Remembering Tove Helland Hammer, A&S ’69

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.

She chaired the organizational behavior department twice during her tenure and became the first female senior editor of the ILR Review in 1994. She served as the journal’s longest-tenured senior editor, holding the post for 17 years, until 2011. 

Hammer touched the lives of countless students, co-workers and colleagues. Below are some of their memories … 

Memories

I met Tove when I first came to ILR as an assistant professor in 1995. At the time, she was doing research with Bob Stern, also a member of the OB faculty at the ILR School, whose office was next to mine. 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. Bob died from childhood diabetes in 2001 at 51 years old, 25 years before Tove’s passing. She and I worked together to organize the several cabinets full of research files that Bob left behind. From then on, we shared many good years; and 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.

- Rose Batt, Alice H. Cook Professor of Women and Work Emerita, Cornell ILR School

Tove was department chair when I was hired. 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 that 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.

- Vanessa Bohns, the Braunstein Family Professor, Cornell ILR School

I was deeply saddened by the news of Tove’s passing. It is impossible to underestimate the profound impact that Tove had on my education at Cornell and my career. She was extraordinarily generous with her time and support for me during graduate school. 

Tove invested so much in the research project to study the dynamics of the board of directors of the Rath Packing Company of Waterloo, Iowa. As a member of the board of directors of Rath, Tove traveled to Waterloo numerous times per year for board meetings, even during the dead of winter from Ithaca! How did she sustain that level of commitment? That travel schedule took heroic courage and reliance on Tove’s part. 

Based on participant observations and transcripts of board meetings, Tove and I published articles on how the board made decisions about the firm's future. Analyzing the data, and writing the manuscripts, required literally thousands of hours of painstaking work. We would never have been able to sustain that work had we not shared a common commitment to the importance of the data and the findings. When we submitted manuscripts for publication, the reviewers were always amazed at the uniqueness of the data and the significant time and effort required to conduct the study! 

I recall walking into the Tove's office in Ives Hall one day around 1985 and she was sobbing at her desk. She had just received the final documentation signifying that Rath had gone out of business. She knew the outcome was inevitable, but she said that receiving the documentation made the outcome final and tangible. Despite all the great work that she and the rest of the board did to save the company, it was not possible in the end. But it was not for lack of Tove’s effort and diligence, and the same for the rest of the board. Tove and the board did, however, extend the operations of Rath, thereby giving the workforce additional years of salary, and benefits. Keeping Rath alive was also so vital to the small town of Waterloo. After her sobbing, she said that she had no regrets and acknowledged the great work that she and the board had accomplished. 

My Cornell experience would simply not have been the same had it not been for Tove (and other members of my dissertation committee such as Harry Katz, Tom Gilovich, and Dick Darlington). I am thankful for her commitment to my intellectual pathway, which positioned me for my academic career. 

- Steve Currall, Ph.D. ’90, executive director and associate vice provost for academic-corporate initiatives, Harvard University

I had the privilege of having Tove's office next to mine for the first several years of my time at ILR. 

She was a quiet neighbor, but we often talked about her trips to Norway, her joys of teaching (even after retirement), and our shared love for fitness and the beautiful region in which we live.

It was inspiring to see someone with such history and impact at the school, who had arrived when women faculty were among the vast minority, still continuing to love her job.

- Shannon Gleeson, the Edmund Ezra Day Professor, Cornell ILR School 

During my first years as an assistant professor in the 1990s, I benefited from Tove, who played a key role in solving problems in my research that were hindering publication. Thereafter, as colleagues, we served on many committees together, and I was in awe at her utter fearlessness and her willingness to be blunt and direct. I experienced her focus on exacting standards in research when she was editor of the ILR Review. In our later years, we talked more about our common interests in Scandinavia. I will miss her deeply. 

- Sarosh Kuruvilla, the Andrew J. Nathanson Family Professor, Cornell ILR School 

I will always remember my good friend and colleague, Tove Helland Hammer. She was a gifted scholar, teacher, mentor, wife and mother, whose Norwegian roots were an important part of who she was. 

She brought to her life and work a deep sense of curiosity, thoughtfulness and purpose. At Cornell, she shared her knowledge and intellectual curiosity with generations of students, inspiring them to ask thoughtful questions and pursue discovery with rigor and imagination. Her impactful research made lasting contributions to her field and reflected her remarkable commitment to understanding the world of Industrial and Labor Relations. 

Above all, Tove was devoted to her husband and their two children, who were always at the heart of her life. I remember her with gratitude for her scholarship, her generosity as a teacher and colleague, and the warmth, love, and inspiration she gave to her family, friends, students and all who had the privilege of knowing her.

Hvil i fred, kjære Tove.

- Olivia Mitchell, business economics and public policy professor, Wharton Business School

Tove was one of the psychologists in the OB department, and my first choice as a supervisor. Early in my first year, I approached her with a rather vague idea for an independent study about resistance to change and asked whether she might be willing to supervise me. She was, and from the beginning she treated the idea, and me, with seriousness and encouragement. It was Tove who later suggested that the subject could become my Ph.D. topic and offered to supervise it. It became my Ph.D. topic, with Tove as my supervisor, and the topic remains a central theme in my research.

As a supervisor, Tove was attentive, demanding and remarkably responsive. She read everything I sent her very carefully and edited it thoroughly. And she had her work cut out for her. She had a particular dislike of the many commas I tended to use in my writing. More than twenty years later, I remain grateful for what she taught me, although I have not been entirely reformed: I still like commas.

