News and Awards

Latest News

  • 2011 News

    • Associate Professor of Management Dusya Vera was awarded the 2010-2011 UH Teaching Excellence Award.  Vera was honored in April among the best on campus at the annual UH Faculty Awards Ceremony. She has been at with the Department of Management since 2002.  In her nomination letter, one undergraduate student said, “Her compassion for her students and her ability to educate young minds is extraordinary to say the least.  When I walked the stage at my undergraduate commencement ceremony I saw how proud she was and it really made me feel as though this is not only an educator, but a person who truly cares about her students on the deepest level.”   An MBA student expressed, “Dr. Vera’s personality reflects the kind and good person that she is and she has served as a wonderful professor, mentor, and most of all, she has been my living inspiration. I believe that we're destined to meet certain people in our lives for a reason and I am truly fortunate that I had a chance to learn such valuable lessons from a great person like Dr. Vera.”
    • Abigail Hubbard won the Bauer College of Business Payne Teaching Excellence Award for clinical professors in the spring.
    • Chet Miller won the Bauer College of Business MidCon Teaching Excellence Award for EMBA Faculty. 
    • Robert Keller won the Bauer College of Business Melcher Excellence in Service Award for 2011.
    • Management Department Chair, Leanne Atwater, and doctoral student Rachel Sturm are two of the co-authors of the paper “Self-other rating agreement in leadership: A review.” The paper was published in the Leadership Quarterly in 2010 and has been voted as a finalist for the journal’s best article of the year award.
    • Management doctoral student, Cory Angert, and Assistant Professor Seemantini Pathak co-author the paper “The Institutional Environment and Gender Diversity on Boards of Directors”. The paper, which was presented at the annual meeting of the Strategic Management Society in Miami has been nominated for the Best Conference Paper Award.
    • Management doctoral student, Joon Park’s paper “Diversity and Team Performance: A Meta-Analysis" won the 2011 Robert J. Wherry Award for the Best Paper at the IOOB Conference.
  • 2010 News

    • Effective September 2010, Professor Leanne Atwater is the new Senior Editor of Leadership Quarterly. Professor Bob Keller is joining her as an Editorial Board Member, and Lecturer Naomi Werner is the new Managing Editor.

      The Leadership Quarterly is an international journal of political, social, and behavioral science dedicated to advancing theory, research, and applications concerning leadership. Contributions to thinking about leadership are desired from many disciplinary perspectives, including political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology, and history. Equally desirable are contributions from interdisciplinary fields such as human resource management, international management, administrative science, strategic management, labor studies, and organization theory and behavior. The aim of the journal is to present scholarly research, theory, and developmental application from the diverse fields of inquiry about leadership.

      The Bauer College of Business will be the home of Leadership Quarterly for the next six years.
    • The University of Houston was again in the list of the schools with 30+ participants at the Academy of Management conference in Montreal, Canada. The list included 36 schools this year, including schools such as Harvard U., U. of Michigan, Texas A&M U., and U. of Texas. UH had 39 participants, 18 of which were members of the MANA department at the C. T. Bauer College of Business. Five of our participants were MANA doctoral students.
    • The Management department is celebrating the launch of a new section to the UH Bauer website focusing on leadership initiatives within the college, the university and the community, located online at http://www.bauer.uh.edu/leadership/ and linked from the Bauer homepage, www.bauer.uh.edu. The goal of this site is to help students new to Bauer, as well as the entire campus community and visitors, have a more comprehensive idea of the various leadership development opportunities and initiatives at UH Bauer. This was a collaborative project initiated by Department of Management Chair Leanne Atwater and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Business Programs Frank Kelley, created by the UH Bauer Office of Communication in the Office of the Dean.

