Faculty Research in the Management & Organizations Area

We give you a snapshot of current interest areas for each faculty member in the brief sketches below. Click on each faculty member's name to connect to a webpage that provides more details. We also describe the areas of research strength for the department in the section below the individuals' listings.

Susan Ashford:	Leadership and personal effectiveness, voice and issue selling, self-management practices (feedback seeking, proactivity) and nonstandard work.

Wayne Baker:	Values, social capital, organizations and networks, economic sociology, culture. See www.waynebaker.org

Kim S. Cameron:	Positive Organizational Scholarship, Organizational Effectiveness, Downsizing, Management Skills, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture.

Gerald Davis:	Corporate governance, organization theory; financial globalization, social networks, social movements, influence of politics and social networks on corporate governance.

Scott DeRue:	Leadership, leader and team development, learning from experience, team leadership, team learning and adaptation, and team performance.

Jane Dutton:	Positive Organizational Scholarship, High Quality Connections and Relationships at Work, Compassion and Organizations, Positive Self-Narratives, Thriving at Work, Issue Selling.

Andrew J. Hoffman:	Nature and dynamics of change within institutional and cultural systems. He applies that research toward understanding the cultural and managerial implications of environmental protection and social sustainability for industry.

Shirli Kopelman:	Social dilemmas, emotion management, and cross-cultural negotiations. That is, cooperation versus competition in interdependent intra- and inter-organizational contexts, strategic display and response to emotions in social interactions, and negotiating relational and financial processes and outcomes in a global economy.

Fiona Lee:	How complex events are understood and communicated within organizations, and how these interpretations affect working relationships, risk-taking, learning, impressions and performance.

Robert Quinn:	Leadership, vision and change, management, organization theory, organizational behavior, organizational change.

Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks:	Cross-cultural and international aspects of organizations including intercultural skills of managers living locally but working globally; emotional aperture among global leaders; individual-level innovation; and team conflict.

Lloyd E. Sandelands:	Determinants and dynamics of social organization.

Gretchen Spreitzer:	Positive Organizational Scholarship, Thriving at Work, Empowerment, Leading Organizational and Personal Change.

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe:	Organizing for resilience and reliability, capabilities for sensing emerging problems and coping with uncertainty, cognitive and experiential diversity in top management teams, and team and organizational learning.

Noel M. Tichy:	Global leadership.

James P. Walsh:	Traditional questions of corporate governance -- understanding the relationship between managers and owners as mediated by the board of directors and disciplined by the market for corporate control -- how society figures in the governance of the firm, purposes and accountability of the firm, how well society is served by business activity.

Karl E. Weick:	Collective sensemaking under pressure, medical errors, handoffs in extreme events, high-reliability performance, improvisation and continuous change.

Janet A. Weiss:	Public management and public policy, challenges of public management and the interplay between policy design and the management of public programs, nonprofit management.

Lynn Perry Wooten:	How changes in workforce demographics and the knowledge economy influence the implementation of strategic human resource management practices. In addition, she examines how these human resource management practices affect the performance of organizations and employee-related outcomes.

Areas of Research Strength

Faculty in our department are risk takers and innovators, being leaders in developing new lines of intellectual thought and teaching in the management field. Here are several strands of research strength:

Within the topic of executive leadership, several of the M&O faculty have redefined the meaning of leadership focusing on the Fundamental State of Leadership (Quinn), building a company of leaders (Spreitzer and Quinn), and a relational perspective on leadership (Baker, Dutton). Several of our faculty developed the Competing Values Perspective (Cameron and Quinn) on organizational culture and leadership development that is being used by practitioners and academics all over the world. Further, they provide research insights into various skills relevant to leaders such as seeking feedback (Ashford), enhancing effectiveness (Ashford), managing diversity (Wooten) and issue selling (Dutton, Ashford). Finally, faculty have developed core leadership ideas such as developing the leadership engine and leaders as teachers (Tichy) and have researched core leadership processes such as how leaders learn from experience (DeRue).

The M&O faculty have also been leaders in the study of corporate governance, with groundbreaking studies on the dynamics of corporate boards, takeovers, institutional investor activism, and the influence of mutual funds on corporate governance, as well as broader examinations of the role of the corporation in society (Davis, Walsh)

Our faculty have pioneered the domain of research on high reliability organizing and organizational resilience, opening up entirely new ways to think about leadership and organizing in ways that reduce errors, promote reliability and foster resilience. This work on the management of unexpected evens has been particularly impactful in the wake of crises such as 9/11, Columbia, Hurricane Katrina and SAARS (Sutcliffe, Weick).

The University of Michigan has one of the largest communities of network researchers in the world, spread among departments from physics and biology to computer science. M&O faculty in the Ross School have been in the forefront of applying network analysis to organizations: both how managers build and use networks within organizations, and how organizations' external networks influence their strategies and structures (Baker, Davis).

M&O faculty members are also widely recognized for their work on the social impact of the corporation, from the link between social responsibility and performance to corporate environmentalism and business initiatives on the AIDS pandemic (Davis, Hoffman, Walsh).

The faculty in our area have contributed substantially to research on cross-cultural management and the importance of values for management which are critical to effective management in a global world (Baker, Kopelman, Lee, Sanchez-Burks, Sandelands).

The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship is the global center for a new view of leadership and management that focuses on how work organizations foster human and organizational flourishing. The Center produces research and teaching materials that support this new view of leadership and management. The Center has expertise in research topics such as human thriving at work, empowerment, managing from strengths, high quality connections and energy networks in firms, and organizational virtuousness (Baker, Cameron, Dutton, Quinn, Spreitzer, Wooten).