Morris Plan Professor of Commerce and McIntire Research Advisory Fellow David Lehman was recently awarded the Best Paper Prize at the Strategic Management Society (SMS) annual conference in Istanbul, Turkey.
Lehman co-authored the winning paper, “The Link between Reliability and Resilience: The Moderating Effect of Human Errors in Accident Management,” with Brian Park of Georgia State University and Rangaraj Ramanujam of Vanderbilt University. Their scholarship tests the relationship between reliability and resilience in connection with accidents being attributed to human error or another cause and represents the latest yearly winner recognized by SMS, dating back to the honor’s first presentation in 1998.
Bestowed by committee, the award is based on soundness of the paper’s conceptual development; originality and newness of the contribution; appropriate and well-applied methodology; relevance to management practice; and effective communication of the central ideas of the work. The honor also includes a $2,000 cash prize.
Being recognized for his contribution was particularly rewarding for Lehman, but he explains there are at least two other reasons for its importance to him: “First, I am a bit of an outsider; in fact, it was my first time attending this conference, as it is for strategy scholars, whereas my background is in organizational behavior—so it was a lovely introduction to the conference,” he explains. “Second, at least one of the scholars in the field I admire most was also a finalist for the award, so it was especially humbling to receive it.”
Lehman notes that the focus of his team’s paper is on resilience and the capacity of organizations to rebound from an accident or failure. “This idea of resilience appears more and more in the popular press and academic research alike because resilience is especially important in complex environments like our present society,” he says, pointing out that context of his team’s study on oil and gas pipeline accidents. “A shutdown has major implications for businesses and consumers, often across multiple states. Understanding how these sorts of companies can bounce back is paramount.”
Research explored in the winning paper stands to be continued, with the authors hoping to continue investigating how the causes of accidents impact resilience.
“The key finding from this study is that causal attributions matter,” says Lehman, clarifying that if an accident is caused by human error versus being triggered by another factor such as an equipment failure it impacts a firm’s ability to recover. “In our study, these causal attributions had a significant impact not only on how long it took a pipeline operator to resume operations but also whether it was able to leverage its past experience with accident-free operations.”
The winning paper is the authors’ second study in a series of research on their topic of interest (“Driven to Distraction: The Unintended Consequences of Organizational Learning from Failure Caused by Human Error” came first).
The SMS, an organization of more than 3,000 members, aims to bridge reflective practice and thoughtful scholarship as it supports the development and distribution of insightful strategic management work and foster professional connections and global knowledge sharing among its associates.
