Series of Awards for WHU Researchers at AoM 2022

At this year’s Academy of Management (AoM) conference, empirical researchers from WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management received an impressive number of awards for their work. Founded in 1936, the AoM’s global community today stands at nearly 20,000 members. The 2022 AoM conference, one of the most renowned in the world for management and organization, took place in Seattle, Washington (USA) and saw more than 12,500 people listed in the program. Research was presented over the course of 2,237 sessions.

Lukas Lanz and Professor Fabiola H. Gerpott, Chair of Leadership at WHU, received the Best Paper Award in the Organizational Behavior division for their work “Adherence to Unethical Instructions from AI Supervisors: Combining Experiments with Machine Learning,” co-authored with Dr. Roman Briker of Maastricht University. In their paper, the authors find that people adhere less to unethical instructions from an AI than to those from a human supervisor—and discuss what that could mean for how work is designed in the future.

Jana Hermle, external doctoral student at the Chair of Family Business (held by Professor Nadine Kammerlander), won the Best Student Paper Award in the Organization Development & Change (ODC) division. In her paper “Choosing When to Go Undercover – How Employees Initiate and Drive Organizational Change,” she examines the ways in which employees (outside of management) bring about changes to the processes already in place at their respective organizations. The OCD division also nominated this paper for the William H. Neuman Award.

Katja Woelfl and Professor Lutz Kaufmann, Chair of International Business and Supply Management I, received a Best Paper Award in the Conflict Management division for their paper “Changing Perspective – Toward a Configurational Perspective on Deception in Business Negotiations from a Target’s Viewpoint,” co-authored with Craig Carter of Arizona State University. Professor Kaufmann also received the Best Reviewer Award from the Operations & Supply Chain Management (OSCM) division. Notably, in 2021, he was also the first ever winner—across AoM divisions—from a continental European institution to win the Distinguished Scholar Award.

“The international successes our researchers have had and the honors they have received never cease to amaze me. I’m delighted that WHU’s research is being acknowledged at this scale,” said Professor Markus Rudolf, Dean of WHU.