IACM Ottawa is nearly here – just a few months away! After two years of virtual conferences—successful though they were—at long last many of us will have the opportunity to see each other and discuss our work on negotiation and conflict management in person. Some of you may recall that in spring and summer of 2019, IACM’s Executive Director Brandon Charpied and I conducted two global searches for conference venues and ultimately selected Thessaloniki for our 2021 meeting and Ottawa for our 2022 meeting. Now, 3 years later, IACM Ottawa is actually happening! IACM Thessaloniki will have to wait until July 2023 (and it will definitely be worth the wait!).

Our conference program chair, Jiyin Cao, has put together a program not to be missed. There will be interesting paper presentations, thought-provoking symposiums and workshops, and many opportunities for making and renewing personal and professional connections with scholars throughout the world. Our local arrangements chair, A.J. Corner, has compiled an exciting list of events and areas of interest around Ottawa. There will be an optional boat tour for IACM attendees on Sunday morning before the conference begins, where you will see important sites of Ottawa-Gatineau and majestic views from the Ottawa River. Stay tuned for more information in the next few weeks as the conference planning team finalizes the arrangements.

We will honor this year’s IACM Award winners at our awards banquet in Ottawa. These include Deborah Kolb (this year’s Rubin Award winner), and Jackson Lu and Julian Zlatev (this year’s Early Career Award winners). Check out columns about these impressive scholars in the accompanying announcements in this newsletter. The winners of IACM’s other awards will be announced soon. These include the Negotiation and Conflict Management Research (NCMR) Article of the Year Award, Outstanding Book Award, Outstanding Publication Award, Outstanding IACM Conference Paper Award, and Outstanding IACM Conference Paper with a Student as a First Author Award. We are currently seeking nominations for IACM’s newest award—the Negotiation and Conflict Management Technology Innovator Award sponsored by iDecisionGames. We look forward to congratulating and honoring all the talented award winners in Ottawa!

This year’s conference will feature a Doctoral Student Workshop (DSW) sponsored by the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management and a Three-Minute Thesis Competition, celebrating exciting conflict and negotiation research conducted by graduate students. Please encourage your doctoral students to register and attend these special conference events. Thank you to Deborah Cai, Michael Gross, and Laura Rees for leading these efforts.

Another highlight of the IACM Ottawa program is a special session about Open Science and the Negotiation Data Repository (NDR), a joint project of IACM and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON). At a time when data is of ever-increasing importance to society, the NDR aims to serve as the world's premier collection of qualitative and quantitative data on negotiation and conflict resolution, enabling advances in scholarship that would not otherwise be possible. I hope you are able to join me and the other NDR co-founders (Michael Yeomans, Nazli Bhatia, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, and Silvia Glick), along with Peter Carnevale, and Jimena Ramirez Marin, at this session to learn more about this important new initiative from IACM and PON. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research (NCMR) continues to be completely free for all readers and authors throughout the world, as a Platinum Open Access and Open Science journal hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Library Publishing Service.

I realize that not all of you reading this will be able to join us in Ottawa and may be wondering about a virtual attendance option. Unfortunately, this is not feasible for our organization with a hotel-based conference, such as this one. The IACM Board discussed this issue at length at meetings throughout the year. Among other obstacles, hosting a hotel-based conference entails constraints on internet usage, making it financially untenable for us to accommodate virtual attendees. One consolation for those of you who cannot attend our in-person meeting in Ottawa is that IACM will continue to offer our monthly Virtual Seminar Series, which we started this past fall, and has been very successful. Special thanks to Ray Friedman for leading this effort, and to the IACM moderators who are scheduling speakers and making it happen: Selin Kesebir, Jessica Li, Michel Mann, and Jiyin Cao. Recordings of several of our prior virtual seminars are available on the IACM Virtual Hub. Later this year, we will be looking for additional moderators to join the Virtual Seminar Series planning team. Please reach out to us about volunteering if this interests you.

