This story was adapted from a UA News Center piece by Bryant Welbourne.
The Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award is presented each year to celebrate and encourage excellence in research, scholarship, and teaching at The University of Alabama.
Culverhouse’s Dr. Daniel Bachrach, a professor of management and the Robert C. and Rosa P. Morrow Faculty Excellence Fellow, was the recipient of the 2024-2025 award, recognized in a ceremony on Wednesday, April 23, in Alston Hall.
Bachrach teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of Management. His research interests include entrepreneurial team performance, idiosyncratic deals, leadership, and organizational citizenship behavior, among others. Bachrach’s work has received more than $1 million in extramural funding from public agencies including the National Science Foundation, Research Facilitation Lab, and the Basic Research Division of the U.S. Army Research Institute.
He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of 17 books on technology, sales, behavioral operations, and management, including the 14th edition of “Management” and the seventh edition of “Exploring Management.” Both textbooks are viewed highly in the field and used throughout the U.S., with versions translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Bachrach has published 70 research articles, and his work regularly appears in the field’s elite scholarly journals, including Organization Science, The Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, among others. According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited more than 23,000 times to date.
He is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and Association for Psychological Science. In 2017, Bachrach was the recipient of the UA National Alumni Association’s Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Award, the University’s highest honor for excellence in teaching. He received the Culverhouse College Board of Visitors Research Achievement Award in 2019.
In addition to his roles as an educator and researcher, Bachrach currently sits on UA’s Grievance and Mediation Committee and is the faculty advisor to both the Crimson Creatives and Crimson Cribbage Club.
The Burnum Award was established by Dr. and Mrs. John F. Burnum of Tuscaloosa to recognize and promote excellence in research, scholarship, and teaching during a distinguished UA career. The Burnum Award Committee, comprised of former winners, screens nominees and forwards two nominees to the president, who selects the winner.
Burnum Award recipients present a special lecture on their research as part of the awards ceremony, with Dr. Bachrach’s on the role of “transactive memory systems,” or TMS, on the performance of teams.
What is TMS? It is a “system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information in a group, where each member of the group is responsible for different pieces of knowledge.” Teams using TMS divide the labor for learning, remembering, and communicating task-relevant information, and in practice, TMS can help teams perform more effectively.
After Dr. Bachrach’s presentation and reception, which was attended by his family and colleagues from across campus, he had dinner with UA President Stuart Bell and other campus leadership, as well as members of the Burnum family.
