The Space Economy (SE) is emerging as a distinctive context for advancing research in Organizational Behavior (OB). Organizations in the SE operate in extreme, safety-critical, and reliability-demanding environments where even small coordination failures can have outsized consequences.
This makes the SE a compelling setting for OB scholars interested in how individuals and teams perform, learn, and remain resilient under pressure. Space organizations must recruit and train highly specialized talent, coordinate tightly coupled technical work, and sustain well-being through long development cycles punctuated by time-critical operations.
At the team level, the SE offers rich opportunities to study psychological safety, speaking up, and leadership in evolving missions, especially when expertise is distributed across disciplines, sites, and partner organizations. It also highlights how coordination is achieved when urgency and uncertainty are persistent features of work, and how organizations manage trade-offs between experimentation, discipline, and safety.
The SE also sharpens OB questions around culture, identity, motivation, trust, role conflict, and collaboration across public–private boundaries. As organizations blend entrepreneurial speed with public accountability, and increasingly face dual-use and security constraints, the SE becomes a valuable laboratory for extending OB theory in uncertain, high-technology settings.
This PDW will support OB scholars interested in resilience, well-being, and sustained performance in high-stakes project environments; leadership, expertise, and teamwork in distributed, expert-intensive settings; and coordination and learning across organizational boundaries in complex, interdependent ecosystems.
📍 PDW at AOM 2026: Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda
🗓 August 1, 2026 | 2:00–5:30 PM
📌 Loews Hotel, Philadelphia, USA
🔗 Register (open until sold out): https://lnkd.in/e3czZT4R
📩 Questions: Mehdi.montakhabi@said.oxford.edu
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Mehdi Montakhabi
Associate Scholar
University of Oxford | Saïd Business School
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