The New Reality: Leaders Have Less Control, Need More Courage

Research Findings Are Not Reaching Business Leaders

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By Nick Keppler

There are now about 400 journals for management as an academic field, producing about 12,000 published articles a year in total. However, top decision-makers rarely learn anything from them, said Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of the George Washington University School of Business.

“Many of us are concerned that the research we do is not being used to the extent that we would like, and it’s called a research-practice gap,” Aguinis said. “Also, there’s a research-policy gap,” stemming from political leaders’ lack of familiarity with research produced in the field of management.

This gap is particularly frustrating, said Aguinis, because scholars on management and organizations have produced a wealth of scientifically sound research on issues that have dominated the news in 2025, including the downsizing of the federal government, the measurement of job performance, discrimination and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and the implementation of AI in workplaces.

“If you want to build a bridge, you will talk to the top engineers, but management scholars are not consulted with the same regularity,” said Aguinis.

This is not entirely the fault of those who could potentially benefit from our research, Aguinis added. Academic journals are often insular and publish articles that only make small contributions to our understanding of critical organizational phenomena. Also, the compensation and reward systems motivate academics to write mainly for other academics, not managers, business leaders, and decision-makers.

“For several reasons, much of our research is not aimed at affecting practice,” Aguinis said. “If you read the typical article of, let’s say, 20 pages, you may find one or two paragraphs at the end saying ‘implications for practice.’”

The research is not lost on everyone. A small number of elite companies look to academia to improve performance. Google is well-known for hiring Ph.D. holders, not just for computer-science roles but also for management and creative jobs. Marriott is a sponsor of doctoral development programs.

These companies reap the benefit in reputation, said Aguinis, often appearing in lists such as Fortune Magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For” series.

“All of these companies, all of them, employ Ph.D.s who actually read the research, and they try to implement leadership strategies and management practices that are consistent with what research says aligns with best-practice evidence as published in scholarly journals,” he said.

Why CSR Is Still Vital for Companies

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By Nick Keppler

Any act of corporate wrongdoing—real or perceived—can be publicized worldwide instantly via the internet and social media. This has made ideas of sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR)—which includes organizations’ initiatives geared toward achieving environmental, ethical, philanthropic, and financial objectives—increasingly important and far-ranging, said Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of the George Washington School of Business.

“Because of information flow across the internet, now we know about sweatshops, we know about companies polluting the environment, and we know about companies that are abusing and taking advantage of farmers and not providing benefits,” he said.

Not coincidentally, measurements of CSR initiatives that make a positive societal impact have grown not just to consider the company’s adherence to laws and regulations but also its impact on globalization, technological developments, fair trade, workers’ rights, pay equity, pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change.

“The expectations have changed mostly because of pressure from the outside,” Aguinis said.

To manage an increasingly complex set of considerations related to CSR and sustainability, many companies have emphasized the three Ps, Aguinis said: people, the planet, and profit.

The “people” aspect does not only encompass employees and shareholders but also a wide span of stakeholders, including “the communities you serve, your customers, the communities around your business locations,” he said.

For example, Intel, a computer components manufacturer, holds town-hall meetings before finalizing plans to open new chip plants.

Small steps like these make operating the business easier and bolster its reputation, Aguinis said.

“The argument is that you can do good and do well at the same time, that those things go hand in hand, is replacing an older cynical argument that some economists have proposed, which is that your priority and loyalty group and number-one stakeholder is your shareholders,” he said. “‘You should just be making money for them, and anything else that you do that goes outside of that is not your mandate, not your responsibility.’”

That thinking—exemplified by American economist Milton Friedman—will not help companies stand up to increasing social pressure and could hurt their reputation, Aguinis said.

“The CSR movement has changed because customers, consumers, vendors, and partners want companies to do more to impact society positively.”

Why Success Can Be the Enemy of Innovation in the Age of AI

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By Jason Collins

A new Pew Research Center report reveals that public optimism remains low regarding the potential impact of AI in the workplace. However, refusing to work with new technologies can cause even the largest organizations to fail as this technology changes the game across many industries.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware reveals that it isn’t the small businesses that are most at risk, but rather larger organizations that choose to rely on what they know works. Smith calls this the paradox of success.

“The companies who are at the top of their market have the most to lose and therefore don’t want to take risks and thus are the most entrenched in what they already do,” Smith said. “Researchers call this the ‘paradox of success’ where successful companies are the ones that fail to adopt new technologies and innovation.”

