The Ph.D. in Business Administration with a major in Management is a high-quality, full-time, residential program designed to prepare qualified individuals for a career in scholarly research and teaching at the university level. Our program is supported by faculty who actively publish research on a variety of topics in organizational behavior and strategic management that reflect the most relevant and interesting questions from the standpoint of advancing academic knowledge and managerial practice. As such, our 

Ph.D. students are exposed to a greater scope of scholarly knowledge while getting an in-depth training on a specific topic of their dissertation research. We also believe that an effective scholar should be trained as both a researcher and a teacher. Our Ph.D. program provides Ph.D. students with an opportunity to learn from the best faculty instructors. We also care about what happens to our Ph.D. students after they graduate. Job search training and support are part of our program.

Our program is small and student-centered, which provides students the opportunity to work closely with faculty on various research projects. This personal attention extends to the small, research‐oriented doctoral seminars that form the core of our academic program. Students are an integral part of our department and viewed more as junior colleagues, research partners, and co-authors than as traditional students. Consequently, we encourage all students to work with multiple faculty, not just their advisor or dissertation chair.

What makes our Management Ph.D. Program unique?

People are our competitive advantage! If you join our program, you’ll find yourself in a very stimulating yet supportive environment. Our PhD students do not compete with each other. The small size of our program allows each student to closely interact with more than one faculty.

Place –joining West Virginia University will certainly persuade you that Mountaineer’s spirit is great! Our Program is residential and located in Morgantown, West Virginia an hour and a half away from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On the BestPlaces to Live list for 2018, Morgantown also appears on Livability.com’s  Top 10 Cities for Affordable Health Care. Known primarily as home to West Virginia University and its 30,000 students, Morgantown has a wide variety of housing options and neighborhoods as well as downtown shops, restaurants and entertainment nightspots for students and residents. The median age here is 22.6 years old, which contributes to a youthful and fun local culture. 

Profession – we are an R1 (high research intensive) university, and our College and Department, in particular, correspond to this prestigious status. Faculty in our Department publish in top academic journals and are recognized well beyond West Virginia University for their research and service to the profession. The vast professional network of our faculty is a great asset for our PhD students in their job search.

Our PhD. Program is looking for people who share our values of curiosity, respect, accountability, service and appreciation.

Research Opportunities

Our research interests include HR and OB topics, Strategy topics as well as Methods-oriented research.

Past and current projects include answering interesting content-related questions, such as whether alliance partners will run away or stick together when a negative event strikes one of them, how to resolve a dilemma of signaling bankrupt-firm performance, what contextual factors influence an individual’s decision to engage in criminal behavior within organizations and examining shades of grey in implicit effective leadership. Interesting methodology-related research includes examination of surprisingly problematic issues of CEO duality conceptualization and measurement, developing an auxiliary theory for measuring dynamic capabilities in organizations, developing global effect size benchmarks and investigating the extent of p-hacking in organizational research. Whether you are interested in content- or methods-oriented research, “we’ve got you covered!”

As students prepare to enter the academic job market, the emphasis shifts from participating in faculty-led research to students developing and leading their own research projects. It is not unusual for graduates of our program to stay connected and collaborate with WVU faculty on research throughout their careers.

We are a very productive group of professors who are excited to work with PhD students on high-quality research projects. Overall, our faculty has published extensively in some of our best academic journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Leadership Quarterly, Organizational Research Methods, Organization Science, Psychological Bulletin, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Personnel Psychology, and Science.

Management Faculty Teaching and Actively Working with PhD Students

Courses

The coursework in management is designed to provide a theoretical, methodological, and statistical foundation for critically evaluating extant research and conducting independent research. During the first two years, students will take a variety of content seminars in management and research methods and statistics courses. Following coursework and the successful completion of a qualifying paper, students take a comprehensive exam, which includes written and oral components. Upon successful completion of the comprehensive exam, students will be admitted to doctoral candidacy. Remaining hours will focus on completing a dissertation.

The Management Department offers a number of content seminars and research methods and statistics courses. Ph.D. students also will take research methods and statistics courses offered by other departments and colleges within WVU (e.g., Economics, Statistics, Psychology, Educational Psychology).  Students will take a multivariate statistics course, and other research methods and statistics courses will be determined in consultation with the Ph.D. Coordinator. Ph.D. students also may take content seminars offered by other WVU departments and colleges.

Please visit the WVU Graduate Catalog to review our program’s course listing and description.