Strategic Compensation

About our author Joseph J. Martocchio's interest in the human resource management (HRM) field began while he was a junior at Babson College and in compensation, particularly, while he was a first-year graduate student at Michigan State University. Martocchio found himself wanting to practice in the field as well as become a university professor and researcher. He 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, PA.

Martocchio advanced his education in the HRM field by earning a master's degree and PhD degree at Michigan State University. His master's degree enabled him to build an even stronger foundation in practice and his doctoral degree provided him with the skills to conduct scholarly research and teach college-level courses. Since earning his graduate degrees, Martocchio has 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, he has 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. He also teaches the compensation and statistics courses online. For many years, Martocchio 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, Martocchio has studied a variety of topics that include employee absenteeism, employee training and development, compensation systems, employee benefits, and generational diversity. His 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. He received the Ernest J. McCormick Award for Early Career Contributions from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and was subsequently elected as a Fellow in both the American Psychological Association and SIOP. Following the attainment of this recognition, he served as the Chair of the HR Division of the Academy of Management as well as in various other leadership roles within that organization.

In 2018, a study in the Academy of Management Learning and Education revealed that Martocchio is in the top 1% of the most influential HRM authors out of a total of 9,744 people. Besides writing scholarly articles and Strategic Compensation: A Human Resource Management Approach, he has 2 additional sole-authored textbooks: Human Resource Management (Pearson Higher Education), 15th edition, and Employee Benefits: A Primer for Human Resource Professionals (McGraw-Hill), 6th edition.