User:HRShami/Michalle Mor Barak

Michàlle Mor Barak is an American social work researcher, academic and author. She is Dean's Professor of Social Work and Business at University of Southern California. She is known for being the first researcher to identify and define inclusion and, together with her research team, the first to offer a theory-based measure for the concept of inclusion.

Mor Barak's research has focused on inclusion of women and members of underrepresented groups in the workplace and the development of new educational practices. Some of her research has dealt with corporate social responsibility, work-life balance and the science of social good. Her research has yielded two measures for diversity climate and climate for inclusion that have been used in research and practice: The Mor Barak Inclusion-Exclusion Scale (MBIE) and the Diversity Climate Scale.

In 2011, she was ranked 4th among 100 authors of the most influential articles in social work discipline over the decade based on yearly citations. In 2007, he book, Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace received the Terry Best Book award from the Academy of Management. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Education
Mor Barak received a BA in 1976 and an MSW in 1982, both from the University of Haifa in Israel. She then received a Fulbright Scholarship and moved to the United States, where she joined University of California, Berkeley for her Ph.D., completing it in 1986.

Career
Mor Barak joined University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor in 1988, becoming Associate Professor in 1994. At the same time, she had a joint appointment at the Andrus Gerontology Center. She became Full Professor in 2003. In 2004, she was endowed the Lenore Stein-Wood and William S. Wood Endowed Professor of Social Work and Business, and in 2014, the Dean’s Endowed Professor of Social Work and Business.

From 2009 to 2016, Mor Barak was the Director of the Ph.D. Program at School of Social Work at University of Southern California at USC. In 2013, she co-founded the Research Cluster on Management, Organizations and Policy Transformation (MOPT) and served as its co-chair until 2016. In 2014, she was appointed as the inaugural department chair of Social Change and Innovation in the School of Social Work.

Since 1995, Mor Bakar has worked as an organizational consultant on diversity and inclusion management, balancing work-family, workplace flexibility and corporate social responsibility.

In 2001, Mor Barak was awarded the Rockefeller grant to lead the first international interdisciplinary conference on diversity and inclusion in the foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference and Study Center in Italy. Two years later, she received a grant from the Borchard foundation to lead a second international conference with a focus on inclusion in the foundation’s Chateau de la Bretesche in France (2003).

Mor Barak was the first social worker ever to be invited as a keynote speaker by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2011 for their conference on Diversity and Inclusion in a Global Context. In her speech, she discussed her original model of inclusive organizations that is built on social work values and highlights the importance of working with communities and with members of disadvantaged groups both nationally and internationally. She was invited to the White House Data Jam on Diversity and Inclusion in 2014 and the White House Roundtable on Best Practices for Assessing Inclusive Environments in 2015.

In 2015, Mor Barak was appointed by the Israel Education Minister to a 5-member International Review Commission to evaluate social work in higher education in Israel.

Mor Barak has been the Associate Editor of Human Service Organization: Management, Leadership & Governance since 2013.

Diversity and inclusion in workplace
Mor Barak’s research on climate for diversity, focusing on gender and racial/ethnic differences, in the late 1990s, was among the first to introduce the concept of inclusion based on scientific findings. Her 1998 article "Organizational and personal dimensions in diversity climate: ethnic and gender differences in employee diversity perceptions" examined the differences between the perceptions of women and racial/ethnic minority groups from the mainstream corporate culture with respect to diversity climate. Conducted by measuring employees’ perceptions of issues and practices that are important to understanding and managing diversity, the results of the study suggested four dimensions of diversity climate—personal value for diversity, personal comfort with diversity, organizational fairness, and organizational inclusion. In their review of the diversity and inclusion research, Shore et al.(2011) noted that Mor Barak was a leader in the field because she was the first to provide theoretical framework for inclusion as well as empirical testing of that framework. The authors note that "most of the research has lacked theoretical grounding… and empirical testing…", yet they credit Mor Barak’s research as being a "notable exception" in that she has developed a theoretical model of inclusion for women and members of minority groups in which she posed that diversity and organizational culture would contribute to perceptions of inclusion-exclusion, which would then lead to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, individual wellbeing, and task effectiveness. Further, they note that "Following Mor Barak’s lead, other empirical studies have been conducted on inclusion practices."

Mor Barak’s research yielded two measures for diversity climate and climate for inclusion that have been used in research and practice: The Mor Barak Inclusion-Exclusion Scale (MBIE) developed in 1998, and the Diversity Climate Scale developed in 2006.

