Research Roundup: March 2026

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:

When Employees Speak, Job Seekers Listen

• Researchers: Jong Min Kim, Konkuk University; Marcello Mariani, University of Reading; Kyusung Hwang, Kyungpook National University
• Output: “Beyond the Words: How Reviewer Status and Review Features Jointly Affect Helpfulness in Online Employee Reviews,” Journal of Business Research, 2026
• Overview: Most job seekers trust employee reviews, but not all voices carry the same weight. This study examines how reviewer identity—specifically, whether someone is a current or former employee—shapes how helpful a workplace review appears. Using more than 3.7 million Glassdoor reviews, the researchers analyze how identity interacts with three key features of writing: length, sentiment, and specificity.
  
  Review helpfulness refers to how useful readers find a review to be when making decisions, while diagnosticity describes how well a review reduces uncertainty and supports evaluation. The goal was to understand not just what makes a review informative but why certain sources are trusted more than others. By combining large-scale data with a controlled experiment, the study examined how identity and content interact to influence credibility.
• Findings: Reviews written by current employees consistently outperform those from former employees, generating about 1.6 percent higher helpfulness scores, even after accounting for company differences. While the increase is modest on its own, it becomes more meaningful as reviews get longer, showing that detailed content strengthens the credibility of insider perspectives.
  
  In contrast, emotionally expressive language can reduce perceived objectivity when it comes from current employees, rather than enhancing trust. Specificity, or how detailed a review is, delivers mixed results and does not reliably improve helpfulness. In a controlled experiment, long reviews from current employees were rated significantly more helpful than those from former employees, while short reviews showed no meaningful difference.
  
  Organizations would be wise to focus less on increasing review volume and more on encouraging current employees to provide thoughtful, detailed perspectives that better support decision-making.

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AI Use Is Not AI Skill

• Researchers: Zach Kowaleski and Jaime J. Schmidt, The University of Texas at Austin; Anu Puvvada, KPMG Studio
• Output: “What the Best AI Users Do Differently—and How to Level Up All of Your Employees,” Harvard Business Review, 2026
• Overview: Most companies can see whether employees are using AI, but far fewer can determine whether they are using it well. This article examines what successful AI use looks like and why simple measures like frequency, hours logged, or prompt count can miss the bigger picture.
  
  Researchers working with KPMG and The University of Texas at Austin analyzed more than 1.4 million prompts and responses generated by about 2,500 employees over an eight-month period. They used that large archive to identify observable signals of sophisticated use, including structured prompting, deliberate strategies, and how employees guided the model’s reasoning. Rather than focusing solely on adoption, the study defines what “good” looks like in an AI-enabled workplace. It also shows how organizations can move employees from regular use toward more advanced, higher-impact habits.
• Findings: The researchers found that sophisticated users shared four clear patterns. They (1) were more ambitious in how they approached AI, (2) treated it as a reasoning partner, (3) delegated complex multistep tasks with clear objectives, and (4) used it as a general cognitive tool rather than just a productivity shortcut. For example, these users were more likely to define constraints, specify success criteria, and refine the model’s thinking over time instead of accepting an initial answer without further inquiry.
  
  The study also found that while nearly 90 percent of employees used AI regularly, only around 5 percent met the definition of highly sophisticated use. Another notable finding is that the strongest users were often above manager level, suggesting that comfort with AI and sophistication in using it are not the same thing.
  
  Organizations may see more consistent performance gains by focusing on the specific behaviors that shape how employees work with AI rather than how often they use it.

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Loyalty Has a Shelf Life

• Researchers: Shichang Deng and Zihan Lin, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics
• Output: “Mainstream Fatigue: A Novel Psychological Mechanism for Understanding Brand Switching,” Advances in Consumer Research, 2025
• Overview: Familiar brands often feel comfortable to consumers, but over time, that same familiarity can begin to lose its appeal. This study examines a driver of brand switching called mainstream fatigue, defined as the gradual loss of interest that can result from repeated exposure to the same brand. The researchers set out to understand why consumers move away from familiar brands even when no clear brand failure has occurred. They conducted three studies with a combined sample of 1,031 participants, focusing on consumer electronics such as headphones, personal computers, and smartphones.
  
  The study distinguishes between cognitive satiation, when consumers feel they have exhausted a brand’s functional value, and emotional satiation, when the emotional connection weakens over time. By isolating these effects, the researchers aimed to understand how familiarity itself can influence switching behavior, separate from dissatisfaction or product failure.
• Findings: The results show that cognitive satiation plays the strongest role in driving switching behavior, while emotional satiation alone does not significantly predict switching in the first two studies. In one study, mainstream fatigue accounts for about 59 percent of the relationship between cognitive satiation and switching intention, suggesting that fatigue plays a central role in the process. The study further breaks mainstream fatigue into four components: sensory adaptation, cognitive exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, and novelty seeking, which together explain how repeated exposure can make familiar brands feel less engaging over time.
  
