The leading international journal of management, Academy of Management Review (AMR), presented its DECADE AWARD to Professor LI Ning, from the Department of Leadership and Organization Management of Tsinghua SEM, and co-authors Murray Barrick and Michael Mount for their article at the 2023 Annual Conference of the Academy of Management (AOM) held August 4 to 8, 2023. Their article, titled "The Theory of Purposeful Work Behavior: The Role of Personality, Higher Order Goals, and Job Characteristics," was published in 2013.

AMR is one of the leading international journals of management. According to the Journal Citation Report, its impact factor was 13.9 in 2021, ranking the third among 226 journals under the "management" category and fourth among 155 journals under the "business" category. The journal focuses on publishing significant and original management theories and is the flagship of AOM. The AMR Decade Award is awarded to only one paper every year, and intended to commend papers that have had the greatest impact on research over the past decade. It is the journal's most prestigious award. LI was also the first Chinese scholar to have received the honor since the award was first presented in 2017.

The paper by LI and his co-authors attempts to answer a fundamental question in management, which is why different people display different motivations and behaviors in their work, and the core mechanism behind this. This paper proposes the theory of purposeful work behavior, which explains how personality and job characteristics influence work behavior through implicit higher order goals and meaningful experiences from the perspective of interaction between humans and their environment.

Winners have the opportunity to write reflective papers on their original paper to delve into its impact and subsequent development, making it possible to further expand the influence of their research.