Abstract
The ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution is presented to the paper published five years earlier that has subsequently had the greatest influence on the field of organization studies. A committee comprising members of our editorial board is charged with reviewing papers published during the target year and choosing the one judged to have made the most important contribution. This year, I am pleased to announce that the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution went to Katherine J. Klein, Jonathan C. Ziegert, Andrew P. Knight, and Yan Xiao for their article “Dynamic Delegation: Shared, Hierarchical, and Deindividualized Leadership in Extreme Action Teams,” published in the December 2006 issue.
Klein and her collaborators examined how leadership is accomplished in an extreme setting: medical teams in a trauma resuscitation unit that does patient intake and stabilization. The authors labeled these “extreme action teams,” that is, “teams whose highly skilled members cooperate to perform urgent, unpredictable, interdependent, and highly consequential tasks while simultaneously coping with frequent changes in team composition and training their teams’ novice members.” They discovered an adaptive process of dynamic delegation in which senior leaders delegated and withdrew active leadership to more junior members of the team. According to the award committee,
The paper is not only highly creative in approach and rigorous methodologically, but also provides a set of theoretical insights highly relevant for today’s rapidly changing and uncertain environment. . . . Its findings are highly important because they show that dynamic delegation enhances extreme action teams’ ability to perform reliably while also building their novice team members’ skills. These insights challenge prior leadership theory and research that is focused on single leaders or the need for clarity in the leader’s role. And because organizations in general are relying more on short-term project teams to accomplish critical tasks, the paper is highly applicable broadly and provides significant avenues for further theory development and research on team leadership in dynamic settings.
The award committee included Christopher Marquis (chair), Madan Pillutla, and Martine Haas. I thank them for their thoughtful work and fine choice and extend congratulations to Katherine, Jonathan, Andrew, and Yan.
I also want to welcome two new associate editors to ASQ: Mary Benner and P Devereaux Jennings. Mary and Dev are both long-standing contributors and friends of the journal with extensive prior editorial experience. Mary has expertise in technology, innovation, and financial markets. Dev’s domains include entrepreneurship, institutions, and the natural environment.
Finally, a brief progress report. Since we moved to the Manuscript Central system for handling submissions and evaluations of manuscripts in October 2011, our turnaround time for new submissions has dropped dramatically. At present, our median time to first decision is 45 days (two days for manuscripts receiving an internal review and 62 days for those that go out for a full review); 90% of submissions receive a decision within 90 days, and 98% within 120 days. The quality of the reviews remains outstanding. I thank our excellent editorial board and outstanding associate editors for this achievement.