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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.
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