Love School of Business professors present at Academy of Management meeting

Five faculty members in Elon University’s Martha and Spencer Love School of Business shared their research and expertise during the 76th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management held Aug. 5-9 in Anaheim, Calif.

The conference, themed “Making Organizations Meaningful,” brought together more than 10,000 students, academics, scholars and professionals. According to Program Chair Mary Ann Glynn, the conference investigated the “processes and outcomes that are associated with making organizations meaningful or perhaps even meaningless.”

Brian Lyons, associate professor of management, presented a paper titled “Bigger Big Brother: Company Off-Duty Deviance Policies Over Time,” which he co-authored with Colby Kennedy, a research scientist at the Human Resources Research Organization, Brian J. Hoffman, an associate professor of industrial/organizational psychology at the University of Georgia, and University of Georgia students Andrea L Hetrick and Alexander T. Cole. Lyons and his co-authors presented their paper as part of the showcase symposium “Changing Perspectives on Employee Deviance: Novel Insights.”

The paper’s abstract: “This study provides the largest to date systematic analysis of the changes in the prevalence and content of corporate policy governing off-duty deviance (ODD). Results suggest a significant portion of companies have policies involving employee ODD and that the incidence of these policies has substantially increased in a relatively short time frame. Most policies were relatively vague and did not specify what type of behaviors were prohibited, the job relevance of prohibited behaviors, or processes following incidents of ODD. Further, when specific information was given, the policies tended to be emphasize punitive outcomes (e.g., termination) rather than approaches to assist employees. Together, it seems evident that ODD is of increasing relevance to modern organizations, and thus, organizational research is obligated to consider this form of deviance and the legal, ethical, and social impactions of this trend on both organizations and employees.”

Research co-authored by Robert Moorman, Frank S. Holt Jr. Professor of Business Leadership, was presented in the symposium “Traditional Predictors of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Reviews and Recommendations for Future Research.” The research cited was from the paper “Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Trust: The Double Reinforcing Spiral,” which Moorman co-authored with Holly H. Brower, Wake Forest University, and Steven Grover, The University of Otago, New Zealand.

The paper’s abstract: “Research on trust and Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) has focused mostly on how OCB performance may be a consequence of trusting relationships. However, recent studies of trust have sought to both broaden and deepen our understanding of trust and develop our appreciation of the complexity of the construct. This paper examines how contemporary treatments of trust enhance our understanding of how trust and OCB performance interrelate. We argue that the relationship between trust and OCB is best modeled as reciprocal taking the form of a double reinforcing spiral. We further discuss how this model informs our understanding of felt trust, trust violation, and trust recovery.”

As part of the “Managing the Meaning of Social and Market Logics in Mission-driven Organizations” symposium, Elena Kennedy, assistant professor of entrepreneurship, presented the paper “Navigating logics: Measuring Performance in Social Enterprises.”

Kennedy was also a presenter in the “Entrepreneurship and Sustainability” paper session. She presented the paper “Business model innovation for simultaneously creating social value and capturing economic value,“ which she co-authored with Nardia Haigh, University of Massachusetts-Boston.

The paper’s abstract: “This study investigated the nature of business model innovation (BMI) seeking to simultaneously create social value and capture economic value through the examination of twenty-four social enterprises that underwent BMI. Three business model components (value proposition/value creation/value capture) and two drivers of BMI (necessity/opportunity) were treated orthogonally to reveal four patterns of BMI: Mission Expansion, Impact Expansion, Assimilation, and Revenue Expansion. These patterns suggest that social entrepreneurs only prioritize economic value capture over social value creation when economic sustainability is at risk, and in the absence of such risk BMI will simultaneously enhance social value creation and economic value capture.”

During the paper session “What is Cultural Distance and Its Impact?,” Rosey Bao, assistant professor of strategic management, presented the paper “The Role of National Culture and Corruption on Managing Earnings Around the World.” Bao and her co-author, Krista Lewellyn, University of Wyoming, received the Academy of Management’s International Management Division Best Paper Award.

The paper’s summary: “Earnings management is ‘the practice of distorting the true financial performance of the company.’ This paper argues that the national context is a key element to understanding why managers exercise their discretion with respect to managing earning in firms around the world. Drawing from institutional theory (Dimaggio & Powell, 1983), and using a sample of 39,715 firms from a mix of developing (12) and developed (14) countries for the 2013 time period, this research shows empirically that the cognitive institution of national culture along with the normative institution of corruption have significant influences on the magnitude of earnings management. This research also finds that these national contextual variables interact such that the cultural dimensions exert moderating effects on the relationship between corruption and earnings management.” 

Sean McMahon, assistant professor of entrepreneurship, spoke on a panel in the workshop “Bridging the Science-Practice Gap: How to Translate Research for Practitioners and the Public.” The panel discussed the current state of the research-practice divide and how “boundary spanners” have developed bridges between the academic and practitioner communities.

Founded in 1936, the Academy of Management is the preeminent professional association for management and organization scholars, and serves nearly 20,000 members.