Greeting from East Lansing, where we are fresh of the heels of the Executive Committee Mid-Year Meeting, held on the campus of Michigan State University. The Mid-Year Meeting was attended by the HR Division Leadership, and includes the past and future division chairs, as well as the chairs of our standing committees such as Awards, Communications, Doctoral Student/Junior Faculty Consortiums, International Relations, Practice Liaisons, Teaching, and Finance. We welcomed four new members to the leadership team this year (Ken Brown, John Delery, Theresa Glomb, and Mickey Quinones) and I want to personally thank the membership for electing such a great new group of people to the leadership team.

This meeting is devoted partially to helping generate innovative programming for both the Scholarly Program and Professional Development Workshops that are being managed this year by Howard Klein and John Delery respectively. We came up with a number of ideas that we think will make for great programming in Anaheim, and we are in the process of lining up a dynamic set of speakers and session topics. Of course, the majority of programming for the conference depends on you, our members to submit your own ideas, and we look forward to a record number of submissions this year. Please keep in mind the deadlines for the both the PDW (November 15, 2008) and the Scholarly Program (January 15, 2008), and submit your work to Howard and John early and often (well, as often as you can within the rule of three limitation!).

We also devote part of this meeting to discussing how to increase our membership. We are currently the third largest division in the Academy with over 3,400 members and are growing at a rate of roughly 3% a year. While it is true that we are a large and growing division, that fact remains that the growth rate for the HR Division is slightly lower than several other divisions, and at the Mid-Year Meeting we discussed several initiatives to recruit new members. These new initiatives will be directed especially towards students and international members. We also discussed strategies to raise retention rates, although currently our retention rate is very high and there are limits to the gains we can make on this dimension. If you have any ideas on these topics, please forward them to the leadership so we can continue to grow and meet the needs of the membership.

Of course, as we all know, size can also be a liability, and we also discussed initiatives at the Mid-Year Meeting that could help to make the division seem smaller and more user- friendly to our members. The goal for everyone is to create a division where each member can draw from and contribute to HR scholarship, teaching and service in a way that matches their own unique talents and interests. We encourage everyone who reads this message (both of you!) to study our web page, familiarize yourself with our committee structure, and perhaps volunteer for a committee. The HR Division needs your input in order to be successful.

November 15, 2007 - Professional Development Workshop (PDW) submissions due
Contact the HR Division PDW Chair John Delery, at jdelery@walton.uark.edu or 479-575-6230 with questions.

December 15, 2007 - Innovative Teaching in Human Resources and Industrial Relations (HRIR) Conference proposals due
See www.hirirteaching.umn.edu for more information.

February 1, 2008 - International HRM Scholarly Achievement Award, Early Career Achievement Award, Innovative Teaching Award nominations due
See www.hrdiv.org/hrdivision/awards.htm for more information.

We're in the process of putting together a great doctoral consortium for the 2008 Academy meetings. Plan on meeting great HR faculty and scholars, learning what editors really think, sharing ideas, hearing career advice that you may not get elsewhere, and getting a chance to network and socialize with your peers! Keep tuned to future Newsletters and the HR Division Website for more details and deadlines. The deadline for applications will be in May 2008. If you have any questions, please contact us at dallen@memphis.edu, morgeson@msu.edu, or kzellars@email.uncc.edu.

We wanted to first thank all of the participants who attended the 2007 junior faculty consortium in Philadelphia. The day was a tremendous success with over 35 participants representing more than 10 countries. We hope you learned many useful tips that will help you succeed in your academic career and that you made a few new friends in the Academy.

We also want to thank our panelists from the 2007 consortium: Jeff LePine, Mark Bolino, Dan Moshavi, Marcie LePine, Christina Shalley, Steve Rogelberg, Amy Kristof-Brown, Micki Kacmar, Brad Kirkman, and Theresa Welbourne. Without your support of the HR Division, such workshops would not be possible. Thanks for spending time with the junior faculty consortium participants!

Finally, while it may seem far away, plans are already underway for an even better junior faculty consortium in Anaheim, CA! We plan to meet from 9am-5pm on Saturday, August 9. We are designing a set of sessions related to teaching and research that will be relevant for U.S. and international faculty at the starting gate of their academic careers. All session topics will be unique from those covered in the HR Division doctoral consortium. Anyone who completed their PhD within the past 5 years and is looking for tips to succeed in an academic career in HRM will be welcome to attend the 2008 Junior Faculty Consortium. Please look for further information in future newsletters.

Research excellence in international human resource management (IHRM) is unique because of its intersection among multiple fields of management, such as Human Resource Management (HRM) and International Management (IM). Scholars working in IHRM have the ability to make a contribution not only to IHRM, but also to broader areas of management - giving colleagues in traditional human resources a broader contextual understanding of their work. To recognize the unique contribution made by IHRM, the HR Division's IHRM Scholarly Research Award has been created. This annual award is given to the scholar or scholars who have advanced IHRM in some significant way through a single piece of published work.

For the 2007 award, the first one to be made, the International Committee of the US Academy of Management has conducted a retrospective review of academic output throughout the years 2005 and 2006. It concentrated on papers that have been influential to the field of International Human Resource Management.

The Committee sought self and peer nominated papers and papers selected through expert selection. The review concentrated on output from the highest standing (citation and impact) journals that take papers in the territory (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management International Review, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of International Business Studies, Human Resource Management and Human Resource Management Journal.

The IHRM Scholarly Award Winner

The review process has now been completed and the International Committee is delighted to announce that the clear winner of the 2007 IHRM Scholarly Award was the paper by Barry Gerhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Meiyu Fang (National Central University of Taiwan): Gerhart, B. and Fang, M. (2005) National culture and human resource management: assumptions and evidence. International Journal of HRM, 16 (6): 971- 986.
This paper has won the award because of the perceived importance of its findings. It examined the assumptions behind the use of culture as an explanator of country differences in HRM. It focused on the work of Hofstede and raised important statistical questions about treatment of data. It drew upon meta-analyses and other studies to assess the impact of culture, and produced a reduced estimate of explained variance down from 50% to 2-4%. The re- analysis of data showed that although culture can still be important, its impact must be put into context and other factors such as organisational culture.