Foster Department of Management and Organization ranked #2 in the nation for research productivity
Foster’s Department of Management and Organization faculty pre-pandemic.
Pandemic? No problem.
The University of Washington Foster School of Business has the #2 most-productive management research faculty in the nation—based on its 2020 publication record in the field’s top journals.
This is according to an annual index compiled by Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia.
The TAMUGA Ranking of Management Department Research Productivity tallies total contributions to the eight most-influential scholarly journals in the discipline of management, and ranks business schools across the United States according to the number of those contributions attributed to their faculty members.
Despite interminable lockdowns, isolation, interruptions and acute Zoom fatigue caused by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, research faculty in Foster’s Department of Management and Organization collectively published 14 papers in top journals last year, just behind the pace set by the University of Georgia (Terry).
Extended stay at the top
Foster’s Department of M&O has become a fixture in the uppermost echelon of the TAMUGA ranking for many years. This year’s database lists Foster #3 in the nation for its research record over the past five years.
That lofty spot in the aggregate ranking is the product of consistently strong scholarly output, despite the significant variability of year-to-year research publication in the most influential—and discerning—journals. Foster’s management faculty were ranked #5 in 2016, #1 in 2017, #13 in 2018, #15 in 2019 and #2 in 2020.
The product behind these rankings is an enormous contribution to the state of the art in organizational behavior, employee behavior, strategy, entrepreneurship, leadership, ethics, diversity and inclusion, human resources and others within the management umbrella.
During the period from 2016 to 2020, Foster’s Department of Management and Organization produced 69 papers published in the discipline’s elite eight peer-reviewed journals, including.
- 17 in the Journal of Applied Psychology,
- 12 in the Academy of Management Journal,
- 14 in the Strategic Management Journal,
- 6 in Organization Science,
- 6 in Personnel Psychology,
- 5 in Administrative Science Quarterly,
- 5 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and
- 4 in the Academy of Management Review.
Only the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) and Michigan State University (Broad) produced more over the same period.
Individual stars, extraordinary bench
Foster management scholars have been extraordinarily productive—individually—relative to peers as well. The department’s five-year per-capita publication rate (2.842 papers per research faculty) is #5 overall in the TAMUGA Ranking. It’s also nearly double the average per-capita research rate of the top 87 schools listed (1.506 papers per researcher).
Far from an outlier at the Foster School, the Department of Management and Organization is simply the bellwether of a powerhouse research faculty with strength from stem to stern. All five academic departments have achieved a top 15 research ranking in the past year.
In January, the Financial Times ranking of overall faculty productivity listed Foster #4 in the world—and #1 among public business schools—for its research record over the past three years in the leading 50 academic journals across all business disciplines.
