The Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award
This award recognizes a work-family researcher or research team who have/has contributed break-through thinking to the work-family field via theory, measures, and/or data sets that led to expansive application, innovation, and diffusion, including the sharing of research opportunity in the spirit of open science.
Honoring Ellen Galinsky
Ellen Galinsky is the Chief Science Officer/Executive Director of Mind in the Making at the Bezos Family Foundation and a senior research advisor for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). She remains president of Families and Work Institute and is the author of over 100 books/reports and 300 articles.
While on the faculty of Bank Street College in the 1970s, Galinsky researched/co-authored a book about exemplary child care, founded The Family Center at Bank Street, and conducted studies on interventions to improve the quality of childcare. In the 1980s, she wrote the Six Stages of Parenthood and led studies on parent-professional relationships.
Seeing how important work-life issues are, she helped establish the work-life field in the 1980s, co-founding Families and Work Institute in 1989. Since then, she has directed/co-directed the most comprehensive ongoing studies of the U.S. workforce/workplace as well as an award program, When Work Works, now in all 50 states. In December 2016, these programs became a part of SHRM, which will release nine new reports in 2018-2019.
In 2000, Ellen Galinsky became concerned that far too many young people were dropping out of learning. The resulting research journey led to her book, Mind in the Making. In March 2016, Mind in the Making became a program of the Bezos Family Foundation. It has developed many materials, including Learning Modules now in 20 states/communities and in Head Start.
Award Recipient
2022 Award Recipient: Tammy Allen
Tammy Allen is Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida. When Dr. Allen began work on work-family issues in the 1990s, the field was is in its infancy. Her work on the topic helped fuel the explosion of research that has occurred over the past several decades. Her 2000 Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (JOHP) meta-analytic review article helped set an agenda for future research. In addition, her 2001 Journal of Vocational Behavior article “Family-supportive work environments: The role of organizational perceptions” was one of the first studies to develop theory and measurement on the importance of family-specific organizational support that goes beyond specific policies, a topic that remains of considerable interest to researchers and practitioners today.
Dr. Allen’s research includes several streams that are innovative and generative in nature. One extends her early work on the limitations of specific policies such as flexible work arrangements (FWA). Although FWA historically have been commonly viewed as a key organizational response to work-family issues, the research findings with regard to efficacy have been mixed. Through a programmatic line of research that included qualitative reviews, primary research, and meta-analytic review, Dr. Allen and her colleagues identified and tested explanations for the mixed results, yielding a better understanding of when FWA are more or less effective in mitigating work-family conflict. Her work has also played a key role in bringing child and family-related outcomes to the fore within organizational psychology. Traditionally, organizational psychologists focused exclusively on work-related outcomes such job attitudes and performance.
Through research examining connections between work variables (e.g., work demands, work hours) and variables such as family dinners, parent-child interactions, and child health behaviors, the organizational psychology literature on work and family research has been expanded to include consideration of the family side of the work-family equation. She has also helped foster work-family research via a cross-cultural/national lens. For example, her recent meta-analytic work on work-family conflict cross-nationally (recent studies published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, and Journal of Vocational Behavior) is extending theory and helping develop an agenda for future research needs for the global work-family research community. A current research stream is devoted to the development of theory, methodologies, and tools for better understanding work-family conflict from a more temporal, person-centered perspective. This includes examining work-family conflict episodically, incorporating physiological assessments, and use of wearable technology.