Faculty-Staff Achievements, March 24, 2013

Awards

Caroline D’Abate, associate professor of management, was recently named a recipient of the Richard A. Swanson Research Excellence Award by the Academy of Human Resource Development. D’Abate and her co-authors were recognized for their published research on mentoring at a Fortune 500 firm, in which they showed the significant positive effects of mentoring. Their article, titled “Mentoring as an HRD Approach:  Effects on Employee Attitudes and Contributions Independent of Core Self-Evaluation,” appeared in Human Resource Development Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2012. Co-authors are P.W. Thurston and E.R. Eddy.

The authors studied whether efforts to reduce barriers to mentoring and efforts to encourage mentoring can lead to such benefits such as greater job, career, and coworker satisfaction; more organizational commitment; and higher performance and competency levels. Moreover, they sought to determine if these effects are independent of the personality of the individual being mentored.

Data from 121 supervisors and 632 employees were analyzed with results demonstrating that while both mentoring and core self-evaluation (personality) had positive and independent relationships with job and organizational attitudes, only mentoring had a statistically reliable relationship with supervisors’ reports of employee contributions (ratings of job performance and competency level). The data demonstrated that mentoring is a more important predictor of employee contributions to the organization than employee’s personality.

D’Abate and her colleagues write, “The promise of mentoring as a strategic human resource development intervention is that all employees can potentially benefit from learning, career, and psychosocial support – not just those [employees] brimming with self-confidence. This study provided evidence that organizations can help their employees and themselves by investing in mentoring programs.”   

Scott Enderle, visiting assistant professor of English, has won the 2013 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities for his dissertation “Novel Properties: Communication, Copyright, and the British Novel, 1710-1774.” This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture, and the humanities. The award was presented at the association’s 2013 annual meeting, hosted March 22-23 by Birbeck, University of London.

Professor of Music Gordon Thompson’s online article “A British Ante-invasion: ‘Telstar,’ 17 August 1962” was chosen by Oxford University Press editor Alice Northover as one of the “Top 10 OUPblog Posts of 2012.”

Activities

Rochelle Calhoun, dean of student affairs, engaged in a conversation with Assistant Police Chief Gregory Veitch of the Saratoga Springs Police Department, following the March 23 screening of the Ken Burns documentary The Central Park Five at the Saratoga Film Forum. The conversation was part of the film forum’s “In the Public Interest” series.

Publications

Victor Cahn, professor of English, is the co-author (with his brother Steven) of Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts into Finished Work (2013, Columbia University Press).

In the News

An interview with Terry Conrad, visiting assistant professor, Department of Art, by Mary Kathryn Jablonski ’89 appears in Numéro Cinq  magazine, March 10, 2013.

Mary Zeiss Stange, professor of women’s studies and religion, did a 45-minute interview/call-in program March 20 with Minnesota Public Radio, on the subject of women and guns.

Gordon Thompson, professor of music was interviewed by Vince Gallagher of YNN about the significance of the “50th Anniversary of the Beatles' First Album,”  Please Please Me on Friday 22 March.