Because smaller organizations don’t have this burden, they have nothing keeping them from trying new things and adopting new technologies such as AI and robotic process automation. History shows us that success can be an enemy of innovation. Smith draws parallels to brands such as Kodak and Polaroid, which failed to make the digital photography transition.

“BlackBerry was this amazing early force of the smartphone but could not compete when brands like Apple came into the market with updated technologies,” Smith said. “Blockbuster Video couldn’t make the transition from VHS tapes and DVDs to streaming when Netflix then took over.

“So, we see that story happen again and again and again,” she said.

If the past has taught us anything, it is that relying on past success without monitoring new technologies, tracking consumers’ preferences, and cultivating boldness in strategic planning prevents innovation.

“I think we’re going to see the same thing now,” Smith said. “And so there is wisdom in ‘Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.’

“It’s totally new technology, but leaders should be learning from history what it means to innovate within an existing company,” she said.

Rethinking Management in the Age of AI

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By Jason Collins

More than one in four workers are worried that AI will lead to job losses, according to a recent poll from the conciliation service Acas. Currently, leaders and management have a key role in shaping how employees use AI during this technological transition.

Instead of viewing AI as a potential replacement for human workers, management can be more effective by considering how people can interact with technology to boost productivity and efficiency. Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware said that doing so requires that senior management shift their mindsets to frame the relationship between humans and AI in the context of what works in their organization.

“One of the roles of leaders is to understand how AI and humans work together,” Smith said. “We tend to think of how technology will replace human, which is an either/or mindset.”

Instead, she urged leaders to frame technology as a complement to, not a replacement for, employees.

“Leaders can adopt a both/and approach, exploring how AI and employees work together to lead to even better outcomes,” Smith said.

Smith advised management to adopt the mindset of using AI to make their team members’ jobs easier and free up time for them to focus on strategic planning and other tasks that require higher-order thinking.

“AI works better because the person and the technology are in a relationship with one another,” Smith said. “We can do better when we ask ourselves, ‘What is this technology good for? What is my level of understanding of it? What am I good for, what do I do well, and how could I work effectively and interdependently with this technology?’”

Smith said that she believes that while AI can perform certain tasks more efficiently than humans, it ultimately comes down to collaboration. For example, the better the prompts that humans give to a generative AI platform, the better the outputs of the gen AI software. Human expertise can help evaluate and assess the quality of the AI responses.

“If AI is going to work to the best of its capabilities, it’s because I bring real and important contributions to the table,” Smith said.

For managers, the question is no longer whether to use AI but how to grow with it and encourage rank-and-file employees to do the same. Smith said this will require “growth and thoughtfulness.” Smith also underscored the advice for people to “recognize that AI and humans work better together, and to be in learning and growth mode.”

Human-Centered Leaders Steer Through the AI Anxiety Curve

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By Jason Collins

Established generative AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard), Anthropic’s Claude, and Jasper (formerly Jarvis) have been competing for users and market share, and the level of competition in the space will continue to grow with the rise of non-U.S. AI startups, including Chinese company DeepSeek. The impact of this new technology in the workplace is far-reaching, and leaders need to guide their organizations’ employees through their psychological resistance with an approach that embraces innovation while acknowledging the potential positive and negatives effects on humans and our emotions.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware noted that history has shown us that when a new generation of technology is introduced, such as generative AI, we resist it psychologically. Smith explained that AI is a great example of this.

“AI introduces all kinds of uncertainty and possibilities, some exciting, others anxiety-inducing,” Smith said.

“It’s a wide range of possibilities, which includes automation of manual tasks, role changes, and job losses, and that type of uncertainty leads us to psychologically fill in the gaps with all kinds of things that we’re afraid of,” she said.

It introduces the question, “What happens with the people who had been doing the work but whose skills are no longer relevant or up to date?”

This AI anxiety curve is not a new concept. Smith cited the introduction of once-disruptive technologies that we now take for granted.

“We’ve seen that story play out in every industry,” Smith said. “For example, we’ve seen how the introduction of the personal computer overtook the mainframe, and the introduction of cloud computing overtook the personal computer.

“We’ve seen it in the past, and when it comes to technology in general is, as a result of this anxiety, there’s this curve of people adopting the anxiety,” she said.