      This web portal is one of the first and most primary leadership portals at UH and is intended to capture a broad scope of the various programs, organizations, activities and initiatives that focus on leadership and are channeled through UH Bauer.
    • Associate Professor of Management Richard DeFrank was honored in April among the best on campus at the annual UH Faculty Awards Ceremony. DeFrank, who began his career with the Department of Management in 1989 as a visiting professor, was recognized with the UH Teaching Excellence Award. The quality of DeFrank’s teaching shines through in the high student evaluations he regularly receives and frequent comments from students that he is the best professor they’ve ever had, said department chair Leanne Atwater.

      “He is hands-down the single most talented educator I have ever seen,” an undergraduate student wrote in a nomination letter. “He cares about his students and provides them every opportunity to do well in his classes. After certain lectures, I (along with a great many others) almost felt inclined to stand up and start clapping.”
    • MANA Doctoral candidate, Marina Sebastijanovic, was also a finalist for the UH Teaching Excellence Award for graduate teaching assistants.
  • 2009 News

    • Forty-six MBA students travelled with Professor Steve Werner, Professor Dusya Vera as part of the Study Abroad Trip to Berlin. This was the 14th time that the department has offered the Berlin trip. The department also offers trips to Prague, Czech Republic, and Santiago, Chile. The students visited companies including Transparency International, Vemmtec, Deutsches Theater and Collonil. In addition, they participated in lectures on the topics of “The History of Berlin and the Changing Map of Europe,” and “The European Union facing the Economic Crisis-Still muddling through or half way through?” As part of the trip students also visited the Collegium Polonicum of the University of Poznan in Slubice, Poland, where Professor Krzysztof Wojciechowski discussed with them the topic of “Poland and Germany – aspects of neighborhood.” This trip was the first opportunity for many of the students to travel abroad.
    • The following papers, co-authored by management faculty and doctoral students, have been accepted for presentation at important national management conferences. Je'anna Abbott, Teri, Elkins-Longacre, and Jim Phillips will present “Mock Victims’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment: Why and When Do They Blame the Organization?” and Susana Velez-Castrillon and Seemantini Pathak will present “Why Do They Serve? A Typology of Director Motives” at the National Academy of Management Conference in Chicago. Susana Velez-Castrillon will also present at the National Strategic Management Society Conference in Washington, DC, a paper co-authored with Dusya Vera and Ariff Kachra entitled “An Examination of the Effect of Improvisational Decision Making in Top Management Teams on Performance.” Finally, Je'anna Abbot and M. Dawson are presenting “Hospitality Culture and Climate: Keys to Retaining Hospitality Employees and Creating Competitive Advantage” at International CHRIE - The conference of the Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education. This paper has been recommended for a best paper award.
    • Dr. Steve Werner and Dr. Herman Aguinis led a team of management doctoral students, Cory Angert, Je'anna Abbott, Joon Park, and Donna Kohlhausen, in a study entitled “Customer-centric science: Reporting significant research results with rigor, relevance, and practical implications in mind.” The study is forthcoming in Organizational Research Methods in August of 2009.
    • Management doctoral students Marina Sebastijanovic and David Epstein were the recipients of the Management Department Doctoral Student Award for Excellence in Teaching. Susana Velez-Castrillon was the recipient of the Management Department Doctoral Student Award for Excellence in Research.
    • The Associate Editors of the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education have chosen the paper "ENHANCING KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN CLASSROOM VERSUS ON-LINE SETTINGS: THE INTERPLAY AMONG INSTRUCTOR, STUDENT, CONTENT, AND CONTEXT," coauthored by management department graduate Louise Nemanich, doctoral candidate Michael Banks, and Dr. Dusya Vera as one of the best empirical papers published in DSJIE during 2008-2009.
    • Management doctoral candidate, Michael Banks, received the award for the Best reviewer of the Business Policy track for the 2009 Southwest Academy of Management.
    • Dr. Dusya Vera has been invited to join the Editorial Board of Management Learning, The Journal for Managerial and Organizational Learning.
    • Dr. Steve Werner joined the renowed authors Dr. Susan Jackson and Dr. Randell Shuller in developing the new edition of the long-standing human resource management textbook “Managing Human Resources, 10th Edition.”
    • The student chapter of SHRM - Society of Human Resource Management - led by advisors Dr. Teri Elkins Longacre and Dr. Steve Werner - was the recipient of the Bauer College’s Rising Star Award for 2009. The chapter gain sixty-one members in its first year.
    • Management professors Seemantini Pathak and Barbara Carlin, with their coauthor Dr. Katalin Takacs Haynes, will present the paper “What Keeps Them Going? An Examination of Subsidiary Resilience to Terrorist Attacks in the Host Country” at the Strategic Management Society Conference in Washington DC.
    • Bauer’s MBA students ranked the program one of the top 15 schools in The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur’s “Student Opinion Honors for Business Schools” in the General Management category. The Honors salute the 15 graduate business schools in the U.S. that were most highly rated by students evaluating their MBA program’s preparation in specific categories, including General Management. Visit Entrepreneur.com for more information.
    • Baker Hughes Professor Robert Keller was a distinguished speaker in January at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he presented a paper titled, "Longitudinal Predictors of R&D Performance for Scientists and Engineers."
  • 2008 News

