Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62913
research The study was conducted by Derek Avery, associate professor of human resource management at Temple University's Fox School of Business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Patrick McKay, chair of human resource management at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey; Scott Tonidandel, professor of psychology at Davidson College in North Carolina; Sabrina Volpone, a doctoral student in human resource management at Temple; and Mark Morris, organization effectiveness director at retailer JCPenney. Race Counts in Retail A NEW STUDY finds that a retail store can gain or lose nearly US$100,000 in annual revenue, depending on how closely the race of its employees matches that of its customers. Four researchers analyzed data from 739 outlets in a U.S. department store. They found that when ethnic representation of a store's employees correlated closely with its customer base, that store could improve customer satisfaction and increase annual productivity by $625 per employee. The stores in the study averaged 150 employ- ees each, which correlates to a potential $94,000 per store—or more than $69 million for the parent company. RESEARCH RECOGNITIONS The Chartered Management Institute has named The Cult of the Leader by Christopher Bones its Book of the Year for 2011/2012. Bones is pro- fessor of creativity and leader- ship at Manchester Business School in the United King- 64 May/June 2012 BizEd dom; he also is dean emeri- tus of the Henley Business School and former director of Cadbury-Schweppes. One judge noted that Bones' book, chosen from 154 entries, was a must-read for "anyone wanting to help plot society's While many in the retail industry believe that it's smart to reflect the race of customers on the sales floor, this study quantifies how doing so can affect the bottom line, says Avery. The researchers found that the effect can be even more pronounced for stores with a higher number of minority customers, who may tend to return to stores with a higher repre- sentation of their race on staff. However, the authors offer their findings with a warning—companies shouldn't adopt hiring quotas for employees of a particular race, which is discriminatory. Instead, they rec- ommend that companies regularly assess factors such as their customer bases and applicant pools and then do more to send the right signals to those audiences. Derek Avery "Is There Method to the Madness? Examining How Racioethnic Match- ing Influences Retail Store Productiv- ity" appears in the February 2012 issue of Personnel Psychology. way forward and should be mandatory reading for our politicians." Yadong Luo, Emery Findley Distinguished Chair and pro- fessor of management at the University of Miami School of Business in Florida, has been named the world's foremost international business scholar Patrick McKay by the Management Inter- national Review. Of approxi- mately 1,100 academic arti- cles published between 2001 and 2009, Luo published 24 of them, ranking him No. 1 on MIR's list of the top 25 schol- ars around the world. The Alliance of Merger & Acquisition Advisors has THOMAS BARWICK/GETTY IMAGES RUTGERS UNIVERSITY/ NICK ROMANENKO