Dennis Marquardt Hits an Academic Triple

by M. C. Jennings | Aug 20, 2019 | Academics, COBA Faculty, Human Resource Management, Research, Uncategorized

It’s been quite a summer for Assistant Professor of Management, Dr. Dennis Marquardt. Marquardt was

Dr. Dennis Marquardt

voted as ACU’s 2019 Teacher of the Year in May, a prestigious honor as faculty member nominees are submitted by students, and he was named as the new Director for the Lytle Center for Faith and Leadership, succeeding founding Director, Dr. Rick Lytle. Dennis was also part of an award winning research team whose paper received recognition at the Academy of Management Conference in August in Boston, MA. The annual conference features over 10,000 management scholars from universities across the globe. We asked him to reflect on the awards, his new position, and what his plans are for the year ahead.

ACU’s Teacher of the Year award came as a surprise for Marquardt, who is deeply humbled, grateful and thankful for the honor. “When it was announced in the first graduation service, it took a little while for it to even register that they were talking about me.  Since there are so many teaching giants at ACU that I deeply admire and respect, I really never thought I would get such an award.” When asked what drives his teaching, Marquardt explained, “It’s a sacred trust when a student comes into my classroom; something I try never to take for granted.  Students are often told that the best way for me to show that I care for them is to maintain the highest of expectations for each of them. I want them to wrestle with tough questions, be exposed to new ideas, and be better equipped as a person than they were before coming to class. While learning is always a chief priority, the thing I care most deeply about as a professor is who my students are becoming as people. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote, ‘intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.’ I couldn’t agree more.”

Marquardt teaching at Leadership Summit

Marquardt’s passion for teaching students is evident in his classroom on the ACU campus and in his sessions at Leadership Summit, where he has served as a faculty member and mentor for the last four years. He’s also been involved with Lytle Center weekly chapels and a weekly morning men’s Bible Study that was born from Leadership Summit attendees asking Dennis and Tim Johnston to bring more of the lessons from the mountain to Abilene. Moving into the role of Director for the Lytle Center for Faith and Leadership is a natural fit for Marquardt. The Lytle Center is new to many people and Dennis looks forward to spreading the word about the mission of the Center. “Our slogan is: ‘Serving God in the Workplace, Serving the Workplace for God’. As people of faith in Jesus Christ, we believe our calling is to be leaders who influence others for the advancement of the kingdom of God (where hope, peace, and life abound). Because of this, we want the students, alumni, and faculty that we serve to be skilled and capable leaders. This means they can effectively promote a vision, drive change, resolve conflict, build teams, make decisions, and empower others. As highly capable leaders, our students and alumni become effective at the work they do and influential in the environments they operate in. We emphasize in the workplace since work is something we were all designed by God to do. The workplace is also a place of unique community, a unifier of sorts. Nearly everyone at some point in their life will engage in formal work. We work with and for people from all walks of life and backgrounds. While few go to church, nearly all go to work. If the world desires hope, peace, and life then the workplace is a great place to bring it”.

Dr. Marquardt is excited about the opportunity to continue and broaden the work of the Lytle Center. He

Dennis and his wife, Monique

has clear goals and a vision for where he would like to take the Center in the coming years. “The Lytle Center for Faith and Leadership exists to promote hope, peace, and life in the workplace. We do this by introducing individuals to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ and equipping them with cutting edge leadership competencies, so that they can be effective servant leaders in the workplace. That’s what coupling faith and leadership means to us.”

Dennis knows that this bold vision will come with some challenges, knowing that the most difficult challenge is in measuring the outcomes of the work done through the Center. “What we are really trying to do is promote spiritual leadership transformation and that requires a consistent commitment to character forming habits and behaviors over time. While we definitely want to inspire, inspiration holds limited power to change. Change requires building authentic relationships, having courageous conversations, and a lot of patience.”

Marquardt is very excited about adding more co-curricular options for students to learn important leadership competencies such as conflict resolution, time management, and ethics.  He’s also looking forward to learning about and partnering with the “many great leaders across campus who are already doing great work in leadership development.”

Along with being a great teacher and mentor, Marquardt is proving that he is a strong researcher. A research project that he was invited to be a part of a several years ago by his doctoral advisor, Dr. Wendy Casper, was recently recognized at the Academy of Management Conference. He says, “This award is really a testament to the leadership and brilliance of my co-authors. I was fortunate enough to be invited onto this project by Dr. Casper. Our first author and tireless leader on the paper was Dr. Sabrina Volpone at the University of Colorado Boulder. Also, Dr. Derek Avery from Wake Forest University, a legend in management and diversity research, was a co-author. I learned so much from each of them and it was a great privilege to be a part of this meaningful work.”

The research team accepts the award at the conference – sans Marquardt who was not able to attend.

The team’s paper received recognition at the conference on August 14th in Boston, MA. The annual conference featured over 10,000 management scholars from universities across the globe. “Our author team is deeply honored that our paper was selected to receive the International HRM Scholarly Research Award, given annually to the most significant article published in international human resource management in the prior year (2018). This is awarded by the Human Resource Division of the Academy of Management. The conference theme this year is, Understanding the Inclusive Organization, which the findings of our paper fit well with.”

We asked Dr. Marquardt to summarize the paper for our readers. “We began our research with the question: Do individuals who grow up as a minority in their home country gain unique skills and abilities that might make them more effective as expatriate workers living in a host country? By analyzing the experiences of international students studying in the United States, we found that the more varied minority experiences people had in their home country positively related to more rapid acculturation as they studied in the U.S. This more rapid acculturation then related to higher levels of psychological well-being and lower intentions to leave the United States. We found that these relationships were influenced by cultural intelligence and the perceived diversity climate of the university. Overall, the paper demonstrates that minorities bring unique strengths to organizations, specifically those working in international assignments. The paper was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and can be found by clicking here.

The topic was intriguing to Marquardt. “The richness of the minority experience has long been of interest to me. While there is a wealth of research on the challenges that minorities face, the unique strengths and abilities that minorities bring to the table because they have had to overcome those challenges are less well understood. It is my hope that our research helps shed some light in this area.”

Dennis hopes that students and those in the workplace can make applications from the team’s findings now. “Our students are entering a workplace that is more globally minded than ever. David Livermore in his book, Leading with Cultural Intelligence, indicates that ‘Ninety percent of leading executives from sixty-eight countries identified cross-cultural leadership as the top management challenge for the next century.’ Our research demonstrates three significant resources worth considering when working and leading cross-culturally. The first is an understanding that having a minority experience provides an individual with vital resources for navigating novel cultural contexts. The second is the value of developing cultural intelligence, a personal capability related to understanding other cultures and behaving appropriately in different cultural environments. The third is the importance of fostering an organizational diversity climate that values unique backgrounds and provides support for people from non-dominant groups. I think students will largely learn about the importance of these resources as they see them modeled in the way that professors engage their classrooms.”

Dr. Dennis Marquardt’s dedication inside and outside of the classroom is evidence of his own personal mission to serve and mentor students to help honor God and bless the world. Congratulations on a much-deserved summer of accolades, Dr. Marquardt!