Faculty Updates

DR. XIAO CHEN, assistant professor of management, completed a collaborative research project with a labour economist at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The project examined the effects of different goalsetting interventions on Chinese ride-hailing drivers’ performance. Dr. Chen presented the project findings at the PEI Senior College (January 2019), UPEI Faculty of Business Research Colloquium (March 2019), the annual conferences of the European Academy of Management (EURAM) (Lisbon, Portugal, June 2019), and the Academy of Management (Boston, USA, August 2019). At the 2019 EURAM conference, Dr. Chen’s work won the “Most Inspirational Paper Award” (as the sole recipient, with a 1000 EURO cash prize) as well as the “Best Paper Award” (with a 100 EURO cash prize) of the EURAM Organizational Behavior Special Interest Group. This paper is being prepared for submission to a top-ranked management journal. In collaboration with researchers from the University of Toronto, University of Central Florida, and University of Haifa (Israel), Dr. Chen (lead author) recently submitted a manuscript, entitled “An enumerative review and a meta-analysis of primed goal effects on organizational behaviour” to the highlyregarded Applied Psychology: An International Review, the official journal of the International Association of Applied Psychology. Dr. Chen received UPEI’s SSHRC Explore Research Grant to study the effect of priming subconscious goals on team creativity. Dr. Chen was nominated finalist for the EURAM Best Reviewer Award. Dr. Chen recently also taught Organizational Behavior at the UPEI campus at the University of Canada, Egypt, in Cairo (June 2019).

SAM KOLAHGAR is a new assistant professor of finance in the Faculty of Business. Mr. Kolahgar is currently completing his PhD in Finance from Concordia University; he holds an MBA from the University of Northern Iowa, USA; an MSc in finance from Shahid Beheshti University, Iran; and a Bachelor of Business from Tehran University, Iran. He currently teaches corporate finance and integrated cases in finance and has previously taught financial management, finance theory, and corporate finance at Concordia University to undergraduate- and graduatelevel students. His research interests include corporate finance and capital structure, corporate governance and stakeholder relationship, mergers and acquisitions and spin-offs, and fintech. He has published in Journal of Public and Municipal Finance, as well as Pensions: An International Journal, and has presented his research at many national and international conferences such as the World Finance Banking Symposium, the International Corporate Governance Society, and the European Financial Management Association. Mr. Kolahgar has extensive consulting experience in investment, venture capital, private equity, business analysis, and managerial accounting fields.

DR. MELISSA JAMES, assistant professor of marketing, successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Understanding International Student Recruitment as Export Marketing Behaviour in Higher Education Institutions”. She received her PhD from Lancaster University, UK, in October 2018. Dr. James currently has several manuscripts related to international marketing of higher education under peer-review and will expand her research into the internationalization of higher education in the coming months.

DR. TINA SAKSIDA, assistant professor of management and the faculty director of the Executive MBA program in the UPEI Faculty of Business, gave a talk on women and negotiation at the 2019 Prince Edward Island Business Women’s Association (PEIBWA) Spring Symposium (May 2019 in Charlottetown, PEI), co-delivered a professional development workshop on an evidence-based approach to case competition at the 80th annual national convention of the Canadian Psychological Association (June 2019 in Halifax, NS), and presented her research on intergenerational differences in youth attitudes towards unions at the 79th annual meeting of the Academy of Management, where she also received a Top 10 Reviewer Award in the Public and Nonprofit division (August 2019 in Boston, Mass.). She currently has two papers under revise-and-resubmit status in leading journals in labour relations and is working on a book chapter on the role of collective bargaining in the digitized workplace. She also recently won a large Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant (with her colleague Dr. Hayden Woodley as co-applicant) to study gender representation in business education.

DR. HAYDEN WOODLEY, assistant professor of management, (along with his research partners Dr. Alex Benson of Western University, and Alaina Roach O’Keefe from the PEI Public Service Commission) received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Engage Grant worth $23,753 to study the effects of personality on the transfer of a leadership development program. Dr. Woodley is the first researcher to be awarded the grant in UPEI history. He had a paper published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal (organizational psychology) entitled “The emergence of group potency and its implications for team effectiveness” (2019). He also recently won a large Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant (with his colleague Dr. Tina Saksida as co-applicant) to study gender representation in business education.

DR. LIUFANG (SOPHIA) YAO, assistant professor of operations management, coauthored the paper “Product recall timing optimization using dynamic p r o g r a m m i n g ” with Dr. Parlar of DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, that was published in the prestigious International Journal of Production Economics (IJPE). In their paper, they identify the number of qualityrelated products returned as an indicator of product defect rate and use it to assist decision-making on when to initiate product recalls, i.e., the optimal product recall timing. Publishing in high-impact journals, such as IJPE, is a strong indicator of the quality of this research and bolsters the Faculty of Business and UPEI’s reputation nationally and internationally.

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