extreme. They emphasized the role of “moral identity,” which refers to the importance of values like honesty and fairness in a person’s self-view.
  
  Across two studies involving over 480 participants from the U.S. and U.K., researchers examined whether ethical leadership is always a resource or if it can become a demand that adds extra pressure on employees. Their goal was to understand how leaders’ good intentions might sometimes backfire, depending on an employee’s value orientation.

• Findings: The research shows that employees perceive ethical leadership differently. Employees with a strong moral identity see ethical leaders as consistently supportive. Those with a weaker moral identity feel stressed under low ethics, less stressed under balanced ethics, and stressed again when leaders demand extreme standards—creating a U-shaped pattern. For example, participants with low moral identity reported higher stress when leaders enforced strict, uncompromising ethical rules, compared to when leaders set high but more flexible ethical expectations.
  
  These findings indicate that, while ethical leadership can serve as a stabilizing influence, its effectiveness relies on whether employees possess the personal resources needed to meet the leader’s standards. Organizations that emphasize high ethical standards can reduce stress by building employees’ capacity to meet those expectations through ethics training or by fostering a culture where ethical norms are practiced consistently across the workforce.

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AI Gets the Hype, Human Skills Get the Hire

• Researchers: Andrew Walker, Quan Yuan, Kun Yuan, and Sabrina White, GMAC
• Output: Prospective Students Survey, Graduate Management Admission Council, 2025
• Overview: The Graduate Management Admission Council’s Prospective Students Survey 2025 Report aimed to understand how individuals considering graduate business education perceive its value. Based on nearly 5,000 responses from 147 countries, the report explores the skills students expect to gain, their preferred formats, and how their priorities match employer demands. The study highlights artificial intelligence, human skills, and values such as sustainability, reflecting the trends most likely to influence future careers.
  
  By comparing student expectations with employer needs, the report highlights areas of agreement and points of tension. This perspective offers business schools and employers a clearer view of how education can better prepare graduates for a workforce shaped by both technology and human-centered leadership.

• Findings: The results show a growing divide in priorities. Nearly half of surveyed students (46 percent) now see AI as essential to their education, compared with just 29 percent in 2022. Their interest is strongest in practical applications like simulations and decision-making exercises, while fewer are interested in technical training such as prompt-writing (41 percent). Employers do not dismiss AI but focus on different skills.
  
  Both groups rank strategic thinking (68 percent of students, 78 percent of employers) and problem-solving (58 percent of students, 67 percent of employers) as the most important skills to gain in business school, yet employers are much more likely to emphasize adaptability, emotional intelligence, and coachability as important qualities.Students, in contrast, place greater importance on leadership, managing people, and building networks. The survey also reveals how these differences go beyond the classroom: more than two-thirds of students say they would consider a company’s sustainability practices when deciding whether to accept a job.
  
  For business leaders, the results highlight that the graduates best equipped for long-term impact will be those who can combine AI fluency with resilience, empathy, and adaptability.

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Finding Value Without Knowing the Odds

• Researchers: David B. Brown and Cagin Uru, Duke University
• Output: “Data-Driven Sequential Search,” SSRN, 2025
• Overview: What happens when decision-makers must choose among offers or prices without knowing how good the next one might be? This study by researchers at Duke University set out to rethink the classic “sequential search” problem, where individuals or firms weigh the costs of continuing a search against the benefits of finding a better option. Traditional models assume the underlying distribution of values like prices, salaries, or offers is known. But in practice, such information is often incomplete or unreliable.
  
  From job-seekers facing unclear pay ranges to companies entering uncertain markets, the challenge is how to make smart choices with little or no prior data. The researchers aimed to develop policies that perform well even in these data-scarce environments, benchmarking results against “Pandora’s rule,” an idealized strategy with complete knowledge of value distributions.

• Findings: The researchers found that committing in advance to a fixed number of options to explore produces consistent results even in highly uncertain environments. When no information exists about the distribution of outcomes, this method guarantees at least 37 percent of the best possible outcome. In more structured environments, performance improves: the approach produces just over half of the ideal result in moderately predictable markets, nearly three-quarters in settings with rare but high-value outcomes, and over four-fifths in stable markets where all outcomes are equally likely.
  For example, in wine markets where prices tend to fall within a narrow range, searching endlessly adds little benefit. In contrast, in art markets where a few items have extremely high prices, casting a wider net often leads to better outcomes. This rule of committing up front to a set number of options also translates beyond markets. In job searches, it can help candidates decide how many roles to pursue seriously before accepting an offer, and in supplier selection, it can guide how many bids to review before choosing a contract.
  
