Bradley Kirkman recognized for management research

Bradley Kirkman, General (Ret.) H. Hugh Shelton Distinguished Professor of Leadership and head of the Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the NC State University Poole College of Management, has been named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). 

 

Kirkman is one of 24 SIOP Fellows elected this year and one of two NC State faculty members to receive the distinction during the society’s 29th annual conference held in May 2014. Adam Meade, associate professor of psychology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, also was named an SIOP Fellow. NC State was the only university with two Fellows elected this year. 

 

SIOP Fellows are distinguished industrial and organizational psychologists who have made an unusual and outstanding contribution to the field. Fellow status in SIOP is an esteemed honor granted through a rigorous nomination process and the contributions of nominees for Fellow are evaluated in terms of impact on I-O psychology and its advancement, and their contribution to the mission of the Society, which is: “to enhance human well-being and performance in organizational and work settings by promoting the science, practice, and teaching of industrial and organizational psychology.” 

 

While not an organizational psychologist, Kirkman said his field – organizational behavior (OB) – and the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology fields are very similar, in that both address organizational topics such as leadership, motivation, decision making, communication and cross-cultural management issues, among others. As a result, Kirkman and other organizational behaviorists may be members of both SIOP and the Academy of Management, and his research has been published in both disciplines’ journals. 

The Society noted that Kirkman is known for his scholarship in three primary areas: teamwork and team effectiveness, leadership, and cross-cultural management. His work is especially distinctive in clarifying the process through which teams are effective in organizations – particularly virtual teams – and has led to over 40 peer-reviewed articles, 13 book chapters and a book. 

 

Through his research, Kirkman has shown how team empowerment was a critical factor in the success of work teams as well as understanding empowerment’s impact on performance variability between different virtual teams. 

 

In the leadership area, he recently identified various contingency factors that weaken the effects of transformational leadership on follower outcomes. In his research on cross-cultural management, he argues that the effectiveness of teams employed in countries outside the United States is contingent on the unique configuration of national cultural values. 

 

In 2008, Kirkman won the Ricky W. Griffin Outstanding Research Award while on the faculty of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University and in 2009, he won the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division Award for Best International Paper.

 

Kirkman  served as associate editor for the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) from 2005 to 2008 and currently serves on the editorial boards for AMJ and the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Psychology Review. He received Outstanding Reviewer Awards from AMJ for five years, and was an outstanding reviewer for the International Management Division of the Academy of Management for three years. 

 

In addition to SIOP, he is a member of the Academy of Management, Academy of International Business, American Psychological Association and Southern Management Association. 

 

Kirkman formerly held the Foreman R. and Ruby Bennett Endowed Chair in Business Administration in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. He also has worked in the Scheller College of Management at The Georgia Institute of Technology and the Bryan School of Business and Economics at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. He also has held visiting professor positions in the Department of Management and Organizations at the University of Western Australia in 2006 and the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in 2012, and received teaching awards while at Texas A&M and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

 

Since joining the NC State Poole College in 2012, he won both the college’s and the management, innovation, and entrepreneurship department’s Research Leadership Award. He was named the General (Ret.) H. Hugh Shelton Distinguished Professor of Leadership in 2014.

 

Kirkman received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He resides in Raleigh, N.C.