Indiana University School of Public Health first year doctoral student Mr. Kyungyeol (Anthony) Kim earned the top award in the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) Student Research Competition and will present his paper during the President’s Luncheon at the NASSM Annual Conference in Denver May 30 – June 3.

Mr. Kim, who is studying sport management under the guidance of Dr. Kevin K. Byon, submitted his original research paper entitled “A Mechanism of Mutually Beneficial Relationships between Employees and Consumers: Dyadic Analysis of Employee-Consumer Interaction.” In his research, Mr. Kim studied the interactions between 190 pairs of employees and consumers in fitness centers to determine how frontline employees’ behaviors influenced consumers’ subsequent behaviors through perceived service quality and satisfaction.

The NASSM is the largest scholarly community in the field of sport management, and the Student Research Competition award is the highest honor for student research in the sport management field. According to the NASSM, “papers should reflect a student’s analytical and/or theoretical research interest.” All submissions go through a blind review process by four different judges before a winner is selected.

In addition to Mr. Kim earning the top award in this competition, Mr. Minkyo Lee, a doctoral student in sport management at the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington, was selected as a finalist for his paper “The Effectiveness of Advertising Embedded in Televised Sport Programming: How Team Performance Influences Attitude Formation”.