News
Liebert Elected as Chair-Elect of ASPA’s Section on Personnel Administration and Labor Relations (SPALR)
May 5, 2020
Wilder School associate professor, Saltanat (Salta) Liebert, Ph.D., was elected as Chair-Elect for ASPA's Section on Personnel Administration and Labor Relations.
Created in 1979, the Section on Personnel Administration and Labor Relations (SPALR) of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) promotes the importance of human resource management and labor relations in public service organizations. The section sponsors two prominent peer-reviewed journals: 1) Review of Public Personnel Administration, and 2) Public Personnel Management.
Leibert will assume the role of the Chair in 2022 for a two-year term. Salta’s key responsibilities will include leading the Section along with its board, organizing the one-day annual symposium on key HR issues that takes place during ASPA's annual conference, working closely with ASPA leadership on issues concerning the Section topics and its members and coordinating the annual SPALR awards.
SPALR awards include the following categories:
1. Outstanding Practitioner Award
2. Outstanding Scholar Award
3. Stephen E. Condrey Service to the Section Award
4. Dissertation Fellowship Award
"I'm very excited about serving ASPA and our larger public administration community in the role of the Chair-Elect (and then Chair) of the Section of Personnel Administration and Labor Relations (SPALR)," shared Leibert.
"Through my work with SPALR, I am looking forward to the opportunity to select cutting age and timely topics in human resource management as themes of the symposia that we'll host as part of the ASPA conference. For example, one of the logical ideas for the next SPALR symposium would be "HR in the Age of a Pandemic." We could invite speakers who could shed light on key HR questions, such as "How has the COVID pandemic changed how we manage human resources in the public sector? How do we get ready for the next crisis?" I also plan to conduct outreach activities to forge more links with practitioners to increase academic-practitioner dialogues through webcasts and other media. I also think it's important to get more students involved in ASPA to provide networking opportunities for them, establish mentoring relationships with established faculty and practitioners, and to groom the next generation of ASPA officers and leadership."