My Presidency of the Academy of Management: Moral Responsibility,Leadership,Governance,Organizational Change,and Strategy

How Is the AOM Governed?

The AOM is a democratically governed professional association of management and organization scholars with a global membership of professors, Ph.D. students, other academics, and practitioners. Primary activities include attending an annual meeting and writing for the organization’s journals. Membership dues are kept low. The AOM is governed by academic volunteers and an Executive Director, who is supported by a 40-member headquarters staff that deals with operational matters. Unlike many other professional associations, the AOM is entirely member-driven. Its volunteer members are responsible for proposing and are involved in executing the organization’s initiatives.

As of 2019, the organization includes 25 Divisions and Interest Groups, 10 Theme and Activity Committees, and 6 scholarly journals. The central governing body is an elected Board of 14 Governors joined by the Executive Director, who is a Governor ex officio and acts as Treasurer and Secretary. The Board is led by a six-person Executive Committee comprised of five elected academic Officers, including the President, and the Executive Director.

The AOM By-laws indicate that the Board of Governors has authority over the AOM’s activities, with some of that authority ceded to its Executive Committee. The President sets the agenda of the Board. All Governors are elected by the membership either in 3-year staggered terms as Representatives-at-Large, or in 5-year terms as officers. The officer’s term begins with a year as Vice-President-Elect followed by a year as Vice President; and then through re-election into a year as President-Elect, a year as President, and a final year as Immediate Past President.

The formal role of the President is primarily as a Governor. The President is required to raise an agenda item on significant matters for approval from the Executive Committee and Board of Governors, with such approval arising successively first from the Executive Committee, which then sends its recommendations to the full Board. Implementation of the Board’s recommendations occurs primarily through the 40 staff members at headquarters and thousands of academic volunteers in various roles within the organization. The Board also has norms such as confidentiality about deliberations and mutual support of Board decisions despite dissent. The full Board is scheduled to meet three times a year (in April, August, and December) over multiple days, and the Executive Committee meets by teleconference in several extra meetings per year, with full-day, in-person meetings scheduled immediately prior to the regularly scheduled Board meetings. The Executive Director and President are in weekly and often daily contact, and the Executive Committee often deliberates ad hoc by email and teleconference on matters of importance prior to convening formally.

The Board has significant fiduciary and legal responsibilities based on the AOM’s formal status as a private, non-profit corporation. These duties are elevated for the AOM’s President and the Executive Director. These responsibilities include a fiduciary duty of care to act in the best interests of the institution, a duty of loyalty to place the institution’s interests ahead of self-interest, and a duty of obedience to the institution’s governance documents. In addition, the AOM’s Code of Ethics requires that officers must act trustworthy and inspire confidence that they act in the organization’s best interest. ⁴ As Officers, the President and each Executive Committee member renews commitment to the AOM Constitution each year by signing a Statement of Obligations which can be used to enforce the duties of the office against the individual if the Board so stipulates. If the President fails to fulfill the fiduciary duty of care, the duty of loyalty, and/or the duty of obedience, the Board has authority to replace the President and to install a replacement, presumably from among the academic Executive Committee members, and most obviously the immediate past President as the only other Executive Committee member fully elected into the Presidency.

History of the AOM’s NPSP, Organization Structure, and Strategy

The roots of the NPSP are in the reconstitution of the AOM after the end of World War II. The objective at that time was to encourage dialogue among researchers of management who might disagree about politics and policy, but who saw value in the generation of knowledge about management and organizations that could advance understanding of matters of public importance (Wrege, 1986, p. 81). Democracy would prevail in all matters related to the AOM’s activities. Membership was open to anyone who sought to belong. No central authority would be in charge other than the Governors—comprised of member volunteers—whose primary responsibility was to enforce principles of decentralization and democracy (AOM, 2019c).

