Mays Business Online

At Mays Business School our outstanding faculty are consistently recognized for their research and teaching accomplishments. As new professors join our ranks, our team of researchers and educators gains greater depth. This year, we introduce 15 new faculty members, whose areas of interest and expertise range from management practices to magic tricks.

ReesLynn L. Rees
Professor of Accounting
PhD: Arizona State University
Recent affiliation: University of Houston

“Teaching is the reason why most professors enter academia, and I’m no exception. I enjoy teaching most when I connect with the students, when they are engaged and provoked to think more deeply about certain issues.”

Managers are increasingly providing voluntary earnings guidance for what they expect their companies will report for the upcoming accounting period. How does this affect the capital market, and under what circumstances should the market react with skepticism or accept the CEO or CFO’s evaluation as informative and helpful?

That’s just one major research question Lynn Rees has turned to as he returns to Texas A&M after two years as C.T. Bauer Professor at the University of Houston. Rees spent eight years at Texas A&M before that as first assistant and then associate professor teaching graduate coursework at Mays.

With 21 scholarly papers, five in progress, and presentations at more than two dozen conferences, Rees delves into issues in accounting regulations, corporate governance and capital market response to accounting disclosures and practices.

Rees has chaired advisory committees for three doctoral students and been part of 15 doctoral advisory committees and eight master’s advisory committees. He has been co-editor of the Journal of International Accounting Research, was associate editor for four years for Advances in Accounting, and is now associate editor for the Journal of International Accounting Research. He also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, and has served on boards for the Journal of International Accounting Research and the Journal of Accounting Education.

KoufterosXenophon A. Koufteros
Associate Professor of Information and Operations Management
PhD: The University of Toledo
Recent affiliation: Florida Atlantic University

“I love teaching. I feel that as a professor, I’m like a sculptor: I receive the raw material, and I try to beautify it and give it shape.”

Choreographing the movements of troops and supplies as an artillery officer in the Cyprus National Guard gave Xenophon Koufteros his first exposure to operations management. Running his grandfather’s marble quarry business in Cyprus, Greece, then gifted him with a firmer grasp of logistics and operations.

Koufteros took those first encounters with the field into his doctoral work and beyond, as he seeks to grapple with important issues in today’s global supply chain. He has turned recently to study perceptions and practices of security in the international supply chain—testing to see who is guarding against potential tampering with containers at ports and other sites of transport. That includes everything from fencing around loading sites to screening and training employees and securing the trucks that carry goods from factories to ports.

Research has proven a strong suit for Koufteros, who has won the Distinguished Research Award from the Decision Sciences Institute in addition to college-level Researcher of the Year designations, in 2002 and 2005. But so has his work in the classroom, where the avid amateur magician amazes students with both the complexities of operations management and a few improbable magic illusions on the side. “The magic is also when everything in the supply chain comes together efficiently and effectively,” he says.

ChenHaipeng “Allan” Chen
Assistant Professor of Marketing
PhD: University of Minnesota
Recent affiliation: University of Miami

“Human behaviors are so rich and contextual that I can spend my entire life studying them.”

Allan Chen sees the business potential in human behavior, studying in his work how individual consumers and managers make business decisions. Customer choices, behavioral pricing, and consumer impatience across cultures have all fallen under this marketing professor’s umbrella of interests.

During a stint managing logistics for Proctor and Gamble in China in the mid-1990s, Chen found himself facing the unknown, and seeking answers. “The questions that I could not solve in my daily work really fascinated me and pushed me to pursue a PhD in marketing.”

He believes in taking that inquiry into the classroom, where he introduces his behavior-based research topics and asks students to share their insights in a positive learning environment. Chen has been honored with teaching awards—including the University of Miami’s School of Business Teaching Excellence Award in 2004—as well as research support for his efforts. He has more than a dozen published articles, manuscripts under review and completed works in progress, and serves on the editorial review boards for Marketing Science and Journal of Business Research.

Chen, who taught at the University of Miami for five years, joins Mays as part of the marketing department’s new focus on consumer research.

GeismarH. Neil Geismar
Assistant Professor of Information and Operations Management
PhD: University of Texas at Dallas
Recent affiliation: Prairie View A&M University

“As teachers we in some sense are missionaries. Our intent should be to communicate to students our love of the subject and to help them to understand its value.”

Neil Geismar started out his career in mathematics, teaching calculus and differential equations to undergraduates as a master’s student at the University of Tennessee. His career path has taken some unexpected twists and turns over the years to bring him back to education.

