Michele Williams receives best paper award from the Academy of Management
June 21 2007
Michele Williams, Assistant Professor, Department of Organizational Behavior, will receive the best paper award from the Academy of Management Conflict Management Division for her work "Disentangling concepts: The role of affect in trust development and cooperation."
Williams will accept the award at the academy's 2007 annual meeting this summer. The Academy of Management is the world's largest and oldest scholarly management association.
In this award-winning theory paper, Williams develops an affective model of trust and cooperation that clarifies the mechanisms individuals use to build collaboration in today's less hierarchically structured organizations. By examining emotions that can prompt non-self-interested behavior (e.g., self-defeating behavior and altruistic actions), she contributes a model that reconciles the perspective of scholars who argue that trust is irrelevant for business transactions with that of scholars who advocate the importance of trust in organizations.
This work suggests that it is not trust alone, but trust and emotion combined that lead to positive collaborative outcomes. Managers and professionals who understand the interrelationship between trust and emotion can avoid suboptimal behavior and lead their teams and organizations to more successful outcomes.
