Member Spotlight: Jared Scruggs – Winner of the 2023 William H. Newman Award
Anti-work sentiments and beliefs among workers around the globe have been a hot topic amongst management scholars. Academy of Management (AOM) member Jared Scruggs sought to explore key elements of this disposition, which he calls “anti-work orientation.” His paper “Not About the Grind: Emergence and Consequences of Employee Anti-Work Orientation,” submitted to the Organizational Behavior (OB) division, won the William H. Newman Award, an All-Academy Annual Award announced at the time of the 83rd Annual Meeting and featured here. The Newman award celebrates the best paper by an individual based on a dissertation.
“What struck me across these [anti-work] movements was that the ideologies and identities of many in these movements were perhaps more diverse than we give credit for, and that at the same time this rejection of modern work may speak to something else we hadn’t quite captured.”
Jared analyzed a massive online open forum dedicated to the broader anti-work movement to better see the conversations people were having around work. He followed this with extensive scale development and survey data. The paper sought to show a worker disposition that is “almost turned toward believing that pro-work narratives or beliefs are pushed onto [workers], unwillingly.”
“There was a lot going on beyond this more surface-level characterization of ‘not wanting to work.’ People were tying their – often unpleasant – experiences at their jobs to larger, more generalized perspectives about work and self-worth, and then to their own feelings and actions at work.”
Jared hopes this research will help push toward empirically understanding how workers are truly thinking about modern work while helping to examine important antecedents and outcomes for management. He also hopes it will further the understanding of contemporary external events, happenings, and beliefs that workers bring with them to work.
Jared Scruggs is a PhD candidate in Management with a focus in Organizational Behavior at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He defends his dissertation this Spring. Before Wharton, Jared attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in Psychology and Portuguese before working in international payroll.
Jared has been a member of AOM since 2018 and is part of the OB and Social Issues in Management (SIM) divisions. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the piano, singing, and photography.
Jared points to AOM as a major contributor to his development as a scholar. “AOM has been a wonderful space for me to connect around some of my core interests. With the Annual Meeting, I thoroughly enjoy seeing other members and all the fantastic directions people in the broader field are taking their work.”
The Academy of Management's William H. Newman Award recognizes the best annual meeting paper based on a dissertation. The award is presented to single-authored papers based on a doctoral dissertation. Each of the Academy's Divisions and Interest Groups nominates one annual meeting submission for this prestigious award each year; up to three of these nominations may be selected to receive the award.