Tove’s support extended well beyond my academic work. I knew that I could turn to her when I encountered difficulties, including personal ones. When I first knew her, she could seem somewhat distant and reserved, perhaps living up to a certain Scandinavian stereotype. I gradually learned how sensitive and caring she was. I saw this side of her most clearly when she met my first son, who was born shortly after I began the graduate program. When she saw him, she would glow; all reserve would dissolve, and she would pull faces and make silly noises to make him laugh. She would become completely gooey in a way I never saw in any other context. I also remember that Tove and [her husband] Dave generously gave us our first high chair, which he loved and which we later used with our second son.

Some of my warmest memories are of the Thanksgiving dinners Tove hosted at her home and invited us to join. As a graduate student, I felt greatly honored to be included, but Tove made us feel completely welcome.

Tove changed the course of my academic life, but her importance to me went well beyond that. Although we were only sporadically in touch in later years, whenever we met, we immediately picked up where we had left off and seeing her was always a joy. It is hard to accept that there will not be another such meeting, and I will miss her dearly.

- Shaul Oreg, professor of organizational behavior, Hebrew University Business School

As most of her friends know, Tove was a very serious fan of Cornell’s hockey team. When I came for a job interview, she and Bob Stern (another member of the OB department) took me to my first-ever hockey game. They gave me a little tutorial on the sport and assured me that understanding hockey was key to being a Cornellian. That may not be completely true, but it was a great introduction to Cornell and by far the most memorable job interview I had. 

And when I joined the department as a newly minted Ph.D., she was very helpful to me in a number of ways, including supporting me during my first semester teaching the big (300 students) introductory OB class - it was a bit of a disaster, so I was really grateful for the support. 

And she was devoted to her Ph.D. students. I remember her 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. She kept in close touch with many of her students, as they went on to academic positions all over the world.

- Pam Tolbert, the Lois S. Gray Professor of ILR and Social Sciences, Cornell ILR School

I started in the ILR Ph.D. program in fall 1987. I was a collective bargaining major with minors in OB and HR. That fall, I took Tove’s Micro OB course. Tove was well organized (as she was with everything!) and an excellent teacher. I really liked OB, but even with that, the theories can be a bit dry. Tove brought OB to life with wonderful stories about research projects she and other scholars conducted over the years. Sometimes, the stories (like those from the Tyson chicken plant) were so funny that the students laughed out loud. She knew how to combine theory, research, real-world examples, and humor to make the information stick in your brain. Tove was a real pro. 

Tove taught my son Ellis in a Leadership writing seminar when he was a sophomore. Ellis’ comments echo mine: “Tove was a truly special person. Just being in her presence was inspiring. And her smile would just fill me with joy and energy every time I saw it! I am really happy I got to take her class. She put so much thought and encouragement into grading papers! I always liked her notes on the papers I turned in.”

During my first year, Tove invited me to work with her on a study of union leadership. It was the perfect collaborative research project for our skill sets. I worked as a union researcher at [the Pennsylvania State Education Association] PSEA for three years prior to Cornell. As an industrial psychologist, Tove had an interest in leadership and unions, a rare combination. She was interested in determining the key behavioral dimensions of union leadership and then identifying how they affect outcomes such as union commitment and instrumentality, pay equity, participation and procedural justice. As with many of Tove’s research projects, she wanted to go big: a sample with many local unions, numerous organizational control variables, and thousands of members. I was thrilled to find a professor determined to dig deep into the union “black box” and conduct research on how leaders and other factors influence union effectiveness. 

Tove didn’t take shortcuts, so if she was going to survey union leaders, she wasn’t going to grab survey items off the shelf or invent items without a thorough understanding. She insisted that we conduct interviews and do focus groups to learn about the union leader’s role. While she was known as an empirical researcher, Tove knew how to put people at ease in focus groups. Here was a Norwegian Ivy League professor talking with Pennsylvania unionists, and you’d swear they had been friends for life. Tove had the leaders breaking down their roles into the most finite of tasks, and in the end, we had the rich qualitative information we needed to construct our survey instruments. 

Tove was never driven by research for the sake of research or to put up publication numbers. She wanted to do research that organizations, in this case, unions, could use. When we were done with our first round of analyses, Tove presented the findings to 70 local and statewide leaders of PSEA. Even though the research was highly technical, Tove boiled it down to simple, understandable findings and explained the practical implications. To this day, the union utilizes these research findings in member and leader training. And in subsequent years, working with the talented Mahmut Bayazit, Ph.D. ’03, Tove’s graduate student, our union leadership and effectiveness research resulted in three published studies in the Journal of Applied Psychology and the ILR Review. 

I could not have had a better mentor. Tove set high expectations, and she then helped me improve my skills and provided me with the confidence to achieve those standards. Tove and her husband, Dave, taught me the value of family-work balance. Teaching and research were important for both of them, but their family always came first. And finally, Tove understood and practiced self-care. She rarely missed a day at the gym. Every day I’d watch her briskly walk to the gym for her workout. And then an hour later, practically speedwalk back to Ives Hall where she would murmur, “skal vi se,” (Norwegian for “let me see”) several times as she focused intensely on a lecture or regressions results. 

I will miss Tove’s insights, her smile, her big heart, and her deep commitment to improving people’s work lives. 

I am privileged to have had her as a mentor and friend. 

- David Wazeter, Ph.D. ’91, PA State Education Association