    • Congratulations to management doctoral students Jeanna Abbott, Michael Banks, Marina Sebastijanovic and Susana Velez-Castrillon who along with their faculty co-authors, Teri Elkins, Dusya Vera, Richard DeFrank and William Zahn, had paper presentations accepted at the 2008 National Academy of Management Meetings in Anaheim, CA.
    • Prof. Dusya Vera was one of three guest co-editors of the Special Issue of Management Learning on "Learning Fusion."
    • In late September, Prof. Richard DeFrank was interviewed by 740 AM KTRH regarding the closing of a pair of local car dealerships and the implications for other dealers as well as the employees. He was also interviewed in October by KTRH regarding an online survey suggesting that almost half of U.S. workers do not respect their bosses.
    • In a July 3 article on Bloomberg.com, Prof. DeFrank was quoted regarding an altercation between a Houston Astros player and the team's general manager.
    • Prof. DeFrank was also interviewed by Laptop magazine regarding business travel stress in an article in the June 2008 issue.
    • Associate Prof. DeFrank was interviewed by the Houston Business Journal about a survey of the most stressful metropolitan areas in the United States. The article appeared in the March 14-20 issue of the HBJ.
    • Associate professor Steve Werner was interviewed in September for a Houston Chronicle article on incentives for small businesses.
    • Associate professor Steve Werner was asked to be on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management and the Journal of Business Research. He is already a member of the boards of Human Resource Management and Human Resource Management Review. Prof. Werner was also recently elected to the executive committee of the HR Division of the Academy of Management. In addition, he was the guest editor of the International Journal of Human Resource Management's Special Issue on Managing Human Resources in North America in August 2008.
    • Dr. Leanne Atwater has joined the department as chair. Atwater previously led the Management Department at Arizona State University’s School of Global Management and Leadership. Click here to read the full story.
    • Congratulations to assistant professor Dusya Vera, who has been appointed to the Editorial Board of the Academy of Management Review, the leading theoretical/conceptual journal in management.
  • 2007 News

    • Congratulations to Assistant Prof. Dusya Vera, who has been appointed to the Editorial Board of the Academy of Management Journal, the leading empirical journal in management.
    • Department chair Dr. Leanne Atwater became a Fellow in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
    • Prof. Dusya Vera and Ph.D. alumna Louise Nemanich were awarded a Best Conference Paper Prize (Honorable Mention) for their paper, "Building improvisation capability in R&D teams" at the Strategic Management Society. Along with doctoral student Michael Banks, Vera and Nemanich also obtained the Best Paper Award of the Management Education Division of the Academy of Management Conference for their paper, "Knowledge transfer and enjoyment in classroom vs. on-line settings."
    • Prof. Vera also received the Lucille and Leroy Melcher Faculty Excellence Award for Excellence in Teaching at the C. T. Bauer College of Business.
  • 2006 News

    • Prof. Dusya Vera received the Melcher Faculty Excellence Award for Excellence in Research at the UH C. T. Bauer College of Business.