Two 2011 graduates receive awards for papers based on their doctoral research

Sharon H. Kim, Ph.D. ’11, and Christopher Yenkey, Ph.D. ’11, received the Academy of Management’s (AOM) William H. Newman Awards at the academy’s annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, in early August.

Kim’s paper, based on her dissertation, was "Selling Out: How Impressions of Materialism Influence Creative Evaluations and Performance." The paper details Kim’s research findings, which show how impressions of materialism can cloud evaluations of creativity.

Belief by others that a person prioritizes money can lead to lower ratings of even objectively good ideas by that person, Kim’s research shows. People expect creative professionals to be unconcerned with, or even shun, material success. That, in turn, biases evaluations of creative work.

The findings could have implications for organizations seeking to recruit, evaluate and sustain creative thinkers, said Kim, who received her doctorate in the field of organizational behavior and is now an assistant professor of management at the Carey Business School of Johns Hopkins University.

Yenkey, who received his doctorate in the field of sociology, received a Newman Award this year for his paper "Ethnic Homogeneity in a Social Network: Recruiting Investors into the Nairobi Stock Exchange." Yenkey, now an assistant professor of organizations and strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Finance, said, "Emerging markets provide outstanding natural laboratories in which to study in real time processes that underlie the construction and development of market institutions."

This research also won the Louis R. Pondy Best Paper Award from the Organization and Management Theory Division of the AOM and the Ronald S. Burt Outstanding Paper Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Economic Sociology.

While at Cornell, Yenkey conducted extensive fieldwork from 2007-10 at Kenya’s Nairobi Stock Exchange and the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange in Tanzania and served as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Economic Affairs in Nairobi, Kenya. He was also associate director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell in 2010-11.