In this episode, I’m joined by Abhinav Gupta, a Professor of Management in the Foster School of Management at the University of Washington, to discuss his recently published AMJ paper that shows how community trauma fundamentally alters risk-taking. When leaders are emotionally shaken, even competitive pressure doesn’t work the way we expect. And that has big implications for how we understand strategy today.

Christian Schumacher, Steffen Keck, and Abhinav Gupta (in-press) Violence and Competition: The Effect of Mass Shootings and Domestic Terrorism on Organizational Risk-Taking in Response to Performance Shortfalls. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.0306

This episode, I speak with Rachel Goodwin, Assistant Professor of Management at Syracuse University in the Whitman School of Management. In this episode, we dig into her recent AMJ article on perfectionism, based on a compelling study of professional ballet - a context where the stakes are high, the standards are exacting, and pressure to be flawless is constant. We discuss what perfectionism looks like in everyday organizational life, why high performers move between healthy and harmful forms of perfectionism, and what leaders, mentors, and peers can do to create environments where people pursue excellence without compromising their well-being.

Rachael D. Goodwin, Lyndon E. Garrett, and Ali P. Block Under Pressure to Be Perfect: How Dehumanizing and Rehumanizing Social Cues Lead to Maladaptive and Adaptive Perfectionism in Professional Ballet.

https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.0187

This episode, I speak with Nan Jia, Professor of Strategic Management at University of Southern California. In our conversation, I talk with Nan about her recent award winning paper recently published in AMJ about how artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance employee creativity. This paper explores how artificial intelligence can enhance employee creativity by automating routine aspects of work and enabling human employees to focus on higher-level problem-solving. We discuss how AI can change the nature of work and how organizations can best respond to these changes.

Nan Jia, Xueming Luo, Zheng Fang, and Chengcheng Liao, 2024: When and How Artificial Intelligence Augments Employee Creativity. AMJ, 67, 5–32,

https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2022.0426