Aten Zaandam

Biography

Aten Zaandam is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Organization Studies at the Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on how the unique experiences of board members and executives shape their cognitive dispositions, which ultimately determine the strategic choices they make. His work is particularly interested in the interplay between business and society. Specifically, how the choices that businesses make influence society, and how society can, in turn, influence corporate strategies.

His dissertation features a paper titled "Balancing Self and Society: The Paradoxical Influence of CEOs' Social Class Origins on Greed and Corporate Social Responsibility" that examines how the childhood economic experiences of chief executives elicit a cognitive state, characterized by resource insecurity, that simultaneously causes them to behave more greedily and prosocially. This paper is currently under review at the Academy of Management Journal (Conditionally Accepted).

Education

Ph.D., Business Administration, Kent State University, 2024

M.S., Industrial Organizational Psychology, Florida Institute of Technology, 2017

M.S., Community Psychology, Florida A&M University, 2014

B.S., Psychology, University of Central Florida, 2010