Shelby Gai

Assistant Professor Michigan State University

  • East Lansing MI

Shelby Gai's research focuses on a subfield of organizational design that emphasizes how to design a company’s board of directors.

Contact

Michigan State University

View more experts managed by Michigan State University

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

Research
Management Consulting
Education/Learning

Areas of Expertise

Strategic Management
Corporate Governance
Managerial Decision Making

Accomplishments

Andreas Al-Laham Best Paper Award

2018

Multi-Level Network Research Standing Working Group at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS)

Education

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

Show All +

Affiliations

  • OMT Division : Communication Chair

News

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.

View More

Journal Articles

Goals & Decision-making: Exploring the Current State & Future Agenda for Goals Research

Academy of Management Proceedings

2022

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.

View more

Board design and governance failures at peer firms

Strategic Management Journal

2021

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.

View more

Institutions: Everywhere But Not Everything

Journal of Management Inquiry

2020

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.

View more

Show All +