At the Academy of Management Conference that was held two weeks ago in Montreal (6-10 aug 2010) the HR-Studies department participated and contributed in some important ways. Besides the "common" presentations of papers in various sessions there were three Professional Development Workshop that were organized by the Department in cooperation with national/international colleague-scientists.

The first (Monique Veld and Jaap Paauwe) involved around contextualizing research in HRM and Performance for health care. Eight renowned researchers in the field of Human Resource Management in health care organizations contributed to this session (including David Guest, King's College, London University, Patrick Flood, Dublin City University, LouiseFitzgerald (Manchester Business School) and Lisa Nishii (Cornell University-USA).

The second professional development workshop focussed on Shared Service Centres. Elaine Farndale and Jaap Paauwe (key note) contributed to this session that was organized by Tanya Badourek (Twente University) and David Lepak (Rutgers University, USA). This session resulted in fruitful roundtable discussions with useful input for cooperation and venues for future research.

The third Professional Development Workshop was organized by Marielle Sonnenberg and Elaine Farndale and titled Engaging Encounters: Talent Management, Employee Engagement and the Researcher - Practitioner Bridge. This session was organized again in close cooperation with international partners from Australia, the USA and the UK, including Paul Sparrow and John Boudreau.

All three sessions were well visited - despite that the starting time was sometimes early - and resulted in further international cooperation, recommendations/suggestions for (improvements of) future research and no doubt contributed to the promotion of the Department HR-Studies in the respective domains.

During the HR Division Breakfast meeting several Awards were handed out, including the International HRM Scholarly Research Award 2010 for Jaap Paauwe en Elaine Farndale, which was handed over by the Chair of the HR Division, professor Howard J. Klein.

We hope that you will join us!

We hope you can all join us for this interesting session!

Organizing committee: Rene Schalk, Jeroen de Jong and Charissa Freese (Tilburg University) and Bennie Linde (North West University).

The theme of the conference is "Capitalizing on Diversity in HRM Research". Many members of our HRS department will attend the conference and present their latest research findings.

On Thursday October 8 (12.45-14.00h, DZ7) Craig Marsh from Lancaster University, United Kingdom, will present his paper: "Business model change and SHRM"

On Friday October 9 (13.00-14.30h, C187) Christopher Harris from the University of Texas, United States, will present his paper: "People as a Source of Competitive Advantage: Relationships Among Human Capital, Social Capital, Behaviors, and Performance".

We hope that you can join us at either or both of these meetings!

The colloquium will take place from 12.45 - 13.45 hrs in room DZ-6. We hope you can join us!

People are one of the most important assets of health care organizations, as they directly contribute to providing more effective and efficient care. Therefore human resource management (HRM) is a critical management task in health care. This conference will focus on this added value of people in health care: how can people performance be improved? HRM researchers from the Netherlands and abroad will present their latest research findings on HRM and performance in health care, covering HRM topics like strategic HRM, HRM and performance, climate, and the HR function. We invite researchers as well as practitioners to join this conference and share ideas on this subject.

Please register for this conference by sending an email to Monique Veld (veld@bmg.eur.nl). Please note: the number of participants is limited to 80.

After two years of coordinating, researching, testing and validating, Renee de Reuver and Brigitte Kroon, together with Erwin Werkers from CenterData, have released the final version of the SIWIT, an online job interest test for people with minor mental disabilities.

People with minor mental disabilities experience problems in expressing what they think. The picture-based test provides a practical tool to discuss job opportunities at their level. On 8 April 2009 the test was officially launched at "Sterk in Werk", in the presence of some one hundred professionals in the field of job coaching and teaching. The project will continue as ongoing improvements will keep the test up-to- date with the requirements of the field.

In the first week of April Jaap Paauwe and Elaine Farndale ran the Advanced HR Programme (in conjunction with TiasNimbas) for the second time. Due to the economic climate, it was unsure whether enough companies would be able to send participants, but at the last moment the programme was able to goahead with twelve, very willing and very capable HR managers. They have signed in for a learning track of 5-6 months, made up of one full week on mainly business topics; then an in-between assignment, by which they design and build their own HR value chain; in June the second week, mainly devoted to HR topics, followed up by a final assignment on how to develop and implement your own high performance high involvement work system, which will be presented during the review day early September.

With a mix of participants from small and large, and private and public sector organizations (stemming from companies like ABNAMRO, Ahold, Brabant water, Boskalis, Oberon, NS, Pon Financial Services, TomTom), there was lively discussion and debate in all of the sessions, which this time included a focus on strategic management,leadership development, management accounting and control, and knowledge management. The participants were very enthusiastic, and as programme academic director and moderator respectively, Jaap and Elaine are looking forward to seeing the participants again in June when they return for their second intensive week, which includes key international speakers such as Wayne Cascio, Patrick Wright, Veronica Hope-Hailey and Chris Brewster.

On 20th January 2009, the second year of the HRM and Employee Relations programme for trade union leaders will start. The programme was developed by the HR Studies Departmentin collaboration with Basis & Beleid Organisatieadviseurs in Utrecht. The first year (2008) had 12 participants from trade unions. Sessions were led by Jaap Paauwe, Paul Boselie, Evert Smit, Marlies van Engen, and Marc van Veldhoven from the HR Studies Department. A number of other tutors also participated, including Ton Wilthagen from Tilburg University Law Faculty. Evert Smit, part-time teacher of employee relations in the HR Studies Department and also a member of Basis & Beleid is the programme coordinator. Click here for the brochure with the programme details (in Dutch only).

Tilburg University has appointed Rob Poell with effect from 1st January 2009 to the post of special Chair of Diversity of School teacher training. The Chair is partly funded for five years by Ons Middelbaar Onderwijs (OMO), the school management body for 45schools of further education in North-Brabant. Poell is going to undertake research into the way in which training in schools contributes to the professionalisation of teachers. Click here for the full press release (in Dutch only).

Elaine Farndale and Marc van Veldhoven, together with two colleagues from the UK (Veronica Hope-Hailey, Cass Business School and Clare Kelliher, Cranfield School of Management), have just been awarded two-year funding by the USA-based SHRM Foundation.

The $100,000 research grant will enable the exploration of the link between performance management and employee engagement in multinational corporations in developed (UK) and developing (India, China) economies.