I am a doctoral candidate in the Organizational Theory & Strategy area at the Gies School of Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

I completed my Masters in Economics and BE in Computer Science from BITS Pilani University, India.

My research interests include understanding organizational purpose, analyzing the cultural life of organizations, institutional analysis, and the governing role of institutions in context of AI-adoption. My work employs a variety of computational methods, including stastical analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning.

Below is a list of my published articles and current projects.

Published Articles

An Eye for AI - Insights into the Governance of Artificial Intelligence and Vision for Future Research (2022)
(Deepika Chhillar & Ruth Aguilera)

In this 60th anniversary of Business and Society essay, we review existing management research on artificial intelligence (AI), particularly its governance, and offer a framework to examine how governance can support sustainable AI-adoption by businesses and society. The governance of AI-powered technologies is essential and yet complex because of AI’s significant impact, where AI is redefining the legal environment, changing industry practices, creating emerging organizational forms, and giving rise to new labor and leadership responsibilities. We discuss the AI challenges studied across various research themes, highlight AI governance's role in mitigating such challenges, and propose a governance framework for bridging the management literature with this emerging yet rapidly growing research topic. We conclude by offering suggestions for future empirical research and theory-building on the governance of AI. This review contributes to the literature by elucidating how businesses and their governance may harness AI’s power without creating or amplifying societal inequalities.

Working Papers

Organizational Culture and Wrongdoing - A view through the Glassdoor
(Deepika Chhillar, Geoffrey Love, Matthew Kraatz, & Donald Sull)

A substantial body of work links culture to wrongdoing. Most work implicitly assumes that culture leads to wrongdoing even though mechanisms and arguments point in both directions. In this large-scale study, we identify the cultural features of organizations that are most strongly associated with organizational wrongdoing. Organizational culture is conceptualized as values and norms, which include normative and normal elements of a firm’s environment. We measure culture via text-based measures using employee reviews posted on Glassdoor and wrongdoing using financial restatements and litigations among large public US-based firms. Our large sample study finds evidence that firms where employees perceive managerial actions inconsistent with the firm’s espoused values, high stress and workload, low creativity, and hostile organizational members, are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. We put forth possible implications for theory and suggest future research avenues. Our approach in this study offers promise for quantifying culture through language processing from rich textual data, deriving meaningful interpretations using methods of machine learning, and advancing our empirical and theoretical understanding of the interplay between organizational features and firm behavior.

Organizational Purpose and Social Performance - Do actions speak louder than words?
(Deepika Chhillar)

This paper examines how an organization’s declared and internalized ‘reason for existence’ (manifested as its mission or purpose) is related to its embodiment by internal members and overall organizational social performance. I argue that an organization’s purpose positions it along a continuum that represents the degree of alignment with the logic of social welfare. I test hypotheses related to these arguments using Glassdoor and ESG violations for S&P 500 firms over six years and find significant results that corroborate the hypotheses. Overall, this working paper aims to address the question of (whether and) how organizational purpose relates to organizational social performance.