Wee receives scholarly achievement award from SIOP

Elijah Wee, an assistant professor of management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, has won the 2019 Williams A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).

The award recognizes the scholarly publication that has the greatest potential to significantly impact the field of industrial and organizational psychology.

That honor, this year, goes to Wee’s 2017 Academy of Management Journal paper, “Moving from abuse to reconciliation: A power-dependency perspective on how and when a follower may triumph over abusive supervision.”

The study, co-authored by Hui Liao, Dong Liu and Jun Liu, demonstrates that employees can bring an end to a persistent cycle of supervisory abuse by making themselves instrumental in some way to that bullying boss. Flipping the power dynamic—even a little—can even lead to reconciliation as the abuser appreciates his reliance on the former target of his abuse.

“Our study challenges the notion of the follower as passive and defenseless against the spiral of abuse,” Wee says.

Fast start

Wee joined the Foster School’s Department of Management and Organization in 2017, after earning his PhD in organizational behavior from the University of Maryland.

The insightful paper on supervisory abuse derives from Wee’s dissertation at Maryland, which broadly examined why, when and how followers challenge power dynamics with their leaders.

That dissertation received the 2018 S. Rains Wallace Dissertation Award from SIOP, as well as the 2018 Smith Outstanding Dissertation Award from the University of Maryland Smith School of Business.

An early version of the paper won the Most Innovative Student Paper Award from the Academy of Management, Organizational Behavior Division, in 2013.

Other studies by Wee have received the Best Paper with Practical Implications Award from the Organizational Behavior Division at the 2017 Academy of Management Conference, and the Best Paper Award from the Organizational Behavior Division at the 2016 Academy of Management Conference.

Wee teaches leadership and organizational behavior to students across Foster’s Undergraduate Program.