In the mid-80s, Geismar quickly became involved in massive custom hardware and software projects for military intelligence, adding computer programming and software design to his math background. The 90s saw Geismar in sales of computer services and recruitment of computer professionals for clients ranging from the Fortune 500 to high-tech startups. By the early 2000s he had refined his career path by earning an MS and PhD in operations management.

Since earning his PhD in 2003, he has published 12 refereed articles in scholarly journals including INFORMS Journal on Computing and IIE Transactions. He also counts eight more submissions or works-in-progress to his name, along with another dozen conference presentations and a Prairie View Outstanding Researcher award.

Geismar’s areas of research and teaching interest include robotic cell scheduling and supply chain scheduling for inventory and distribution systems.

GilbertBrett Anitra Gilbert
Assistant Professor of Management
PhD: Indiana University
Recent affiliation: Georgia State University

“The opportunity to be a part of the management department at Mays, and also have a role in getting the entrepreneurship program off the ground, seemed too great to pass up.”

Entrepreneurs looking to start up a new business may be better off—in the short run—founding their business in an industry’s geographic cluster region. In such regions, like the Silicon Valley for technology firms, new firms have higher sales growth and more product innovation as well as more alliance partners to chose from, according to research from Brett Anitra Gilbert.

But firms founded in such cluster regions also prove, in the long term, to produce innovations that are mostly add-ons to existing products. New product and process break-throughs are less likely, Gilbert finds.

That’s just one prong of research the entrepreneurship scholar has delved into since turning her mind to the academic side of business in the early 2000s. Gilbert first considered becoming a professor when contacted by the PhD Project—a group working to increase diversity of business school faculty. But it was the ability to research vital business issues that really turned her head.

She now has more than a dozen publications or works-in-progress to her name. “I was thrilled at the prospect of being able to do extensive research on topics that interest me,” she says. “I truly love applying research to solve business problems.”

HawsKelly L. Haws
Assistant Professor of Marketing
PhD: University of South Carolina
Recent affiliation: University of South Carolina

“This is my kind of town, and my kind of workplace. There’s a great enthusiasm toward enhancing the consumer behavior focus in an already diverse and productive marketing department. And I will have access to the resources I need for the type of research I want to do.”

How do consumers deal with constant temptations in the marketplace?

That’s the big question consumer behavior specialist Kelly Haws seeks to get a handle on in her 2007 dissertation. She proposes a construct called consumer spending self-control to take into account how individuals regulate their spending habits—in accord with self-imposed standards.

People who budget for impulse purchases, for example, are relying on internal monitoring, much as do consumers who map out major purchases and never pick up an impulse item at the checkout.

“There’s a difference between a lack of self-control, where the consumer is all about present enjoyment, and this idea of people who are so overly focused on achieving long-term goals that they fail to enjoy consumption,” Haws says.

Haws joins Mays in her first role as a professor, part of a new team of researchers who focus on behavior in the marketplace. Honored with the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and a Doctoral Research Award from the University of South Carolina in 2007, she walks a fine line as both instructor and researcher. Haws approaches her classroom as an interactive learning lab, and she already has a dozen scholarly contributions published, under review or in progress.

HaynesKatalin T. Haynes
Assistant Professor of Management
PhD: Arizona State University
Recent Affiliation: Arizona State University

“I realized that as much as I enjoyed being in the MBA program and enjoyed working in corporate America, for me it’s research that satisfies my intellectual curiosity. It’s almost like solving puzzles.”

American top bosses take the cake: When CEOs run similar-sized, similarly structured businesses across the globe, U.S. chief executives can earn as much as 50 times the pay of counterparts in other nations. That’s the most revealing finding from Katalin Haynes’s dissertation, completed this year.

Haynes also takes a look in her work at the concept of board capital—how well connected and well informed a firm’s board of directors is within and outside the firm’s industry. Industry embeddedness indeed impacts performance, she finds, but there’s an as-yet-undefined optimal level of industry diversity that boards must achieve to be effective.

The Hungarian native’s first love is research—she was a professor of English at a top university in Budapest when she left for the United States in the 90s. But it wasn’t until she opened her own business that she got a taste for business management. Her business experience led to an MBA from Arizona State University and a master’s in international management from Thunderbird.

Haynes continued her business education at Arizona State, finishing out a promising doctoral education earlier this year with two publications in press or under review and four works in progress. In the classroom she draws upon extensive international travel and living experience to illustrate principles of international business and global trends.

HeimGregory R. Heim
Assistant Professor Information and Operations Management
PhD: University of Minnesota
Recent Affiliation: Boston College

“I’m excited to get going, to jump in and contribute and collaborate. Joining the faculty at Mays is a fantastic opportunity to make a real impact with my research.”

