Updated: August 12, 2009
Building a culture of curricular innovation
A group of Bryant faculty present research, network with professionals, and learn best practices at Academy of Management conference.
Five Bryant professors are attending the Academy of Management conference in Chicago that began on Friday and concludes today. The five-day event, which is the largest annual gathering of management professors in the world, gives academicians the opportunity to present their latest research and gain feedback from colleagues from around the world. (Learn more about the conference.)
Attending the conference are Associate Professor of Management Lori Coakley, Assistant Professors of Management Crystal Jiang and Eileen Kwesiga, Trustee Professor of Management Mike Roberto and Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems Ken Sousa.
Sousa and Coakley will get feedback on research they have gathered about Bryant’s innovative Business 101 course, while Jiang and Kwesiga will present papers about their latest research.
Roberto, who recently earned Bryant’s Mentor of the Year award for his work with new faculty, is one of two main speakers for a workshop on professional development, as well as a featured expert in a session about blogging by management scholars.
Each will be blogging about their experiences. Here is what they had to say:
The Academy of Management conference is now over. Today, I attended a great session on top management teams. Ann Mooney, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and Allen Amason, a professor at the University of Georgia, presented a paper that builds closely off of a paper I wrote a few years back. They are doing a nice job of enhancing our understanding of the typical CEO's inner circle.I also met an acquaintance of Bryant professor Greg Carter who is doing good work on senior teams.
I learned a ton at this conference, and I cannot wait to share with students and colleagues.
Mike Roberto
Tuesday, August 11
As a business professor in a dynamic world, the opportunity to attend a conference like this is multiple-fold.
First, is the opportunity for professional development to stay current on different ideas and thoughts from outside the 'Bryant bubble' that help us avoid becoming too narrow in our vision and thinking.
Second, is curriculum development and the ability to stretch ourselves in the same manner that we ask our students. We do not always have all the answers or see an opportunity to integrate something creative into the classroom. It could be as dramatic as a new project or as simple as how to create more student participation.
Third is the chance to pursue research, which is a difficult and challenging component of our career. It is valuable to learn and receive feedback and coaching on a research project, give back new knowledge to practitioners, and build our knowledge for the classroom.
Lori and I received that valuable feedback on Friday. Now comes the challenge to integrate that feedback for more quality research.
We often talk to students and the Bryant community about lifelong learning. This is our opportunity to practice what we preach as well as stretch ourselves to become better educators for our students, Bryant, and our community.
Ken Sousa
Monday, August 10
Fostering collaboration
As mentioned by Mike Roberto, Ken Sousa and I are here at the Academy of Management Meeting in Chicago. As he stated, on Friday night we had the opportunity to build thick skin and have a paper reviewed by colleagues and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Management Education. While the feedback was positive for the most part, what we gleaned overall from the experience was twofold; the paper we had submitted was really four papers in one, but more importantly, the feedback and guidance on the different ways to pull our data together was immeasurable.
To back track just a moment, this type of workshop requires participants to work in a round table setting, reading three papers submitted by colleagues and providing feedback to each one. This approach would be highly beneficial to promote more often at Bryant, as we have in the past through the Working Paper Series. Some time you find you are too close to your own data to see all the possibilities. To foster such a collaborative and research-supportive community at Bryant on a more regular basis is one of my goals after attending the conference.
On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend an excellent session by the Christensen Center for Teaching at Harvard Business School on how to use teaching evaluations to enhance personal development, learned how my students can post their presentations for class on You-Tube, and participated in a professional development workshop focused on marrying scholarship with practice. From each session and workshop, I found a myriad of connections to my own work at Bryant, and look forward to using the information culled from each to enhance both my teaching and research.
Today, many of the sessions I will be attending focus on the research being conducted by my Honor students, Justin Andrews ’10 (Spencer, MA) and Arielle Langlais ’10 (Coventry, RI). I am attending two sessions that focus on gender and leadership: Assumptions and Reactions to Women Leaders and Gender and Leadership to acquire new research that should assist Arielle as she completes her literature review and develops her model focusing on the means by which women can successfully navigate the corporate ladder. In between, I will be engaged in a session that specifically examines leadership research, Focus on the Leader, in hopes of providing Justin with a way to narrow his research focus and complete his literature review. Since both of these areas resonate with my own work, I am looking forward to hearing what new work is being conducting in each of these fields.
