Academy of Management 2024: A breathtaking whirlwind in the windy city!

*GASP!* Learning we won the "Phillips & Nadkarni Best Paper on Diversity & Cognition" Award 🏆 today at the Academy of Management was truly breathtaking! (No, really--I nearly passed out! 😅)

People tend to prefer people who are like them (i.e., homophily), which can perpetuate inequalities in organizations. For example, in many contexts, leaders have historically been men; so, if they tend to interact and network more with other men, this locks men into (and women out of) critical professional networks. Instead of revealing more bias, we develop and test a new way to network: playfulness. 💡 Across 5 mixed methods studies comprising 4,461 data points from interviews, vignettes, archival data, and recalled scenarios, we found that men and women--as well as lower and higher status persons--are more likely to interact in more playful situations. So, the next time you're planning a networking event or just want people to mix at a mixer, make it more playful (i.e., spontaneous, pleasurable, and interactive) to facilitate interactions across differences as a step toward more social inclusion and professional equity in organizations. 🌟

Above, Dr. Huong Pham, Mihwa Seong, and I accepted/hold our plaques from these 2 terrific MOC leaders, BURAK OC and Beth A. Livingston, in Chicago. The award is named in honor of the late scholarly greats, Katherine W. Phillips (Columbia Business School) and Sucheta Nadkarni (Cambridge Judge Business School)--both of whom I briefly met at past AOM meetings--who have deeply shaped the field and inspired thousands with their research in #DEI and behavioral strategy.

We are absolutely honored and utterly thrilled; this work would not be possible without our amazing coauthors (Mihwa, Eugenia, and Huong below) and unpictured coauthors: Isabelle Engeler, and Raina Brands, and the generous funding from Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF. 🙏

Of course, we (re)connected will colleagues new and known, attended scholarly sessions and presented our own research, supported the DEI division where Mihwa and I are both members of the Executive Committee, and continued our education in professional development workshops, too. But, winning this award (and presenting this paper among an all-star session of network scholars) was truly a highlight!

Exchanging & Inspiring with International & Interedisciplinary Scholars

We were delighted to share some of our research in the prestigous and selective “Organization Science Winter Conference” in Zurich (below). We discussed the work-in-progress with a range of scholars from Switzerland, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, and the U.S.

Thanks again to the organizers from ETH Zurich and to all of the participants for the warm welcome of our more micro-research in this historically more macro research community. We’re integrating the feedback and hoping to submit our paper soon.

Our core PLAID lab team were also delighted to share a new paper (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) on how playfulness can facilitate interactions and networking across diversity (e.g., men and women, lower and higher-status persons) in organizations. In total, 31 research groups from across HSG shared their sustainability-related insights. See here for more information.