Panel Symposium Research Articles

How to Review a Manuscript? A Developmental Panel Symposium by Journal of Managerial Psychology

How to Review a Manuscript? A Developmental Panel Symposium by Journal of Managerial Psychology

Economic Inequality and Management: Empirical and Theoretical Developments a Decade after Occupy

A coherent agenda on economic inequality is still in its early stages of development in the management field. While research since the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 has helped legitimize the topic and brought inequality in vogue as a keyword in our journals, a central concern remains about how much empirical and theoretical progress has actually been made. Management scholarship in this area thus has to take stock of progress across the first decade since Occupy and critically assess empirical and theoretical insights to invigorate a new generation of scholars who can take us beyond this decade of inequality research and into the next. This panel symposium will bring together insights from the diverse panel and the discussant towards two objectives: first, to provide a critical assessment of the extent and nature of progress that has been made in the field, and second, to lay out a pathway of where the field needs to go in order to make important headway in terms of theoretical and empirical contributions, and also in providing contributions of relevance to policy and practice. In doing this, we provide an avenue for management scholars to engage with the theme of the Academy of Management 2022 conference, “Creating a Better World Together,” given that inequality remains one of the most pressing societal grand challenges of our times.

Different Cultures, Different Dynamics? Driving Forward a Community Perspective of Social Innovation

Tackling society’s grand challenges is an increasingly important topic that many organizational scholars have started to turn towards. In this context, one question that has lately garnered a lot of attention is how social innovation, can help to tackle such issues. While much of the prior literature on social innovation has focused on heroic social entrepreneurs engaged in “changing the world” or hybrid organizations managing the ongoing tension between business and charity, we see a growing interest in the role of environmental contexts in shaping the emergence, diffusion, and implications of social innovation endeavors. In response to this burgeoning interest, in this panel symposium, our aim is to drive forward a community perspective which may help to develop a more contextualized and nuanced understanding of social innovation across the globe.

Organizational Learning and Search Track: Technology Across Organizational Boundaries

Existing research has explored the profound impact technologies may have on individuals, organizations, and industries. Recently, scholars have emphasized that multiple groups of actors—many with varying perspectives—participate in the field surrounding a new technology. The existence of different perspectives on the technology influences outcomes for the technology and the involved individuals, organizations, and industries. As the actors that participate in technological fields often reside within different organizations, it becomes important to explore how technologies are used and understood across organizational boundaries. Therefore, we seek to facilitate a conversation around how organizational members and market participants understand and use technologies across organizational boundaries. This perspective across boundaries helps scholars to consider the broad implications of new technologies which span boundaries more frequently, such as digital technologies that gather data across organizations and individuals. In this panel symposium, we bring together experts in technology to facilitate discussions on the impact of technologies across boundaries.

Blockchain: Challenges and Opportunities for Management Research

Blockchain technology is widely hailed as a disruptive technology that will not only lead to the emergence of new business models, but also redefine what constitutes an organization and how it can effectively operate. Concurrently to the widespread adoption of blockchain and its technological maturity, a vibrant community of scholars studying blockchain and its implications for management is emerging. Therefore, we believe that the time is ripe to bring together leading scholars with different research foci and diverse methodological preferences to discuss, provide direction, as well as debate, how blockchain will affect management theory and practice. This panel symposium will serve as a forum to elaborate on how blockchain related research differs from past work, what are the associated challenges and opportunities, as well as identify areas that future blockchain research should focus upon. In a facilitated discussion, we will raise these issues, providing ample opportunities for participants to engage, raise questions, and learn from their peers to design and conduct top blockchain management research.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Track: Entrepreneurial Strategies in Developing Economies

The purpose of this panel is to generate new insights into the challenges and opportunities of researching entrepreneurial strategies in developing economies. While entrepreneurial strategies have been studied from a variety of perspectives, most theories are rooted in the experience of developed economies and are not necessarily generalizable beyond them. Thus, there is a major gap in our understanding of entrepreneurial strategies in developing economic contexts. This panel symposium will bring together thought leaders operating at the frontiers of research in developing economies to reflect on the state of entrepreneurship research in such contexts and its implications for management scholars. The scholars will identify questions, mechanisms, and phenomena that bear upon research in ENT, STR, TIM, and RM.

Innovation Processes Track: Endogenous Shaping of the Business Environment

The purpose of our panel symposium is to stimulate the emergent research on endogenous shaping of business environments. Distinguished scholars who have studied this subject from different perspectives will provide their insights on the ‘who,’ ‘when,’ and ‘how’ of shaping, as strategic actors seek to construct and alter their future business environment. Bringing these different perspectives together creates the opportunity to move the field forward in a systematic way. In addition, the discussion would highlight future avenues for theorization and empirical research that will take our understanding of shaping of the business environment a step further.