The NPSP quickly became part of the defining identity of the AOM. Despite the massive social unrest of the 1960s over the Cold War and the Vietnam War, the AOM did not issue any condemnations or participate in any aspect of political or public discourse. Even as Associations in other fields took positions on public policy, the AOM did not. And the AOM was not alone in this approach. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes leaders of scholarly associations on the problems associated with taking political stands: issue fatigue, capability requirements, and divisiveness among members (McMurtrie, 2014). At the AOM, the NPSP went deeper than avoidance of these problems, however. It was about pursuit of the constructive outcomes that could arise from scholarly dialogue among academic colleagues who may have disagreed politically, but who shared a commitment to cultivate mutual understanding through shared knowledge. The purpose is to amplify members’ individual voices. To this day, the AOM’s identity is grounded in the idea that political divisions can be overcome by advancing knowledge about the sources, nature, and character of the phenomena that give rise to those divisions.

Decentralization is a second principle that is part of the AOM’s identity as an organization that has, at times, been problematic. For example, the Board of Governors reviews on a 5-year rotation each of the AOM’s division’s adherence to good governance. Centralized enforcement of principles of democratic decentralization is sufficiently asynchronous that difficulties inevitably arise. The incorporation of the AOM in 1995 in the United States also reflected the limits of decentralized, volunteer governance. The Board of Governors sought to mitigate the centralizing effects of incorporating and of hiring a professional Executive Director by again affirming the original principles upon which the AOM was founded, including especially that member volunteers would have primary responsibility for maintaining and enforcing the AOM Constitution, including the NPSP (Newsom, 1990).

Between 2001 and 2013, the AOM Board of Governors engaged in a strategy process that led, among other things, to statements of the organization’s mission, vision, and values. ⁵ As part of this process, the AOM affirmed its NPSP and decentralization. A corollary of these principles were two rules: first, that only the President can speak on behalf of the organization and, second, that nobody, including the President, can represent personal views as those of the organization.

I was elected into the AOM Presidency cycle in March and April 2013. I faced a steep learning curve because I had not served as a Representative-at-Large on the Board of Governors. The reason I was eligible to stand for election was that I had served for 17 years in various roles within the Business Policy & Strategy Division (now called Strategic Management).

Between the time of the election and my induction that August, I attended the regular meeting of the Board of Governors in Philadelphia in April, 2013. The more I investigated and learned about the strategy work that had been conducted, the more I appreciated the structural challenges that arose from the AOM’s constitutional principles of member-driven decentralization. I also saw the extensive workload of the headquarters team and the Governors, who were effectively running a thriving publishing company while supporting membership initiatives and the Annual Meeting. I also was exposed to the lack of cohesion in the agenda of the Board as the Governors sought to adhere to constitutional principles that emphasized that academic initiatives had to be member-driven. The Board dealt with this challenge by adding even more issues to its agenda.

In 2014, deliberations occurred over where the annual meeting would be held, particularly in light of a study that showed that holding the annual meeting outside of North America would create operational challenges that would impinge significantly on the nature and number of academic sessions and, importantly, low registration fees. A decision was made to rotate the selected sites over a 10-year period through five North American cities, none of which were in the U.S. southern states. Contract negotiations stalled on the 2025 site, leaving a slot open to experiment with someplace new. Concerns about questionable research practices (QRPs) such as p-hacking, plagiarism, and reviewer integrity were raised by members and were sent into subcommittees for deliberation. Discussions during the first half of 2015 about QRPs and a request of the AOM to join an initiative on Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) were of particular concern because of their relevance to the AOM as a publisher. Significant action on QRPs was taken, but some steps were stalled as the Board sought to assess whether taking them was in conflict with the NPSP.

As Vice President, I raised the idea of amending or changing the NPSP in July 2015 to then AOM President Paul Adler because I wanted the AOM to consider condemning irresponsible research practices and endorsing responsible ones such as proposed by the RRBM. I also was concerned that the AOM was not prepared to respond to attacks on scientists in Turkey, China and other countries. President Adler advanced my suggestion for revising the NPSP to the Executive Committee, but it was not adopted immediately onto the Board’s agenda because the Executive Committee determined that such a change would be so fundamental to the identity of the AOM that extensive analysis and reflection were required. Questions arose about the boundaries on when the AOM would and wouldn’t take a stand, and how such stands would be developed and implemented. Concerns were raised about the dual complications of discerning member alignment with a potential AOM position on a matter of public importance and of the implications of taking a position responsibly given the legal and policy expertise required. When the Executive Committee discussed revising the NPSP in connection with the QRP proposal in particular, we realized that we had not converged on a unified point of view. The issue of the NPSP became dormant as the Executive Committee awaited feedback arising from a newly organized, day-long meeting of the AOM’s journal editors to discuss QRPs and other topics of mutual concern.

