Foster Department of Management and Organization ranked #4 in the nation for research productivity

Foster’s Department of Management and Organization faculty in 2020.

The University of Washington Foster School of Business has the #4 most productive management research faculty in the nation, based in its publication record over the past five years in the discipline’s top journals.

This according to the annual index compiled by Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia.

Xiao-Ping Chen

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.

Sustained excellence

The Foster School’s high spot in the aggregate TAMUGA 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—peer-reviewed journals. Foster’s management faculty were ranked #1 in 2017, #13 in 2018, #15 in 2019, #2 in 2020 and #9 in 2021.

Chris Barnes

During the period from 2017 to 2021, Foster’s Department of Management and Organization collectively produced 66 papers published in the discipline’s elite eight peer-reviewed journals, including:

• 17 in the Journal of Applied Psychology,
• 11 in the Academy of Management Journal,
• 9 in the Strategic Management Journal,
• 7 in Personnel Psychology,
• 7 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,
• 5 in the Academy of Management Review.
• 5 in Organization Science, and
• 5 in Administrative Science Quarterly.

Only the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), University of Georgia (Terry), and Arizona State University (Carey) produced more publications over the same period. And Foster’s distribution of papers among the top eight journals is one of the most balanced in the index.

Prolific per-capita

Foster management scholars have been extraordinarily productive—individually—relative to peers as well. The department’s five-year per-capita publication rate (2.712 papers per research faculty) is #7 overall in the TAMUGA Ranking.

Crystal Farh

It is nearly double the average per-capita publication rate of the next 75 schools listed (1.406 per researcher). And it’s well above the average per-capita rate of the nation’s 82 most-productive faculties (1.589 papers per researcher).

Relevant across disciplines

Beyond its outstanding and sustained raw and per-capita research record, Foster’s management faculty are also distinguished by the extraordinary breadth of topics that they examine.

Abhinav Gupta

Rather than concentrate on one or two aspects of the discipline, Foster’s researchers have made significant recent contributions to the state of the art in organizational behavior, employee behavior, strategy, entrepreneurship, leadership, ethics, diversity, equity and inclusion, human resources, corporate social responsibility, organizational change, applied psychology, even stress reduction, among other issues of management and organization.

Foster flagship

The Department of Management and Organization is no outlier at Foster. It is simply the pacesetter of a research faculty notable for its scholarly strength from stem to stern. All five academic departments achieved a top 15 research ranking in the past two years. In national research rankings by discipline, Foster currently stands at:

• #4 in management over the past five years (according to the TAMUGA Ranking)
• #5 in information systems over the past three years (according to the AIS Research Rankings)
• #8 in accounting over the past six years (according to BYU’s Accounting Rankings)
• #14 in marketing over the past five years (according to the Top 100 Business School Research Rankings)
• #17 in finance over the past five years (according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities).

Add it all up and the Foster faculty ranks #8 in the world for its overall research record over the past five years, according to the Financial Times scholarly index, which tracks each business school’s publication record in the leading 50 academic journals across all business disciplines.