Decision making processes and consequent policy decisions of top management teams often have tremendous impact on employee careers and wellbeing, but the difficulty of accessing executive decision making has made studying such processes especially difficult. Whereas scholars have often relied on their own professional networks to gather small samples of executives or leveraged proxy measures compiled from publicly-available documents, we propose and demonstrate an alternative approach which we term Experimental Shareholder Activism (ESA). ESA allows researchers to directly study executive leadership via the shareholder proposal process—under Rule 14a-8—by purchasing relatively small amounts of stock in a company, and experimentally manipulating features of shareholder proposals to elicit responses from key stakeholders within the company. This approach allows for the direct examination of executive decision making with the benefit of quasi-experimental design. We describe the method, identify vocational and career-relevant areas of inquiry best suited to ESA, and discuss manipulations readily embedded in shareholder proposals. We then provide a toolkit for scholars interested in studying executive decision making on employee career and Human Resource-related outcomes, and demonstrate the viability of such an approach via a pilot experiment.

高层管理团队的决策流程和随之而来的政策决策通常会对员工的职业和福祉产生巨大影响，但是获得高管决策的难度使得研究此类流程尤为困难。尽管学者们经常依靠自己的专业网络来收集高管人员的小样本样本或从公开文件中收集的杠杆代理指标，但我们提出并证明了一种替代方法，称为“实验性股东行动主义”（ESA）。根据规则14a-8，ESA允许研究人员通过股东提议流程直接研究高管领导层，方法是购买公司中相对少量的股票，并实验性地操纵股东提议的特征以引起公司内部主要利益相关者的回应。这种方法可以利用准实验设计直接检查执行决策。我们将介绍该方法，确定最适合ESA的职业和与职业相关的调查领域，并讨论容易嵌入股东提案的操纵方法。然后，我们为有兴趣研究有关员工职业和与人力资源相关成果的高管决策的学者提供了一个工具包，并通过试点实验证明了这种方法的可行性。