Of course the opportunity to see old colleagues from Bryant such as Juan Florin and Ron DiBattista, as well as colleagues from my doctoral program, and those met at past conferences has been rewarding. We have also found a few hours to have some fun, and learn a little bit about Chicago. Yesterday morning, before the heat was too much, Ken Sousa and I took a boat ride along the Chicago Rivers and Lake Michigan, and were entertained with the architectural history of Chicago.
For instance, did you know that Wrigley’s began first by making soap, and when the soap was not selling well, the company decided to insert gum into the soap packages to encourage purchase. Well, the gum was better received than the soap, and the rest is history! Another fun fact was that one of the main avenues here in downtown Chicago, Michigan Avenue, which is now several blocks from Lake Michigan, use to abut the lake, hence it’s name. However, after the great Chicago fire, all of the debris from the fire was pushed into the lake, creating a large land fill. I thought this was really interesting, until I realized the Hyatt hotel at which I’m staying is part of that land fill territory!
Off to my first session to see Dr. Crystal Jiang’s presentation.
Lori Coakley
Monday, August 10
Enhancing the educational experience
Over the weekend, I was pleased to spend some time with Bryant Professors Lori Coakley and Ken Sousa, hearing about a workshop in which they participated. Lori and Ken presented and received feedback on their educational research based on Bryant’s innovative Introduction to Business course (BUS101). The evaluators of their work felt that they had some fascinating findings, with the potential for several impactful articles to be published from this large dataset that they have compiled based on surveys of students from the course. This research demonstrates how Bryant faculty members are conducting research that can have a direct impact on improving the quality of our student’s educational experience.
I also had the opportunity to get together with several old friends from graduate school who are now teaching at various schools around the world. I was pleased to have a chance to congratulate my old grad school classmate, Mark Cotteleer – a professor at Marquette University, on his best paper award in operations management. He received the award Sunday at the conference.
This morning, Crystal Jiang, one of Bryant’s excellent international business professors, presents the first of two papers that she has authored for this conference. Her first paper involves a study of 70 semiconductor firms in China from 1999 to 2006. Her second paper, which she presents on Tuesday, is a study in corporate entrepreneurship in China. That paper consists of an in-depth case study of a leading Chinese automobile company. Crystal’s research has provided her a front-row seat into one of the most interesting developments in international business at the moment – the emergence of Chinese companies in the global auto industry.
This morning, I have been invited to serve as a discussant for a session on how firms formulate their competitive strategies. As a discussant, I will be analyzing four papers that are being presented and offering my constructive feedback to the authors. I find these papers particularly interesting given my own research into how senior management teams make strategic decisions, as well as my role as one of the professors in the strategic management course that all Bryant business students take as a senior capstone experience.
Mike Roberto
Monday, August 10
Research and scholarship
The Academy of Management Conference opened at 8 am on Friday morning. This conference is the largest annual gathering of management faculty in the world. Over 8,000 professors and doctoral students appear on the conference program.
I began the conference with a professional development workshop for which I was the co-leader along with Professor David Ager of Harvard University. The two-hour workshop focused on how academics and practitioners can collaborate effectively to create effective leadership development programs. I invited three panelists from industry to join me in presenting at this workshop - the Chief Learning Officer from Mars, Inc., former Chief Learning Officer at Morgan Stanley, and head of external partnerships from Target.
I have worked with each of these people over the past few years, and they did a terrific job. We had a standing room only crowd, having to scramble to bring in chairs from nearby rooms to accommodate everyone! I plan to write an article with one of the panelists based on the findings we presented at this workshop. I spent the rest of the day as a panelist in a workshop on how and why management scholars can and should write blogs as a means of disseminating our ideas. I presented my blog at this workshop: http://michael-roberto.blogspot.com/. I found time at this workshop to also discuss some of my latest research with Doug Orton of the Project for National Security Reform. He and I are both very interested in high reliability organizations, and how that research might apply to agencies of the federal government who are trying to detect and prevent terrorist incidents.
Mike Roberto
Saturday, August 8