In other association news, this year, IACM’s membership voted to approve two amendments to IACM’s Constitution—one amendment related to the Advisory Council (AC) standing committee (Article X, Section 5) and the other amendment related to expulsion, termination, or suspension of membership in cases of misconduct by IACM members (Article IV, Sections 3, 4, and 5). Related to the membership amendment, at our spring board meeting, the IACM Board of Directors approved a new policy describing Rules and Expectations for Professional Conduct. The revised Constitution and Rules and Expectations for Professional Conduct are both available on the IACM website. Special thanks to the IACM task force members (Brandon Charpied, Cynthia Wang, Zoe Barsness, Laurie Weingart, Peter Carnevale, and William Hall) who helped create these new policies and procedures. By instituting these policies and procedures, IACM affirms its intention to promote opportunities to learn, teach, and conduct research and its expectation that individuals treat others with integrity, respect, fairness, trustworthiness, and transparency. This includes all interactions within IACM, within academic and professional institutions, and with members of the public. In the coming weeks, we will be hiring an ombuds to assist IACM stakeholders should issues arise related to unwelcome or inappropriate behavior. We are currently interviewing candidates for the ombuds position and hope to have someone in place prior to our July conference.

As my two-year term as President of IACM is coming to a close, this will be my last President’s Column. What an honor it has been to serve an organization I love so much. Though I will miss leading the organization, I am looking forward to continuing to serve on the IACM Board of Directors next year as Past-President. Cynthia Wang’s term as President will begin in July at the close of our annual meeting in Ottawa. Because we have yet to have an in-person meeting since I became President in 2020, Past-President Zoe Barsness still holds the IACM gavel—we can pass it right along to Cindy in Ottawa! At that time, we will welcome Scott Wiltermuth and Siyu Yu, our new At-Large Board Members, as the next Officers of IACM, as the terms for Noam Ebner and Julia Bear come to close. Niro Sivanathan and Rachel Campagna will continue to serve as At-Large Board Members, and McKenzie Rees will continue to serve as IACM Secretary. IACM Treasurer Brooke Gazdag will transition off of the Board this summer, and Niro Sivanathan will take over as Treasurer at that time. In addition, Ray Friedman’s term as Advisory Council (AC) chair will come to a close in July, and incoming AC-Chair Linda Putnam will transition onto the Board as an ex-officio member. Tony Kong will continue to serve as Editor of IACM’s SIGNAL newsletter, having taken over for Jennifer Parlamis earlier this year. Finally, as announced last month, Qi Wang’s term as Editor-in-Chief of NCMR will come to a close in August, and Jimena Ramirez Marin will take over as NCMR’s next Editor-in-Chief. Thank you to each of you for your service to IACM. I cannot begin to express my appreciation for your work. What an honor it has been to learn from you and collaborate with you on IACM tasks and initiatives. IACM is exceedingly lucky to have such a dedicated membership, with talented scholars, educators, and practitioners who are willing to contribute their time and expertise to this community. On behalf of myself and the entire IACM membership, thank you for your service. And, to all the members of this great organization—thank you! Come find me at our conference in Ottawa this July and say hello. Hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

Taya Cohen

IACM President

We are getting closer to our first in-person conference since July 2019 as we host our 35th annual conference at the Ottawa Marriott in Ottawa, Canada! Our conference program is now available, where you can find all of the research papers, symposia, roundtable discussions, and more.

New to the our conference this year is the Doctoral Student Workshop (DSW), an effort in coordination with Academy of Management's Conflict Management division and funded by AOM. The DSW will take place from 1:00pm - 5:30pm on Sunday, July 10th and provide additional sessions within the general conference program. The DSW comes at no additional cost to our doctoral student attendees and can be selected during conference registration.

IACM is thrilled to announce the NTR-IACM Early Career Scholars Program funded by our colleagues at Negotiation Team Resources (NTR). This program will support early career scholars (doctoral students, post-docs, and junior faculty up to five years post-PhD) who have been accepted to present at IACM, and who are committed to presenting at IACM in future years as well. The scholarship will cover conference registration and IACM membership fees and is intended to encourage young scholars to conduct negotiation research and become active, long-term members of IACM for years to come.

In addition, doctoral students will once again have the opportunity to apply for a Columbia University AC4 Fellowship. This Fellowship will cover the full registration cost of IACM 2022. The AC4 Fellowship is available to apply for by "historically underrepresented groups and students from developing countries the opportunity to present their research at the IACM Annual Conference.” More information regarding submitting for an AC4 Fellowship will be sent to conference paper authors soon.