Geographies of Innovation: Challenges and Opportunities

The purpose of this panel symposium is to generate new insights into the theoretical and empirical challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for scholars interested in agglomeration research. Though the extensive literature on agglomeration has documented the positive externalities, boundary conditions, and moderators of outcomes among clustered firms, there are a variety of theoretical and methodological aspects related to agglomeration literature that remains to be explored. This panel symposium will bring together thought leaders engaged in scholarly work at the frontiers of agglomeration research to reflect on the state of agglomeration research and its implications for management scholars. The scholars will identify questions, mechanisms and phenomena that can guide frontier scholarly work by STR, TIM, and ENT division members.

GLOBE 2020 on Trust: Preliminary Findings of Study of Cultural Foundations of Trust in 142 Countries

Trust is an important variable linked to employee performance, citizenship behaviors, commitment and others. However our current understanding of trust is based on western cultures and literature on interpersonal trust in the international context is as yet limited and fragmented. An important question is the link between culture and antecedents of trust in interpersonal relationship. GLOBE 2020 study aims to address this question by studying, among other topics, contemporary cultural norms and their relationship with generalized and interpersonal trust in 142 countries. In this panel symposium, we will present a review of the study, first round of findings regarding generalized trust and interpersonal trust. This session will be of value to AOM audience members through expanding knowledge of management practices across borders and offering new methodologies for international research and advance knowledge on trust dynamics across cultures.

Integrating Sustainability into Teaching: ONE Teaching Award Winners Share Their Tips

This panel symposium will offer ONE Teaching Award winners' best practices and tips for incorporating sustainability into teaching strategies. The goal is to equip our academic colleagues with knowledge to share with students, our future business managers and leaders, on the role of business in tackling our greatest environmental, societal, and economic challenges. In the context of an ongoing global pandemic, it is more important than ever that we work toward Creating a Better World Together.

Organizational Learning and Search Track: Scientific and Technical Knowledge: Search, Diffusion, and Impact

Both innovation and entrepreneurship crucially rely on scientific and technical knowledge. Scientific and engineering principles can be applied to processes of creative search to resolve technical problems, increase useful innovation, and create new business opportunities. Yet, recent years have seen dramatic changes in how knowledge is generated and diffused, with still limited evidence on how these changes are impacting innovation. The emergence of big data and computational capabilities might provide “automated” ways to generate knowledge in the form of predictive statements. What are their effects on the innovation search process and on the rate and the direction of technical change? Furthermore, these trends are magnified by the diffusion of the internet and digital modes of exchanging information. How important is the human component for the diffusion of knowledge? Is the diffusion and impact of knowledge still dependent on localized interactions, despite the widespread availability of ICT and the internet? This panel symposium will assemble four papers on the topics of search, diffusion, and impact of technical knowledge. It will discuss 1) the role of data in the search for innovation, 2) the directional consequences of data availability on the accumulation and diffusion of technical knowledge, and 3) the localization of knowledge and how physical proximity of scientists and inventors influence knowledge flows and company creation. These questions are important to craft strategy processes for managers and the allocation of resources for policymakers.

Employee Entrepreneurship in the Context of Modern Economy

This panel symposium will focus on our current state of knowledge and new frontiers regarding the multifaceted phenomenon of employee entrepreneurship. This includes how entrepreneurship emerges from ideas in the context of established firms, the role of motives in shaping entrepreneurial career outcomes of employee entrepreneurs, how founders attract additional members to their entrepreneurial teams, and finally what role mobility restrictions play in these processes. The panel will discuss recent advances in this literature and focus on how the changing role of knowledge and technology relate to research questions in employee entrepreneurship. The topics discussed in this panel symposium sit at the intersection of both employee entrepreneurship and strategic human capital research which are both major foci in the STR and ENT domain. Distinguished scholars and leading researchers have agreed to serve as panelists: Sonali K. Shah, Florence Honoré, Evan Starr, and Martin Ganco.

Configurational Research in Teams

Teams are complex systems in which multiple individual members, themselves containing multiple characteristics, are embedded (Arrow, McGrath, & Berdahl, 2000). Team research has historically been dominated by a focus on what is shared across these multiple components, such as aggregations of team member characteristics or perceptions of team processes operationalized through calculating agreement statistics and means. Instead, configurational perspectives on teams and their members recognize the complexity of teams by focusing on the uneven and disproportional effects of member characteristics or processes on team outcomes (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). Understanding such effects is essential for building upon traditional approaches using shared team constructs to create new knowledge about how teams create synergy amid seemingly limitless potential for chaos and conflict. Moreover, adopting configurational perspectives on teams is increasingly tractable with advances in configurational methodologies (e.g., social networks, faultlines, latent profile analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, and attribute alignment). As such, this panel symposium will 1) generate awareness of configurational perspectives and methods used in team research, 2) share recent advances in the field, and 3) create an opportunity for researchers who are actively working in or interested in this area to collaborate. The format will include an introduction to the topic, brief presentations from the panelists, and an informal Q&A session involving the panelists, their collaborators, and the audience.