Mor Barak wrote the book Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace in 2005. Throughout the book, women’s issues, particularly women of color and women from disadvantaged backgrounds, are highlighted, including a focus on women migrants, balancing work and family, and the scarcity of women in top management positions. The book won the Academy of Management’s George R. Terry Book Award for the most “outstanding contribution to management knowledge”. It also won the Association of College and Research Libraries Choice Award and received positive reviews in academic journals, including a review in the Academy of Management Learning and Education Journal noting that the book is “an excellent resource to develop, theorize, and work out the inclusive workplace in a very comprehensive, encompassing, and multidisciplinary way”. Mor Barak proposed an original model for creating an inclusive workplace – one that helps organizations integrate with society via expanding circles of inclusion at the organizational, community, state/national and international levels.

In 2016, Mor Barak completed a meta-analysis study reviewing 20 years of research on diversity and inclusion in human service organizations. It won the 2017 Best Paper for theory-based research from the journal of Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership and Governance.

Mor Barak has created an on-line course, through the University of Southern California’s Virtual Academic Center focusing on gender and diversity issues in a global context. The course uses a variety of resources that promote gender and diversity inclusion and features lectures by women leaders in for profit and non-profit organizations.

Social work in workplace
A significant part of Mor Barak's research has focused on social work in the workplace. She wrote articles redefining social work in the workplace for the 21st century. She also co-edited, with David Bargal, a book in this area entitled Social Services in the Workplace: Repositioning Occupational Social Work in The New Millennium.

Mor Barak's research has focused on social workers as workers with several longitudinal research studies in collaboration with a large department of children and family services, focusing on retention, burnout, work-life balance and supervision for social workers. Her theory-based meta-analysis exploring the reasons for turnover among social workers published in 2001 Social Service Review was ranked #4 most cited article in social work between 2000-2009.

Michàlle was one of the original co-creators of the first Islandwood meetings on Science of Social Work in Doctoral Education in 2013, and of the second Islandwood roundtable.

Awards and honors

 * 2001 - Best Paper Award, Institute of Behavioral and Applied Management.
 * 2003 - Sterling C. Franklin Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship
 * 2005 - The Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentorship
 * 2006 - Choice Award for Outstanding Titles from the Association of College and Research Libraries
 * 2007 - Fellow, Global Business Round Table, Center for Work and Family, Boston College
 * 2007 - Academy of Management George R. Terry Best Book Award for “the Most Outstanding Contribution to the Advancement of Management Knowledge”- Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace.
 * 2014 - Sterling C. Franklin Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship.
 * 2016 - Academy of Management, Division of Gender and Diversity in Organizations Award for Scholarly Contributions to Educational Practice Advancing Women in Leadership.
 * 2017 - Mary Parker Follette Award for Best Paper, Journal of Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership and Governance.
 * 2018 - Elected and Inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW)
 * 2018 - Award for Leadership in Doctoral Education, Group for Advancement of Doctoral Education (GADE)

Books

 * Social Networks and Health of the Frail Elderly (1991)
 * Social Services in the Workplace (2000)
 * Instructor’s Manual for Managing Diversity (2006)
 * Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace (2017)
 * The Science and Practice of Social Good (2020)

Selected papers

 * Mor Barak, M.E., Cherin, D.A., and Berkman, S. 1998. Organizational and personal dimensions in Diversity Climate: Ethnic and gender differences in employee diversity perceptions. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 34(1), 82-104.
 * Mor Barak, M.E., Nissly, J., and Levin, A. 2001. Antecedents to Retention and Turnover among Child Welfare, Social Work, and other Human Services Employees: What can we learn from past research? A review and Meta-analysis.  Social Service Review (December), 625-661.
 * Mor Barak, M.E., Lizano, E. L., Kim, A., Duan, L., Hsiao, H. Y., & Rhee, M. K. Brimhall, K. A. 2016. The Promise of Diversity Management for Climate of Inclusion:  A State-of-the-Art Review and Meta-Analysis, Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership and Governance 4(40), 305-333.  DOI: 10.1080/23303131.2016.1138915
 * Mor Barak, M.E., Findler, L. and Wind, L.H. 2001. Diversity, inclusion, and commitment in organizations: International explorations. Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 2(2), 72-91.
 * Mor Barak, M.E. and Brekke, J.S. 2014. Social Work Science and Identity Formation for Doctoral Scholars within Intellectual Communities, Research on Social Work Practice, 25(5), 616-624.  Doi: 10.1177/1049731514528047
 * Mor Barak, M.E., Travis, D.J., Pyun, H. and Xie, B. 2009. "A Meta-analysis of the Role of Supervision in Child Welfare Service Provision" Social Service Review, 83(1):3-32 (Lead Article).
 * Mor Barak, M.E., Levin, A., & Nissly, J.A., Lane, C.J. 2006. Why do they leave? Modeling turnover intentions from child welfare workers’ perceptions of their organizational climate, Children and Youth Services Review, 28(5), 548-577.
 * Mor Barak, M.E. and Travis, D. 2013. Socioeconomic Trends: Broadening the Diversity Ecosystem. In Q. M. Robertson (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in the Workplace, London, UK: Oxford, pp. 393-418.