Undergraduate Student to Present Research paper at Academy of Management Conference

Hassan Ziauddin ’17, will present research conducted at Shenandoah’s Harry F. Byrd, Jr. School of Business at Academy of Management Conference – the largest and most prestigious management conference in the world – in August.  The vast majority of the papers submitted are from faculty, not students, and only about 1 in 4 of those are accepted. The paper, “Nice teams finish last: An investigation of prosocial orientations and prohibitive voice,” explores the team level costs of being prosocial (highly valuing harmony and relationships).

Ziauddin, who studied business administration (finance and economics major), developed a passion for understanding how people and teams succeed at work as well as for the empirical research needed to advance that knowledge after taking Introduction to Management and Organizational Behavior.

Inspired by the course, he devoured top-tier journal articles on a wide variety of topics and narrowed his focus to tractable research questions around the effects that individuals wanting to help others and follow their passions have on team interactions and outcomes. He created high-quality research on the topic with Shenandoah Assistant Professor of Management Bret Sanner, Ph.D., as well as a University of Virginia professor.

Papers like Ziauddin’s are presented in larger rooms in groups of four at the conference, being held this year from Aug. 4 to Aug. 8 in Atlanta, Georgia. He is set to present with faculty from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Harvard Business School and Standford Graduate Business School. In short, the session will feature the “Big 3” business schools and the Byrd School, thanks to Ziauddin’s hard work. Ziauddin also hopes to join his co-presenters’ ranks one day as a professor of management.

His paper explores an important topic, due to 98% of organizations being team-based and prosocial orientations being shown to impact a wide variety of outcomes. Over three studies, his paper shows that teams of prosocially oriented people make worse decisions because they do not engage in prohibitive voice (i.e. constructive criticism) to correct errors and erroneous assumptions. It further shows that managers asking questions can reduce prosocially oriented individuals’ aversion to prohibitive voice. These findings infer that managers should be hesitant to put too many nice people on the same team. 

As one reviewer stated, Ziauddin’s paper is “impressive work.”