  For business leaders, straightforward decision rules can protect against risks, ensure consistent performance in uncertain environments, and offer a disciplined way to move forward when reliable data is limited.

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Not Just a Journey, But a Collective Experience

• Researchers: Arne De Keyser and Paolo Antonetti, EDHEC Business School; Maria Rouziou, Texas A&M University; Mathieu Beal, Emlyon Business School; Zih-Hsiang Wang, Yany Gregoire, and Bruno Lussier, HEC Montreal
• Output: “Understanding the B2B Customer Experience and Journey: A Convergence-Based Lens,” Journal of Business Research, 2025
• Overview: The business-to-business (B2B) customer experience (CX) has long borrowed insights from the consumer world, but this approach overlooks the complexity of B2B relationships. In response, researchers introduced a convergence-based framework to better understand how B2B CX develops and changes within and across organizations. They focused on two main types of alignment: psychological convergence, which refers to the shared perceptions of CX within buyer teams and organizations, and operational convergence, which is the coordination of actions and processes between buyer and seller.
  
  Unlike traditional views that treat customer touchpoints separately, this model highlights the interconnectedness of people, departments, and stages in the customer journey. The study’s goal was to give business leaders a way to better understand and actively manage the collective experiences that shape long-term B2B relationships.
• Findings: The research highlights six key insights, emphasizing that the B2B customer experience (CX) is not just a personal feeling but a shared perception developed across departments like procurement, finance, and IT. These collective experiences form over time through internal communications, shared service interactions, and organizational leadership. For example, when a seller’s customer success team collaborates closely with a buyer’s IT and procurement units during a software implementation, this coordination fosters both trust and a unified sense of value.
  
  Additionally, the B2B customer journey is more segmented and longer than its B2C equivalent, encompassing a buying phase (with pre-buying, negotiation, and contract stages) and an implementation-and-usage phase (including onboarding, support, and reassessment).These stages often involve different teams at different times, leading to overlapping sub-journeys that need coordination across silos. Sellers who customize their actions—such as aligning timelines and providing tailored support—are better positioned to deliver a seamless and positive experience.
  
  For business leaders, the findings indicate that managing CX involves orchestrating both internal alignment and external collaboration, not just measuring satisfaction at isolated touchpoints.

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Women Recall Ties, Men Recall Gaps

• Researchers: Eric Quintane, ESMT Berlin; Matthew E. Brashears, University of South Carolina; Helena V. González-Gómez, NEOMA Business School; Raina Brands, UCL School of Management
• Output: “Gender, Network Recall, and Structural Holes,” Personnel Psychology, 2025
• Overview: In every workplace, success often depends on understanding who is connected to whom. But do men and women remember these networks in the same way? Researchers from ESMT Berlin investigated this question by examining network recall accuracy—the ability to remember relationships among colleagues. They looked at two patterns that influence recall: the triadic closure schema, a mental shortcut that assumes two people are connected if they share a mutual contact (common in close-knit teams), and structural holes, the gaps in a network where such a connection is missing (more common across departments).
  
  Their goal was to determine whether men and women rely on these shortcuts differently, and how those differences might influence who is more likely to succeed in cohesive teams versus fragmented, cross-functional groups.

• Findings: The study showed that women generally remembered workplace networks more accurately than men, but this advantage depended on the network’s structure. In close-knit teams, women’s use of the closure shortcut helped them make correct assumptions—such as recognizing that colleagues with many mutual contacts are also likely to know each other. In fragmented networks, however, this same shortcut often misled them, causing false connections where none existed. Men who used less closure showed more consistent accuracy: they were not as strong in cohesive networks but made fewer errors in fragmented ones.
  
  For business leaders, this suggests women may excel in collaborative settings but are less likely to identify brokerage opportunities—roles that involve bridging unlinked groups and controlling information flow. Targeted training that helps employees recognize and address these gaps can ensure more leaders, especially women, are prepared to access the influence and innovation that brokerage provides.

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If you have new research from your school share with the business education community, please submit a summary and relevant links to AACSB Insights via our online submission form at aacsb.edu/insights/articles/submissions.