Shelby Gai
Assistant Professor | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Shelby Gai's research focuses on a subfield of organizational design that emphasizes how to design a company’s board of directors.
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Biography
Shelby Gai is an Assistant Professor of Management at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on board design – a subfield of organizational design that emphasizes how to design a company’s board of directors to align with the organization’s strategic goals. In her dissertation, she examines how formal and informal structures of publicly listed US boards as well as varying governance configurations of Hong Kong family businesses affect both board- and firm-level outcomes.
Her work has received awards like the 2018 Andreas Al-Laham Best Paper Award from the Multi-Level Network Research Standing Working Group at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), and was nominated for the 2019 Best Paper Proceedings from the Strategy Division of the Academy of Management.
Shelby graduated with an M.A. and Ph.D. in Management and Organizations from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She also has an M.S. in Statistics from Northwestern as well as a M.A. from the Wharton School, where she researched changes in Hong Kong’s board independence regulations using an institutional lens. Shelby graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in Sociology and a certificate in East Asian Studies. During college, she researched topics related to race and ethnicity.
Before entering academia, Shelby worked in the Financial Services and Board Services Practices at the executive search firm Spencer Stuart in both their New York and Shanghai offices. As the Junior Knowledge Manager in the Board Services Practice, she spearheaded research efforts that culminated in the first Hong Kong Board Index.
Industry Expertise (3)
Research
Management Consulting
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (3)
Strategic Management
Corporate Governance
Managerial Decision Making
Accomplishments (1)
Andreas Al-Laham Best Paper Award (professional)
2018 Multi-Level Network Research Standing Working Group at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS)
Education (5)
Princeton University: A.B., Sociology 2010
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: M.A., Ethics and Legal Studies 2015
Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University: M.A., Management and Organizations 2018
Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University: M.S., Statistics 2020
Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University: Ph.D., Management and Organizations 2020
Affiliations (1)
- OMT Division : Communication Chair
Links (3)
News (1)
2022 Best Undergraduate Professors: Shelby Lun Gai, Michigan State University Broad College of Business
Poets&Quants online
2022-12-11
Shelby Lun Gai, 34, is Assistant Professor of Management at Michigan State University Broad College of Business. Her research centers on board design – a new subfield of organizational design that emphasizes how to design a company’s board of directors to align with the organization’s strategic goals.
Journal Articles (5)
Goals & Decision-making: Exploring the Current State & Future Agenda for Goals Research
Academy of Management Proceedings2022 In this symposium, we seek to advance the current state of several theoretical paradigms that deal with multiple goals at multiple levels. In doing so, we aim to explicate the mechanisms connecting the micro-level processes to organization-level outcomes. We hope to provide a forum for reviewing prior work in this area and identifying new avenues for future research that will further elucidate the complexities of having multiple goals at the individual- and firm-level.
Board design and governance failures at peer firms
Strategic Management Journal2021 Our study introduces board committees as a crucial determinant of board actions. We examine how directors who structurally link different board committees—referred to as multi-committee directors (MCDs)—explain why some board actions are merely symbolic while others are more substantive. As a baseline, we argue that boards in general respond to financial restatements at peer firms by symbolically appointing new directors who are relatively inexperienced and unlikely to have a substantive impact.
Institutions: Everywhere But Not Everything
Journal of Management Inquiry2020 Recent critiques by Alvesson, Hallett, and Spicer have characterized neo-institutional theory (NIT) specifically as confronting a mid-life crisis and institutional theory (IT) more generally as uninhibited. While offering valid points, these critiques lack a fundamental understanding of how organizational institutionalism (OI) has become distinct from NIT. In contrast to NIT’s master hypothesis of isomorphism and focus on structural determinism, OI has made remarkable progress in explaining institutional variation and change.
Dominant Choices? How CEO/Board Power Predicts Compensation Consulting Firm Relationships
Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings2019 While research examining the relevance of differences in CEO/Board relative power across firms has typically focused on intra-organizational antecedents and consequences, this study analyzes the potential inter-organizational implications of such power differences. Specifically, we consider how existing differences in CEO/Board power within prospective client firms makes third-party service providers differentially attractive to these client firms, and we examine how such differences in client firms will affect the use and choice of compensation consulting (CC) firms.
Brokering a Stick for a Hammer (or a Rock): Inter-Board-Committee Cooptation
Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings2018 Environmental threats do not affect all groups equally within an organization. Due to this uneven external pressure, only certain groups engage in problemistic search, limiting the pool of solutions to those that are within the affected group’s control. When an affected group does not have a viable solution, we argue that the group will seek access to another group’s set of solutions. Melding the BTF framework with work on brokers, we posit that tertius iungens brokers who connect the affected and unaffected groups may use their coordinating ability to coopt one group to advantage another.
