Michael Hitt, a University Distinguished Professor in Management, was ranked the most influential scholar in his field in an article, “Scholarly Impact Revisited”, in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives. The article, published in May 2012, quantified and ranked the scholarly influence of management professors on audiences inside and outside their fields.

Michael Hitt
Hitt

To compile this list, the authors ranked 384 of the most highly cited management scholars of the past three decades based on both their number of academic journal citations and the web references to their work on nonacademic sites — those that do not end in .edu — indexed by the Google search engine. Hitt was ranked #1 as the most influential scholar in the world in management, based on the combined scores.

Other Mays management faculty members who were also included in the rankings were Murray Barrick, Luis Gomez-Mejia, Duane Ireland, Ricky Griffin, Michael Wesson and Lorraine Eden.

Hitt holds the Joe B. Foster Chair in Business Leadership at Texas A&M’s Mays Business School. He has won numerous awards and has served on the editorial review boards of multiple journals. He is a former editor of the Academy of Management Journal and a former co-editor of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.

A 2010 article in Times Higher Education listed Hitt among the top scholars in economics, finance and management. He is a member of the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame and former president of the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society.

Jerry Strawser, Hitt’s dean at Mays Business School, calls him “truly a one-of-a-kind scholar. … The numerous awards and accolades he has received reflect the fact that his research findings direct the work of other scholars and course of future study in the academic profession. In addition, he studies relevant issues that affect the business world and impact economic development. In short, his research affects both the academic and business worlds and is used both in the classroom and in the boardroom.”