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Assistant Professors Ping Wang and Dave Yates Receive Academy of Management Awards
(College Park, MD – 08/30/07) The Academy of Management, with over 18,000 scholars the premiere professional association for research on management and organization, presented two prestigious awards to the College of Information Studies faculty at its 2007 annual conference in Philadelphia. Assistant Professor received the from the Academy’s Organizational Communication and Information Systems (OCIS) Division, one of 22 divisions in the Academy. Assistant Professor received the first , inaugurated to recognize the best sole-authored OCIS paper based on a dissertation.
In his award-winning paper, “Chasing the Hottest IT: Effects of Information Technology Fashion on Organizations,” Dr. Wang examined some of the important organizational impacts of the fashion phenomenon in information technology. He defined an “IT fashion” as a transitory collective belief that an information technology is new, efficient, and at the forefront of practice. Using data collected from published discourse and annual IT budgets of 109 large companies for a decade, Dr. Wang found that firms whose names were associated with IT fashions in the press did not have higher performance, but they had better reputation and higher executive compensation in the near term. Similarly, companies investing in fashionable IT also had higher reputation and executive pay. These results illustrate that following fashion can legitimize organizations and their leaders even in the absence of performance improvement. The findings also extend innovation research from its usual focus on the adoption of enduring practices to transitorily fashionable innovations as a novel source of social approval. His study was supported in part by the General Research Board of the Graduate School at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Dr. Yates’ award-winning paper, “Collaborative Technology Support for Integrating and Applying Knowledge in Virtual Contexts,” examines how individuals learn and innovate when they rely exclusively on collaborative technologies to interact virtually with others instead of meeting face to face. A survey of 106 recognized experts working on 44 highly innovative projects in the aerospace industry revealed that in synchronous virtual meetings individuals depended on simultaneous document editing and context mechanisms to obtain rapid feedback, while in asynchronous virtual contexts individuals relied on document repositories and email to understand others’ knowledge. Success depended on technology-supported integration and application of knowledge in both contexts; thus previous research investigating only one context or comparing the two contexts had not previously uncovered the link between collaborative technology support and innovation. In addition to explaining how virtual innovation occurs across virtual contexts, this work extends virtual teams research by demonstrating the multi-dimensional role collaborative technology plays in enabling cross-functional sharing of expertise.
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