Speaker bios

Fabiola Gerpott

WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management

“It’s Significant! …Or Not? Registered Reports: A New Route to Publishing Rigorous Research in Management & OB”

Abstract

Many academic journals are interested in significant results. The resulting “publish or perish” culture has contributed to replicability issues and publication bias, as significant results are published, and non-significant results are filed away. Indeed, the issue of irreproducibility impacts all fields of research. Most scholars have heard rumors about others using HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results are Known), selective reporting, optimal/selective choice of control variables, playing around with outliers, changing the inclusion or exclusion criteria for participants or cases, and using different analytical methods until one approach “works”.

What if we could imagine a world in which all this would not be necessary because research gets published irrespective of the significance level of the findings? In this talk, I will introduce Registered Reports (RRs) as a publication format that could make this dream come true. On the one hand, I will present findings from our meta-science research in which we identified 50 RRs in the areas of management and OB and surveyed authors with and without experience in publishing RRs as well as reviewers/editors who have handled RRs. Based on our analysis, I will scrutinize prevalent beliefs surrounding the RR format and outline hands-on best practices, including “new ways of seeing” RRs. On the other hand, I will enrich these data with insights from having gone through three Registered Report publication processes myself. These personal highs and lows may also help to relate to the topic on a more personal level.

Bio

Dr. Fabiola H. Gerpott holds the Chair of Leadership at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, a leading German Business School. She also serves as a Senior Associate Editor for The Leadership Quarterly and is a member of several Editorial Boards, including Human Relations, Academy of Management Discoveries, Journal of Business and Psychology, and the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies.

Fabiola graduated from a Double PhD program in 2017 with a PhD in Organizational Psychology (VU Amsterdam) and a PhD in Business Administration (Jacobs University Bremen). After working as an assistant professor in Amsterdam and Berlin, she was appointed as a tenured full professor at WHU in 2019. Fabiola is interested in studying contemporary challenges of leadership (e.g., collaboration with AI, emergent leadership, diversity management), interaction dynamics in organizations, and meta-science research. Her work has been published in leading academic outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She is also highly passionate about making her research accessible to practice. Accordingly, she is a frequent guest on podcasts, contributes to practitioner-oriented journals, has published a popular press book on how AI may transform the future of work, and was recognized as one of Germany’s Top 40 under 40.

Billy Obenauer

Maine Business School

“Replications in Management” · joining online

Bio

Dr. Billy Obenauer joined the Maine Business School in 2021. He was previously full-time faculty in the School of Business at Ithaca College. Prior to that, he earned his PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the current Co-Editor-in-Chief for Group & Organization Management.

Billy’s research focuses on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in organizations, with an interest in learning more about how research design influences our understanding of DEI. He serves on the executive board for the Advancement of Replication Initiative in Management (ARIM) and is widely regarded as a methods expert for replication research, reproducibility studies, and open science practices. His research has been published in journals such as The Leadership Quarterly, Group & Organization Management, Journal of Management Scientific Reports, and Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice. His paper, “Are women strategic leaders more effective during a crisis than men strategic leaders? A causal analysis of the relationship between strategic leader gender and outcomes during the COVID-19 crisis” won The Leadership Quarterly’s Best Paper Award for 2024.

Billy integrates his research expertise into his teaching by illustrating to students how various decisions that they will make as managers will influence DEI in their organizations. His teaching style is driven by his core values which include transparency, equitable access to education, and that no one should be defined by their worst day. Billy’s commitment to creating an engaging educational environment with multiple opportunities for students to succeed has been shown to improve student engagement and performance. Additionally, he shares lectures on YouTube where he has over 5,000 subscribers and has received more than 650,000 views.

Billy is married with four children. He and his family live in Glenburn. He used to list his “spare time hobbies” here, but he currently does not have a lot of spare time.

Anand van Zelderen

SKEMA Business School

“Leveraging Virtual Reality to Create Replicable Research”

Bio

Anand van Zelderen is an Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Business at SKEMA Business School. His research examines the socio-emotional costs that surface when employees become overly dependent on generative AI agents for creative, sensitive, and interpersonal tasks. A pioneer in experimental management research, he is among the first to develop simulated field studies, an approach that integrates AI and Virtual Reality to create lifelike organizational simulations that capture real behaviors while preserving experimental control. To democratize access to these tools, he founded the Openverse Open Science Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration of more than 70 scholars around the world. Through his research and education, Anand aims to shape a human-centric future of work where emerging technologies are integrated ethically, inclusively, and sustainably into organizations and society.

Anastasia V. Sergeeva

KIN Centre for Digital Innovation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Editors’ panel · Senior Editor, Organization Science

Bio

Anastasia V. Sergeeva is Professor of Work, Technology and Organization at the KIN Centre for Digital Innovation, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Prof. Sergeeva conducts ethnographic research to trace what happens to work “in the wild” once novel technologies are introduced. Her research lies at the intersection of information systems and organization theory, and advances conversations on technology-mediated organizational change, the transformation of professional work, and the emergence of new forms of organizing driven by digital technologies. She also serves as a Senior Editor at Organization Science.

Jost Sieweke

Department of Management & Organization, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Replicatathon mentor · Editors’ panel

Bio

Jost is an Associate Professor of Strategic Leadership at the Department of Management & Organization at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Management Studies and an associate editor at The Leadership Quarterly. His research focuses on strategic leadership, which is the study of how top executives and their teams shape organizational outcomes. Within this field, he pursues two main streams: the effects of leadership team composition on firm performance, and executive decision-making under conditions of risk and uncertainty. A methodological commitment to credible research and causal identification using quasi-experimental designs (instrumental variable design, regression discontinuity design) runs through both streams.

Long Wang

City University of Hong Kong

Editors’ panel

Bio

Long Wang is an associate professor of management at the City University of Hong Kong. He earned his Ph.D. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

His research sits at the intersection of economic psychology, business ethics, and organizational behavior, with a particular focus on decision making, executive behavior, trust, creativity, organizational incentives, work relationships, social entrepreneurship, and the transformative role of AI in management. His work has been published in leading journals, including Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Journal, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Management Science, among others.

His scholarship has received extensive recognition, including the R. Edward Freeman Journal of Business Ethics Philosophy in Practice Best Paper Award (2022), the Early Career Award from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) (2014), the Academy of Management OB Division’s Best Paper with Outstanding Practical Implications Award (2008), the Outstanding Senior Scholar Paper Award at the ComplianceNet Conference (2025), and the Best Paper Award for Contribution to Theory from the Northeast Decision Sciences Institute (2017). His research has also been recognized as a finalist for the Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) Division Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management Conference (2024) and for the Academy of Management Learning & Education Paper of the Year (2011).

He currently serves on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Discoveries and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.