Zahid Rahman This is the second in a five-part series profiling the graduate student recipients of the 2016 Jack Miller Excellence in Research Awards.
Zahid Mohammad Rahman — MSc, Management; Supervisor: Professor Dirk De Clercq
In 2014, Zahid Rahman and his family left their home in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to come to Canada so Rahman could restart his education in Brock University’’s MSc in Management program.
About nine years earlier, after completing a bachelor’s degree in business and a MBA at the University of Dhaka, Rahman went to work in the industry in order to help support his mother and siblings after the sudden death of his father. He never for a moment lost sight of his goal — his dream — to be a university teacher.
“I started working in the industry in 2005 and considered this as an opportunity to turn my industry experience into future academic interests,” says the father of a four-year-old boy. “I always believed in the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln — ‘ I shall prepare and someday my chance will come.’ I chose Brock’s program, as I needed a stepping stone to bridge my industry experience with the goal of pursuing PhD study.”
Rahman has excelled in his master’s program and has made significant contributions with his research in the area of employee creativity, says his supervisor in the Goodman School of Business Professor Dirk De Clercq.
“Zahid’s research is original in investigating several critical contingencies that underlie the link between employees’ knowledge-sharing efforts and creativity,” De Clercq says. “Zahid’s thesis results are significant in that they establish a more complete understanding of how creative behaviours emerge within organizations.
“The key finding about the positive role of extensive knowledge-sharing efforts in promoting creativity suggests that organizations can benefit greatly from developing and valuing their employees’ skills and expertise, particularly by acknowledging the need to unlock these features through efficient knowledge-sharing routines.”
Rahman is the recipient of an impressive set of internal and external scholarships during his tenure as a master’s student, including a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC).
He has co-authored and presented a paper about his pre-thesis research at the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC) Conference 2015 at Halifax, N.S., and the paper is now forthcoming in a prestigious academic journal. Another paper, based on his thesis, has been accepted for inclusion in the proceedings of the 76th annual meeting of the Academy of Management, to be held in Anaheim, Calif., Aug. 5 to 9.
Rahman will continue his scholarly journey when he starts his PhD program in the Alberta School of Business at University of Alberta in Fall 2016.
About the Jack M. Miller Excellence in Research Awards
The awards were established as the Excellence in Research Awards by the late Jack Miller when he served as Vice-President Research and Dean of Graduate Studies, from 1999 to 2004.
As a tribute to Miller, the Faculty of Graduate Studies renamed the awards in his honour in 2013 and, at the same time, increased the number of awards available and the value of each award.
Since then, as many as 11 graduates students, in research-based programs, are selected annually from within the six academic faculties to receive between $1,000 to $1,500 to support their research and scholarship.
Read the first part of the series highlighting winners in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences.
