Tove Helland Hammer ’69, First Female Editor of ILR Review, Dies at 80
Tove Helland Hammer, A&S ’69, professor emerita of organizational behavior in the ILR School and the first female editor of the ILR Review, died on Sept. 12 in Ithaca. She was 80.
Hammer taught in the ILR School’s Department of Organizational Behavior for 47 years, beginning in 1973 as an instructor. She was named an assistant professor the following year, an associate professor in 1981 and a full professor in 1990 – a rank she held until her retirement in 2022.
Remembering Tove Helland Hammer
Over the course of her 47 years at the ILR School, Hammer touched the lives of countless students, co-workers and colleagues.
She chaired the organizational behavior department twice during her tenure and became the first female senior editor of the Industrial and Labor Relations Review in 1994. She served as the journal’s longest-tenured senior editor, holding the post for 17 years, until 2011.
“Tove was department chair when I was hired,” said Vanessa Bohns, ILR’s Braunstein Family Professor. “Now that I am department chair myself, I model so much of my communication style and department engagement on her. She cared so much about mentoring junior faculty, and loved opening her home to host faculty, students and their families.
“For a while, I would invite her to do a guest lecture on motivation for my large 300-person lecture course every year. She spoke so softly in this huge lecture hall that, at first, I worried students wouldn’t stay engaged, but they were enraptured. She would tell stories about students climbing Uris Hall when it was first built and factory workers who loved their jobs cutting beaks off chickens. I would always invite her back because I simply couldn’t do justice to the material the way she did. She was such a strong and special person who never stopped being intellectually curious and deeply engaged in the world and people around her. She will be deeply missed.”
Hammer served on the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Vocational Behavior, and Groups and Organization Studies.
She held long-standing visiting professor appointments in the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, and the School of Hotel Management at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She also held sabbatical-year appointments at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London (1983–84, 1991) and at ESCP Europe in Paris (2011).
In 2017, Hammer was named a Member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, a multidisciplinary Norwegian science academy affiliated with NTNU. She was also a longtime member of the Society for Organizational Behavior, an elite, invitation-only group of organizational psychologists.
Hammer was devoted to her students, keeping in touch with them as they went on to academic positions all over the world, said Pam Tolbert, the Lois S. Gray Professor of ILR and Social Sciences.
“I remember Tove telling me that as she got older, she realized that, ultimately, students represented the most important legacy that she and most other academics would leave.”
Early in her career, Hammer studied leadership, supervision and career mobility before moving on to examine employee stock ownership, worker buyouts and labor representation on corporate boards of directors. Beginning in the 1990s, her primary research examined the effects of the physical and psychosocial work environment on employees’ mental and physical health. She conducted field studies with a special focus on how organizational-level norms about work performance, social support and reward systems influence the degree of work-family conflict, workplace bullying and harassment, job stress and psychological and physical health.
Hammer’s scholarly contributions were recognized by her election as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (1988), a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (1988) and a Fellow of the American Psychological Society (1991).
“I met Tove when I first came to ILR as an assistant professor in 1995, and at the time, she was doing research with Bob Stern, a member of the OB faculty,” said Rosemary Batt, the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work Emeritus at the ILR School. “Tove the psychologist and Bob the sociologist were best of friends – complementing each other’s work in ways that allowed their joint publications to shine.
“I would see her frequently, and as editor of the ILR Review at the time, she was particularly helpful in guiding my first journal publication through the difficult review process – and many thereafter. I learned tremendously from her wisdom and experience. In 2011, she passed the editorial torch of the ILR Review to me. I worked hard to live up to her legacy. I will remember her for her superb scholarship, tough and constructive editing, and generous spirit.”
Tove Helland Hammer was born in Tønsberg, Norway, on November 8, 1945, and grew up at her ancestral home, Bangsbø, on the shoreline of the Oslo Fjord.
She left Norway to attend Cornell University on a four-year Teagle Foundation scholarship in September 1965. After earning her B.A. in psychology from the College of Arts & Sciences in 1969, she enrolled at the University of Maryland and earned an M.A. in psychology in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology the following year.
It was during her time on East Hill that she met graduate student David Hammer, Ph.D. ’69, and the couple married in August 1968. Her husband of 58 years joined the faculty at Cornell in 1977 and is currently the J. Carlton Ward, Jr. Professor of Nuclear Energy Engineering.
“She was the beautiful flower and love of my life for more than 60 years,” said David Hammer. “Tove loved her family, colleagues, former students and friends, as well as summers spent ‘at home’ in Tønsberg.
“We are grateful she was able to go home this year for one last very enjoyable summer, seeing her closest relatives and friends over a seven-week period that included many long, sunny days at Bangsbø.”
