University of Delaware management professor Wendy Smith has spent much of her career examining a challenge familiar to leaders across industries: how to navigate competing demands without choosing one at the expense of another.
Now, research that helped advance the study of those organizational tensions has earned recognition for its lasting influence.
Smith, Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management in UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, received the 2026 Academy of Management Annals Decade Award for the article “Paradox Research in Management Science: Looking Back to Move Forward.”
Published in 2016 with coauthors Jonathan Schad, Marianne Lewis and Sebastian Raisch, the article was recognized as the most-cited paper published in Academy of Management Annals over the past decade. The Decade Award recognizes scholarship that has demonstrated enduring influence on management research and practice.
The article examines paradoxes in organizations — persistent and interdependent tensions that can arise when leaders face competing demands. Rather than treating those demands as problems that can always be resolved by choosing one option over another, paradox research explores how and why leaders and organizations can engage competing priorities simultaneously to result in more creative and sustainable strategies
The work helped consolidate and advance a growing body of paradox research in management scholarship. In the decade since its publication, the article has continued to influence researchers studying leadership, strategy and organizational change.
For Smith, the recognition builds on a career devoted to understanding how leaders can approach competing demands more effectively. Her research examines strategic paradoxes, including tensions between exploring new opportunities and exploiting existing capabilities, pursuing social missions while meeting financial goals, and competing in the present while investing in the future.
Smith has also brought those ideas to a broader audience through her research, teaching and writing, helping leaders understand how a paradox mindset can turn seemingly conflicting demands into opportunities for creativity and innovation, more recently with her book Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions To Solve Your Toughest Problems (HBSP, 2022).
The Academy of Management recognized Smith and her coauthors at its 2026 annual meeting in Philadelphia in August. The award underscores the continuing reach of their scholarship and its impact on how researchers and practitioners understand the complex tensions facing organizations and their leaders.