Many life experiences led Gregory Heim to pursue research as a professor of operations management.

During his undergrad years, Heim wanted to be an economist. As a consulting econometrician working on projects for the United States Postal Service in the early 90s, he focused on the impact of postal price hikes on shipper behaviors. It was during this time he realized his passion for research.

Heim also spent his summers in college on the manufacturing floors of light industrial plants. Inhaling fumes and sweating over machines gave him a first-hand look at what really happens in manufacturing—experiences he uses to this day in his research and in the classroom.

Today, Heim focuses on e-service management and how managers strategize given the overwhelming demands for mass customization—services that tie individual consumer or smaller business needs to vast information networks within a business. He also focuses his research on person-to-person service operations and retail supply chain management. He has taught extensively in operations management, MIS, e-commerce, and e-service operations classes.

Heim has published 10 journal articles and two technical reports and presented at two dozen conferences. He was a faculty member at Boston College for seven years following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

KetzenbergMichael Ketzenberg
Assistant Professor of Information and Operations Management
Phd: University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Recent affiliation: Colorado State University

“The quality of life for a business professor is excellent. You get to work and interact with smart people in an intellectually stimulating environment, continuously helping to create the next set of business leaders.”

Michael Ketzenberg started his career as a systems analyst and project manager, developing computer systems in several industries including finance, advertising and distribution. He decided to return to school after working in higher education, finding himself unable to resist the draw of earning a graduate degree and reinventing himself.

It was while he was earning his MBA at Vanderbilt that he realized faculty life suited him, specifically in allowing him to evaluate the kind of work he’d developed a career around. His research questions since earning his PhD focus on how information can be used to improve supply chain performance.

To date, Ketzenberg has added nearly 25 scholarly and refereed articles, book chapters and works in progress to his research list, with more than 20 conference presentations. As a professor, he has taught supply chain and operations management at Colorado State and George Mason University. He also has visited frequently at Erasmus University in The Netherlands, where he collaborates with colleagues on international research issues in reverse logistics and closed loop supply chains.

Ketzenberg has served on five thesis committees and is an ad hoc reviewer for several journals including, among others, Production and Operations Management, IEEE Transactions in Engineering, and Journal of Operations Management.

NdoforHermann Anchidi Ndofor
Assistant Professor of Management
PhD: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Recent affiliation: University of North Carolina-Charlotte

“I find teaching most times initiates some of the most interesting research questions. Interacting with students helps bring aspects of my research into perspective.”

Hermann Ndofor joins Mays Business School from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, where he taught courses in business policy, new venture creation, innovation creativity and intellectual property, and the new venture experience.

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he earned his doctorate in 2004, he designed and taught an undergraduate capstone management analysis course that employs case studies to cover topics such as environmental analysis, competitive analysis and strategy formation. At the University of Maryland, where Ndofor was a student, he likewise designed and taught a business policy capstone course and a management in organizations class.

His experience as a researcher runs just as deep: His half-dozen publications and conference proceedings include scholarly articles in top-rated Journal of Management and the Academy of Management’s best paper proceedings in 2003 and again in 2005. His interests lie in entrepreneurship, strategic management, and competitive dynamics, as well as knowledge management and executive succession.

In addition to his PhD and MBA degrees, Ndofor earned a BA in economics and international relations and an MA in applied economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

PengXiaosong “David” Peng
Assistant Professor of Information and Operations Management
PhD: University of Minnesota
Recent affiliation: University of Minnesota

“The freedom of choosing the business problems you are most interested in and developing solutions to them systematically was a big appeal to me.”

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for just the right management practices in your manufacturing firm—instead, managers should selectively develop tactics depending on the specific operations capabilities they want to build. That’s one finding from David Peng’s research that contradicts the “best practices” promoted by some consultants as practices all firms should adopt.

Peng also focuses his research on the interaction of management practices with new technologies, specifically those new developments that better connect companies to their supply chains.

Though a new PhD, Peng has already garnered awards for his research, including two Juran fellowship awards established by quality guru Joseph Juran, a best conference paper proceeding from the Academy of Management in 2006 and a doctoral dissertation fellowship from the University of Minnesota. He has a handful of papers at various stages for journal publication and has presented at seven major conferences.

Peng earned his BS in business from the Beijing Institute of Technology and an MS in information systems management from Carnegie Mellon before turning to Minnesota to start his PhD work. Peng has already mapped out his teaching principles, including engaging in active learning, continuing to learn while teaching, establishing trust with students and serving as an ambassador for his discipline.

