The IOHRM Program is proud to announce that all of our second-year students have completed and passed their oralcomprehensive exams (OCE)! The OCE is relatively new for the program and was implemented as an exit exam in place of the PHR exam, which now requires five years of work experience before you can sit for it. For the OCE, students sign-up for hour and a half long time slots, during which threeprofessors, unknown to the students beforehand, ask questions covering a broad range of IOHRM topics. This is a rigorous process and all students performed at the high level of excellence that we expect of all of our graduates. Congratulations to all of the second-year students!
Additionally, two of the graduating second-year students, Ian Head and Sarah Light, successfully defended their theses. Ian’s thesis, titled “How Emotional Intelligence Affects LMX Relationships” examined whether emotional intelligence influencedthe development of employee-supervisorleader-member exchange relationships and found some support for employee-supervisor similarity influencing the relationship between emotional intelligence and leader-member exchange quality. Sarah’s thesis, titled “The Influence of Candidate Gender, Incumbent Gender, and Job Position on Hiring Decisions in an Experimental Paradigm” sought to build on existing research examining gender effects in the initial stages of the hiring process by having participants evaluate a male or female candidate applying for either a managerial or non-managerial position in a retail industry based on their resume alone. Her results suggested that that the job position may be more influential on evaluations of job candidates than either the candidate gender or incumbent gender. Congratulations to Ian and Sarah!
-Written by Cameron Stinnett, Class of 2014