We look forward to you joining us in Canada's capital city of Ottawa! With our host site - the Ottawa Marriott - being in the center of the city near the banks of the Ottawa River and just a couple of blocks from the Parliament of Canada, we are in a prime spot for our attendees to take in many of the national museums in our vicinity, local breweries, and more!

We have put together a page of local activities and events for you that will give you an excellent taste for all of the excitement and beauty Ottawa has to offer. Listed on our local arrangements page includes tours, museums, breweries, local flair, sports teams, festivals, and other events. We highly recommend you review these happenings soon so that you can plan out what will be a memorable experience at IACM!

The IACM Rubin Award honors a member who bridges theory and practice in conflict management through generating theory from practice, using practice to inspire research, and/or changing practice. The 2022 recipient, Deborah Kolb, exemplifies all three of these bridges between theory and practice in her 40-year career. She has produced 8 books and over 80 articles and chapters that translate theory to practice, especially in helping women uncover hidden assumptions in negotiation, navigate power relationships, and turn small gains into big wins. She also introduced key constructs to the field, ones that inspire research and theory development, such as the shadow negotiation, moves and turns, and everyday negotiations.

In the area of practice, she has conducted negotiation training workshops with such organizations as the 2016 Obama Administration, African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (funded by the Gates Foundation), women parliamentarians in Bosnia, and women leaders in Sarajevo as well as corporate and non-profit venues, including Deloitte, Google, HBO, Time Warner, The Ford Foundation, Girl Scouts USA, and Women in Technology International. In each of these endeavors, Prof. Kolb draws on theoretical perspectives to advance negotiation practice, create opportunities, and manage workplace relationships. As an aside, Prof. Kolb and Jeff Rubin were close friends and colleagues. He recruited her as a Senior Fellow to the Harvard Program on Negotiation and the two of them conducted numerous workshops together, developed the Negotiation Journal, and wrote case studies that we use to teach negotiation.

IACM’s Early Career Award honors scholars in the first five years of their post-doctoral career, who have shown exceptional promise for making significant contributions to the study of conflict and negotiation. This year, the award goes to Jackson Liu (MIT) and Julian Zlatev (HBS). Both Jackson and Julian have done exceptionally important work. [READ MORE ABOUT THE EARLY CAREER AWARD WINNERS...]

Negotiation and Conflict Management in Public Relations and Strategic Communication

Special Issue Editor: Dr. Lan Ni

Dear IACM Members,

I hope this letter finds you well. In this digest, I’m delighted to introduce to you our first two NCMR issues in 2022. Issue 15(1) (the February issue) and 15(2) (the May issue) contain five special issue articles and three regular issue articles. The special issue was edited by Dr. Lan Ni and focused on Negotiation and Conflict Management in Public Relations and Strategic Communication. Dr. Ni summarized the special issue articles as follows:

In response to the call for a special issue on “Negotiation and Conflict Management in Public Relations and Strategic Communication,” five articles were selected for publication. These articles ranged from empirical studies to conceptual pieces with case illustrations. A common theme was that public relations, as an academic discipline, can and should be connected to negotiation and conflict management to enhance both theory development and practical advance in how organizations manage and resolve conflicts with their publics. Some general frameworks for such integration were offered in Grunig’s (2022) overview of effective and ethical public relations and its role in helping manage conflicts as well as Huang and Cai’s (2022) integrative public relations model that connects two-way symmetrical communication with conflict resolution. At the same time, articles examined the nuances and dynamics in the context of conflict management, ranging from individual (Lee & Chon, 2022), organization (Pang & Cameron, 2022), and relationships (Cheng & Fisk, 2022).

[READ MORE ABOUT THIS SPECIAL ISSUE AND ITS ARTICLES...]

May peace and health be with you and yours,

Qi

Dr. Qi Wang

Editor-in-Chief,

Negotiation and Conflict Management Research (NCMR)

Cynthia Wang is the Executive Director of the Dispute Resolution and Research Center (DRRC) and a faculty member of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University and a Ph.D from the Kellogg School of Management. She is an active member of the international conflict management community. In her role as Executive Director of the DRRC, she is charged with upholding the center’s reputation as a nationally-recognized center for research on conflict, dispute resolution and negotiation, as well as an internationally-recognized provider of education programs and teaching materials.

