QSB Research Excellence Awards

Congratulations to Jana Raver the 2012 recipient of the QSB Award for Research Achievement and Wei Wang, the 2012 New Researcher Achievement Award.

This year’s recipients of the Queen’s School of Business Research Excellence Awards have done masterful jobs upending conventional wisdom.

Both passionate researchers, Jana Raver, Associate Professor and E. Marie Shantz Faculty Fellow in Organizational Behaviour, and Wei Wang, Assistant Professor and Distinguished Faculty Fellow of Finance, have earned global attention for their work and, now, honours from their Queen’s peers. At a special ceremony at Goodes Hall in November 2012, Jana was given the Award for Research Achievement, and Wei received the New Researcher Award.

Jana completed her PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Maryland and has been on Queen’s faculty since 2004. Her research interests include interpersonal relations and group processes in the workplace. She focuses on the ways in which employees support each other and build high-performance environments instead of engaging in counterproductive actions such as harassment and bullying.

Jana’s research has shed light on the nuances of organizational culture. An example is her recently published study on the impact of highly agreeable and disagreeable people on overall team performance; she and her colleagues found that “bad apples” have a much more powerful influence on team performance than “good eggs.” Her study on destructive criticism, which attributes poor performance to a person’s character, showed that highly competitive people on the receiving end of such feedback perform poorly as a result, but those that are not competitive may actually be motivated by destructive criticism to perform better.

Jana impressed the award review committee with her record of publications in top-tier journals and her role as editorial board member for leading publications. She has published articles in journals such as Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Human Resource Management Review. She is an associate editor at Applied Psychology, and a principal reviewer at Journal of Applied Psychology.

“This award was completely unexpected at this relatively early stage in my career,” says Jana. “I was very excited to hear that my faculty peers had selected me for this honour. I’m especially grateful for QSB’s supportive culture for research. It’s wonderful to work in an environment where the Dean and Associate Deans encourage top-notch research on par with teaching excellence, and where collegial faculty and staff help make research excellence possible.”

Wei Wang’s accomplishments early in his scholarly career are impressive as well, making him a worthy recipient of the New Researcher Award. The award recognizes a faculty member whose research during the pre-tenure period is considered outstanding.

Wei completed his PhD in Finance from QSB in 2006 and joined the faculty in 2007. He focuses on bankruptcy restructuring, distressed investing, activist investors, corporate governance, capital structure, and behavioral finance. In 2012, he made a name for himself with several papers relating to creditor rights in large bankruptcies. In one, he and his research colleagues showed that hedge funds, far from their reputation as predators, play a productive role in getting bankrupt companies back on their feet. In a second, he showed that bankrupt companies that use employee retention plans to keep senior leaders from leaving move out of Chapter 11 faster and are more likely to be successful over the longer term.

Wei’s findings grew out of a core dataset he painstakingly assembled from hard-copy documents he sourced from visits to bankruptcy courts and the National Archives in the U.S.

His research has been published in Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis,Financial Management, and Journal of Fixed Income. In 2012 alone, he presented his research at seven seminars and two prestigious conferences. His provocative findings have drawn attention from media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, The Globe and Mail, National Post, and Business Week.

In his acceptance speech at a ceremony at Goodes Hall, Wei lauded the research climate at Queen’s and gave special thanks to professors Wulin Suo, Lynnette Purda, Lewis Johnson, and Louis Gagnon. These seasoned QSB scholars were at Wei’s side during his four years of PhD studies at Queen’s, and they now count among his colleagues.

The Research Excellence Award program is administered by an ad hoc committee of QSB professors who consider the research achievements of their peers. In addition to the recognition, recipients receive grants to support their research and facilitate its dissemination into journals and other quality publications.

Story by Alan Morantz