Wednesday, April 9, 2014 VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 27 www.uicnews.uic.edu facebook.com/uicnews twitter.com/uicnews NEWS UIC youtube.com/uicmedia For the community of the University of Illinois at Chicago Photo: S.K. Vemmer UIC Theatre presents the premiere of “i wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever (or) things i found on craigslist,” a play by recent Goodman Theatre playwright-in-residence Christopher Oscar Peña that opens Friday. The student cast includes (L-R) James Crumb, Mark Pontarelli, Alex Rodriguez and Emily Woods. Read more on page 5 and watch the video at youtube.com/uicmedia Theatre students find new play on ‘craigslist’ INSIDE: Profile / Quotable 2 | Campus News 4 | Calendar 8 | Student Voice 9 | Crossword / Police 10 | People 11 | Sports 12 Jelena Spanjol studies corporate Greek Week celebrates UIC New use for orphan drug: ‘only Flames baseball sweeps values, job satisfaction student organizations hope’ for kidney transplant Youngstown State Profile, page 2 News, page 4 News, page 7 Sports, page 12 2 UIC NEWS I www.uicnews.uic.edu I APRIL 9, 2014 profile Send profile ideas to Gary Wisby, [email protected] Jelena Spanjol examines how values impact job satisfaction By Gary Wisby If you work for a company that shares your values about the environment, you will have greater job satisfaction and be more creative, says Jelena Spanjol. But if both you and your employer have a high level of concern, the effect is greatly magnified, her re- search shows. The associate professor of marketing in the College of Business Administration (her name is pronounced Yell-EN-a Shpahn-JOHL) surveyed Australian engineers for the project. “We decided to look at engineers because they develop the technical solutions to help firms become more sustainable,” Spanjol said, “rather than people in marketing, who are more concerned with product solutions and communication.” The research, done with the help of two colleagues from the University of Wollongong and the University of Western Sydney, is the subject of an upcoming article in the Journal of Business Ethics. “Our analysis did find that while congruency [of environ- mental values] always resulted in greater job satisfaction and creativity, it was magnified much more for companies that shared a high level of environmental concern,” Spanjol said. Photo: Roberta Dupuis-Devlin Most of her research examines innovation, from the mul- Jelena Spanjol focuses her research on how a company’s and its employees’ shared values about the environment affect satisfaction and tiple perspectives of firm, marketing, employee and consumer. creativity. “Congruency always resulted in greater job satisfaction,” says Spanjol, associate professor of marketing. “I’ve been conducting research on team dynamics and how openness to adopt or develop innovations is influenced when people share more or less the same motivational profile,” she responsibility initiatives become negative.” laude from Urbana-Champaign. Before returning to work said. She compares this to the concept of “greenwashing,” on a Ph.D. in marketing, she spent two years as international With another set of co-authors, from Ruhr-Universität Bo- where a corporation presents itself as environmentally pro- marketing coordinator for Wolfram Research Inc., based in chum, Spanjol looked at German firms to answer the question, gressive but actually isn’t. Champaign and Oxford, UK. She taught at Texas A&M for six “Are employees really the most important stakeholder a com- Spanjol offered Walmart as an example of companies with years before joining UIC in 2006. pany needs to take into account when investing in corporate an externally tilted social responsibility portfolio. Spanjol lives in Highland Park with her husband, Adade social responsibility initiatives?” “Former labor secretary Robert Reich called it ‘Scrooge Deganus, who works in corporate finance, and their sons, The researchers interviewed more than 3,000 employees posing as Mother Teresa,’” she said. Mihajlo-Joshua, 8, and Gabriel-Aleksandar, 4. from small, large and mid-range firms. In the classroom, Spanjol teaches in the Interdisciplinary They enjoy downhill skiing as a family and they’ve skiied in They were asked if the companies they worked for, in ad- Product Development curriculum. Switzerland, Utah and Granite Peak near Wausau, Wis. dition to spending on sustainability, waste and pollution re- The two-semester curriculum partners companies with Spanjol is an avid reader. One of her favorite authors is duction, and philanthropy — “looking like a good corporate student teams, typically having five members, that work on Mary Roach; she recently read Roach’s Gulp, about the diges- citizen,” Spanjol said — also put resources into the workplace generating solutions and concepts for business. tive system, and Packing for Mars, about the peculiarities of to enhance employees’ physical and psychological well-being. Spanjol and other