2017 Responsible Research in Management Award

Co-sponsored by the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management and the International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR)

December 22, 2017

The purpose of this inaugural award is to discover good scholarship in management published in the recent five years that focus on important issues for business and society with rigorous research methods and credible results. We wish to provide examples of such research and to feature their contribution to both knowledge and practice. Since we published in the Call for Nominations the review criteria (the seven principles of responsible research which emphasize both the credibility and usefulness dimensions of research), we assume there would be self-screening and that most nominations would have demonstrated most of the seven principles. Our expectations were not too far off. Most nominations represent excellent work that focuses on topics with relevance for employees, managers or organizations in addition to contributions to the literature. A committee of three chairs and fifteen reviewers assessed these nominations, based on the seven principles of responsible research. We thank each member of this committee for the careful review and excellent work, in selecting the best research studies that we use to showcase responsible research.  

Each nomination demonstrates many of the seven principles with most articles scoring the highest on principle 1: Service to society. Collectively, they score lower on Principle 5 (multidisciplinary approach), the reproducibility aspect of Principle 6 (sound methodology), and Principle 7 (broad dissemination). This suggests that future research should pay more attention to these principles. Due to the complex nature of social, business and organizational problems, multidisciplinary research is highly desirable. Replication is central to building credible knowledge, and broad dissemination will facilitate the transfer of knowledge to practice.

Based on the rigorous review, we are pleased to honor ten articles and two books as winners of the award. They are listed below (with hot link to each article or book), followed by the list of the review committee members, and the seven principles of responsible research in business and management.

The ten winning articles offer a diversity of topics and methods and they exemplify most of the principles of responsible research, with the knowledge produced directly relevant and potentially beneficial to businesses, organizations and society. Another noteworthy feature is that most of these articles are by junior scholars. The two winning books meet the high standards set by the principles, despite their different approaches to knowledge development and transfer of knowledge to practice. Each strives for broad and significant societal benefits, leaving the world a better place for their presence. The actual impact of this collection of works will take time to realize but with credible knowledge on important issues, we hope they will be translated into ideas that managers will find useful. Further description of each publication will be available on rrbm.network (English) and iacmr.org (English and Chinese).

We whole-heartedly congratulate the authors for their excellent research that exemplifies the principles of responsible research.

Winners

Articles (with hyperlinks to the publisher websites)

Barnes, C. M., Miller, J. A., & Bostock, S. (2017). Helping employees sleep well: Effects of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia on work outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(1), 104-113.

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Burbano, V. C. (2016). Social responsibility messages and worker wage requirements: Field experimental evidence from online labor marketplaces. Organization Science, 27(4), 1010-1028.

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Campos, F., Frese, M., Goldstein, M., Iacovone, L., Johnson, H. C., McKenzie, D., & Mensmann, M. (2017). Teaching personal initiative beats traditional training in boosting small business in West Africa. Science, 357(6357), 1287-1290.

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Gehman, J., & Grimes, M. (2017). Hidden badge of honor: How contextual distinctiveness affects category promotion among Certified B Corporations. Academy of Management Journal, 60(6), 2294-2320.

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Howard-Grenville, J., Nelson, A. J., Earle, A. G., Haack, J. A., & Young, D. M. (2017). “If chemists don’t do it, who is going to?” Peer-driven occupational change and the emergence of green chemistry. Administrative Science Quarterly, 62(3), 524-560.

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Lo, C., Tang, C. S., Zhou, Y., Yeung, A. C., & Fan, D. (2018). Environmental incidents and the market value of firms: An empirical investigation in the Chinese context. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 20(3).

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Malesky, E., & Taussig, M. (2017). The danger of not listening to firms: Government responsiveness and the goal of regulatory compliance. Academy of Management Journal, 60(5), 1741-1770.

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Shepherd, D. A., & Williams, T. A. (2014). Local venturing as compassion organizing in the aftermath of a natural disaster: The role of localness and community in reducing suffering. Journal of Management Studies, 51(6), 952-994.

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Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2015). Short on time: Intertemporal tensions in business sustainability. Organization Science, 26(2), 531-549.

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Zhao, E. Y., & Wry, T. (2016). Not all inequality is equal: Deconstructing the societal logic of patriarchy to understand microfinance lending to women. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6), 1994-2020.

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Books

London, Ted. (2016). The base of the pyramid promise: Building businesses with impact and scale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Romme, Georges. (2017). The quest for professionalism: The case of management and entrepreneurship. London, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Review Committee Members