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Do virtual, yet informal and synchronous, interactions affect individual performance outcomes of organizational newcomers? We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large global organization that estimates the performance effects of “virtual water coolers” for remote interns participating in the firm’s flagship summer internship program. Findings indicate that interns who had randomized opportunities to interact synchronously and informally with senior managers were significantly more likely to receive offers for full-time employment, achieved higher weekly performance ratings, and had more positive attitudes toward their remote internships. Further, we observed stronger results when the interns and senior managers were demographically similar. Secondary results also hint at a possible abductive explanation of the performance effects: virtual watercoolers between interns and senior managers may have facilitated knowledge and advice sharing. This study demonstrates that hosting brief virtual water cooler sessions with senior managers might have job and career benefits for organizational newcomers working in remote workplaces, an insight with immediate managerial relevance.

The evaluation of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet literature suggests that this process is subject to inconsistency and potential biases. This paper investigates the role of information sharing among experts as the driver of evaluation decisions. We designed and executed two field experiments in two separate grant funding opportunities at a leading research university to explore evaluators’ receptivity to assessments from other evaluators. Collectively, our experiments mobilized 369 evaluators from seven universities to evaluate 97 projects resulting in 761 proposal-evaluation pairs and over $300,000 in awards. We exogenously varied the relative valence (positive and negative) of others’ scores, to determine how exposures to higher and lower scores affect the focal evaluator’s propensity to change the initial score. We found causal evidence of negativity bias, where evaluators are more likely to lower their scores after seeing critical scores than raise them after seeing better scores. Qualitative coding and topic modelling of the evaluators’ justifications for score changes reveal that exposures to lower scores prompted greater attention to uncovering weaknesses, whereas exposures to neutral or higher scores were associated with strengths, along with greater emphasis on non-evaluation criteria, such as confidence in one’s judgment. Overall, information sharing among expert evaluators can lead to more conservative allocation decisions that favor protecting against failure than maximizing success.

We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously varied opportunities for face-to-face encounters among 15,817 scientist-pairs. Our data include direct observations of interaction patterns collected using sociometric badges, and detailed, longitudinal data on the scientists’ post-symposium publication records over six years. We find that interacting scientists acquire and create more knowledge when they share some overlapping research interests, but are less likely to cite each other’s work when they are from similar fields. Our findings reveal both collaborative and competitive effects of knowledge similarity on knowledge production outcomes.