We live in an era of start-ups, e-commerce, and IPOs. But according to statistics published in 2018 by the
Small Business Administration (SBA), about one-fifth of new businesses fail in the first year and about half of all employer establishments fail within five years.

Poor management was cited by the SBA as one of the seven main reasons why most small companies go out of business. For academics, the study of business ethics, and the moral or ethical problems that can arise in a business environment, is crucial to understanding why those poor management decisions are being made.

Professor Simon Lam Sing-Kwong is Professor of Management at the Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong. He is also Director of the Centre of Asian Entrepreneurship and Business
Values and Head of the Faculty’s Management and Strategy Area.

Professor Lam’s primary research interests are in the areas of leadership and entrepreneurship. His research formulates and tests models that describe the motivational processes through which ethical leadership promotes behavioural change. His work aims to develop comprehensive research models that help explain the often-complex interplay between national culture, effective leadership and workplace performance across different organisational settings.

He has conducted many research projects to examine the moderating and the mediating effects between ethical and transformational leadership styles, leader attributes and psychological states, and the attitudinal and behavioural effects of employees and their in-role and extra-role work performance behaviours. Data were collected from major companies in the US, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Australia and Japan, and unique field quasi-experiments were conducted that allowed him to manipulate major variables in these models and to test them directly in the field.

Professor Lam has published 17 A-grade management journal papers in his research areas. These include the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and the Journal of Marketing. The impact factors of these journals are among the highest in the business and applied psychology areas. He has published 30 other international refereed journal papers, including the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process. These papers have been cited over 3,000 times in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

Professor Lam serves as a senior editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management, which has the highest impact factor among all management journals in Asia. He also sits on the editorial board of numerous other similar publications and reviews papers for top-tier academic journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, and the Journal of Applied Psychology.

He was Chair of the Fourth Asian Academy of Management Conference, Director of the Asian Academy of Management, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. His joint research projects on leadership and entrepreneurship received over HK$2 million from internal and external government competitive grants.

Professor Lam has over 20 years’ experience teaching undergraduate, MBA, DBA and senior executive development programmes. His teaching interests are business model innovation, corporate governance and ethics, organisational development cycle and reforms. He is much sought-after by companies around the globe as a management consultant specialising in corporate governance and ethics, organisational development and reform, start-up strategy and execution, and innovative business model creation. He also
serves as the non-executive director of several publicly listed companies in Hong Kong.