In August of 2016, I was inducted as President in Anaheim, California. Immediately, I revived onto the Executive Committee’s agenda the revision of the NPSP. In September, 2016, I commissioned a Board subcommittee to study how a revision could be implemented. I also began a renewed strategy process to establish goals for the AOM on a 5- to 8-year period into the future, which we called Moonshots (McGahan, 2017b). The idea was to build on the earlier strategy work and to update our analysis of the external and internal challenges that the AOM faced in the organizational center and in its business units (these are publishing, meetings, and membership). What was clear to us at the time was that publishing was undergoing a wholesale, disruptive transformation involving open-access requirements, research financing, the competitive landscape, and online dissemination. In the meetings area, members wanted smaller, specialized convenings in addition to the large annual meeting. We also felt that holding the annual meeting outside North America had become imperative given the wide geographic affiliations of members and globalization itself. A study was commissioned by the headquarters team and criteria were developed to evaluate possible non-North American locations as well as North American ones for the open slot in 2025. In membership, we sought to meet the needs, for example, of large numbers of scholars from outside of North America who had joined the AOM. For the organizational center, we wanted to improve services to the Divisions, Interest Groups, committees, and journals while deepening and improving governance processes. We raised options such as expanding the size of the Board of Governors and the headquarters team.

Just prior to EO13769, in December 2016, I led the Board of Governors in a strategy session at Atlanta’s Civil Rights Museum in which we did the work that soon culminated in the set of 5-year goals that the Governors readily adopted formally. ⁶ At the regular meeting of the Board of Governors that immediately followed, the subcommittee on revising the NPSP gave a report. U.S. President Trump had just been elected. The conversation was intense. The headquarters team had analyzed the different approaches to political stands adopted by various Associations, including those that also had an NPSP, in support of the subcommittee’s work. The subcommittee advanced the idea that the AOM should take a moral stand when the action of a government violated the AOM’s mission or Code of Ethics, as long as the stand was not political and as long it did not constitute or encourage lobbying. The Executive Committee returned the issue to the subcommittee for further development because we could not discern any situation in which an immoral act of government would not be political, and because we felt that the AOM could not hold governments to the AOM Code of Ethics, which was designed to govern the interaction of scholarly members (the violations would be countless!). We reflected on the implications for the global membership of the AOM, but could not find the right boundary on when and how the AOM could respond to issues of concern to members. The proposal needed more work. As a result, the original NPSP was still in place on January 27, 2017, when EO13769 was issued.

The Response to EO13769

On January 27, 2017, I was at the Sorenson Innovation Summit in Salt Lake City. My preoccupation was a broken bone in my foot that I had stupidly inflicted upon myself about a week earlier by moving a cabinet unsafely. January 27, 2017, was a Friday. EO13769 was issued late in the day—around 5 p.m. local time. As soon as I heard about it, I called the Executive Director of the AOM and left a message requesting a call over the weekend. That evening, I skipped the conference dinner. At the hotel, I wrote an email to the Executive Committee describing EO13769 as an immoral Muslim ban. Some members of the Executive Committee were not online (in part because of time differences), but others responded right away. Someone wrote back that we couldn’t take action because of the NPSP. I had a sleepless night.

In the airport and on the cross-continental flight back to Toronto the next day, I wrote several things that went out on e-mail as my flight landed. The first was a message to the Executive Committee indicating that I wanted a meeting as soon as possible. We set one up for two days later on Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern. The second was the first draft of what would become, over the forthcoming few days, a revised proposal offered under my name to the Executive Committee to change the NPSP (see Exhibit 1). The third was a draft message to the membership condemning EO13769 as immoral that I sent to the Executive Committee for approval.

