Rate My Professor Richard Tarpey

Richard Tarpey serves as Associate Professor of Management in the Department of Management at Middle Tennessee State University’s Jones College of Business. He holds the position of Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Business Administration in Supply Chain Management and Director of the Center for Supply Chain Management and Sustainability. Tarpey also chairs the 2026 Undergraduate Curriculum Committee representing Business and Management, and he has been recognized as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Teaching and Mentoring. As sponsor of the Supply Chain Management Student Group, he organizes professional speakers, business tours, and career discussions to prepare students for industry roles. He has contributed to high-profile events such as the Midsouth Supply Chain Summit, which drew a record number of attendees in 2024.

Tarpey earned his Doctor of Business Administration from the University of South Florida in 2018 and a Master of Business Administration from Middle Tennessee State University. Bringing over 30 years of professional experience in labor and asset management, his academic research focuses on labor management, productivity, scheduling, and staffing, with applications in supply chain and healthcare management. His publications appear in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Service Theory and Practice, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Journal of Small Business Strategy, and International Journal of Logistics Economics and Globalisation. Key works include “Comparing three contract types to optimize profits in service firm – digital service platform relationships” (Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 2024), “Nurse and Staff Centralized Scheduling Dissatisfaction: Perceptions of Organizational Justice” (Academy of Management Proceedings, 2024), “Is Paper Stationery or Agile? An Investigation of Dynamic Capabilities in the Printing Paper Supply Chain” (Journal of Small Business Strategy, 2023), “Antecedents to Logistic Clustering” (International Journal of Logistics Economics and Globalisation, 2022), “Project management education through simulation: Achieving reliability, relevance, and reality in a ‘messy’ environment” (Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 2022), and “Engineering Innovative Clinical Resource Management By Design: A guided Emergent Search Through a Complex Adaptive System of Systems” (IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2021). In 2023, Tarpey and Murat Arik received the Institute for Global Business Research Conference Distinguished Research Award for their collaborative paper.