The September issue offers the opportunity to celebrate the winners of two awards. The winning articles are selected from extremely strong sets of contenders. We present the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution to the article published five years earlier that has subsequently had the greatest influence on the field of organization studies. We present the ASQ Dissertation Award to an article published in the previous year based on a dissertation, with the lead or sole author being the dissertation author. The award-winning dissertation article is the one that best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ as described in our Invitation to Contributors. Two committees, comprising members of our editorial board, review articles published during the target years and choose the award winners.
I am pleased to announce that the 2024 ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution goes to Andrew M. Carton for “‘I’m not mopping the floors, I’m putting a man on the moon’: How NASA leaders enhanced the meaningfulness of work by changing the meaning of work.” The committee commends Carton’s “creative and masterfully implemented archival case analysis.” The article demonstrates how leaders can foster connection between employees and a grand overarching organizational purpose. Drawing on the case of NASA, Carton connects actions at the top of the organizational hierarchy to the perceived meaningfulness of work among employees at the lowest ranks. He details how NASA leaders mapped the organization’s largest goals to the daily work done by employees at all levels, showing how leaders’ sensemaking activities can inspire a sense of purpose and meaning for all workers. The committee noted that the leadership implications of this scholarship “are easily translated to audiences outside of academia, augmenting its theoretical impact. In short, this is an instant classic.” The article captures the importance of meaningfulness at work and has clear implications for practice.
I am pleased to announce that the 2024 ASQ Dissertation Award goes to Yoonjin Choi for “Cultural breadth and embeddedness: The individual adoption of organizational culture as a determinant of creativity.” In 2023, ASQ published 15 articles based on dissertations (out of 26 total articles). Choi’s paper, co-authored with Paul Ingram and Sang Won Han, uses both South Korean and U.S. contexts to provide new insights into the determinants of individual creativity by decomposing cultural fit into cultural breadth and embeddedness. Choi finds that cultural breadth—adopting a broad range of values, beliefs, and norms that span an organization’s culture—contributes to novelty. But cultural embeddedness—adopting core values, beliefs, and norms entrenched in the organization’s culture—helps generate ideas that others view as useful. The authors show that “integrated cultural brokers” with both high cultural breadth and depth are most likely to generate novel and useful creative ideas. By using a semantic networks approach, this article is an exemplar that highlights the microsocial processes behind broader outcomes like creativity.
Each award committee also recognized a runner-up. The runners-up for the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution are W. Chad Carlos and Ben Lewis for “Strategic silence: Withholding certification status as a hypocrisy avoidance tactic.” This compelling article offers a counterintuitive perspective on the potential dangers of prosocial signals and the reasons that firms may not publicize their sustainability initiatives. This scholarship has inspired new research streams that meaningfully extend impression management theory by exploring the potential backlash to prosocial claims and the important role that perceived authenticity plays in audience reactions to strategic communication.
The runner-up for the ASQ Dissertation Award is Summer R. Jackson for “(Not) paying for diversity: Repugnant market concerns associated with transactional approaches to diversity recruitment.” The committee noted that this “impressive” and “fascinating” article demonstrates how even well-intentioned organizations with DEl mandates may struggle to implement effective diversity recruitment strategies. In an ethnography of a technology company, Jackson found that when recruiting racial minority candidates, managers balked at using some of the same transactional platforms they used for recruiting traditional candidates. An unintentional consequence of this managerial resistance (and of using alternative, more-developmental platforms) was the hiring of diverse employees at lower levels in the organizational hierarchy. These insights have crucial managerial implications for designing DEl initiatives that better align with managers’ ethical and relational models.
ASQ seeks papers that engage the theoretical and empirical literature on organizations and make significant contributions to it. The editors interpret this as papers that open up scholarly conversations and inspire research through their theoretical and methodological advances, papers that will be studied for a long time, and papers with conclusions that will be tested, re-tested, and found to hold true. Our award winners fulfill these criteria, demonstrating ASQ’s commitment to research that combines significant theoretical advances with extensive data collection and rigorous analysis. Notably, our award-winning articles do this while simultaneously illuminating the opportunities and challenges of tackling important problems in society.
These awards are decided by independent committees representing the diversity of ASQ readership. Each committee examines the eligible articles and judges which one best meets the award criteria. The ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution Committee was chaired by Mae McDonnell and composed of Justin Berg, Jillian Chown, and Elizabeth Pontikes. The ASQ Dissertation Award Committee was chaired by Melissa Valentine and composed of Cheng Gao, Oliver Hahl, and Mandy O’Neill. I thank the committee members for the time they dedicated to reading and deliberating on the contenders and selecting such fine articles for recognition.
Christine M. Beckman
