Mitchell honored by Academy of Management for lifetime achievement
Terence Mitchell, a professor of management and organization at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, has been named recipient of the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management.
The award is the highest honor of the Academy’s largest division. It annually recognizes one outstanding scholar whose research and service has made an indelible contribution to the discipline of organizational behavior throughout his or her career.
“Since this is a new award—only six members of the Academy’s OB Division have won it—we’re still hitting the cream of the crop, the absolute pioneers of the field, “ said Blake Ashforth, a professor of management at the University of Arizona W.P. Carey School of Business and past chair of the Organizational Behavior Division. “Terry fits that description perfectly. His remarkable record of scholarship and service to the academic community is known far and wide. It was only a matter of time before he won this important award.”
Mitchell joined the University of Washington in 1969 after earning his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Over the decades at the Foster School, he has authored groundbreaking research in the areas of leadership, motivation, decision making and, most recently, employee turnover.
A three-time winner of the Foster School’s Best Scholar Award, Mitchell is ranked 35th among the world’s most influential management scholars in a 2008 study published in the Journal of Management. He has published more than 120 articles in major professional journals, delivered more than 120 addresses at major professional meetings, contributed more than 40 chapters to edited volumes and published four books.
Recent recognition includes awards for his research methods paper on time, co-authored with Larry James, which won the Academy of Management Review Best Paper Award in 2001. His paper on turnover with Tom Lee in Research in Organizational Behavior won the 2001 Best Paper published in the field of Organizational Behavior. His seminal 2006 paper on job embeddedness, co-authored by Lee and Brooks Holtom, earned that year’s Academy of Management award for Outstanding Practitioner Oriented Publication in Organizational Behavior.
Mitchell has served on the executive committee of the Organizational Behavior Division and on the governing board of the Society for Organizational Behavior. At the Foster School, Mitchell is the Edward E. Carlson Distinguished Professor in Business Administration, and serves as faculty director of the school’s PhD program.
According to Lee, the Foster School’s associate dean for faculty and academic affairs and past president of the Academy of Management, Mitchell is a giant in the world of management research. “But within the Foster School, Terry is recognized as both an excellent researcher and teacher,” said Lee. “And his greatest contribution may be as a mentor. He has improved the careers of everyone he’s worked with.”
Mitchell is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association and the Society for Industry and Organizational Psychology, from which he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1998, also a career contribution award.
The list of prior recipients of the Organizational Behavior Division’s Lifetime Achievement Award includes Denise Rousseau (2009), Barry Staw (2008), Gary Latham (2007), Lyman W. Porter (2006) and Edwin Locke (2005).
“It’s deeply satisfying to know that the Academy of Management has formally recognized what we have known for decades at the Foster School,” said James Jiambalvo, dean of the Foster School of Business. “Terry Mitchell is one of the world’s premiere thought leaders in the field of management. This award is a fitting testament to his outstanding career and major impact on generations of scholars and students.”
Mitchell will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 annual meeting of the Academy of Management in early August.