The next day—Sunday, January 29, 2017—all members of the Executive Committee responded by email and I spoke with the Executive Director. The Committee established that a condemnation of EO13769 was not allowed under the AOM Constitution. As such, I could not use the AOM’s communication channels, which are administered by the headquarters team, to issue any such message. I remember holding my head in my hands in frustration, thinking about a way forward. I then called the Executive Director again to say that I was exercising my authority as President to call an off-cycle meeting of the Board of Governors to vote on revising the NPSP. We discussed that this was unprecedented. Much work would be necessary to develop such a proposal. I committed to doing the work personally. We discussed that the Executive Committee would first have to consider the proposal. The Constitution required 7 days advance notice. A plan emerged and, over the next day or so, a schedule was set. A formal meeting of the Executive Committee was scheduled for February 5, 2017, and of the full Board for February 10, 2017.

Late that Monday afternoon, January 30, the Executive Committee convened by phone. That weekend, I had declared on social media that I personally condemned EO13769. The Executive Committee reiterated that I did not have the authority to condemn EO13769 in the name of the organization because of the NPSP and the no-personal-views rule. As a result, I would not have access to the AOM’s systems or resources for issuing a condemnation.

In a step that was out of line with Executive Committee norms, I then formally recalled the issue of revising the NPSP from the Board subcommittee into the Executive Committee. A phone conference was scheduled on February 3, 2017, between me, the subcommittee, and several other Executive Committee members to accept the subcommittee’s final report. Immediately after the meeting, I wrote to the Executive Committee indicating that I was calling the subcommittee’s work to closure without adopting its proposal (McGahan, 2017c):

We determined that a challenge with the [subcommittee’s proposed] statement is its breadth. Discerning a moral stand from a political stand is of itself nearly impossible, especially in important matters. Furthermore, as a practical matter, if the AOM is empowered under this proposed revision to take a stand on an immoral governmental action anywhere in the world, then we would be in the full-time business of doing precisely this, as our ethics guidelines are broad enough to encompass a wide range of situations of governmental action: A Chinese scholar is banned on disciplinary grounds from participating in a governmental meeting in China; an American member denied tenure sues on grounds of religious discrimination, and a court denies the claim; a government funding body in Africa denies a grant proposal based on the applicant’s nationality . . . Another challenge with the proposed statement is that it is not clear on what “violating” the AOM’s mission means. Would this mean that a political body would have to prevent explicitly our meeting, or ask us to cease publishing our journals?

Also, on January 30, 2017, I circulated a first draft to the Executive Committee of what I had written on the plane, which would become an alternative proposal to revise the NPSP (see Exhibit 1):

The Academy of Management does not take political stands. Officers and leaders are bound by this policy and may not make publicly stated political views in the name of the Academy or through use of Academy resources. However, under exceptional circumstances, and with the consensual support of the Executive Committee and in consultation with the Board of Governors, the President is authorized to issue a statement on behalf of the Academy when a political action threatens the existence, purpose, or functioning of the Academy as an organization.

This proposal was informed by the analysis conducted by AOM headquarters of other Association’s policies, the subcommittee’s deliberations, and the Executive Committee’s and Board’s conversations. The rationale was that we could assume that every member would agree that a threat to the AOM’s existence, purpose, or functioning should be condemned simply by virtue of the person’s membership. Exhibit 1 is the core of the full, final, nine-page proposal.

In our meeting on January 30, the Executive Committee members also discussed communication with the AOM membership, which I advocated. Messages were coming across on email and social media. Most expressed concern for scholars affected by EO13769. Some demanded a condemnation from me. A vocal minority of members supported EO13769. Some asked whether the annual meeting could be moved from Atlanta to a city in another country so that Muslim scholars could attend. Through the course of the day, and on January 31, the Executive Committee members and I exchanged several rounds of emails in which the Officers revised and refined the message that I had initially proposed so that it would conform to the NPSP and yet still convey support for members. The e-mail that was sent out to members went out late on January 31, 2017, and is reproduced in Exhibit 2.

