Human Resource Management

About our author Joseph J. Martocchio

My interest in the human resource management field began while I was a junior at Babson College. I found myself wanting to practice in the field as well as to become a university professor and researcher. I pursued both professional desires starting with employment at Cameron and Colby (a reinsurance company) in Boston and General Electric's Aerospace business group in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

I advanced my education in the human resource management (HRM) field by earning a master's degree and PhD degree at Michigan State University. My master's degree enabled me to build an even stronger foundation in practice and my doctoral degree provided me with the skills to conduct scholarly research and teach college-level courses. Since earning my graduate degrees, I have been a professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and assumed administrative roles as a Provost Fellow, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Interim Dean. All the while, I have taught a variety of courses in the HRM field. These include compensation systems, employee benefits, employment systems (HRM and labor relations), HR planning and staffing, and statistics. I also teach the compensation and statistics courses online. For many years, I served as the faculty advisor to the student chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management at the University of Illinois during which time students earned Merit Awards and Superior Merit awards on multiple occasions.

As a researcher, I have studied a variety of topics that include employee absenteeism, employee training and development, compensation systems, employee benefits, and generational diversity. My work appears in leading scholarly journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, and Personnel Psychology. I received the Ernest J. McCormick Award for Distinguished Early Career Contributions from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and I was subsequently elected as a Fellow in both the American Psychological Association and SIOP. Following the attainment of this recognition, I served as the Chair of the HR Division of the Academy of Management as well as in various other leadership roles within that organization.

Besides writing scholarly articles and Human Resource Management, I have 2 sole-authored textbooks: Strategic Compensation: A Human Resource Management Approach (Pearson Higher Education), which is in its 9th edition, and Employee Benefits: A Primer for Human Resource Professionals (McGraw-Hill), which is in its 6th edition.