University Human Resource Research Articles

Check Out HealthyMe@UMB and Call Me in the Morning

This paper describes the development of Healthy Me @ UMB <http://www.hshsl.umaryland.edu/healthyme>, a Web site for promoting quality health information and campus health and wellness resources. The Health Sciences and Human Services Library at the University of Maryland collaborated with the University's Human Resources Office to develop and promote the resource to staff, faculty, and students on campus.

Expanding medical library support in response to the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy

Responding to recent changes in the scholarly publishing process, Coy C. Carpenter Library is expanding its scholarly communications program to better support the research publication efforts of the faculty at Wake Forest University Health Sciences (WFUHS). Recent advances in open access publishing and archiving initiatives, adoption of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) “Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research” (Public Access Policy) in 2005, the rapidly increasing pool of published biomedical research, rising costs of subscription rates, and continued barriers to access have necessitated an internal redesign of the library's Faculty Publications (FP) database. Changes in the scholarly publishing environment have also spurred the creation of online resource lists specifically addressing common issues in scholarly communications, including copyright and intellectual property ownership, open access, and the importance of scholarly publishing [1–3]. These efforts, coupled with plans for educational sessions on open access and copyright retention for faculty, are intended to address common questions raised during the publishing process. In particular, the FP database will bridge faculty publication citations to individuals' personnel profiles in the university's human resources department's management software, PeopleSoft, and to the full text of faculty-authored journal articles, thus providing the institution with a more complete picture of WFUHS faculty research initiatives and outcomes. This paper illustrates key objectives in Carpenter Library's strategy for supporting scholarly communications through enhancing the knowledge management applications of the FP database and leveraging the database's functions to promote open access to research.

VIVO

To help faculty, researchers, and students in the life sciences discover common interests and make connections, the Cornell University Library has created a virtual life sciences community that uses an entity-relationship ontology model to organize and present information on people, research, and education activities. This single point of access for scholarly activity in the life sciences at Cornell ? VIVO (http://vivo.library.cornell.edu) ? transcends campus, college and department structure to provide Cornell faculty, students, and administrative and service officials, prospective faculty and students, external sponsors, and the public an integrated view of the life sciences at Cornell. At the request of university administration, the VIVO database is currently being augmented to provide similar content for the social sciences, engineering, physical sciences, international activities, and potentially other areas at Cornell. VIVO's search engine clusters results into categories (People, Activities, Events, Organizations, Publications, etc.), providing a campus-wide search capability that offers a richer context than typical undifferentiated text-based indexes. Each page in VIVO presents bi-directional hyperlinks to any related entities, giving users access to a web of content that might otherwise necessitate discovering and visiting multiple websites. VIVO draws on content from across the university through automated ingest of core university human resource and grants information, subscriptions to licensed and public domain publications databases, department or college faculty reporting mechanisms, and manual curation. The underlying ontology model organizes information at a granular level by type (entities) and relationship (properties) to present, for example, faculty profiles with affiliations to departments, fields, or research units, research projects, courses, seminars, and facilities relevant to life scientists regardless of the campus, college, or department in which the entity resides.

Factors Associated with Research Anxiety of University Human Resource Education Faculty

Factors Associated with Research Anxiety of University Human Resource Education Faculty

A heuristic approach to simultaneous course/student timetabling

Many approaches have been taken in academic environments to address the problem of student and course timetabling. Typically, student scheduling and course scheduling have been treated as separate tasks. Our approach is to build the schedule and place the students into classes simultaneously. That is, to collect all constraints and requirements, quantify them, and build a schedule based on heuristic functions, as we populate it with students. Heuristic functions are also used to order the processing of students. After the schedule is built, we endeavour to further optimise it using additional heuristic-based operations. An initial parallel implementation of the system was performed alongside the manual system followed by live runs in recent semesters. The system has been successfully adopted by the United Arab Emirates University's University General Requirements Unit since the semester starting February 2001. The schedules created have been well accepted by the students and the administration as they have made good use of the students’ time while making near-optimal use of the University's physical and human resources. The scheduling system is written in Visual Basic with embedded SQL.

Facilitators and inhibitors of the transfer of knowledge between scientists and practitioners in human resource management: Leveraging cultural, individual, and institutional variables

Industrial-organizational psychologists in university settings and human resource managers in organizational settings comprise “two solitudes”. The psychologists toil at discovering theory and data to enable managers to increase an organization's effectiveness. The managers are either unaware or unconvinced of the value of psychological theory and research. Eight prescriptive ways are suggested to facilitate reciprocal learning between these two solitudes. A triadic framework is discussed for removing the inhibitors that currently maintain the two solitudes.

