Very excited to see that Markus Kreutzer and my new book on “Reconceptualizing Organizational Control: Managing in the Age of Hybrid Workplaces, Artificial Intelligence, and the Gig Economy” is listed as forthcoming on the Cambridge University Press website!

This year’s Annual Conference of the Strategic Management Society took place from September 30 to October 3 in Toronto, Canada, and it was great to meet so many old and new colleagues and friends in person again!

Had a fantastic experience spending the long weekend in Lexington, KY, for this year’s Intraorganizational Networks Conference organized by the University of Kentucky’s LINKS Center, which featured some of the most prolific and influential social networks researchers in the world.

Big thanks to my coauthor Ajay Mehra (center) for organizing this conference and for his kind invitation!

This year’s Academy of Management Annual Meeting is taking place in Seattle, WA, and judging from the scores of participants crowding the streets and hotels around the convention center, everyone seems glad to be back in person after two years of virtual meetings.

Joint research with Daniel Levin (Rutgers University) and Keith Murnighan (Northwestern University) featured in a recent article in the German magazine “Psychologie Heute.”

Glad to see that my research has made an impact with now over 2,000 citations on Google Scholar

An article coauthored with Markus Kreutzer & Karin Kreutzer (both at EBS Universität) has just been published in the Journal of Management Studies:

Setting the Tone for the Team: A Multi-Level Analysis of Managerial Control, Peer Control, and their Consequences for Job Satisfaction and Team Performance

In this study, we develop a multi-level theoretical framework linking antecedents and outcomes of peer control, defined as team members at the same hierarchical level noticing and responding to their peers’ behaviour or performance. Analysing multi-level data from 356 volunteers and 58 regional teams in a non-profit organization, we examine top-down managerial controls as antecedents of lateral peer control, both directly (i.e., monitoring and responding directly to peers) and indirectly (i.e., gossiping about and avoiding underperforming peers), and peer control’s effects on individual- and team-level outcomes. In line with our predictions, we find formal managerial control and clan control to be antecedents of peer control, albeit with differential effects on direct and indirect peer control. We also find a significant association between peer control and both individual-level job satisfaction and team-level performance, but again, with crucial differences between the two types of peer controls and the two outcomes. Our study contributes to the development of a better theoretical understanding of peer control, sheds light on inconsistent findings across prior studies, provides novel insights into how team leaders can influence team members’ individual satisfaction and team-level performance via peer control, and reveals important trade-offs with regards to peer control’s influence on individual-
and team-level outcomes.

Keywords: formal and informal (clan) control, job satisfaction, multi-level analysis, non-profit organizations, organizational control, peer control, team performance, volunteers

Thanks to Adam Grant for featuring our research on reconnecting dormant ties in his New York Times column!

Given the circumstances we find ourselves in, which are forcing us to socially distance ourselves, (virtually) reconnecting with our dormant contacts can help a great deal to combat social isolation.

Read the full article for more.

Happy to share that our symposium “The Role of Memory and Cognition (vs. Activity and Behavior) in Social Networks” co-organized and co-chaired by Daniel Z. Levin (Rutgers) and myself was selected as a “Showcase Symposium” and the Winner of the Organizational Behavior Division Best Symposium Award!

This year’s Academy of Management Annual Meeting is happening in Boston, MA. My co-authors and I are represented on the program with two presentations:

• Levin, D. Z. & Walter, J. (2019). Is tie maintenance really necessary?
• Ross, J. R., Mehra, A., Levin, D. Z., Walter, J. (2019). Dormant ties: A review and agenda for research.

Both presentations are part of a symposium Daniel and I organized:

• “The Role of Memory and Cognition (vs. Activity and Behavior) in Social Networks.” Presenters: Jiyin Cao (Stony Brook), Edward Bishop Smith (Northwestern), You-Ta Chuang (York), Fu-Sheng Tsai (Cheng Shiu), Wenpin Tsai (Pennsylvania State), Martin J. Kilduff (University College London), Tiziana Casciaro (Toronto), Jason Rekus Ross (Kentucky), & Ajay Mehra (Kentucky). Discussant: Ronald S. Burt (Chicago).

I was also honored by receiving an “Outstanding Reviewer Award” by the Strategy Division.

Thanks to the Strategic Management Society (SMS) for hosting another successful planning meeting in Frankfurt, Germany–this time for the SMS conference in Minneapolis in the Fall! It was a pleasure working with you for the last time as Chair of the Strategy Process IG!

Greetings from Strategic Management Society’s 38th Annual Conference in Paris, where I served as the Program Chair for the Strategy Process Interest Group as well as the co-chair of the Executive Discoveries Series.

Together with my fellow IG Track Chairs, I am attending the back end of the SMS Special Conference in Oslo, and we just finalized the program for the SMS 38th Annual Conference in Paris.

Thanks to Niko Pelka and his team for hosting another very productive meeting!

A new article “Before they were ties: Predicting the value of brand-new connections,” co-authored with Daniel Levin (Rutgers University), has just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Management.

Complementing and extending prior studies on the value of existing work relationships, this study examines whether we can predict the value of brand-new ties before people ever meet. We examine this question by developing three sets of hypotheses reflecting the three main perspectives in the social networks literature: the resource (actor), dyadic (tie), and structural (network) perspective. To test our hypotheses, we asked executives to reach out for advice from someone they had never met and to complete a survey of their various thoughts about the other person both before and after making a connection. We find support for all three perspectives after a connection has been made; however, before tie formation, we find evidence only for the structural perspective. Our results suggest that the lack of reliable information about strangers obscures which brand-new ties will turn out to be more valuable but that surrounding network structures remain a reliable predictor of value, even for brand-new ties.

My co-author Daniel Levin (Rutgers) and I just published a commentary titled “Is tie maintenance necessary?” in the Academy of Management Discoveries.

In this commentary, we build on our research on dormant ties to contrast what we would call the activity-based perspective of tie maintenance—i.e., the premise underlying the vast majority of social networks research that ties to individuals who are associated with one’s past are important to maintain—with we would call the memory-based perspective on tie maintenance, i.e., that the memory of a prior relationship is often sufficient and that past relationships can retain considerable value, without the need for active maintenance.

Happy to see that the research I have published over the last few years have made an impact–so far, it has been cited over 1,000 times on Google Scholar!