Skip to main content

Turner Business Chats with Kevin Hurt about Leadership Research Program

Our 5 September 2025 profile of Turner College management professor Kevin Hurt has been a popular one here at Turner Business. That blog post focused mainly on the portfolio of leadership research that he has steadily built up over recent years into one that is unmatched in the Turner College. We recently visited with Hurt to discuss his research endeavors. The transcript of that visit appears below.

TB:Turner Business recently profiled your growing list of research publications in leadership. What would be your assessment of how your research program in leadership has gone so far?

KH: Overall, it has been a rewarding journey. I appreciate that the Turner Business profile acknowledged my work, particularly in the area of servant leadership. While journal publications are a measure of success for us as faculty, to me that success also includes building the next generation of leaders. It was the latter that inspired me to leave a Fortune 500 corporation and seek a career in academics. I've been committed to involving my graduate students directly in the research process, helping them learn to objectively assess some phenomenon of interest in leadership using logic and empirical evidence. This commitment has contributed not only to advancing the field theoretically but also practically, through the development of young scholars.

TB: Very recently, you published leadership research in Conflict Resolution Quarterly and American Business Review. These are high-quality outlets according to the Turner College's journal ratings guides. How does this increasing trajectory fit in with your assessment?

KH: In general, I submit all of my research to a journal on TCOB's target list. I was particularly proud of these two publications because they were coauthored with two of our former MSOL graduate students; both coauthors were also part of the MCCC program. Each paper began as a research project in my Foundations of Servant Leadership class. While the published papers were refined after the class, it was gratifying to see the student's desire to continue to work on the research long after the semester was over. It's uncommon for a master's student to publish in an academic journal. It is rarer still for those journals to be high-quality outlets.

TB: With this productivity trajectory, did you earn a merit raise last month?

KH: I did not earn a merit raise, which came as a big disappointment given the impact I have had with our graduate students over the years. Congratulations to those who did receive one.

TB: You are approaching a Google Scholar citations milestone - 500 citations - that will be reported on here at Turner Business. How do you feel about that?

KH: I don't really pay much attention to those statistics, but I'm glad to see others in the field are finding value in my research and are incorporating it in their own studies.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Seven Turner College Management and Marketing Faculty Have Combined to Produce Eight A-Level Journal Publications Between 2021 and the Present

A number of faculty in the Turner College's Department of Management and Marketing, which includes faculty in management information systems, have produced A-level journal publications in the last few years. This report covers that activity, starting with John Finley , the chairperson of the department. Professor Finley published a paper in the Journal of Computer Information Systems in 2022.      Finley is joined by Kirk Heriot , the Crowley Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship. Heriot, who earned a PhD in management from Clemson University, published in a 2021 issue of Small Business Economics . One of the study's co-authors, Andres Jauregui of Fresno State University, was previously a member of the Turner College's economics faculty.      Next is Johnny Ho , a professor of management, who has a 2022 publication in the Journal of Computer Information Systems . Ho has won CSU's Excellence in Research Award on multiple occasions, while he has compiled 2...

TSYS School, Jianhua Yang, Lixin Wang Each among Top Five in the World

New research by computer scientists in the School of Information Technology at Universiti Utara Malaysia that ranks institutions and individuals on the basis of scholarship in the area of stepping-stone attacks heaps praise on the Turner College’s TSYS School of Computer Science and two of its faculty – Jianhua Yang and Lixin Wang .   The article, published in the April 2023 issue of the International Journal of Research in Engineering and Science , provides a bibliometric analysis of both publication and citation data from 2000 to September of 2022 related to research on stepping-stone intrusion.   Among several results, it reports that Columbus State University ranks second worldwide, trailing only the University of Houston, using total publications on the subject as the basis of comparison.   A number of other U.S. institutions appear in the top 10, including third-ranked North Carolina State University, fourth-ranked University of Illinois, sixth-ranked Iowa State U...

ABDC Releases 2025 Journal Review, Now Ranks Journal Edited by Phil Bryant

The long-awaited journal review being conducted by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) has been released and there are a number of news items that relate to faculty in the Turner College. One of these is the ABDC's decision to now include  Compensation and Benefits Review in its journal rankings. This is big news for the Turner College as its editor, Phil Bryant , is a professor of management in the Turner College. The ABDC is proposing that the journal enter its system for the first time as a C-rated journal. Acting Turner College Dean Tesa Leonce sits on the journal's editorial board, while Turner College management professor Mark James has guest-edited an issue of the journal. Published by SAGE,  Compensation & Benefits Review is the leading journal for senior executives and professionals who design, implement, evaluate and communicate compensation and benefits policies and programs. The journal supports compensation and benefits specialists and academic ex...