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Preparing a New Generation of Scholars
 Debra L. Shapiro UMD ’82, Clarice Smith Professor of
Management and
Organization, is artistic by nature— a concert-level pianist, a theater
enthusiast, and an art collector. But it is in academia—and business school at
that!—that this artist found a way to merge her varying interests into a
rewarding career.
Shapiro’s initial academic interest was psychology, following in the
footsteps of her grandfather, a renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, because
she liked the idea of helping people deal with interpersonal challenges. But
Shapiro found her true calling when her studies turned her toward
workplace-related challenges involving people: “I realized I could help managers
as they dealt with employees who are unhappy; who are unproductive; who aren’t
fully committed or engaged. It gave me an avenue to help people in a broad way,”
says Shapiro.
It wasn’t until graduate school that Shapiro found that she really enjoyed
teaching, too. This was a natural fit, given Shapiro’s involvement with theater
and the tendency for great teachers to be great performers. Her classes tend to
be lively, because Shapiro would rather have students engaged with one another
than merely listening to a lecture: “People learn best when they are actively
engaged in the learning process.”
Shapiro came to the Smith School after seventeen years at the University of
North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, where she was the Willard J.
Graham Distinguished Professor of Management. Shapiro teaches at all
levels—undergraduates, full- and part-time MBAs, executive MBAs, custom
programs, and PhD students— and has been recognized for excellence in teaching
with consistent top rankings and a 2008 Krowe Teaching Award.
Shapiro also heads the Smith School’s prestigious PhD program, recognized as
one of the best in the nation. Last year, the Smith School committed $12 million
in additional resources to its PhD program as a result of a gift from Robert H.
Smith ’50. Shapiro, who was associate dean of doctoral programs at the Kenan-Flagler
Business School, has been head of Smith’s PhD program since July 2008.
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Great Placements
One of Shapiro’s key concerns is helping doctoral students get placed in top
business schools around the world. Over the past five years, 99 percent of
Smith’s PhD students have been successfully placed immediately after they
graduate—about 95 percent as tenure track assistant professors at an accredited
university, and the rest as researchers in either private or government
organizations.
Recent placements include:
Rottman School of Business, University of Toronto
Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University
Terry College of Business, University of Georgia
Nanyang University, Singapore
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“The PhD experience is a lot like an apprenticeship,” says Shapiro. “We
intentionally admit a very small number of students to maximize the quality and
quantity of faculty-student interactions. There is a depth and intensity to the
program that is unmatched in any other type of educational training. In fact,
one of the reasons I came here is because I knew the Smith doctoral program was
one of the strongest anywhere.”
Shapiro is working to build an increasingly connected intellectual community
that supports and encourages cross-functional research. In the Smith School’s
informal environment, students spend a lot of time working with faculty
one-on-one, and there is a significant amount of joint research going on. But
much of it is concentrated within academic disciplines. Shapiro recently began
an intranet community that she hopes will ease the ability of students and
faculty to gather across, as well as within, discipline-based areas around
shared research interests. She believes it will help students and faculty
discover their common research interests outside their functional silos.
Shapiro’s own research focuses on identifying strategies including
negotiation, third-party interventions, and explanations that help to overcome
workplace-related challenges associated with managing employee perceptions of
injustice and resistance to organizational change. This includes unwanted or new
management initiatives, such as self-managing work-team assignments or
expatriate assignments. Shapiro is particularly interested in examining these
challenges when they involve culturally different and globally dispersed
employees, for whom talking openly about differences may be logistically
infeasible or unequally comfortable for people of different cultural
backgrounds. Shapiro was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Academy of
Management for the significant research contributions she has made to the
management field and is a co-editor (with Barry Goldman, a graduate of the Smith
Doctoral Program) of a forthcoming SIOP Frontiers book titled: The Psychology of
Negotiations in the 21st Century Workplace.
With teaching, research and mentoring on the docket, Shapiro’s schedule
varies from demanding to ridiculous— last semester she taught over 200 MBA
students in addition to running the doctoral program and maintaining multiple
research projects! But she thrives on the challenge, says Shapiro. And through
it all she continues to teach students at all levels with her unique combination
of academic rigor and artistic sensibility.
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