Best paper award for USQ lecturer

When USQ Senior Lecturer in Management and Organisational Behaviour Cec Pedersen was asked five years ago who he thought was a wise person, it was a question that intrigued him.

A question which he pondered for some time, Cec decided, with the help of USQ Masters student William Ellsum, to question how people defined what wise, or wisdom meant.

The result was a paper entitled ‘Conceptualising managerial and leadership wisdom – how many wise managers and leaders do you know', which received a great response and won a ‘Best Paper Award" at the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM) Conference last December.

'I was asked what I thought wisdom was and who I thought a wise person was and it was something that I had to think about,' he said.

'The first person that I thought of was my grandfather and I immediately wondered why I had chosen him.

'I then decided to look into what wisdom is and with William we developed a paper over four years and came to the conclusion that wisdom is contextual, that is that someone might be considered wise in one context but not in another.

'We also discovered that people tend to consider wisdom from a particular paradigm – philosophical, spiritual, cultural, psychological or ethical and that a knowledgeable person is not necessarily a wise person.'

The years of hard work and research paid off when Cec and William submitted their paper to ANZAM, the peak professional body for management educators, researchers and practitioners in Australia and New Zealand, and were named as one of only 19 winners out of 300 papers presented during the organisations annual conference.

'The ANZAM conference is a premier management conference and there were over 300 papers in 18 different streams that were presented and ours was accepted without any changes, which is rare,' Cec said.

'Our paper won ‘Best Paper' in the Management Education and Development stream.'

While it questioned the meaning of wisdom, the paper also looked at whether or not wisdom could be passed on and developed in managers and leaders.

'The question of leadership has become an important topic area over the last decade,' Cec said.

'Through our research we suggested that blending spiritual practices with a leadership and management development mentoring program may be a way in which wisdom can be transferred within an organisation.'

As well as presenting two papers at the conference, Cec also chaired a session and was the USQ institutional representative in the ANZAM institutional member's workshop.

Media Contact: Josh Ada, USQ Media, +61 7 4631 1628