A leading academic journal has published the research of University of Arkansas at Little Rock Distinguished Professor Rolf Wigand and his colleagues from the University of Munich, the Technical University of Munich, and the University of South Carolina.

Wigand is the ​Jerry L. ​Maulden-Entergy Chair in the Departments of Information Science and Management at UALR.

The article, “The Dynamics of Shared Leadership: Building Trust and Enhancing Performance,” was published as the lead story in volume 99, issue 5 of the Journal of Applied Psychology.

The article’s publication is a direct result of Dr. Wigand’s $400,000 National Science Foundation’s (NSF) research grant, which supported the study of a virtual organization using data collected from a massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG).

“The research demonstrates that MMOGs can serve as a unique laboratory, almost Petri dish-like, for studying large-scale human behaviors,” said Wigand.

The findings contribute to the literature on shared leadership and group dynamics by demonstrating how the growth in shared leadership contributes to the emergence of trust and a positive performance trend over time.

Named one of the “Journals of the Century,” the Journal of Applied Psychology is the premier, flagship journal in industrial and organizational psychology with a 16 percent acceptance rate.

It is among top-ranked journals in terms of citation rates and has an impact factor of 4.758, an academic measure that reflects the average number of citations to recent articles and which is used to demonstrate the authority of a journal in its field.

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