In Spring of 2016 when Vivien Jancenelle was a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) student, he was awarded the Excellence in Research award from the Monte Ahuja College of Business. The Doctoral Excellence in Research awards are earned by DBA students who have consistently provided research that is applicable, relevant, timely and provides insight.
He is now an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University - Central Texas in the College of Business.
Vivien's research as a DBA student drew on signaling theory, upper echelons theory and the organizational identity perspective in order to investigate how top management teams (for publicly-traded firms) and founders (for small ventures) can create value through the use of efficacious signals in two-party relationships. At the public firm level, Vivien is gauged shareholders' reactions to quarterly earnings releases and how those can be moderated by signals sent by top managers during post-earnings announcement conference calls. One study on this topic was accepted for publication in the Journal of Strategy and Management and highlighted how optimistic or other certain language cues can protect a firm’s market value under conditions of heightened firm-specific risk. Another study in the same context investigated how a CEO’s voice and tone can inform market participants about the firm’s true economic state during periods of uncertainty.
Watch Vivien describe his experience as a DBA student here:
At the entrepreneur level, Vivien's interest in founder-investor relationships is within the context of online loan and seed fund marketplaces. He investigates the effects of signals embedded within business plans and entrepreneurial video pitches on the odds of securing funding from investors. In this setting, normative signals (e.g., passion, meaning) are often found to have a stronger effect on the odds of securing funding than utilitarian signals (e.g., profit orientation, competitive aggressiveness), suggesting that firms with strong normative identities may be better equipped for success in crowd-based financial platforms. These findings suggest that online-based entrepreneurial finance may rely on different mechanisms than traditional venture capitalism, opening roads for new research and the applicability of new theories to the study entrepreneurial finance (e.g., warm-glow theory).