What’s New in the Department of Management

Shelly Arneson Retires

After a successful 24-year professional career at HP followed by several years as a full-time instructor in the Department of Management at the College of Business, Shelly Arneson decided to retire this semester. An experienced leader with a successful track record in building strong organizational cultures and financial executive management, Arneson focused on leadership development, teaching, creating and facilitating workshops, and developing motivated and productive teams during her final years at HP. She then brought that passion for teaching to the department in 2014 as an adjunct and starting in 2016 as fulltime faculty, teaching leadership and management courses to undergraduate and graduate students.

Beyond her teaching, Arneson was an engaged member of the management faculty and advised two department chairs with leadership decisions. Arneson helped human resources faculty establish the HR Edge Network. She also mentored student workers in the department and established the social media intern position to better promote departmental reputation. Arneson is best known for her knack for taking personal experience into the classroom and sparking the passion and confidence in her students needed to make a difference in the world. Her colleagues frequently noted that she always balanced this solid foundation and the strength in her convictions with a compassion for people and “doing it right.”

Arneson is excited to begin her retirement and plans to spend more time on herself and with her family. Thank you, Shelly, for your many years of dedicated service to the discipline and department. We wish you the very best as you enjoy retirement.

Bidding Jay Zhang Goodbye

Postdoctoral fellow Jay Zhang spent two years at the College of Business and will soon start a position at the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater. During his time at the College, he worked with the supply chain management faculty researching humanitarian logistics, e-commerce and mixed-method literature review. Zhang developed a new research stream surrounding social sustainability in supply chain. He enjoyed the research collaborations and teaching and is grateful that he had the chance to teach MGT 375 - Advanced Supply Chain Management, which helped him bring his research into the classroom. He especially enjoyed his time and colleagues in the department, and the laughter and joy from his time here will be unforgettable. Working at the College was one of the most wonderful experiences in his life.

"No matter where I go, CSU will always hold a special place in my heart,” he said.

Welcome Birgit M. Schneidmueller

This year we welcomed Birgit M. Schneidmueller to the department. She earned her PhD in cinema and media studies from York University in Toronto. In her dissertation, “Narrative Strategies in Transmedia Environments,” Schneidmueller explored the power of storytelling and communication in business settings, focusing on how successful media producers use a selection of narrative techniques to convey their stories to a broad audience. She earned her master’s degree in media culture from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and her bachelor’s degree from New Orleans’ Tulane University with a double major in communication and psychology. Schneidmueller serves as the course coordinator for BUS 300 - Business Writing and Communication. Welcome to the department, Birgit! We are excited to see how you will continue your work here.

Teaching is lecturer Gwendolyn Fink’s second career, and she’s driven by creating those magical moments in which students grasp key concepts. Fink draws on a wide range of teaching experience, from business to developmental math to engineering technology, in her new role at the College. Prior to joining academia, Fink enjoyed a 16-year career as an aircraft engineer, focusing on aircraft navigation systems. She worked for two Fortune 500 companies and slowly transitioned from engineering to facilitator and corporate trainer.

Fink holds a master of business administration from the University of Memphis and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Christian Brothers College. Outside of teaching, she is a student of being present and living life fully, which both require intentionality! Her hobbies include reading, hiking, scuba diving, watching and playing tennis, horseback riding and ziplining. She enjoys serving in her local church, gathering with family and friends, eating flavorful foods, traveling to new places, meeting new people and enjoying memorable adventures with her husband.

Discovering the Motives for Workplace Ostracism

Most employees recall a time at work when they experienced ostracism or were intentionally excluded, ignored or shunned by coworkers or even their boss, and how emotionally painful this experience was. Ostracism has harmful effects on employees, including increased stress, depression and poor sleep, and increases employee turnover and reduces productivity. Given these effects and its prevalence in the workplace, it is important to better understand why employees decide to exclude others at work.

Samantha Conroy, Chris Henle, John Morton and Lynn Shore reviewed 38 studies on the causes of ostracism to understand what motivates employees to ostracize coworkers.

In “Putting a Spotlight on the Ostracizer: Intentional Workplace Ostracism Motives,” the researchers discover two primary motives for workplace ostracism. First, employees driven by punitive motives ostracize coworkers with the intention of preserving harmony and protecting in their work group. This group-oriented motivation uses ostracism as a signal to group members about unacceptable behavior such as poor performance or disruptiveness. It may also be used to reinforce group norms and punish and correct undesired behavior so future behavior conforms to norms.

A second, self-oriented motive for ostracism is used to protect individuals from feeling badly or inferior because of unfavorable comparisons between themselves and others, such as coworkers who are better performers. This also motivates employees who wish to distance themselves from toxic relationships at work, such as an abusive supervisor. Thus, workplace ostracism can be used as a defense mechanism.

Understanding the motives driving workplace ostracism help organizations design interventions to reduce it. To combat punitive ostracism, organizations could provide information on holding difficult conversations with those believed to be in violation of group norms. Reducing defensive ostracism could boil down to teaching managers to be more broadly inclusive and increase employees’ self-esteem or minimize social comparisons.

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Fighting Wildlife Smuggling

Illicit wildlife trafficking is a challenging problem precisely because the actors involved actively work to remain hidden. This topic has often been researched from a conservation biology perspective but is only recently gaining visibility as part of an integrated supply chain/criminology/operations research/ artificial intelligence problem. Recent research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by John Macdonald advocates for this multidisciplinary approach with an example of illicit ploughshare tortoise networks in Madagascar.

This approach examines the current state of antitrafficking knowledge as well as communicates the gaps and opportunities to fight trafficking by looking at illicit activity and scarce natural resources and operations research techniques that answer important questions about the structure, operations and drivers of illicit networks. Finally, with an eye toward breaking further down academic communication barriers, researchers collected and published a directory of available data for other researchers around the world to utilize. The goal of this research is to interdict and reduce illicit supply chain networks and maintain sustainability of our natural mineral, flora and fauna resources for future generations.

Roboticized Opportunity –Automation and Entrepreneurship

As automation technology advances and industrial robots become more adept at handling complex tasks, the global workforce faces growing concerns about job displacement and income inequality. A new working paper by Boris Nikolaev and his departmental colleagues Tiffany Trzebiatowski and Chris Henle investigates the impact of industrial robots on opportunity-driven entrepreneurship.

Drawing from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data, the study uncovers a considerable negative effect of robots on entrepreneurship. More importantly, it suggests that socio-cognitive factors account for much of this impact. A higher number of industrial robots is associated with lower entrepreneurial self-efficacy, increased fear of failure and reduced alertness to new business opportunities. Ultimately, these factors discourage the pursuit of opportunitydriven ventures. This underscores the necessity of understanding the implications of automation on entrepreneurship and the potential repercussions for the global workforce. Policymakers must take these potential consequences into account when devising solutions, such as social safety nets and reeducation programs to mitigate the far-reaching effects of automation. Overall, the research sheds light on the significant negative effect of industrial robots on opportunity-driven entrepreneurship across the globe.