faculty members “train students from space travel. “Investing in external initiatives is great, but did the em- business, design and engineering to work across disciplines, Spanjol reads “indiscriminately” from fiction and nonfic- ployees perceive their companies to have a portfolio tilted understand the users and come up with marketable solu- tion, in three languages at a time. toward the outside, or did they see employers balance this by tions,” she said. She grew up speaking Serbo-Croatian. Since her home was investing in training, fairness in employee evaluations, equality “I’m the marketing professor and I have colleagues in en- in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, it was natural for and diversity, and health care?” she said. gineering and graphic and industrial design, and we all speak her to learn that tongue. She studied French because the Swiss “Unless companies have balanced portfolios, they don’t re- to the same issues. educational system requires learning another official language, ally benefit in the long run from engaged employees who have “We leverage each discipline’s unique perspectives.” and her town was on the French border. job satisfaction and want to stick around. Spanjol grew up in Switzerland, although she spent much Along the way, she picked up some Italian. “Companies are punished in terms of performance when all time in the former Yugoslavia, her parents’ native country. “I love languages,” she said. the attention is on the external, as returns to corporate social She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics summa cum [email protected] quotable “Some of the things (Gene) Roddenberry envisioned “There are some tasks that we seem to do better on if “The notion that the kid in Arkansas doesn’t need — the communicator, tablets and earpiece — I don’t we aren’t too focused on a solution. Too much focus the same skills as some kid in New York doesn’t think there was a proof of concept in the 1960s that can cause us to miss small or remote ideas.” make much sense.” they could be built. Either he had an amazing imagi- nation or someone on the staff had unbelievable Psychology professor Jennifer Wiley, whose study Timothy Shanahan, professor emeritus of curriculum vision.” found drinking alcohol may provide a beneficial boost to and instruction, on the debate over national Common creative problem-solving, on freelancers using bars as Core educational standards, April 5 Naplesnews.com Physics professor Dirk Morr on the feasibility of the sci- office space, April 6 New York Post ence used in the “Star Trek” TV series and films, April 7 Chicago Tribune APRIL 9, 2014 I UIC NEWS I www.uicnews.uic.edu 3 New online portal helps researchers track grants By Christy Levy A new online tool will make it easier for researchers to spend more time on their work and less time on administra- tive duties. The myResearch portal, scheduled to launch next month, gives researchers 24-hour online access to their grant informa- tion. Principal investigators can log in to the portal to view grant status, financial data and other information. “The beauty of this is that it allows the principal investi- gator to see what’s happening with their grants in real time, updated every night to see how many dollars are left, the start date, the end date — all sorts of information,” said Luisa DiPi- etro, associate vice chancellor for research. The portal is part of a larger project, the Systemwide Tools for the Administration of Research and Training, an initiative led by Mitra Dutta, UIC’s vice chancellor for research, Peter Schiffer, vice chancellor for research at Urbana-Champaign, and Lynn Pardie, vice chancellor for academic affairs and pro- vost at UIS. By 2016, the electronic research administration system will contain all parts of the grant process, including tools to manage submissions, Institutional Review Board forms and conflict of interest information. Before the online portal, researchers usually received grant data from paper reports completed by their business Photo: L. Brian Stauffer managers, Dutta said. UIC researchers submitted 3,458 grant The university’s three vice chancellors for research — Peter Schiffer, Urbana-Champaign, Lynn Pardie, UIS, and Mitra Dutta, UIC — are lead- proposals requesting a total of $625 million last year, which ing an initiative that gives researchers 24-hour online access to their grant information. produces a lot of paperwork. “Some researchers have business managers entirely de- multiple colleges, you can imagine what a nightmare it is to it encourages them to work with colleagues in other fields, voted to their project, others don’t get reports every month,” collect all of the signatures,” Dutta said. “This will pull every- said Jennifer Rowan, executive director for research admin- she said. “Now, I can go in every day at any time — midnight thing together and make the paper system go away.” istration and operations. on a Saturday, if I so wish.