PetkovaRalitsa G. Petkova
Assistant Professor of Finance
PhD: University of Rochester
Recent affiliation: Case Western Reserve

“As I came to know Mays Business School, it became obvious that in addition to having top-notch faculty, it is also a very welcoming place to be.”

Ralitsa Petkova’s recent research examines why different types of stocks tend to provide expected returns—such as when so-called “value stocks” produce higher average returns than growth stocks.

Petkova also studies how risk patterns vary for value and growth stocks during the business cycle, and how that affects returns.

Joining Mays in 2007 from Case Western Reserve—where she was an assistant professor—and a role as visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Petkova brings with her a focus on investment management, empirical asset pricing, financial portfolio selection and predictive variables.

After earning her B.A in economics and mathematics from Hamilton College in New York as a magna cum laude, Petkova earned her master’s in applied economics from the University of Rochester and also, in 2003, her PhD in business administration. She has published in two major journals in the field, Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics. She also has four works in progress.

SchijvenMario Schijven
Assistant Professor of Management
PhD: Tilburg University (The Netherlands)
Recent Affiliation: Tilburg University

“The whole idea of dedicating time and effort to the pursuit of new knowledge seems to me to be one of the most noble and exciting ways of making a contribution.”

Most scholars tend to underestimate the gains that firms end up realizing from mergers and acquisitions, Mario Schijven finds. Past work has usually taken a short-term perspective, but that fails to capture gains in profitability and equity that are unlocked as a result of organizational restructuring 10 or 15 years into the future.

“Although most acquisitions may—in the short term—seem to be unsuccessful,” Schijven says, “many of them will only live up to their full potential once all the necessary ingredients to the overarching corporate strategy have been collected and put into place.”

The new PhD’s work on organizational learning and evolutionary economics encompasses his biggest research question of how firms grow and evolve over time. That includes understanding how firms learn to execute mergers more effectively on the basis of prior experience.

Schijven is a native of The Netherlands who takes on his first job at a U.S. university as he joins Mays this fall. Earning his PhD in 2007, he already has publications forthcoming in top journals, including the Academy of Management Journal and the Journal of Management, has received several awards, and has a dozen works-in-progress on the table.

SharpNathan Y. Sharp
Assistant Professor of Accounting
PhD: University of Texas at Austin
Recent affiliation: University of Texas at Austin

“I noticed a difference the moment I walked onto A&M’s campus. I could tell the students were different in a wonderful way, and I knew I wanted to be part of that school.”

Firms with weak corporate governance or less external monitoring are more likely to bury news of their financial missteps and accounting mistakes, according to research emerging from Nate Sharp’s work on strategic disclosure. Some companies also attempt to minimize the impact of such announcements by packaging the news with a positive earnings announcement.

When and how managers of public companies choose to announce errors in past financial reporting can affect how much compensation CEOs get, how the market reacts, and how the firm itself fares in the future. Sharp is also examining how external auditors respond to the risk that financial statements are incorrect, and whether analysts are able to identify accounting problems early on—and if so, whether they effectively address those problems with managers.

Sharp is a 2002 Brigham Young graduate who first saw himself as an academic when he joined the BYU PhD preparation program during the course of his master’s in accounting study. He takes on teaching of the undergraduate financial reporting course at Mays this fall, with time to continue research.

So far, Sharp has developed two working papers and is in progress on two additional projects.

WinterichKaren Page Winterich
Assistant Professor of Marketing
PhD: University of Pittsburgh
Recent affiliation: University of Pittsburgh

“My role is that of a facilitator, providing students with knowledge and encouraging them to learn creatively by examining their own consumer behaviors.”

Karen Winterich took an unusual turn in a fairly routine job at a supermarket in high school and college: She spent her time intently watching customers and their shopping behaviors. “Not surprisingly, this led to my research interests in consumer behavior,” she explains.

Winterich’s work at the intersection of consumer behavior and social identities leads her research to some innovative considerations of how people make decisions and behave based on their social connections. One finding so far is that men and women donate differently to charities based on their moral and gender identities.

She’ll continue her work beyond her 2007 dissertation, and is already working on papers that examine how political affiliation affects one’s charitableness and the relationships between consumers and brands they claim as their own.

The 2006 American Marketing Association-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow is blazing an early trail in the study of identity in consumer behavior. Her focus on social influences also makes her a ready fan of the way the Aggie family functions. “Seeing the Aggie spirit in both the students and the faculty on my first visit drew me in,” she says.

— Staff Reports