Jackson G. Lu

Jackson G. Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies (WOS) and Rahul Bhui, Assistant Professor of Marketing, have both been named APS (Association for Psychological Science) Rising Stars. This designation “is presented to outstanding APS members in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD”—“researchers whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.”  This is one of the top honors for junior psychologists (selected from across all fields of psychology—cognitive, clinical, developmental, social, etc.).

The APS Rising Stars were announced last month. 

Sinan Aral, Jackson Lu, Hal Gregersen, Andy McAfee, and Geoff Parker have received Thinkers50 honors. Since 2001 Thinkers50 has recognized leading business and management ideas every two years with their Top 50 global rankings of the most influential business thinkers, emerging Radar ones to watch, and Distinguished Achievement Awards in specific management categories – “the Oscars of Management Thinking” (Financial Times). 

Sinan Aral, David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing as well as Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE), has won the 2021 Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, which "celebrates the thinker who has done the most to convert the digital language of the 0 and 1 into useful human insights,” whose “research and insights shed the newest and most original light on the new digital reality.”

The top 50 honorees on the Thinkers50 2021 Ranking of Management Thinkers include:

Sinan Aral, who “forensically and persuasively gets to the reality inside social media and tech”;

Hal Gregersen, Senior Lecturer of Work and Organization Studies (WOS) and former Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center, a “catalytic questioner and global innovator, exploring how asking the right questions builds leadership and innovation, and drives purposeful change”;

Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist and Co-Director of the MIT IDE, who with Erik Brynjolfsson (former IDE Director) “launched into the thought leadership stratosphere in 2014 with The Second Machine Age”—“their work continues to provide a road-map for success in a digital economy”;  and

Geoff Parker, Visiting Scholar at the IDE, who with Marshall Van Alstyne (former Visiting Scholar at the IDE) “developed the concept of two-sided markets, which is used extensively in platform business models, and delivered the first comprehensive analysis of platform technology.”

In addition, each January Thinkers50 announces 30 emerging thinkers “with the potential to make lasting contributions to management theory and practice” to watch in the year ahead, and the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2021 included Jackson Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies.  The citation notes his being the first “to systematically research the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ phenomenon” experienced by Asians in the United States, with “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), co-authored with Richard Nesbitt (Univ. of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia). 

Jackson Lu was also subsequently shortlisted for the Thinkers50 2021 RADAR Thinker Award—which recognizes the emerging scholar “most likely to shape the future of business and business thinking,” whose “work has the potential to challenge the way we think about management”—“for his impactful research on cross-cultural management and psychology, especially his research on the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ faced by Asians.”

Jackson G. Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies (WOS), has won the 2021 Academy of Management (AOM) Network of Leadership Scholars (NLS) Rising Star Early Career Award, sponsored by the Exeter Centre for Leadership. This award recognizes Lu’s significant contributions to the field of leadership research through his core research stream on the Bamboo Ceiling experienced by Asians in the United States.

Two published papers in Jackson’s winning stream of research are: 

1) “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), co-authored with Richard Nesbitt (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University); and

2) his sole-authored “A Social Network Perspective on the Bamboo Ceiling: Ethnic Homophily Explains Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership in Multiethnic Environments” (forthcoming, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).

The award was announced recently. Lu will be presented with the award in a ceremony at the 2022 AOM Conference in Seattle.

Jackson Lu has recently received four honors for three different papers.

First, Lu won the 2021 Phillips and Nadkarni Award for Outstanding Paper on Diversity and Cognition from the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management (AOM). Lu’s sole-authored winning paper is entitled “Cultural Diversity Stimulates Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Two Large-Scale Natural Experiments”. Worth noting, is the distinction that two of the five finalist papers were Lu’s, and the one above won: Lu also was a finalist for this same award with a different sole-authored paper entitled “The Bamboo Ceiling: A Network Perspective on Why East Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership”.

The second paper above was also honored with a nomination for the AOM’s Carolyn B. Dexter Award, an academy-wide honor for the paper that “best meets the objective of internationalizing the Academy of Management.” 

Finally, Lu was a finalist for the 2021 Responsible Research in Management Award, selected by AOM Fellows and co-sponsored by Responsible Research in Business and Management to recognize recent research that “benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge.” Lu’s finalist paper, entitled “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mar 2020, 117(9), 4590-4600), was co-authored with Richard E. Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University).

Jackson Lu has won the 2019 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Center for Leadership at Florida International University, in partnership with the Network of Leadership Scholars. This award recognizes a dissertation’s outstanding contribution to the field of leadership. As the award recipient, Lu will deliver an invited presentation at the Leadership Research Colloquium at the FIU Center for Leadership in 2020. Lu’s winning dissertation is entitled “Global Leader or Cultural Outsider? The Divergent Effects of International Experiences on Leadership Effectiveness vs. Leadership Selection” (abstract since currently under embargo until April – additional information about his dissertation is included in this article).