Current Developments in Leader Member Exchange (LMX): An Interactive Incubator Panel Symposium

Acknowledging recent critiques, this interactive panel symposium will provide a forum for scholars to discuss several promising areas of inquiry for future LMX research and spark new ideas to help us better understand the leader-follower relationship. Panelists are LMX researchers who will discuss the recent critiques of LMX and innovative topics in the area of LMX research in which they are presently engaged. Participants will be able to network with these scholars in order to advance LMX research, and perhaps develop collaborator relationships. Question and answer periods, and breakout sessions with senior scholars will give opportunities for small group interaction with them.

Creating a Better World via Cross-Sectoral Collaborations

Despite the widely-acknowledged potential of cross-sectoral partnerships to solve complex social issues, the process of cross-sectoral collaborations is saturated with conflicts and tensions. Researchers have investigated the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of cross-sectoral collaborations with different theoretical frameworks and primary foci. In this panel symposium, the panelists will present five theoretical perspectives, explore the conceptualization of theoretical boundaries, and discuss how to produce knowledge by spanning theoretical fields. The perspectives to be presented include (1) collective action theory, which helps us understand how parties with conflicting interests build collaborative institutions and governance norms to overcome collective action dilemmas; (2) the institutional logics perspective, which focuses on the value differences among partners and the associated outcomes; (3) the interactional framing perspective, which looks at how interpretations and sensemaking are constructed and deconstructed in partnerships; (4) the resource dependence perspective, which examines the resource dependencies among partners and external stakeholders; and (5) the paradox perspective, which focuses on the contradictory but interrelated elements that persistently coexist in cross-sectoral collaborations. This symposium aims to respond and contribute to diverse discourses both within the management academy and around societal challenges. This interactive session will include Q&As and discussions on strategies for developing new interactions between different fields of inquiry.

Towards a More Nuanced Understanding of Communities: Definitions, Debates, and Dark Sides

In this panel symposium, we collectively explore the nuanced nature of community dynamics and their consequences for individuals and organizations. Although the concept of community has longstanding presence in management literature, our understanding of the concept remains relatively vague. Many different definitions and types of communities have been discussed in various streams of literature, contributing to ambiguity around the term. Moreover, as studies about communities most often focus on their positive aspects, communities’ potential dark sides are understudied. The purpose of this panel symposium is to unpack the various definitions of communities, debate their ramifications, and rebalance our view of communities by bringing the potential dark sides of communities back into the academic fore. By considering different theoretical conceptualizations of community in organizational scholarship and in the empirical reality of communities, we hope to further the growing conversations about community and around the potential challenges of responsible engagement with the communities for organisations and scholars.

A Critical View on Achieving Organizational Resilience: Unpacking the Underlying Trade-offs

In past decades, many natural disasters and social crises that occurred even before the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic have directed the attention of many scholars towards organizational resilience. There have been many reviews and reconceptualizations of this construct that are paramount for rigorous future research which have highlighted the complex multi-level nature of this phenomenon. However, a critical view of organizational resilience seems to be left out of the conversation. With this panel symposium, we expand the discussion - both from academic and practitioners' perspectives - by delineating and discussing three underlying trade-offs: 1) Efficiency vs. resilience, 2) Buffering vs. adaptation, 3) System resilience vs. component resilience. While doing this, we elaborate on the multi-level sources and mechanisms leading to organizational resilience as well as associated challenges.

Evidence-Based Leadership Development: Do We ‘Walk the Talk’ and How Can We Get Better at Doing That

Academic institutions are guided by science, with scholars and educators seeking ways to extend knowledge in different domains and establish their work on evidence. Yet, despite the fact that leadership development is at the core of many business schools’ mission statements, leadership development programs (LDPs) are not as evidence based as one might expect. Research shows that a variety of reasons is behind this inconsistency, such as relative scarcity and availability of leadership development research, low accessibility of existing work, challenges of conducting research to examine the effects of LDPs, and conflicting priorities in business schools themselves. This panel symposium will examine the main challenges academics and practitioners face in their efforts to make leadership development programs more evidence-based. It will further explore ways in which we can all work together to overcome these challenges and create more evidence-based LDPs that are crucial to equip leaders of today and tomorrow with the knowledge, tools, competencies, and abilities to effectively lead organizations and society as a whole.

Future Directions of Servant Leadership: A Panel Symposium Research Incubator

This panel symposium brings together eminent and emerging servant leadership scholars to debate about the future and value of the servant leadership model. The goal of our panel is to explore the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological challenges faced by servant leadership researchers. Participants will engage in an open discussion with the panelists about the current state of servant leadership’s construct clarity, methods, and the universal application of servant leadership, to meaningfully move the field forward.

How Does Creativity Factor in Forming Entrepreneurial Opportunities?

Does creativity change in the absence of markets? Does forming entrepreneurial opportunities necessitate the existence of markets? What is the role of creativity in recognizing, discovering, and/or creating entrepreneurial opportunities? In this panel symposium we will debate whether the role of creativity is the same in discovery versus creation of entrepreneurial opportunities. The panelists are in three camps: the discovery camp, the creation camp, and the third – it does not really matter camp.