2020 Award Recipient: Hak Yoon Kim
This award recognizes a recent graduate of a doctoral program who has already made a significant contribution to the work and family knowledge base. The Kathleen Christensen Dissertation Award has been created to encourage doctoral candidates and early career scholars to reach for/achieve high and rigorous standards of research relevant to the work and family area of study. It provides financial support to help a promising work-family scholar to initiate post-dissertation research. This award is co-sponsored and co-selected by the Work and Family Researchers Network and the Society for Human Resource Management. This award is made possible by generous support from the Northrop Grumman Corporation, the Families and Work Institute, the SHRM Foundation, SHRM’s National Study of the Changing Workforce, and the Work and Family Researchers Network members. The award recipient was selected by the review committee Alexander Alonso, Clare Kelliher, Gary Latham, and Christina Matz (chair)
Dr. Hak Yoon Kim is currently an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior/Human Resource Management at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She received her PhD at Case Western Reserve University (USA) in 2019 in Organizational Behavior. Her dissertation is “The Working Mom’s Tug of War: Trajectories of Work-Family Conflict and the Buffering Roles of Job and Family Satisfaction.”
Dr. Kim’s research focuses on the dynamic nature of work-family conflict among working mothers by exploring trajectories of work-family and family-work interference and the buffering roles of personal resources such as job and family satisfaction. Her ambitious research project investigated the experiences of South Korean women over a six year period. Important findings of the study are the buffering role of job satisfaction and how linkages between interference and satisfaction can be explained by conservation of resources theory. Dr. Kim’s dissertation suggests that organizations can benefit by attending to the long-term effects of work-family conflict among employees, particularly for working mothers. She concludes that unless organizations (and societies) find ways to buffer against the negative effects of work-family conflict, birth rates among dual-earner couples may continue to decline. Her research directly relates to organizational practice, demonstrating how the creation of satisfying work can mitigate the adverse effects of work-family conflict. Dr. Kim plans to extend this research by focusing on working fathers’ experiences and on social class dynamics.