Five Year Review

Henrich Greve Division Chair INSEAD

Royston Greenwood Division Chair Elect  University of Alberta

In 2010 we completed a thorough review of the OMT Division (download full report here). We have thought about what the Division does, surveyed our members, and considered options for the future. We appreciate the feedback which you provided, and are delighted with the high rates of satisfaction indicated in the survey, and with the constructive advice and suggestions that were put forward.

OMT has a long history and has spent much time developing its offerings and the po pularity of our core activities suggests that we would have a revolt on our hands if we made major changes – imagine, for example, a shorter doctoral consortium, a business meeting with no reception, or a Distinguished Scholar who did not get to give a speech! Or, let’s not imagine any of those things, because they are not going to happen. The core activities of the OMT Division received overwhelming support from our member survey and will stay as they are.

Nevertheless, it is still useful to reflect on who we are and to look for improvements in what we do. Four things stood out from the membership survey. First, OMT is old and young. It is old because it was one of the first AoM Divisions to be created (the exact founding date seems to be more of an archaeological issue than an archival issue), which means we obviously cannot grow at the same rates as a division or interest group founded just a few years ago. It is young because people tend to join OMT as doctoral students or junior faculty members, and to stay because we are ‘the theory division’. Being old and young at the same time poses interesting opportunities and challenges, most notably that we take on a heavy burden of early-career training and have members resolutely in favor of this role as a central responsibility for OMT. Because of their youth, our members are also very heavy paper-submitters (which is great!) and (thank goodness) willing reviewers. One challenge that arises is that, although many famous management scholars are past OMTers, OMT is not a top-heavy division, so we often find ourselves having to draw repeatedly upon the same pool of OMT senior scholars for our consortia and other mentoring activities. Despite this challenge, our doctoral and junior faculty mentoring is very well received by our members.

A second notable feature of OMT is its international attraction. OMT’s membership is very diverse in both their national origin and their university affiliations. This has been the case for a long time, but it has increased in recent years and participation in our consortia and our elected bodies reflect this feature of our membership. Even so, the membership survey still raised the question of whether we are providing enough content for our international membership, and especially for international junior scholars. We are addressing this issue through our pre-conference program, and we will also start formalizing the informal ties that already exist between OMT and some international associations for business scholars.

The third feature is that the OMT Division is large. This is a strength because it provides resources to support our activities and it means that our community is vibrant. For these reasons size and growth are celebrated by division chairs – notice how they are found in the opening passages of most chair statements! But large divisions are often perceived as more ‘distant’ to their members, and communication can become cumbersome. OMT certainly has had difficulty handling the need for mass communication and for communicating with its members between the Academy of Management Meetings. Our intention, therefore, is to build a far better website in order to facilitate such communication. But, a website is just a place to communicate; it is not communication in itself. We will rely on our officers and members – you! – to turn the website into an active online community.

Finally, OMT faces a paradox. On the one hand, its growing membership and the increasing submission of papers to the Academy Conference reflect a vibrant community of scholars. But this optimistic scenario is dampened by the far more modest number of jobs in OT, and the seeming decline in the teaching contribution of OMT to business programs, especially the MBA. OMT has not been very aggressive in marketing its role as the driver of the intellectual agenda in business research, and its role as a foundation for business school teaching. Some progress has been made through the Teach OMT initiative. Our intention is to do more. OMT’s endowment fund will be used to co-sponsor mini-conferences on topics relevant to its domain. Doing so will help the Division advance its research, support doctoral students, and strengthen its profile. We will also strive to strengthen teaching of OMT topics in business schools by increasing the content in the TeachOMT wiki and by raising awareness of this resource among its members.

Henrich and Royston

The Division and Interest Group Committee 2010 OMT Review Feedback Memo is available for download.