On February 1, 2017, I took a break to post on Facebook my own personal views about the AOM’s response to EO13769. I don’t log onto Facebook often, but I found that day posts from several members. I replied to the ones posted by Haridimos Tsoukas with the following two in a short exchange (McGahan, 2017d):

On February 1, 2017: Thank you for this post. I’ve been quite clear where I stand on this as an individual: I abhor the Trump policy. I’ve signed petitions, given to the ACLU, and am reaching out to my colleagues and friends to offer support. As I explained yesterday, I have also been restricted by the policy that binds all AOM Officers at the level of the Academy and in the Divisions: I cannot represent my personal views as those of the AOM. Because the AOM has this policy, it has no process by which the organization as a whole can develop a coherent organizational view. In fact, we started down the road about a year ago of exploring whether and how the AOM could take a stand under extreme circumstances. As the minutes of the Board meetings show, that proposal is still in committee. In the meantime, I hope we stay unified as we need to have precisely this conversation. Best wishes, Anita McGahan

On February 2, 2017: Thank you, Prof Tsoukas. I am intent on strengthening the AOM as a scientific institution. I’ve posted in reply to the discussion of [X]’s comment some thoughts on these issues. The AOM is a member-driven org that does not have policies in place for supporting the expression of an org view on matters such as this. Officers cannot take stands on political policies, even when those policies also are moral in character. There are two interrelated issues here. The first is that the restriction on political speech is constraining all speech in this situation. The second is that there is no process for achieving an org view. If you believe that the AOM’s governance models and policies should change, then I hope you get involved in that conversation. Best wishes

Over the course of the next several days, I received hundreds of messages and social-media posts from AOM members. Most were requests for information and/or expressions of support. A few threatened physical violence against me, which I interpreted as a measure of member outrage. Others described me as “worthless,” “pusillanimous,” “ready for deportation,” and “immoral” (see Bell & DeGama, 2018, for an analysis of what occurred in the CMS Division after EO13769 ⁷ ). Some members wanted to boycott the meeting in Atlanta as a protest against EO13769. These types of messages and communications continued through the month of February and into March, when I received petitions asking the AOM to condemn EO13769 and/or to move the meeting from Atlanta.

Over those months, I talked with every member who wanted to talk with me, and responded personally to every e-mail, social-media post, phone call, and petitions of me that I received and/or could find. I had coffee with a member who had written that I should be shot, for which he apologized. I talked with Chairs of the AOM’s Divisions and Interest Groups in a series of calls, communications, and presentations. When an emeritus scholar called me a “Hillary lover,” I replied by explaining that the NPSP revision would not lead to endorsement of any candidate, but rather to an affirmation of the importance of scholarly exchange among all members regardless of religion (although as I wrote the response, I turned the spine of the Harvey Milk biography that I keep on my desk toward me for inspiration).

I estimate that I interacted during this period with more than 10,000 AOM members through 870 voice-to-voice calls, 5,000 e-mails and social-media exchanges, and 50 meetings and presentations. In everything I said and wrote as AOM President, I called for a doubling down on scholarship in the face of injustice, human rights violations, denials of climate change, and other global challenges (McGahan, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2018). I talked about how management practice, management education, and even some management research had contributed to the most significant global challenges in the world today, and how, as researchers and educators, we needed to take on these problems. I explained how the NPSP was part of the AOM’s identity, and the actions that we were taking to change it. The following message is representative. I sent it on March 7, 2017, to the AOM Fellows in response to a series of emails about whether the meeting in Atlanta should be moved (McGahan, 2017e):

Thanks for all your notes on the location of the Annual Meeting for the AOM. I hesitate to write to you again on this, but I’ve received emails from so many of you that I thought I’d provide a bit more information. In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be updating the President’s FAQ on the aom.org website with much more information on the location of the Annual Meeting, so please take a look there if you are interested in this topic.

While the historical reasons for having the meeting in the U.S. related to tradeoffs on costs and logistics, those are not the only criteria that were considered or that the AOM leadership team is considering now. A few years back, the membership’s needs emphasized keeping costs low, which is why my predecessors on the Board of Governors favored keeping the meetings in North America. Things have changed, of course. As I mentioned in my message from yesterday, we’re looking at new venues for future meetings. This includes venues outside North America.

