The School of Management & Business has won a research grant from The Higher Education Academy for Teaching Development.

The grant, £30,000 over 15 months, is for Teaching, Learning and Measuring Leadership Skills, and was a result of a highly competitive tender.

 “We are delighted this has come to us,” said Andrew St George who is directing this research project at SMB.  “We have a strong idea and a capable team.  It’s a classic case of bringing one technique or body of knowledge to bear on an interesting question: in this case, can you measure leadership?”

The team includes SMB's Dr Nishikant Mishra whose cutting-edge work involves multi-disciplinary research into supply chain management, healthcare, mathematical modelling, heuristics and algorithms, lean and agile systems, and general operations management.  His research includes case-based reasoning, multi-criteria decision analysis, modelling of uncertainty by fuzzy sets, meta-heuristics, hyper-heuristics and multi-agent systems. He has published over 30 papers in these areas.

The project applies Dr Mishra’s thinking to measure leadership qualities.  Dr St George and Dr Mishra will be trialling their new techniques in leadership exercises next year involving students and staff.  The project produces a tool that quantifies leadership qualities and this can be applied in the commercial, charities and government sectors.

Measuring soft skills is a new discipline which will have an impact in the way that recruitment, head-hunting and employment agencies assess and present their candidates to employers; it will also change the ways in which SMEs can assess their leaders (internal and potential); and it will help larger organizations manage career progression and succession planning.

Christopher Dawson, Andrew Henley, (2012),"Push" versus "pull" entrepreneurship: an ambiguous distinction?, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, Vol. 18 Iss: 6 pp. 697 - 719

Christopher Dawson, Andrew Henley, Something will turn up? Financial over-optimism and mortgage arrears, Economics Letters

Public Sector Size and Peripherality, Spatial Economic Analysis, 7(4), 2012. (with R. F. Jones and P. Midmore.

Voluntary Corporate Governance Disclosures by Post-Apartheid South African Corporations, The Journal of Applied Accounting Research, 13(2), 2012. (with C. Ntim, J. Danbolt and K. Opong)

Risk and Structural Instability in US House Prices, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, (with M. Karoglou and B. Morley). [Pre-publication availability online – DOI: 10.1007/s11146-011-9332-1, SPRINGER ONLINE LIBRARY]

Journal article reprint: Efficiency in Knock-out Tournaments: Evidence from EURO 2004, European Sport Management Quarterly, 8(3) 2008. (with F. Carmichael). [Selected for reprinting in Recent Developments in the Economics of Sport, Andreff, W. (ed.), The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics, Founding Series Editor: Mark Blaug, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

Dr Mary Alice Young (RA to Nick Perdikis and lecturer in Modern Banking Law)
Banking Secrecy and Offshore Financial Centres: Money laundering and offshore banking
By Mary Alice Young Published 23rd November 2012 by Routledge – 194 pages