Smith Professor Leads Academy of Management

Professor Debra Shapiro from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business started a one-year term as president of the Academy of Management during the professional association’s annual meeting Aug. 7-11, 2015, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Worldwide membership includes about 20,000 academics, PhD students and business leaders from 118 countries.

Shapiro is Smith’s third faculty member to lead the academy. Smith professor Kathryn Bartol served as president in 1984-85, and Smith professor emeritus Ken G. Smith led the academy in 2006-07. In the academy’s 76-year history, only three other schools have produced as many presidents.

Shapiro received an additional honor at the annual meeting. Her article, "Scholarly Impact: A Pluralist Conceptualization," was runner-up for the 2014 best paper award in the Academy of Management Learning & Education journal.

The paper shows the benefits of using pluralistic measures — not just counting top-tier journal publications — when assessing scholarly impact. “We critically assess a common approach to scholarly impact that relies almost exclusively on a single stakeholder (i.e., other academics),” Shapiro and her co-authors write. “We argue that this approach is narrow and insufficient, and thereby threatens the credibility and long-term sustainability of the management research community.”

For more information about Shapiro, visit her faculty profile page.