She has been a constant fixture at the International Association of Conflict Management (IACM) Conferences since her inaugural attendance at the 2004 Pittsburgh, PA (USA) conference. She has served IACM as the program chair (2015) and a board of representative member (2016-2018).

Her research interests focus on negotiations, cultural and social diversity, and social and economic exchange. She publishes in top research outlets such as Science, Organization Science, Psychological Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Her research has received attention from media outlets such as CNN, Time, and Scientific American. She has taught classes in negotiations, organizational behavior, group decision-making, and cross-cultural communications at the undergraduate, MBA, and executive levels. She has received a number of research and teaching awards, including several best paper awards at the Academy of Management Conference and induction as a Fellow into the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. She also serves on the editorial board for Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and is an adhoc reviewer for numerous journals

Greetings from Canada! It’s incredibly exciting that we will be getting together in person for IACM this year, and I’m thrilled for everyone to travel to Ottawa in a couple of months. I’m pleased to be serving as the Local Arrangements Chair for IACM 2022, and I hope that you will enjoy your visit to this beautiful city (especially in July!).

Ottawa has been my home since 2018, when I moved here to join the faculty of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. I completed my PhD at Georgia State University in the USA, while my BA and MBA are from the UK. My research focuses on interpersonal relationships in the workplace, including team and negotiation contexts. I’m also interested in conflict management in cross-cultural settings. After mainly attending the larger management and psychology conferences during my PhD, it was wonderful to join the IACM community in 2019 – the Dublin conference was such a positive experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing IACMers again very soon!

Please read through the local information on the IACM website for some ideas and recommendations for your stay in Ottawa. The relatively small size of this capital city (approx. 1 million population in the metro area) means that there are a lot of amenities and attractions within easy reach – and almost everything is walkable from the Ottawa Marriott. There is always a lot happening in the summer, with an active festival season, scenic outdoor eating and drinking, and plenty of opportunities to experience the city’s waterways. My top picks with out-of-town guests are taking a boat tour, visiting the Canadian Museum of History, cycling beside the river, having a drink at Tavern on the Hill, and catching the Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill.

Happy planning and please feel free to contact me with any questions!

Scott researches how socio-environmental factors affect people’s reactions to unethical behavior and their likelihood of behaving unethically themselves. He also researches how interpersonal dynamics, such as synchrony and dominance, affect people’s willingness to cooperate with others. He has published papers in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Academy of Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and numerous other academic journals. His work has been reported in many media outlets, including: The Economist, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Previously, he worked in the airline industry as a strategy consultant. He holds a PhD from Stanford, an MBA from INSEAD, and an AB from Harvard.

Siyu is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University. Her research seeks to uncover new insights with respect to inequality and hierarchy, gender and diversity issues, social networks, and group dynamics. For example, one area of my research focuses on the accuracy of perceiving status hierarchies. She investigates how this perceptual accuracy, at the individual level, helps people form high-status network ties, ultimately benefiting their performance. At the group level, it helps groups avoid status conflict and improve group performance. Another line of her research examines how advantageous social networks, such as connections with high-status others, result in unexpected social sanctions for disadvantaged group members, thus presenting an obstacle to overcoming the social inequality.

Chris Atkins (Chief Negotiation Officer, The Gap Partnership)

Moderator: Michel Mann

8 AM   US Pacific

11 AM  US Eastern

5 PM   Amsterdam

11 PM  Singapore

1 AM   Melbourne

A question for you. Why don’t we see butterflies the size of eagles, or beetles as big as dogs? The answer is spiracles, or more precisely lungs. Insects breathe through a series of small pores, or spiracles located along their body and the oxygenated air that they need to function diffuses into their organs. This is great if your body is small, but as it grows larger the diffusion is just not enough to carry oxygen to every extremity and organ fast enough for survival. Hence why larger animals have lungs to force the movement of air.

So, lack of lungs has restricted the growth potential of the butterflies.

What is holding your organization back? Does something need to radically change so that your business can reach its commercial potential? And, if that is the case, what change is going to accrue the biggest benefits?

Associate Professor of Organizational Leadership

Leeds School of Business

University of Colorado Boulder, USA

If you would like to contribute content to a future issue of SiGNAL or have any questions, thoughts, or suggestions, please contact me at signal@iafcm.org.