Dr. Dwertmann provides Students with Experiential Learning Opportunities with Community Impact

When considering experiential learning and community impact, Dr. David Dwertmann, Associate Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior, focuses on both through his teaching and scholarship.

In his course, titled “Leadership in the 21^st Century,” Dr. Dwertmann highlights the practical relevance of his course content and engages his students in experiential projects that serve clients from local non-profist and small business, as well as our campus community.  Serving as consultants and applying skills and knowledge from his course, students solve problems and identify new opportunities for their clients. 

Some projects include creating a business plan for pool parties for the Salvation Army’s KROC Center in Camden, designing a fundraising strategy for the PhD Project (a national organization aimed at increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in business school faculty positions), designing an onboarding process for the School of Business, developing a social media strategy for the University’s Office for Civic Engagement, and many more. In total, students have worked on 27 different projects with various partners on and off campus. Ultimately, this work positively impacts students and society. For his community engagement through teaching Dr. Dwertmann received the 2018 Chancellor’s Award for Academic Civic Engagement. The students in Dr. Dwertmann’s courses have provided $478,522 in value to partner organizations over the past five years.

In 2020, Dr. Dwertmann received the Rutgers University-Camden Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. The faculty selection committee “was especially impressed by your [his] thoughtful integration of theory and practice in your [his] civic engagement class on leadership.” The committee noted that his course was “exactly the kind of teaching that can make Camden the destination for effective teaching.”

Dr. Dwertmann’s research focuses on Diversity & Inclusion (e.g., people with disabilities, immigrants, the aging workforce), Team Norms & Organizational Culture and Climate, and Leadership, receiving several national and international awards for his work. He is always interested in partnering with organizations to collaborate on projects, collect data (e.g., employee surveys), and utilize existing data (e.g., HR systems) to advance our knowledge in these areas as well as organizational practice. His prior management consulting experience is particularly helpful in this regard.

As a recent example, the article, “Receiving service from a person with a disability: Stereotypes, perceptions of corporate social responsibility, and the opportunity for increased corporate reputation,” by Dr. Dwertmann and his coauthors will appear in the Academy of Management Journal, the world’s premier journal in the field of management. In this article, he finds that organizations can benefit from employing people with disabilities in customer-facing roles since it is often perceived as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and increases the reputation of the organization. In addition, facilitating interactions between people with and without disabilities in this way also contributes to reducing negative stereotypes towards people with disabilities.

In 2021, Dr. Dwertmann was named one of the world’s Best 40-Under-40 business school professors by Poets & Quants and in addition to his teaching excellence, the selection committee wrote that “Dwertmann is one of our top publishers to be included in this year’s list.”  

Dwertmann, D. J. G., Goštautaitė, B., Kazlauskaitė, R., & Bučiūnienė, I. (in press). Receiving service from a person with a disability: Stereotypes, perceptions of corporate social responsibility, and the opportunity for increased corporate reputation. Academy of Management Journal. 

Selection of Recent Awards for Research, Teaching, and Civic Engagement

2018. Rutgers University-Camden Chancellor’s Award for Academic Civic Engagement for outstanding work in integrating engaged civic learning into the Leadership course.
2019. Best Paper with International Implications Award from the Organizational Behavior division of the Academy of Management. 
2020. Rutgers University-Camden Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. 
2021. Rutgers University-Camden Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity
2022. 2021. Named one of the world’s Best 40-Under-40 business school professors by Poets & Quants