Economist Haig Nalbantian honored by Academy of Management

Published: Friday August 20, 2010

Richard Guzzo and Haig Nalbantian with the AofM award.

New York - Labor economist Haig R. Nalbantian, has received the 2010 Academy of Management "Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication" award for his Harvard Business Review (March 2009) article, "Making Mobility Matter."

The award was given to Haig and his co-author, Richard Guzzo, at a ceremony in Montreal on August 9th, during the Academy's annual conference. The Academy is the premier global professional association of management scholars with nearly 19,000 members from over 100 countries. Some 8000 delegates attended the conference.

The article was selected for the award by a committee of six well-known management scholars who reviewed the journals in the field and other papers nominated by the Academy's membership. In citing "Making Mobility Matter" as the best practitioner-oriented paper published during 2009, committee members noted:

"This is an example of a science based practitioner model that is used by practitioners and described for practitioners. . .this article is to the point, and actually solves one particular practical problem without falling into any management traps - very well done article."

"A great practitioner article that is well crafted and shows research can be used to effectively address a practical issue."

The article is a critical, empirically-based assessment of what the authors call "the mobility equation" - namely, the received wisdom in business and academic circles that mobility develops breadth and breadth is required for leadership. Nalbantian and Guzzo show that while building breadth may be important to leadership development, serious unintended consequences can make this strategy counterproductive. Excessive mobility, they demonstrate, can lead to disruptions of operations, loss of technical depth, and perhaps most importantly, loss of accountability as decision makers often are long gone before the wisdom of their decisions is tested in the market.

In their article, Nalbantian and Guzzo set forth a framework and tools to help organizations solve the "mobility equation" to support their own organizational requirements. They show how advanced statistical modeling techniques can be used to derive empirical answers to the three core questions that must be addressed: What kind of Mobility? Mobility for Whom? And, how much Mobility? The authors have applied these techniques successfully in many leading, global companies.

Haig R. Nalbantian is Senior Partner at the consulting firm, Mercer, and their Global Director of Research and Commercialization. He is an internationally recognized expert on human capital measurement and management and leader in the development of an asset management approach to the people side of business - what he calls a "new science" of human capital management. The author of the prize winning book, Play to Your Strengths (McGraw Hill, 2004), he has published widely in leading business and academic journals and regularly lectures before business groups, professional associations and universities.