The long lead times on contracts means that we have to plan on a seven- to-fifteen-year horizon. For Annual Meetings on the planning horizon, we are now actively exploring venues both inside and outside North America on criteria that go way beyond cost (although cost is one factor, of course). Globalization is a high priority. There are a range of logistical tradeoffs. For example, as [X] mentioned, we need lots of contiguous meeting rooms—more than a thousand. As well, we need more than ten thousand nearby hotel rooms. The hotels and conference centers have to be close enough to allow members to travel between meeting rooms in an efficient way as busing people between hotels and to a conference center is undesirable. We also need to consider costs of air travel for members. There are other considerations as well. Having said all this, we’re trying to break the tradeoffs and identify the best possible options. We also don’t want to wait for a decade to have a meeting outside North America. In 2018, there will be two AOM specialized conferences outside North America.

In the next week or two, I’ll be updating the President’s FAQs on the AOM.org website with more information about the selection of venues for the Annual Meeting. We’ll be outlining the options and creating ways for you as members to comment on the tradeoffs.

Please allow me to make one more point about the Atlanta meeting and the AOM in general: We need to strengthen institutions of science in the face of challenges to truth, facts, and scholarly exchange. I believe that it is crucial that we work together—united in our commitment to scholarship, scholarly exchange, academic freedom, and scholarly convening—to make the Academy of Management better. It is heartbreaking when challenges to what we all hold dear divide us. I do hope that you all will come to Atlanta as we need your voices to make the Academy stronger and more effective.

Warm wishes all, Anita

My closest colleague during this period was President-Elect Glynn, with whom I wrote to the AOM’s divisional, committee, and editorial leaders explaining that we would post updates on the main AOM webpage regularly on what we were doing, and why we could not move the meeting from Atlanta that August. We explained that we had already initiated a process for selecting a non-U.S. location for the Annual meeting at the earliest opportunity, which was 2025. We planned to run a survey of members on the trade-offs between alternative locations, which we had narrowed down to three cities: Toronto, Singapore, and Copenhagen. The survey ran during February and March 2017, and the results showed that the membership was split just about evenly among the three alternatives, leaving the Executive Committee to select from the three based on the strategic goals that were formally adopted by the Board in April of that year: Copenhagen.

On February 10, 2017, at the earliest possible date after EO13769 given the requirement of a 7-day advance notice of a special meeting, the entire Board of Governors convened by teleconference in an unprecedented, out-of-cycle meeting to accomplish the next step in changing the AOM policy of NPSP. This Board meeting was held just 14 days after EO13769. All Governors attended and voted. At it, the proposal that I had made was recommended for adoption by the Executive Committee, was discussed, and passed unanimously. The results were announced on the AOM website. In the ensuing weeks, I received a mounting wave of e-mails and other communications from members who objected to the revision of the NPSP. I responded to each of these by explaining that the revised policy allowed the AOM to act when its purpose, functioning, or existence was threatened by a change in public policy.

Accompanying the change in the NPSP was a 90-day embargo for review on how the revised policy would be implemented. This review was conducted by a special Task Force chaired by former AOM President Michael Hitt and vice-chaired by President-Elect Glynn. In totality, the task force comprised eight scholars and administrators. The scholars were from five continents to represent the broad international membership of the AOM. An excerpt from the charge that I wrote to the Task Force is reproduced as Exhibit 3. The first paragraph is (See Exhibit 3, A. M. McGahan, Introduction of the Charge to the Task Force, February 14, 2017):

Thank you so very much for joining the AOM Task Force on Taking Political Stands. I believe that it is fair to say that the Academy of Management has never been confronted with such an extensive and compelling opportunity to unify as an institution of science. There is growing awareness among AOM members that challenges to academic freedom, scholarly exchange, and even scholarship itself are intensifying. We must find our way forward with dispatch, common sense, and a commitment to our core values. We are asking for your help in accomplishing this.

The primary purpose of the Task Force was to address the lack of a procedure for supporting the AOM President in making a statement on public policy. The process that the Task Force recommended, as well as a renaming of the “no political stands policy” to the “no public policy stands policy,” was adopted at the next regular meeting of the Board on April 21, 2017. The process involved several steps initiated by a formal proposal from a member-at-large: First, approval by consensus of the Executive Committee, and, second, approval by the full Board of Governors.