Smith noted that this spread of emotional reactions results in a wave of people, especially in the workplace, feeling this anxiety and thus holding out for the new technology to become more established before gauging its implications, or dismissing its potential to create positive outcomes. Leaders cannot afford to ignore this anxiety. If they are to continually innovate, they need to take into account employees’ emotional responses.

“Effective innovation requires attention to, not rejection of, employees’ emotional experiences,” Smith said.

“The best leaders navigate this learning and adoption curve across the organization with empathy for their workers and clarity on the objectives for deploying the technology with a human-centered approach to leadership that also embraces innovation,” she said.

Why Doing Meaningful Work Makes Time Fly

By Daniel Butcher

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That’s relativity.” —Albert Einstein

When people talk about time at work, they usually don’t think about subjective time, how we perceive time differently, for example, at work vs. on vacation, noted Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on that topic with Karen Jansen of Henley Business School.

“A key to understanding subjective time is thinking about how people interpret time itself—workers often ask themselves, ‘Is there meaning in what I’m doing? Where is this leading me?’” Shipp said. “Expense reports feel meaningless, and most people consider them to be a waste of time, as opposed to, ‘I worked on this big project—it’s going to save lives, for example, if you’re in the medical community.’

“So the same amount of time spent on one sort of task or project vs. another can feel different and have different meaning, and that interpretation of time is really important for how people think and feel about their job and career,” she said.

“Leaders need to consider this different view of time when engaging their teams.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Mental Time Travel at Work Matters

By Daniel Butcher

While many self-help gurus advise living in the moment, most people’s thoughts also tend to wander to the past or the future. That has implications for how people interact with each other and work together.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on that topic with Karen Jansen of North Carolina State University, said that when people talk about time at work, they’re almost always referring to “objective time.”

“Time is measured by the clock or the calendar, so when workers think, ‘What time is a meeting scheduled?’ or ‘Am I managing my time well?’ or ‘December feels different than June,’ they’re always referring back to what they think are fixed elements of time—the clock or the calendar,” Shipp said. “But my research over the years has really been looking at people’s subjective experience and interpretation of time, and when we went into the literature to really explore this more in depth, we found that this is mostly hidden.

“One of the main elements of subjective time is that people mentally time travel,” she said. “They remember the past and they forecast the future.

“At any given moment, 50% of your thoughts are spent in another period of time; you aren’t in the present moment—you’re thinking about different periods of time.”

Other research that Shipp has done shows that people have characteristic tendencies to mentally stay in one or more periods of time. Some people tend to think about the past more often, while others like to plan and imagine what will happen in the future.

“I’m very future-focused, whereas my husband is very much present- and past-focused,” Shipp said. “If you think about it from a work perspective, if people are thinking about different things, if their minds are in different places, they can have conflicts, or they can have complementarities.

“That kind of subjectivity has important implications for team composition or, the flip side of it, team conflict,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Work Frenemies Are More Common than Work Friends

By Daniel Butcher

In our portfolio of relationships, we want as many friends and as few enemies as possible. But many work relationships aren’t clearly positive or negative; instead, they’re more neutral, like cordial acquaintances, or even ambivalent. Think “frenemies,” two-faced colleagues, or polite rivals. While having mixed feelings about a coworker sounds awkward—and research studies have shown that frenemies increase each other’s stress and blood pressure—ambivalent relationships also tend to boost creativity, adaptability, and productivity by fueling a competitive spark.

“Ambivalent relationships have always been relatively common in organizations, as they are breeding grounds for having to simultaneously collaborate and compete, for example,” said Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter. “But because some of the more complicated interpersonal interactions were paused or transformed during the COVID-19 pandemic, workplace relationships seemed to become more one-dimensional.

“Either someone was unreliable or difficult to work with, or they were motivated and helpful,” she said. “Now, in the ‘post-pandemic’ world of work, we’re starting to see ambivalent relationships emerge again.”

Methot has been doing research to better understand how and why friendships necessarily blur work and non-work boundaries to create unique tensions. That holds true for both remote and in-person work as well.

“It’s important for people to understand how to balance when we’re exposing our personal or intimate information to someone who we work with, and the paradox and the complications that come along with that,” she said. “A lot of people want to have those close relationships and those experiences with the people who they work with but maybe don’t really understand how that can turn against them.