Assessing academic department efficiency at a public university

AbstractThe assessment of public universities has gained importance because of the demands from such state government bodies as the executive and the legislature. Public universities are increasingly being asked to account for how efficiently they have used diminishing state financial resources. Administrators thus have the responsibility of ensuring that the university's financial, human, and physical resources are allocated to academic departments in a manner that enhances the institution's efficiency. In this paper, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is proposed for evaluating the efficiency of academic departments at a public university. DEA provides a single measure of efficiency for each academic unit. It also identifies the causes behind the inefficiencies exhibited by poor performing units, as well as the changes that these units need to make in order to improve their efficiencies. Its usefulness as a planning tool is also discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Vigor or Rigor? The Competing Goals of Variety Trials

Both growers and vegetable seed companies have had long-term historic relationships with public agriculture extension educators and faculty to conduct unbiased evaluation of vegetable varieties. Reductions in both the number of vegetable seed companies as well as university human resources has led to questions about the viability and appropriateness of publicly-funded variety evaluation programs. Field based extension educators and regional staff have taken more leadership to evaluate varieties, but this often results in fragmented or repetitive trials with limited long term integration of data. Statewide vegetable extension specialists must provide the leadership in coordinating these trials to enhance the rigor of data collection and analysis. Fundamental to enhancing rigor is improving regional coordination and collaboration. The calculation of stability estimates for new and older varieties is most efficiently and quickly achieved through regional collaborations. Initial efforts should improve uniformity of trials by creating common evaluation methods for yield and qualitative evaluations (e.g., color, appearance), including two standard varieties (one local and one regional, long-term standard), standardizing field establishment practices, and selecting experimental designs and plot sizes to improve labor efficiency. These regionally coordinated trials will improve the ability to publish this type of applied research and demonstrate new levels of efficiency for university administrations. In the long term, carefully designed comparisons of genotypic performance among different environments could suggest new directions for university breeding programs as well as cropping systems research.

Feedback seeking in university human resource development education in the US, UK, and Singapore

This survey-based study centered on feedback seeking behaviors by students in twelve human resource development university courses in the US, UK, and Singapore. Based on previous research, the study differentiated among sources of feedback, and student and instructor behaviors and characteristics. The results of this study suggest that students sought feedback about attainment of learning goals quite frequently and from a variety of sources. Instructors tended to underestimate their own role and overestimate the contributions of course activities and materials in this process. Individual-level and instructor-related variables emerged as important predictors of feedback seeking behaviors. The implications of these findings for further research and the practice of human resource development education and training are discussed.

Evolution and current status of university HR programs

Current-day university human resource educational programs had their beginnings in the late 1910s and early 1920s when textbooks and courses in personnel management first appeared, an event that occurred in tandem with the emergence of personnel management/industrial relations as a new functional area of business practice. Over the next eight decades, both the practice of HR management and the university programs that train people for it have evolved and grown in a number of important and interesting ways. This article provides a brief overview of this evolution in university HR education, summarizes the structure and curriculum of contemporary HR degree programs, and briefly describes the strengths and weaknesses of HR management as an intellectual subject area. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Corporate Performance and CEO Turnover: The Role of Performance Expectations

We are grateful to Lynch, Jones, and Ryan, Inc. for use of the I/B/E/S data base and to Lawrence Brown, James Meindl, Jerry Newman, Gerald Salancik, participants in the Northeastern University Human Resources Management research seminar, and the ASQ reviewers for their valuable comments. We would also like to thank Linda Pike for her editorial insights. The authors are listed in alphabetical order. This paper proposes that the inconsistent findings in previous studies of the relationship between corporate performance and CEO turnover may be due to insufficient attention to the type of performance indicator used by the individuals responsible for making CEO turnover decisions, namely, the board of directors. We argue that the board develops expectations of corporate performance, which it then uses to judge the CEO's performance. The study reported here analyzes financial analysts' forecasts of corporate performance, as a surrogate for the expectations board members could be expected to have, and then examines the relationship of forecasts to turnover. The principal finding is that turnover occurs when reported annual earnings per share fall short of expectations. For a sample of 408 CEOs under the age of retirement, this measure of corporate performance is a predictor of CEO turnover, whereas mechanical algorithms of abnormal security returns and historical accounting ratios are not.'