This year’s cohort includes 9 graduate students who will be presenting on his/her current conflict management research at the 2018 IACM Conference from various schools and universities around the globe and increases diversity among presenters at the 2018 IACM Conference.
Bhushan Kumar
Ashoka University, India & University of Pennsylvania, United States
Behavioral Change & Conflict Resolution
Bhushan Kumar is a Young India Fellow (Ashoka University), and will be joining the Master of Behavioral & Decision Sciences program at University of Pennsylvania this academic year. His research interests include memory, behavior and conflicts in the context of Indian manufacturing sector, with which he has been engaged since 2012. At IACM, he will present his research titled ‘Zero Hour – An Indian Twist to Culinary Diplomacy’ which deals with using culinary diplomacy as a tool to create cross-cultural understanding, foster cooperation and mitigate conflicts. At the core of his research is the belief that well-being of employees can have wide-reaching multiplier effects in a society.
Hemant Kakkar
London Business School
Organisational Behavior
Hemant Kakkar is a PhD candidate in Organisational Behaviour at the London Business School. He draws on social psychological and evolutionary theories of status to examine the judgements and behaviors of individuals and groups within social hierarchies.. He holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Biotechnology from the VIT University, Vellore, India and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. At the 2018 IACM conference, Hemant will be presenting two research papers. His first presentation examines the impact of competitor’s status momentum on focal actor’s performance in a rank ordered hierarchy. He finds that competitor’s status momentum increases salience of psychological threat for the focal actor(s) which negatively affects their performance. His second research examines the inconsistent relationship between social class and unethical behavior. The findings indicate that relationship between social class and unethical behavior is contingent on the immediate economic environment such that high social class members’ unethical behavior decreases with the worsening of economic climate, whereas among low social members, there is an increase in dishonest behavior.
Huiru (Evangeline) Yang
University at Buffalo
Organization and Human Resources
Huiru (Evangeline) Yang is a PhD student in Organization and Human Resources at University at Buffalo. Her research interests focus on how culture and emotion influence conflict management. At IACM 2018, she will present her work on the effects of self-conscious emotions on leader’s blame-taking behavior in different cultural contexts.
Huisi (Jessica) Li
Cornell University
Industry and Labor Relations
Huisi (Jessica) Li is interested in issues related to social hierarchy and cross-cultural communication. Her research sheds light on how to manage participation and status dynamics in multinational teams (Li, Yuan, Bazarova, & Bell, 2018) and how people from different national and organizational cultures view, gain, maintain, and utilize status (Li, Chen, & Blader, 2016). At IACM 2018, Jessica will present her work on power and lying.
Jiahui He
Zhejiang University of China
Jiahui He is a PhD candidate in Zhejiang University of China. Her academic research focuses on the field of teamwork and organizational behavior. At the 2018 IACM, she will present an archival study on how individualism-collectivism values moderate the relationship between team faultlines and team performance with a unique sample of 2014 FIFA World Cup. The research suggests that team faultlines are negatively associated with team performance and such a negative relationship is weakened when the teams are high in collectivism.
Krithiga Sankaran
University of Utah
Business Management
Krithiga Sankaran is a doctoral student in the management department at the David Eccles School of Business in University of Utah. Currently, she is interested in the various social-psychological processes that affect moral judgments and behaviors in the workplace. Her present research can be broadly classified into two conceptual areas that involve 1) understanding the bidirectional relationship between morality and conflict and 2) understanding social-psychological processes that lead to judgment biases and (un)ethical behavior at the workplace. At IACM 2018, she will be presenting her research examining the moral content in workplace conflict. Using text-analysis and survey tools, her project shows that task and relationship conflict differ in their moral foundations content (e.g. care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity).
Lawrence Ibeh
Ludwig Maximilian University, Munch, Germany
Geography and Remote Sensing
Lawrence Ibeh is an advanced Ph.D. student at the Environment and Society Program at the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig Maximilian University working on a dissertation on natural resource conflict modelling and sustainable peace using a transdisciplinary coupled approach. He has studied in Nigeria, The Netherlands and Spain, and lectured at the University of Nigeria and Ebonyi State University before starting his current research in Germany. At 2018 IACM conference in Philadelphia, USA, he will present empirical research focusing on ”neo-ecology”, a new theory which challenges the resource curse theory and which addresses the question: to what extent does the resource curse thesis apply to resource conflict management at a community level in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria? Using satellite imageries and qualitative data, he argues for the need to link local case studies with research on global megatrends, in this case, “neo-ecology”.
Ndzamangwi Isidore Agha
Uludag University
International Relations
Ndzamangwi Isidore Agha is currently pursuing his PhD in International Relations at Uludag University. His research interests include conflict, post conflict, negotiation and peace building. At the 2018 IACM conference he will present his research on how conflict and cooperation has continued to shape Turkish Russian strategic relations within the Eurasia and Middle Eastern region. The analysis advanced by this work, maintains that though the Turkish-Russian plane crisis of 2015 was resolved through formal and informal channels of negotiation, Turkey must draw strong lessons from the crisis, and diversify its political and economic needs if it must continue to play its role as a vital actor within the regions that border it.
Yuanxin Wang
Temple University
Media and Communications
Yuanxin Wang is a PhD candidate in Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. At the 2018 IACM conference, Yuanxin will present her research on the role of social injustice in cyberbullying. By conducting a series of experiments, her study explores causal relationship between social injustice and cyberbullying behaviors with aggression serving as a mediator.