From the outset, those of us in AOM leadership were aware that members of the AOM held different views about both EO13769 and the NPSP (Exhibits 1 and 3). The extent of this diversity was made apparent when, during a “listening period” under the policy embargo, we ran a survey on a random sample of members. A significant minority said the NPSP should not have been changed; another significant minority said that the NPSP should be entirely removed; more said that the revised NPSP was appropriate. Members also held many different positions regarding what the AOM should disclose or do about EO13769.

In conversations with AOM members in late January and early February 2017, I was sometimes asked why I was going through the process of changing the organization rather than breaking the rules to make a condemnation in the name of the AOM. My reply to one member was to analogize rhetorically my own choices with, “What do you want? A President that does not respect the Constitution?” I found compelling the idea in the AOM Constitution that the AOM President could not use her position to express a personal view as the organization’s without due process. Were I to condemn the NPSP in the name of the organization, I would be imposing my identity onto that of the organization in a way that the organization explicitly prohibited. This is why I accepted the 90-day embargo on the revised NPSP to allow the task force time to do its work, even though I would have preferred that the AOM condemnation be issued immediately.

The assertion in Tsoukas (2018) that a leader in my situation should use her imagination to violate the Constitution by issuing a proclamation is both anti-institutional and ethically problematic. Leaders are not always on the right side of morality. Many examples readily come to mind of charismatic and narcissistic leaders who seek to use their organizations to advance their self-proclaimed moral agendas in ways that constituents view as immoral. This is why we have Constitutions. The identity of an organization as separate from the identity of its leader rests on the strength of its Constitution and, in times of crisis, on the leader’s respect for Constitutional principles that protect the voices of members with whom the leader disagrees.

Some members suggested that I should have resigned in protest. The following were factors in why I did not: (a) there was no assurance that, if I were to resign or be ousted by the Board for violating the NPSP, the person selected by the Board to replace me would have condemned EO13769 or pursued revision of the NPSP; (b) the U.S. Federal Courts had stayed EO13769, which opened up a small window of time to change the NPSP and then condemn the policy before it went into effect; (c) my resignation would put the AOM into deeper crisis at a time when the leadership team’s entire capacity was already focused on EO13769; and (d) that crisis would have further divided, disorganized, and harmed the AOM.

At a very basic and personal level, however, the most important reason that I did not resign was that I wanted to maintain solidarity with Muslim colleagues, students, friends, scholars, and prospective immigrants; with impoverished, desperate, vulnerable immigrants and refugees facing vile abuse and discrimination; and with anyone anywhere whose freedoms were restricted (McGahan, 2017a, 2018). My understanding and resolve about the nature of solidarity has developed over the course of my life, refined by my experiences, which include what I learned through my scholarship on global health and immigration (Hum, Verguet, Cheng, McGahan, & Jha, 2015; Mossman, Bhattacharyya, McGahan, & Mitchell, 2017; Vakili & McGahan, 2016), and what I experienced working at Partners In Health between 2004 and 2006. What mattered to me was strengthening the AOM at its core to defend the role of scholarship in society as advancing knowledge-driven discourse in a way that would be relevant and important to the lived experience of those who are vulnerable. I wanted the AOM to emerge from this experience stronger than it had been, driven by its identity as a place of civil dialogue among scholars who may disagree politically but who work together in scholarly community to develop insights that can break impasses and inspire new insights. I wanted us to fight EO13769 by refusing to succumb to tactics that divide us, and instead choose to double down on scholarship showing that divisive leadership is dubious, polarizing, and dangerous. I wanted us to do what we do best to support vulnerable immigrants in a fight for freedom and other human rights. The most important reason why I did not resign is that I felt the powerful and emotional response of the AOM membership to EO13769 was a foundation for this agenda.

