New editor-in-chief for OMJ in 2017
As readers of this journal know, I announced I was retiring as editor-in-chief of Organization Management Journal in the first issue of 2016. I have held this position for 10 years, which were the first 10 years of our history as a quarterly, publishing faithfully every quarter of that decade. Ten years is a little more than 25% of my career as a professor and I have actually enjoyed it very much, but it is both time for me to do something else and time for someone else to have a chance to do this job. Thus, the officers of the Eastern Academy of Management constituted a search committee headed by Kathleen Barnes, who happens also to be the guest editor-in-chief of our upcoming special issue on Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)-oriented articles, and that committee has made its choice, Professor Priscilla Elsass of Clark University in Worcester, MA.
After Cornell and a PhD from the University of Connecticut, Professor Elsass has spent her entire academic career at Clark in a variety of dean and teaching positions. She has published widely in journals like Academy of Management Review, AOM Executive, Human Relations, International Journal of Management Education, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, and others. Recently she was a Visiting Professor of Leadership at Linnaeus University School of Business and Economics in Kalmar, Sweden. At the Eastern Academy of Management she has served most recently on the Board of Governors, a chair of local arrangements, and five times as a track chair. When it comes to editing scholarly research, she has an Eastern Academy of Management role as translations editor of the Executive for 6 years and is currently a special issues editor for Journal of Management Education. In short, Priscilla is eminently qualified to be our next editor, especially in the fields of linking theory and practice, management education, and international research. Finally, I am happy to say, she is highly enthusiastic about her upcoming role as our editor-in-chief. Welcome, Priscilla!
Speaking of special issues, we are on track for a late 2016 or early 2017 special issue of our own on topics related to accreditation by AACSB and the challenge of continuous improvement of our pedagogy and research.
Best OMJ articles of the 2015 volume
The editorial staff was able to announce the annual Best Article results of 2015 in Research articles and in Management Education. As usual, four of the co-editors nominated two articles in each category and a blue-ribbon selection of past co-editors who are now advisory board members—Don Gibson, Alvin Hwang, and Steve Meisel—read all four and chose the winner in each category from among four outstanding articles. Each winning team of authors received a $250 award, with the Research award sponsored by the publisher and the Management Education award funded by the Fellows of the Eastern Academy of Management. Congratulations to the winners and runners-up.
Research award
“Managers’ Family-Supportive Supervisory Behaviors: A Multilevel Perspective” by Sue Epstein, Janet Marler, and Thomas Taber (winner).
“The Effects of Informal Social Structures: A Cognition-Structure-Action Approach,” by Harry “Trip” Knoche and Gary Castrogiovanni (runner-up).
Management Education Award
“Mission-Centric Learning: Developing Students’ Workplace Readiness Skills” by Lisa A. Burke-Smalley and Kathleen K. Wheatley (winner).
“Increasing Knowledge by Leaps and Bounds: Using Experiential Learning to Address Threshold Concepts” by Thomas Bradley, Gerald F. Burch, and Jana J. Burch (runner-up).
New emerging conceptual scholarship co-editor needed
One other editorial note is that we have accepted the resignation of one member of our Emerging Conceptual Scholarship section, Jill Woodilla, effective at the end of this year. Jill will continue to shepherd the manuscripts assigned to her until they have achieved perfection, into 2017. However, we are in need of a new co-editor for this section. Applicants can be either junior or senior academics interested in conceptual research from all disciplines, as long as it has a bearing on our field of organizational, group, and interpersonal management and/or management education. Please send an e-mail to either Bill Ferris or Priscilla Elsass indicating your interest and qualifications.
The new articles in this issue
In this third issue of the 2016 publication year, we have four insightful articles. Two of these come from the Current Empirical Research section. Rebecca L. Badawy, Brooke A. Shaughnessy, Robyn L. Brouer, and Stephanie R. Seitz examine motive attributions from supervisor to subordinate and how subordinate political skill and leader–member exchange (LMX) impact performance ratings in “Are You Actually Helping or Just Looking Out for Yourself?: Examining the Individual and Interactive Effects of Relationship Quality and Political Skill on Supervisor Motive Attributions.” Their study concludes that both do play a role in motive and organization citizenship behavior attributions as reflected in supervisor performance assessments, but political skill has more of an impact than LMX factors. In the second article, “Linking Abusive Supervision to Employee Engagement and Exhaustion,” Melinda L. Scheuer, James P. Burton, Larissa K. Barber, Lisa M. Finkelstein, and Christopher P. Parker report on a supervisor assessment measure they developed to attempt to discover which kinds of perceived supervisory behaviors lead to challenge versus those that lead to exhaustion. As one might expect, supervisory behaviors coded as “challenging” lead to engagement and behaviors coded as “hindrance” lead to exhaustion and perception of the supervisor as abusive.
In the Teaching & Learning section, “Business Student Perceptions of Online Learning: Using Focus Groups for Richer Understanding of Student Perspectives” by Justin D. Cochran, Hope M. Baker, Debbie Benson, and Wes Rhea explores what online students say they need for online education to be effective. Not surprisingly, these things include consistency in course design across the online program, better use of certain time management tools, the importance of faculty presence, and absence of what students see as “busy work.” Assessment of learning and of the value of online courses continues to be a challenge for academics, and this article brings our attention to the need to listen to students as we attempt to improve this pedagogy.
Finally, in the Linking Theory & Practice section, Saheli Goswami and Jung E. Ha-Brookshire report on the effect of perceptions of corporate hypocrisy (CH) on employees in the retail industry in “Exploring U.S. Retail Employees’ Experiences of Corporate Hypocrisy.” They discover that perceived CH has a more profound effect on employees than it does on customers. In a set of 16 in-depth interviews, they present qualitative empirical evidence that such perceived CH, eventuating mainly from actions of employers not matching their words, leads to outcomes such as separation and turnover. Additional perceived CH includes observations of favoritism, biased penalizing, and experiencing inconsistent instructions. This study highlights the impact of behavior to which management may be paying too little attention in its pursuit of consumer feedback more often than employee feedback and determination to avoid the perception of corporate hypocrisy. In fact, all of our articles in this issue shine spotlights on how management (including course management by online instructors!) can be more productive as a result of better attention to the needs of subordinates and students. We think you will find them interesting and insightful.