Dear all,
The Organizational Neuroscience Interest Group (NEU) is less than two years old! Yet, we already have 400 members and many of them are doctoral students or are in the early stages of their careers. We are excited but not surprised by the interest of young scholars in our activities. Being part of a field that is largely influenced by the discipline of Psychology (in addition to other disciplines, of course), it is just natural for management scholars to be engaged in research that relies on neuroscience theory and methodology. Such methods are now mainstream among psychologists and their popularity is also growing among our colleagues in marketing, economics, and other areas.
Adopting neuroscience/biological theory and methodologies has significantly advanced adjacent fields, such as social psychology, where scholars have been able to gain important insights about fundamental human phenomena, such as social influence and justice. Research on social prejudice, for example, has been revolutionized by the introduction of neuroscience. Social neuroscientists have demonstrated how discerning ‘us’ from ‘others’ is a central characteristic of the human brain (Amodio, 2014). It takes the brain only a few milliseconds to make such critical judgments which have implications for prejudice, stereotypical behavior, and group conflict, all of which are highly relevant to understanding individuals and organizations.
I hope that you will join my colleagues and me in this exciting voyage and be one of the pioneers in organizational neuroscience! Please feel free to be in touch!
Yair Berson
Professor of Organizational Behavior, McMaster University, Canada
Incoming Chair, NEU IG.