Asper School researchers awarded SSHRC Insight Grants

The Asper School of Business is proud to celebrate two faculty members who have received 2026 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grants. These prestigious grants support early-stage research with strong potential for impact in the social sciences and humanities. 

In total, the Asper School was awarded $219,905 in funding—which is split between the two business administration scholars: Rong (Ratchel) Zeng, Associate Professor and Asper Behavioural Management Fellow, and Wei Wang, Assistant Professor and The Associates Fellow in Leadership and Ethics.

In the world of business, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more complex strategic undertaking than a cross-border acquisition—when a firm acquires another from a different country. 

During this type of acquisition, there is bound to be significant uncertainty. It could be a rogue stakeholder, cultural differences (either the company’s, the country’s, or both), or even media coverage of a company’s past wrongdoing.

Ratchel Zeng’s SSHRC IG research focuses on this last issue: the impact of Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSIR) media coverage on a cross-border acquisition.

Let’s say that a Chinese company wants to acquire an American oil company. In the year leading up to the acquisition announcement, the media published stories about the oil company mistreating workers at one of its facilities.

From the Chinese company’s point of view, several questions immediately arise: (1) Will the acquisition still be completed because of the media coverage on CSIR? (2) If so, how long will it take to complete the deal? And (3) under what conditions is media coverage more likely to create stakeholder resistance versus motivate firms to take actions that facilitate deal completion?

Zeng said that while conventional wisdom suggests greater media coverage of a CSIR incident would delay a deal, as firms work to regain trust and manage stakeholder concerns, her preliminary findings showed the opposite: greater media coverage was associated with faster deal completion.

Zeng sat back in her chair and paused as she told me, “So that’s very interesting.”

It was the kind of discovery that energized her and made her ask new questions. Questions that, with the backing of the Asper School of Business research community and the SSHRC grant, she is confident she can find the answers to.

Collaborators: Wenlong Yuan (Asper School of Business), Maoliang Bu (Nanjing University Business School) and Wonyong Oh (University of Nevada)

When power, money, and office politics are on the table, it’s possible for organizational leaders perceived as “good” to “break bad,” and make unethical decisions. 

Wei Wang’s research asks, how do we stop leaders from taking the turn to the dark side? Wang says firms already have measures in place—they just don’t work. 

“Unethical leadership is costly; financially, mentally, and in terms of worker performance,” he said. “But the reason why it persists is that we never have good solutions.”

Long, boring training sessions “may work temporarily, but after a week or a month, core ideas are forgotten.” 

Instead, with his SSHRC grant, Wang wants to learn the impact of “micro-interventions” – small, low-effort reflection tasks that leaders can do as a reminder to think twice about the impacts of their behaviour on employees.

One example is a “goal-setting intervention,” which is designed to stop leaders from using their followers as “tools they can exploit to achieve bottom-line goals.” 

The key is that unlike a boring training session, a micro-intervention is an engaging task they can do daily or weekly, to keep those ideas top of mind. 

Collaborators: Luke Zhu (York University) and Dr. Michelle Duffy (University of Minnesota)