  Emotional factors become more relevant when combined with cognitive fatigue, suggesting that switching is more likely when both functional interest and emotional connection decline together. The researchers also found that brand inertia, or the tendency to stay with a familiar brand out of habit or perceived switching costs, reduced the impact of fatigue, and when inertia was high, fatigue no longer led to switching.
  
  The findings suggest that switching risk can build even without clear dissatisfaction, especially when long-term brand use stops feeling mentally or emotionally engaging.

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The Human Side of Digital Business

• Researchers: Zsófia Tóth, University of Durham; Jun Luo, Martin J. Liu, and Ruizhi Yuan, University of Nottingham Ningbo China; Omar S. Itani, Lebanese American University; Mona Mrad, American University of Sharjah
• Output: “From Handshakes to Hashtags: Fostering Digital Human Touch in Business Interactions,” Journal of Business Research, 2026
• Overview: A handshake once defined business relationships, but today many of those connections are built entirely through screens. This study introduces digital human touch, defined as the ability to convey empathy, authenticity, warmth, and care through digital channels, such as social media, in business-to-business interactions. The researchers aimed to understand how firms maintain strong relationships without physical interaction, particularly as digital communication accelerated during the pandemic.
  
  They used a three-stage design: (1) 40 interviews before COVID-19, (2) 20 interviews during the crisis plus an analysis of 11,543 buyer reviews from Alibaba, and (3) post-pandemic interviews to assess how practices evolved. The study focuses on how companies incorporate these human elements into digital communication and how those behaviors shift in times of disruption. The researchers sought to determine not only whether relationships can continue digitally but also how they can remain effective and stable over time.
• Findings: The study finds that digital human touch in B2B settings is built on three core dimensions: digital authenticity, warmth and care, and openness in communication, which remained consistent across all stages of the research. During the pandemic, two additional dimensions became more visible: forgiveness and tolerance, and reconciliation, particularly when suppliers acknowledged issues and communicated next steps. Social media also shifted from a supporting tool to a central relationship channel, often serving as a visible signal that a company was still operating and responsive during disruption.
  
  The researchers also observed more active co-creation of value through digital channels, including the sharing of insights and collaboration on product development. After the pandemic, real-time connectedness emerged as a growing expectation, reflecting demand for faster and more continuous interaction.
  
  For business leaders, these findings suggest that as digital channels become the default, relationship strength will increasingly depend on how consistently organizations demonstrate human qualities within those platforms.

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From Participation to Potential

• Researchers: Aizhan Shomotova, Zayed University; Ali Ibrahim, United Arab Emirates University
• Output: “Higher Education Student Engagement, Leadership Potential and Self-Perceived Employability in the United Arab Emirates,” Studies in Higher Education, 2024–25
• Overview: A degree alone is no longer enough to signal readiness for the workforce. This study examines higher education student engagement, defined as how actively students participate in academic, social, cognitive, and emotional aspects of university life, to understand how it shapes both leadership potential and self-perceived employability. Using survey data from 523 undergraduate students in the United Arab Emirates, the researchers validate a five-part engagement model that captures different ways students connect with their learning environment.
  
  The study centers on two outcomes: leadership potential, meaning the ability to build skills like teamwork and decision-making, and self-perceived employability, or how confident students feel about their ability to secure and succeed in a job. It also explores whether engagement strengthens the connection between these two outcomes. At a time when about 80 percent of employers prioritize soft skills such as communication and leadership, the research finds that engagement is a key driver of workforce readiness.

• Findings: The results show that higher levels of engagement are closely tied to stronger leadership development and greater confidence in job prospects. Engagement explains about 56 percent of the variation in leadership potential and 22 percent of students’ perceptions of their employability, indicating a stronger influence on leadership growth. Academic engagement, including coursework and formal learning activities, consistently supports all aspects of employability, while affective engagement, or a student’s sense of belonging and emotional connection to their institution, also plays a meaningful role.
  
  However, not every form of engagement has the same impact. Cognitive engagement, along with social engagement with peers and instructors, does not show a direct effect on employability outcomes in this study. What stands out is that engagement helps students translate leadership skills into real confidence as they enter the workforce.
  
  For organizations, finding highlights the advantage of individuals whose development has been shaped by meaningful engagement that builds both capability and the confidence to apply it.

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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.