BTU doctoral candidate wins the "2024 AOM Best Student Paper Award" at the world's most important management conference

The award was presented at the 84th Annual Meeting of the AOM, the world's leading professional society for management and organizational research, which took place from 9 to 13 August 2024 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

The winning paper, entitled "Improving Theory Testing with Nonlinear Control Variables", impressed the jury of the Research Methods section by identifying a problem that has been neglected to date but is relevant to many research projects. Many studies in management research deal with the estimation and testing of non-linear relationships, for example in the analysis of entrepreneurial success factors, where more of something is initially good and much more is then bad and what is initially good is also not equally good for all companies. When analyzing what the benefit of a success factor depends on, a so-called non-linear relationship, it is important to correctly identify the cause of the differences using statistical methods. The article emphasizes the importance of non-linear confounding factors for the reliability of estimates and tests of such non-linear relationships and provides comprehensive methodological recommendations for the correction of these confounding factors using so-called non-linear control variables.

Andreas Salmen's dissertation, which focuses on methodological challenges of estimating nonlinear effects, benefited significantly from his supervisor’s international network and the resulting collaboration with Herman Aguinis, a renowned methods researcher at the George Washington University School of Business, who is regularly ranked among the world's 100 most influential management researchers. The award-winner Andreas Salmen is a lecturer in methods courses for the Bachelor's degree program as well as in the Master's degree program in Business Administration at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg.

"This award not only underlines the outstanding quality of research and doctoral training at BTU, but also shows how a combination of budget-funded basic research and international networking can strengthen the international visibility of our university in the scientific community," emphasizes Prof. Dr. Diemo Urbig, Head of the Chair of General Business Administration, in particular Empirical Business Research and Transformation.

Founded in 1936, the Academy of Management is the world's leading organization for management and organizational scholars with 18,000 members from over 120 countries. The Annual Meeting is the AOM's largest and best-known event, often bringing together up to 10,000 scholars to advance their research, network with colleagues, and share knowledge to address the most pressing management and organizational challenges of the 21st century.
An updated version of the award-winning presentation by BTU doctoral candidate Andreas Salmen will be presented at the annual meeting of the Strategic Management Society (SMS) in Istanbul from October 19-22, 2024.