Main Menu
Contact: David West
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466
5/20/99
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NATCHITOCHES - Four research articles co-authored by Northwestern State University Associate Professor of Management Marcelline Fusilier have either been published or accepted for publication in national professional journals.
Two articles were written with Northwestern Professor of Business Subhash Durlabhji.
"HRM for The 21st Century: A New Perspective" was published in the "Proceedings of the Academy of Strategic and Organizational Leadership."
The paper contends that organizations should expand their vision to incorporate spiritual need fulfillment and make whole the fragmented view of humans on which it is based. This view focuses on material need fulfillment.
In their paper, Durlabhji and Fusilier explain the five-step pyramid of human needs. They maintain the program they suggest is as scientifically grounded as any modern program. The paper explores the organization's role in this process.
The other collaborative effort examines the college classroom. This paper, "The Empowered Classroom: Applying TQM to College Teaching," will be published in the journal "Managing Service Quality."
In conducting the research, Fusilier and Durlabhji utilized the principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) in designing a graduate course in organizational behavior. The principles included 100 percent customer satisfaction/zero defects, self-managing or autonomous teams, employee empowerment and continuous process evaluation and improvement.
According to Fusilier, students made many choices in the course that are usually made by an instructor. She said students responded enthusiastically to the challenges of self-managing teams and empowerment. However, the concepts of customer satisfaction and process evaluation were more difficult to translate into class process. In the paper, the researchers examined the theoretical and practical implications of applying a business management model to an educational context. They also looked at the study's implication for higher education.
Fusilier and NSU Assistant Professor of Business John G. Williams co-wrote a paper, "Awareness of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Among Personnel Managers." The article was published in the Journal of Individual Employment Rights.
Williams and Fusilier sampled 150 personnel/human resource managers from the public and private sector. They found a high level of awareness and knowledge of the ADA among the managers sampled. Fusilier said that virtually no empirical research to date has addressed employer knowledge of the law.
Fusilier and Michael R. Manning of New Mexico State University collaborated on a paper, "The Relationship between Stress and Health Care Use: An Investigation of the Buffering Roles of Personality, Social Support, and Exercise." The article was published in the Journal of Psychomatic Research, a behavioral medicine journal.
This research is part of a larger study that evaluated employee wellness programs in work organizations. Fusilier and Manning found that the presence of exercise, hardiness and social support seemed to decrease health care use but the factors contributing to greater health care costs and claims were more complicated to interpret.