As we write this editorial, we are deep into the Dog Days of Summer, and many of us are wilting under unseasonably warm temperatures. Before we can look forward to cooler fall temperatures and a new academic year, many of us will have our usual stop at the 2023 Academy of Management Annual Conference. For many, this event, along with the Organization Theory in Health Care Conference, is our "conference home." A time to meet new and catch up with old friends and colleagues. An opportunity to discover new professional skills and learn about the latest health care management research. A look ahead via a cursory thematic analysis of the Health Care Management Division paper program suggests we have much to be excited about with this year's conference.
This year's program includes "tried and true" health care management topics, such as organizational correlates of financial performance and team dynamics. Leadership is also prominently represented in the program, albeit with a greater emphasis on behavioral perspectives. Similarly, a number of papers focus on the adoption of technology, although the emphasis seems to be shifting more to mHealth technologies and, of course, artificial intelligence. Is there anywhere that Artificial Intelligence has not spread to? Not these editorials, we can assure you!
It is also exciting to see topics in the program that have been underrepresented in the health care management literature. Perhaps most notable is a cadre of papers rooted in the organizational behavior and communication literature. For example, at least four papers examine the benefits of employee and patient voice and how health care organizations can promote these behaviors. The program also includes papers that examine trust, commitment, resilience, and personality, to name a few others. It is exciting to see more colleagues looking more deeply within health care organizations to understand how the people who inhabit them behave.
Similarly, the papers included in the program appear to be embracing the use of methodological techniques that can provide more insight into the underlying causal mechanisms and conditional effects of relationships. Yes, we're looking at you mediation and moderation. We have preached in other editorials about the problems of "black box" theorizing and the need to "unpack" hypothesized relationships. It is encouraging to see the application of methods that are aligned with this message.
The slate of professional development workshops is equally compelling. Mainstays like the research and teaching incubators are joined by a practice incubator focused on developing closer relationships with industry. Likewise, several other workshops are focused on bridging the world of research and practice, a topic that is of particular interest to Health Care Management Review with its requirement that all submissions explicitly discuss the practical implications of their research.
By the time you are reading this editorial, the 2023 Academy of Management Annual Conference will be in our rearview mirror. Hopefully, we had a chance to see and talk with some of you while in Boston. We look forward to seeing some of the great work presented at the conference in a future submission to Health Care Management Review. Until then, we hope your new academic year is off to a great start!
Cheryl Rathert
Larry R. Hearld
Co-Editors-in-Chief