For me, the most shocking day of my Presidency was May 10, 2017, when the embargo on the revised NPSP expired, and no member-at-large—not a single one—stepped up to propose condemnation of the U.S. immigration policies to the Executive Committee. This opportunity was widely publicized throughout the Academy, on the AOM website, in our newsletters, and in our FAQs. I had personally asked the most vocal advocates of condemnation to step forward. No member did. The reasons were varied.

In August, 2017, the AOM held its Annual meeting as planned in Atlanta. The threatened boycott had not materialized. The meeting was the second-highest attended in AOM history after Vancouver two years prior, and exceeded expectations, which were of lower-than-average attendance given the location. At the meeting, we held a number of special sessions on immigration and public policy that had been planned during the winter to support scholarly dialogue on the issues. My Presidential address on August 6, 2017, entitled “Freedom in Scholarship: Lessons from Atlanta,” described the threat to and opportunities facing the AOM in the same terms that I have expressed here (McGahan, 2017a, 2018).

A month after my AOM Presidency ended, I was the member-at-large who proposed formally that the AOM condemn the U.S.’s immigration policy. On September 25, 2017, which was the day after a new Executive Order on immigration, I recused myself from the Executive Committee to submit a first-stage proposal under my member number. The summary statement was “The immigration policy ordered by U.S. President Donald J. Trump on September 24, 2017 threatens the purpose and functioning of the Academy of Management as an institution of science.” This proposal was approved and advanced by the Executive Committee to the second stage for full consideration by the Board of Governors. For this second stage of the proposal, I was joined by 13 other past presidents of the AOM as co-signatories. The proposal was accepted by the Board of Governors, and the prose we wrote was used as the basis of the condemnation that then AOM President Glynn made in her letter to the U.S. President describing the immigration policy as a threat to science, academic freedom, and the Academy’s mission and values. As I and the 13 other past presidents requested, and as the Board of Governors unanimously supported, the AOM then also joined other Associations in condemning the ban.

Conclusion

This case study on the AOM demonstrates how an organization’s identity differs from that of its leader. Misunderstandings among members about the AOM’s organizational identity arose from a lack of communication about the AOM’s purpose that accompanied divisionalization. The opportunity that the Board of Governors embraced during the crisis created by EO13769 was to enliven and reinterpret the core principles in the AOM’s identity both by revising the NPSP and by encouraging the civil discourse that the AOM has always supported. The AOM has changed organizationally as a result. Its strategy is now more fully articulated. The organization can now react when its existence, purpose, or functioning is threatened. The case shows how organizational change can arise from the exercise of adaptive governance under Constitutional principles.

As AOM President, I wanted to inspire our members to shift our research to the most important global challenges of our time because I believed that these challenges were, in part, the product of polarizing leadership, ineffective management, unethical organizational practice, and shareholder-oriented management education of the 20th century (McGahan, 2011, 2012, 2017a, 2018). I believed that the insights of scholars of management and organization could both ameliorate the problems and contribute to solutions (McGahan, 2017a, 2018). Throughout my Presidency, I was deeply concerned about the politicization of scientific discourse. I sought to make the AOM a body that would support and protect scientific inquiry and, in so doing, deploy its best capabilities in the interests of those who had been affected adversely by organizational practices. I was navigating the moral paradox created by the instrumental and polarizing weaponization of falsehoods as truths while, at the same time, believing in the core principles that constitute the AOM’s identity: civil dialogue among scholars who may disagree politically, but who are committed to engage together to construct new knowledge that can break impasses, and who are committed to defend the truth in society. The reinterpretation of the NPSP that the Board of Governors accomplished during my presidency strengthened the AOM, but as I explained in my Presidential address, I believed it was only a start.

There is still much more to do to strengthen the AOM. In the end, while condemnations by associations such as the AOM are important, they do not exhaust our responsibilities as scholars. This is because issuing statements is not sufficiently helpful to people made vulnerable by bad leadership and unethical organizational practices on a time frame that is relevant to their experience. We must do more. Everyone whose human rights are restricted for any reason deserves the application of our best scholarly capabilities to discern and expose the truth about what is happening in the world around us. We are privileged by this responsibility. We must protect the truth with integrity. People of all religions deserve it. All vulnerable people deserve it. Climate change requires it. We each deserve it from each other as well.