June 16, 2008

Business college scholars to present papers

by Sun Min

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Scholars from Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s College of Business and Administration will present papers at the Academy of Management (AoM) Conference in Anaheim, Calif., Aug. 8-13. The AoM Conference is the premier conference in management research.

Participating will be Professor of Management Steven J. Karau, Associate Professor of Management Michael D. Michalisin, management alumnus Abdel Elsaid and management doctoral students Bryan Stinchfield, Andrew J. Setterstrom and Matthew S. Wood.

The AoM is the leading professional association for scholars dedicated to creating and disseminating knowledge about management and organizations. AoM's members, which now exceed 17,000 and represent 102 nations, are scholars at colleges, universities and research institutions, as well as practitioners with scholarly interests from business, government and not-for-profit organizations.

Michalisin and Wood will present their paper, “Entrepreneurial drive in the top management team: Effects on strategic choice and firm performance,” which used Upper Echelons Theory and the entrepreneurship literature to develop and then empirically test a theoretical model of the relationships between top management teams’ (TMT) entrepreneurial drive, TMT strategic choices and relative firm performance. The results show that the TMT’s level of entrepreneurial drive and the firm’s choice of strategy are both positively related to firm performance. Moreover, when the TMT’s level of entrepreneurial drive is high and the firm follows an entrepreneurial strategy, it accrued superior financial performance relative to its competitors

Michalisin and Stinchfield will present their paper, “Environmental attitudes and formal business education: An empirical exploration.” Henry Mintzberg and other scholars contend that formal business education transforms previously socially conscious students into profit maximizing automatons. Given the growing concern that businesses have had and are continuing to have on the natural environment, the study empirically investigated the research question: Do students change their attitudes about management’s responsibility to the natural environment versus that of maximizing shareholder value as they complete their business program? The scholars surveyed two groups of undergraduate business students, 239 at the beginning of their business program and 118 at the end of their business program and found no significant difference between the environmental attitudes of the two groups.

Michalisin and Setterstrom will present, “The Natural Resource-Based View of a Firm: Strategic opportunities in IT.” Environmental strategies are becoming more prevalent in today’s landscape as firms recognize that the ongoing degradation of the natural environment will have significant consequences on mankind’s quality of life. Environmentally proactive firms seek to resolve such problems in profitable ways by satiating the needs of environmentally conscious customers and by gaining the favor of powerful environmental constituencies. Such firms are now beginning to recognize that information technology (IT) is a potential strategic asset in identifying, formulating, and implementing profitable, proactive environmental strategies. The current research uses the logic embodied in the IT literature and that of the Natural Resource-Based View of the Firm to articulate how firms leverage IT to achieve business and environmental sustainability.

The paper entitled, “Individual differences in beliefs about groups” by Karau and Elsaid, describes the development and validation of a scale to assess peoples' positive versus negative feelings about working with others in groups. The scale should be useful in future group dynamics research and may also help organizations design effective work teams.