The Role of Conferences in the Emergence of Developmental Professional Culture

Year 1—Testing the Waters

The 5-year leadership role of OMT is a sequenced cycle with different roles, responsibilities, and titles each year. In the first year as Professional Development Workshop (PDW) chair, I surveyed the membership to find out how the PDW program could better serve to develop our members. There were two clear messages from the survey. First, members wanted more opportunities to meet and interact with others in less formal settings. Although several divisions of the Academy, including OMT, have been offering more developmental opportunities for individual mentoring such as junior faculty consortia, dissertation development workshops, and meet the editor sessions, several of the suggestions received were for new formats, which were designed to further break down formality. Second, some members felt that the perceived low acceptance rates gave a sense of nonapproachability and exclusivity. Due to space constraints, each division of the Academy is allocated a limited number of on-site hours to deliver PDWs, which can result in a low acceptance rate overall. When submissions are rejected, some authors may feel excluded. Interpreting the survey results through the developmental organizer perspective, it was clear we had an opportunity on both fronts. We clearly needed to figure out mechanisms to generate free spaces for our members to get together in less formal off-site events without institutional constraints. OMT Cafes and OMT Bike were born. OMT Cafes offered an opportunity to have members meet casually in a nearby café to have topically themed casual chats with no financial or space costs to the Academy. OMT Bike offered a fun activity for like-minded people to take a break from the primary academy program and enjoy the outdoors together, again with no costs to the Academy. Combined, the OMT Cafes and OMT Bike Rides added 13 additional opportunities to the 2015 program for our members to meet and interact. All were listed on the official Academy program, and were cosponsored by other divisions of the Academy to maximize the possibilities for members to meet other members and build community by connecting through shared interests on a deeper level outside of their formalized roles and affiliations. Many were organized primarily by doctoral students and drew attendance across the full spectrum of career stages. Some of the events went so well that the following year, the connections they created developed into full PDW proposals by the same doctoral student organizers working with some of the leaders of the field such as the, now very popular, Big Data With Minimal Programming PDW. The institutional constraints led to a developmental solution building an inclusive community with higher acceptance and participation rates, which may not have come about otherwise.

Year 2—Diving In

The second year role of OMT Program Chair provided new opportunities to take the developmental conference organizer perspective. The Program Chair builds a reviewer pool, solicits submissions, runs the entire review process, accepts and rejects submissions, builds paper sessions, and develops the program schedule. This requires significant communication with a broad swath of the membership. To support the developmental perspective, I recruited a Reviewer Engagement chair to help build, engage, and develop the reviewer base. Together with the OMT Social Media Chair, Communications Chair, and Global Representative at Large, we all worked to build ongoing communication consistent with the developmental strategy throughout the reviewer recruiting and ultimate review process. We envisioned the review process as an entry point to ongoing engagement with the OMT division, and the field more broadly. In other words, we conceptualized the review process as a first step of a bigger long-term developmental process. Our underlying logic was that if developmental norms are established early at the conference stage, they logically can diffuse to other academic activities such as journal reviewing through second-order imitation, yielding a wider scale institutional change. The key to second-order imitation is actively learning norms through participation, which enables a deep learning that is then transferred to other contexts, which may appear at first to be nonrelated (Westphal, Seidel, & Stewart, 2001). In other words, if academics actively experience developmental and inclusive conference events, in addition to the more direct experience of a developmental conference review process, they are more likely to invoke such behaviors back at their home institutions and when engaging in other academic activities such as reviewing for other conferences and journals, mentoring junior colleagues, and generally making the field as a whole more developmental and inclusive.

The Academy’s institutionalized system has some technology in place to assist with basic communication, but there were many opportunities to add developmental touches throughout the process. As language choice can have a direct impact on institutional changes (Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004), we wanted to stay true to the developmental conference organizer perspective and heavily customized all communications with subtle language shifts reinforcing the desired developmental and inclusive tone. These changes included shifting language to a more conversational tone by using first and second person as appropriate, emphasizing how the review process brings and trains new people into the community, stressing the importance of fostering the OMT culture of developmental intellectual discussion, recognizing and thanking people for how their volunteer efforts help develop the program and other’s work, and celebrating joint successes at the various milestones. For instance, “You have been assigned the following paper . . .” was changed to,

Thank you once again for signing up to review for the OMT Division. We really rely on volunteers such as yourself to help build the best possible program for OMT. You are what makes OMT what it is. Based upon the preferences you specified, you have been assigned the following paper . . .

These carried through to language changes in instructions to discussants, which included additions such as, “As discussant, your primary goal is to foster the OMT culture of developmental intellectual discussion.” Each of these language changes was small, yet when combined, they formed a consistent repeated message at multiple touch points, a type of repeated exposure (Seidel & Westphal, 2004).

Eunice Rhee, the OMT Social Media Chair, took the lead on interviewing the best reviewers from the previous year—those who won the Above and Beyond the Call of Duty (ABCD) Award. She created a three-part blog series titled, “Tips From the OMT ABCD Award Winners,” which was divided into Tips for First Time Reviewers, the Nuts & Bolts of Crafting Good Reviews, and the Developmental Benefits of Reviewing. The developmental framing came through clearly throughout the tips. This type of communication served dual purposes. First, there is the clear direct training role of communicating the developmental norms and expectations to reviewers. Second, it recognizes the importance to the field of high-quality developmental reviewing by highlighting the expertise our best and most developmental reviewers possess. We received numerous comments from first-time reviewers thanking us for providing this guidance, and how excited they were to be contributing to the field in this important way.