“The issue with workplace friendships that makes them distinct and unique from relationships or friendships outside of work is that the shared space is the office, and so the friendship is founded on a professional work relationship, and those two things tend to compete with each other.”

Especially for team members of comparable seniority, it can be difficult to reconcile the fact that they are collaborating with each other at the same time that they may be competing with each other.

“A formal work relationship is transactional, professional, and non-discretionary, versus our private, more discretionary, informal friendships, and those two things tend to conflict with each other,” Methot said. “How do we balance these paradoxes or tensions that we end up facing when we try to become friends with people who we work with?

“It ends up potentially creating these rivalries—we might be both going up for the same promotion,” she said. “I want to be proud of my friend and happy for him or her, but I’m also jealous, and so this started leading into my research understanding how we feel ambivalently towards our friendships.

“Work friends must deal with this emotion of ambivalence, where we might feel joy or pride and jealousy, and the question is, ‘How do we balance those emotions?’”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Shadow Networks Foster Collaboration

By Daniel Butcher

People often collaborate with colleagues across departments in ways that benefit their organization, sometimes sparking inter-team creativity and productivity. Human resources (HR) can either kindle or pour cold water on those fires.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Review article on this topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College and David Allen of Texas Christian University and University of Warwick—said that managers routinely search for ways to foster collaboration and break down silos by rotating employees or creating cross-functional teams. Other effective tactics include fostering networks through company retreats or company-sponsored volunteer service among employees across departments.

“I’m really interested in the interactions and communication among employees in a way that is outside the formal organizational chart,” Methot said. “The functioning of the informal organization is often a shadow network behind the official organizational chart.

“We know that there’s a lot of dynamics that occur in the ways that people interact and communicate and build trust and develop friendships and gossip in organizations, and organizational leaders often try to prioritize building a climate or a culture where people are creating these types of networks, where they feel a sense of psychological safety and are comfortable sharing information and asking questions,” she said. “But they don’t often know exactly what HR policies are going are going to affect those networks, and how they’re going to affect those networks.

“It’s crucial to track and analyze how a formal HR policy impacts the informal infrastructure in an organization, how people are interacting with each other, whether they form mentoring relationships or developmental relationships with each other, and whether they form close friendships, even when they traditionally had only worked together as team members.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

How Tech Can Support Connecting via Remote Work

By Daniel Butcher

Some people hate virtual meetings and calls and prefer face-to-face in-person interactions. Others are uncomfortable in a traditional office setting and prefer communicating in ways that are mediated by technology. Many people fall somewhere in between. But small talk is valuable for everyone.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Journal article on that topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College, Patrick Downes of the University of Kansas, and Allison Gabriel of Purdue University—said that she has talked to a lot of people whose teams or organizations are now using Slack, Teams, or other communication software and provided the following advice:

“Set up informal interaction channels over Slack to give employees an outlet where they can talk about exercise or leisure or any hobbies that they have that doesn’t necessarily have to implicate work-related topics,” Methot said. “Giving them an outlet to talk informally with each other can be really helpful.”

This doesn’t always apply to, say, neurodivergent individuals or other people with disabilities or people who are from minoritized backgrounds, or even expatriates, she noted.

“Small talk is actually really challenging for people who don’t understand American norms, and we’ve heard that from a lot of immigrants, expatriates who don’t have the context for how to get involved in the conversations with those familiar with a particular country’s cultural norms and trends,” Methot said. “For Americans, it seems accepted and relatively normal.

“We understand that it’s polite to engage in conversation, but we talk about topics that they might not be familiar with, things related to hobbies or sports or network television, and they feel excluded,” she said

“Also, the idea of returning to the office might not feel as accepting or welcoming for certain populations, like those who are neurodivergent.”

While many people bemoan the disruption to traditional nine-to-five office schedules, for many others such as parents and people with disabilities, remote or hybrid work arrangements are a breath of fresh air.

“For some people, technology has really vastly improved their social circles, work-life balance, and ability to present themselves more authentically,” Methot said.

“Stigmatized groups might struggle to live and work in their environment when they have disabilities, or for individuals who are neurodivergent, it’s harder for them to form in-person connections, and so interacting online can really be a lifeline for them,” she said.

“I want to make sure that I’m addressing the fact that encouraging small talk isn’t a blanket set of practices or results that apply to everyone.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile