20/09/2026
📢 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Global Leadership Frameworks Pioneered by CMMU Faculty Anchored in Landmark Wharton School Study
BANGKOK, THAILAND — The College of Management, Mahidol University (CMMU) proudly highlights a major international milestone reinforcing its position as a world-class hub for leadership and organizational research. Frameworks developed by CMMU faculty members Prof. Dr. Philip Hallinger and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sooksan Kantabutra have served as structural pillars in a breakthrough longitudinal study led by a globally recognized management scholar at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
The new study, titled "For Good and for Bad: The Distinctive Effects of Successors' Leadership Behavior on Collective Engagement and Organizational Performance," was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the absolute gold standard for organizational psychology. Led by Professor Katherine J. Klein, an internationally acclaimed authority on leadership and organizational change at Wharton, the multi-year study utilized CMMU’s pioneering paradigms to dissect how top-level leadership transitions actively alter an organization's collective psychology and performance over time. The study integrates the research of both Hallinger and Kantabutra to conceptualize and measure the two core leadership behaviors at the center of its theoretical model: leader coaching and vision communication.
🎤 Highlighting the overarching institutional significance of this breakthrough, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vichita Ractham, Vice President for Corporate Communication and Branding at Mahidol University, shared her perspective on how this international acclaim cements the institution’s global standing: "High-impact, rigorous empirical research is the absolute core to building the Mahidol University brand into a global symbol of trust and innovation. This recognition from premier institutions like The Wharton School and the Journal of Applied Psychology serves as a powerful external endorsement that the Mahidol Brand is truly world-class. It demonstrates to the international community that our homegrown intellectual assets are not just theoretically sound, but are vital tools actively shaping thought leadership and global organizational practices."
🎤 Emphasizing why this international acclaim marks a watershed moment for the institution, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Prattana Punnakitikashem, CMMU Dean, underscored the unparalleled weight of peer recognition and its direct benefit to students: "This milestone is more critical than any other validation because it indicates that our pioneering intellectual assets have been thoroughly evaluated and embraced by our most elite peer experts on the global stage. Having our homegrown leadership theories selected as the foundational architecture for research by a top Wharton scholar—and published in the field's definitive journal—proves that CMMU does not merely consume management education. We are creating the absolute benchmarks that global authorities use to advance organizational science. Most importantly, the cutting-edge knowledge our faculty create, which is actively used by top business schools around the world, becomes classroom materials right here at CMMU. Our students do not read these breakthroughs second-hand; they learn first-hand from the very experts who invented them, giving them an unmatched competitive edge in the global market."
Both Hallinger and Kantabutra have consistently been recognized among the World's Top 2% of Scientists by Stanford University and Elsevier. This prominent integration into the pinnacle journal of organization studies further solidifies CMMU's alignment with Mahidol University’s "Wisdom of the Land" philosophy—bridging hyper-rigorous empirical science with global organizational strategy.
For the Wharton-led study, click here: https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001359
Media Contact:
Sooksan Kantabutra, PhD
CMMU Center for Research on Sustainable Leadership
College of Management, Mahidol University
Email: sooksan.kan @ mahidol.ac.th
