It’s a triple win for Associate Professor Sam Yam (Head, Dept of Management & Organisation), who clinched three international awards in management research in just one year.
In 2022, Assoc Prof Yam received the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, the Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award (Science) from the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology, and most recently, the Early Career Achievement Award from the Academy of Management.
These awards recognise the impact and quantity of an academic’s early-career research work seven years after his or her PhD. As of August 2022, Assoc Prof Yam had published 59 research papers, received multiple best paper awards, and his work has been cited more than 3,000 times.
In conferring the award, the Academy of Management (HR Division) wrote, “To date (as of January 2022), Sam has published a total of nearly 50 articles in international referred journals, of which more than half were published in top journals in the fields of HR and management. Beyond top HR and management outlets such as AMJ, AMR, JAP, OBHDP, and PPsych, where Sam regularly publishes in, he has also published first-authored works in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), the top social psychology journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), one of the top general-interest journals, and even in one of the top medical journals (British Medical Journal). By publishing in top outlets in other fields, Sam creates meaningful conversations between HR researchers and researchers in other disciplines to further advance our field.”
Assoc Prof Yam said, “From thriving in a workplace to working effectively in groups, business management research helps individuals to become better selves and strengthens organisations’ performance. I stand on the shoulders of my mentors and collaborators, and am proud to impart management knowledge to my students and create practical research insights for society.”
Assoc Prof Yam joined NUS Business School in 2015 after earning his PhD in Organisational Behaviour from the University of Washington. In the past seven years, he has earned numerous accolades. He was named one of the 40 best business professors under 40 by the United States ranking website Poets and Quants in 2016. The following year, the Association for Psychological Science named him a Rising Star in his field. Assoc Prof Yam is also recognised for his teaching quality, receiving the NUS Business School Teaching Excellence Award in 2019 and 2021. His role expanded to guiding the school’s junior faculty members in their research and career, and was appointed Assistant Dean, Faculty Development in 2021. This year, he takes on another leadership role as Head of the Department of Management & Organisation.
Assoc Prof Yam also holds a courtesy appointment in the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Department of Psychology.
This Dean’s Chair professor’s research interests include leadership, business ethics, and the future of work. Some of his recent studies include workplace interactions with animals, people’s responses to unethical behaviour, and how people behave when working with robots or robotic supervisors.