Positive Deviance as a Response to Institutional Constraints

These types of efforts are never without hiccups. In the middle of the 2016 planning process, we learned that the Academy was no longer going to allow off-site events to be listed on the official Academy program. The OMT Cafes and other off-site events were in jeopardy. We opted to take a positive deviance (Spreitzer & Sonenshein, 2004) approach and ultimately reached an agreement with the Academy that OMT could continue the off-site events, but that we would be solely responsible for publicizing them as they could not be listed on the official Academy program. This institutional constraint led to the creation of the OMT Events calendar using free tools from Google. We created a complete program of off-program events with the same developmental and inclusive goals as the original OMT Cafes and OMT Bike Rides. In fact, the flexibility of not having to prebuild the entire off-site program so far in advance to meet institutional deadlines for the formal Academy program development process enabled us to ultimately expand the offering to include a wider range of activities with a primary focus of allowing newer members an opportunity to meet other members in casual settings. In addition to even more OMT Cafes, we added OMT Runs, OMT Yoga, OMT Drinks, OMT Eats, and the OMT Administrative Science Quarterly Editor Chat. In combination, these added 28 additional off-program opportunities for our members to meet and interact casually at no cost to the Academy. We envision these events as critical components of the institutional work to shift the culture of the conference to a more inclusive and developmental tone. Whereas established academics frequently schedule informal off-site events and meet-ups with colleagues, newer members normally do not have such an opportunity until they are more established. These types of events offer even a first-time attendee the opportunity to meet others in a positive way around shared interests in a casual setting. As the events were no longer going to be on the program, we needed to communicate the calendar broadly. Because that communication was framed consciously with an inclusive tone, it served as a form of repeated exposure, which has been shown to intensify framing effects (Seidel & Westphal, 2004). Sending such communications through multiple channels such as email and social media intensified the framing of developmental and inclusive norms of interaction of the field. Once again institutional constraints led to new chances to bolster the diffusion of developmental and inclusive norms. Social media also provided us with the opportunity to reinforce that message during and after the conference by sharing photos of members in a variety of off-site contexts building an inclusive community, through sharing a meal at nearby ethnic restaurants, going for a run, or enjoying a coffee with a journal editor.

Next Steps

At OMT, we have seen some of this initial institutional work start to pay dividends. There was a 15.7% increase in the number of people signing up to review for OMT for the 2016 conference, and a 27.9% increase in the number of reviewers being assigned and completing at least one review. With the expanded reviewer pool, there was a very high review completion rate of 90.9%, and no need to request any emergency last minute reviews. In fact, the reviewers decreased the average time to review completion. But what was the impact of an expanded reviewer pool working faster on the quality of the reviews? We saw an increase in quality—the average length of a review increased while the authors rated the reviews as significantly more useful and constructive in tone. In addition, even though attendance for the Academy as a whole was down from the previous year due to location choice, we saw the largest number of student registrations in the entire history of OMT. Although the long-term impacts of these initial efforts are not yet known, we view these all as encouraging initial signs of both improving the review process and increasing inclusiveness for newer scholars in the field. They inspire me to build upon these initial experiments during my remaining 2 years in the OMT Executive as Division Chair, and Past Division Chair. These leadership roles give an opportunity to institutionalize aspects of these changes to ensure longevity both within the division, and to facilitate the diffusion of such practices more broadly to other divisions, conferences, and journals.

We plan to continue and expand upon this effort at OMT going forward. One of the benefits of the 5-year executive rotation is that institutional knowledge is transferred smoothly over time from year to year. But OMT is clearly not enough. I note that these efforts are thoroughly in line with the stated objectives of the Academy of Management Strategic Plan around improving inclusion and tending to the next generation of scholars through building supportive community. We have been in communication with the division leadership of several other divisions to discuss our experiences with these experiments. The Technology and Innovation Management division has already launched TIM Hangouts and cited OMT’s efforts as the inspiration. Our understanding is that several other Academy divisions are now planning similar informal off-site activities in future years, and citing the OMT communication around these activities as a best practice. If that does in fact come to be, it would signal the success of this initial institutional work in diffusing cultural changes. I am personally committed to helping them accomplish that in any way I can, and am happy to discuss possible collaborations for future years to help diffuse the practices and institutionalize them in appropriate ways for other divisions and conferences. We all are in this together.

Transitioning the impact of these experiments to the journal review process is a long-term process. Just as the influence of the Asilomar conference has persisted through time to influence this OMT experiment, I hope that part of the diffusion to the journal review process will naturally emerge through first- and second-order imitation over time as the socialization at the conference level continues and more people experience it. One of the OMT off-site events, the OMT ASQ Editor Chat, was intended to start that natural diffusion process. At the event, many newer members got the opportunity to share a coffee with the editor (another Asilomar alum incidentally) and two associate editors of ASQ in a very casual off-site inclusive atmosphere. To further aid the diffusion, ASQ has also invited the top OMT reviewers (the ABCD award winners) to sign-up to do ad hoc reviews for the journal. These are small steps designed to nudge the diffusion, and will continue to evolve and accrue over time. In fact, the idea for the Escape From Abilene dialog this essay is part of came about through a casual discussion over a meal, and is intended to further diffuse the norms of developmental academic culture through specific actions being taken by conference leaders and journal editors (Hannah, Meyer & Seidel, 2018). Reading the other pieces by all the journal editors gives me great hope that these trends will continue to diffuse. Instead of just identifying where we are all stuck and unhappy, this combined dialog will instead help us all escape from Abilene together by committing to take specific actions, which change the institutions of the field through cultural shift.