Atul Mitra
Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company Professor
Management Head
CBB 233
Directory Contact
Atul Mitra
Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company Professor
Management Head
Ph.D. (Management - HRM/OB), University of Arkansas; M.Tech. (Management and Systems), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, India; B.Tech. (Electrical Engineering with Honors), Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT), Jaipur, India.
Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, and Compensation Systems
Atul has been investigating employees' reactions to annual pay raises and other pay-related issues for over three decades. Atul is fascinated by how people assign meaning to money. His research seeks to answer such questions as: (a) do workers experience happiness and work harder if they receive typical 2%-3% annual merit raise? or (b) is gender pay inequity a useful idea to address the observed pay gap between men and women across nations? He employs a variety of psychological, economic, and psychophysical theories to answer such questions in the hope of helping organizations design effective reward systems. Currently, he is working with a team of international researchers on a global pay systems project, "Investigating Merit Pay Across Cultures and Territories (IMPACT)."
Atul Mitra's research focuses on the management of compensation practices. He has twenty scholarly publications & book chapters as well as more than forty presentations and proceedings. His work has been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management, Human Resource Management, Journal of Economic Psychology, Compensation and Benefits Review, Strategic Change, and ACA Journal to name a few.
In 2012, he received Highly Commended Award Winner at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence for his work on skill-based pay. In addition, in 1990, he received the Southern Management Association's Best Paper Award for work on absence and turnover and two Citations of Excellence by ANBAR Management Intelligence (1997 & 1998). His research on the meaning of pay raises has been considered as one of the ten most important contributions in the field of reward systems by WorldatWork (the most influential association for the total rewards professionals). He has also received several awards at the University of Northern Iowa (Gaylen Miller Special Recognition Award; 2013-2014 and Faculty Scholarship Award - 2002-2003) and Lyon College (Teacher of the Year - 1993). Until 2014 he served on the panel for the Fulbright Senior Specialist program. Six years of industry experience as a senior techno-commercial engineer for a large public sector enterprise in India provides a real-world perspective to Atul's research and teaching.