Wendy Smith, Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and co-director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, has been elected as a fellow of the Academy of Management (AOM), the leading professional organization for management scholars.
The fellowship honors AOM members who have made significant contributions to the science and practice of management. She is one of 17 top management scholars from around the world, representing institutions such as Harvard University, University of California, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, London Business School and INSEAD who have been appointed to this role. She was formally inducted at the AOM Fellows Dinner in Seattle in August.
“I’m honored to join such an esteemed group of colleagues, with the goal of advancing our work worldwide. As one of the youngest members of this group, I look forward to pushing forward the mission to advance intellectual leadership in the field of management.”
Smith was selected for her work in studying strategic paradoxes, exploring how leaders and individuals adopt a more holistic, integrative approach to competing demands such as those between today and tomorrow, social missions and financial demands, stability and change, or self and other. She received the Web of Science Highly Cited Research Award (2019, 2020 and 2021) for being among the 1 percent most-cited researchers in her field and received the Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review for the most cited paper in the past 10 years.
Her work has been published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, and Management Science. She has taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania–Wharton while globally working with executives, senior leaders and middle managers to navigate personal and strategic paradoxes, and address issues of interpersonal dynamics, team performance, organizational change, and innovation.
Smith is also the incoming program chair-elect of AOM’s Organization and Management Theory (OMT) division, one of the largest divisions of the Academy of Management. The appointment is a five-year leadership track position. Smith has been an active member of OMT since 1998 and has served in various capacities.
Smith is the faculty director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware. She earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, where she began her research on strategic paradoxes.