Award-winning professor and researcher Dr. Allison Gabriel has joined the faculty at Purdue’s Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business as the Thomas J. Howatt Chair in Management and director of the university’s new Center for Working Well.
“Along with the Daniels School’s reputation and its outstanding faculty in the Organizational Behavior and Human Resources area, the opportunity to lead this new center was what attracted me to Purdue,” Gabriel says. “It’s not often that you get an opportunity to grow something from the ground up, so I’m excited by the possibilities.”
Gabriel received her BA in Psychology with honors and highest distinction from Penn State University in 2008, and her PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from The University of Akron in 2013. Her research focuses on emotions, motivation, interpersonal stressors/relationships, and employee well-being — especially women’s health and its intersection with work.
Gabriel’s research has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Organizational Research Methods, and Journal of Management, among other outlets, and has resulted in numerous presentations at the Academy of Management (AOM), American Psychological Association (APA), and Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conferences. Her research has received popular press attention from outlets such as CNBC, CNN, Fast Company, Forbes, Psychology Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, in addition to being featured by Harvard Business Review.
Fitting with Purdue University’s tripartite mission of learning, discovery, and engagement, the Purdue Center for Working Well (CWW) aims to be a cutting-edge center at the forefront of challenges facing modern workforces and employees’ desire to “work well.” The core mission of the CWW is to develop a robust understanding of what that means to employees and organizations, encompassing challenges with promoting personal well-being, creating sustainable performance, adopting to grand challenges in modern organizations, and cultivating positive and inclusive relationships at work and home.
“My vision for the center is to be doing research and asking questions that speak to people’s rich lives at work and at home,” Gabriel says. “What does it mean to be a remote or hybrid worker? How do we create meaning in our work? How do you build good workplace relationships? How do you create family flexible policies and practices? How do we make people feel authentically valued in the workplace?”
To address these and other questions, the CWW is initially offering two courses — The Science of Working Well for undergraduates and Motivation and Well-Being for PhD candidates. The center also plans to host an academic symposium every two to three years, as well as a “Working Well Symposium” in which organizational leaders gather to discuss challenges facing the well-being of their workforce. In addition, faculty associates within the Daniels School and across Purdue will have the opportunity to apply for an annual small grant program to fund research related to the mission of the center.
“It’s important that our research has practical applications for organizations,” Gabriel says. “My hope is that as more companies learn about the center, they’ll want to partner with us and use our research and outreach initiatives to bring best practices back to their workplace to help employees work well.”
Gabriel has been the recipient of five early- to mid-career awards, including the 2021 AOM Organizational Behavior Division Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award, the 2021 SIOP Distinguished Early Career Contributions-Science Award, the 2020 AOM Human Resources Division Early Career Award, the 2019 AOM Sage Publications/Research Methods Division/Lawrence R. James Early Career Achievement Award, and the 2018 Western Academy of Management Ascendant Scholar Award. Her research on women’s health received the 2022 SIOP William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award, the 2021 AOM Organizational Behavior Division Outstanding Publication in OB Award, and the 2021 AOM Human Resources Division Scholarly Achievement Award. She was also named a SIOP Fellow in 2023, and was selected by Poets&Quants in 2018 as a Top 50 Undergraduate Business School Professor.
For information on collaborating with the Center for Working Well, contact the Daniels School’s Business Partnerships Office at buspo@purdue.edu.
