Dear colleagues,
I'm excited to share this new issue of Management Insights with you! hope you find it useful for your research and teaching! Xiao-Ping
Bridging Management Research and Practice
Xiao-Ping Chen
As a university professor, I do research and I teach. As a researcher, I understand how much time and effort are involved in producing a high quality research paper that can be published in top-tier academic journals. From ideation to hypotheses development to data collection and analyses to writing the paper to going through a rigorous reviewing process and finally getting acceptance, it normally takes three to five years. On the other hand, the unfortunate reality is that many of these papers are never read by management practitioners. Interestingly, when I share some of the research findings in the classroom, MBA students are often excited (novel but expected findings), surprised (counter-intuitive findings), and convinced (the rigors exercised in getting the findings). They find many results insightful and implementable.
One of the reasons practitioners do not read academic papers is that the papers are too difficult to understand. Academies use their own language to write, which often sounds foreign to the general public. To overcome this barrier and to disseminate the exciting new knowledge from the frontiers of management research, we created Management Insights. The mission of Management Insights is to translate the cutting-edge knowledge and findings in management research into ideas and perspectives that inspire new thinking in business leaders and tools that can be implemented in business practices. We call the rewritten papers Research Highlights, which are published in both Chinese and English.
Moreover, we are also interested in learning about how Chinese business leaders of successful companies deal with the unique challenges they face in an emerging market, and how they manage relationships with the government, business partner, employee, technology, and the market. We interview CEOs of various industries and record their stories and our conversations (they are called Executive Perspectives). While all of the interviews are published in Chinese, we chose a few and translated them into English. In 2015 we published both Chinese and English in the same issues of Management Insights. After hearing feedback from our readers we decided to publish four quarterly issues in Chinese and one annual issue in English in 2016.
So it is with great enthusiasm that I present to you this full-English version of Management Insights! Many insightful rewritten papers are published in this issue, including "Pride and Fear: How Nokia Lost the Smartphone Battle?" --a paper based on in-depth interviews of Nokia employees who described the emotional atmosphere in the company before its fall. "Sarcasm Increases Creativity" presents findings from rigorously designed lab experiments that sarcasm stimulates abstract thinking that allows multiple perspectives to emerge simultaneously, which increases creativity. Other papers such as "How Does Minority Influence Majority?" or "Making Public Goods Sustainable by 'Pay What You Want'" also provide novel findings and useful suggestions in helping managers to effectively address group dynamics and conflicts between maximizing individual vs. collective interests in the workplace.
The two CEO/founder interviews tell fascinating stories of two Chinese companies: Golden Concord Holdings Limited (GCL) in clean energy and the Aurora Group in the office equipment business. These two private enterprises experienced the ups and downs of the Chinese economy but have made steady progress in its own field. GCL is now the fourth largest solar electricity producer in the world, and Aurora has entered the cloud office and 3D printing business and has an iconic shining building on the bund of Shanghai. We hope that you will be inspired by their respective reflections on their successes.
We wish you all a very productive and prosperous year of 2017!
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Xiao-Ping Chen, Ph.D.
Associate Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs
Philip M. Condit Endowed Chair Professor of Business Administration
Editor-in-Chief, Management Insights
Department of Management and Organization
Michael G. Foster School of Business, Box 353226
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
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