Tammy Beck

I am interested in inter-organizational collaboration, strategic management, and organizational resiliency.

Anita Blanchard

Organizations increasingly rely on computer mediated communication such as email and the internet for employees to communicate with each other.  As more employees become telecommuters or interact in virtual groups, it becomes more important that the groups formed through this computer communication are effective.  My research has three main threads in determining how successful virtual groups and virtual communities develop:

• Sense of virtual community: how can we measure SOVC? What are its antecedents what are its outcomes? How does SOVC relate to other important employee attitudes?
• How do virtual groups affect FtF groups and organizations?
• How does the online environment interact with the online group’s social processes to affect group functioning and success?

Yang Cao

A major trend in today’s global economy has been the rapid expansion of large corporations across national boundaries. How do these transnational organizations structure their employment relationship in foreign countries? What kinds of labor management structures (e.g., recruitment test, suggestion system, and grievance procedures) are they likely to adopt? To what extent are their employment practices shaped by economic/rational considerations, political/legal environments, and institutional/cultural heritages? The main project I am working on seeks to address these and related issues in the context of China, where foreign direct investment has surged during the past 25 years and yet multinational operations continue to be troubled with frequent labor strife. Dr. Wei Zhao and I have recently conducted fieldwork and surveys in China and we are hoping that the data we collected will help us to better understand these questions.

David Gilmore

1. Personality differences (Big 5) in interviewer behaviors. Is E related to amount of talk time? Is A related to verbal/nonverbal support by interviewers? Does E or A influence applicants’ perceptions of likelihood of job offer, etc.?
2. Replicate and extend a study I did some years ago to determine applicant perceptions/reactions to behaviorally based employment interviews, situation ally based interviews, and "traditional" interviews.
3. Hunting expedition-try to find a set of personality items and/or facets that are related to self/other discrepancies on 360 instruments. This might be akin to Self Monitoring, but there may be Big 5 or CPI items that could relate to the amount of discrepancy.
4. Assessing emotion/personality in the interview. A few possibilities: a. can facial or other non verbal expressions be reliably "read" to measure emotions? b. do facial expressions reflect real personality/emotional differences, e.g., extroversion, agreeableness, etc.?

Loril Gossett

Broadly, I am interested in organizational communication, nonstandard labor arrangements, and identification, participation, and control in organizational settings.  Specifically, I am interested in examining how alternative work relationships (out-sourced/contingent employees, volunteers, geographically dispersed workers, etc.) impact our understanding of what it means to be or communicate as an organizational member.

Eric Heggestad

My research focuses on applications of individual differences and individual differences assessment to workplace settings. I have three more specifically dedined lines of research . First, I am interested in faking on personality assessments (when people give answers that aren’t accurate but make them look good). This is where most of my research effort has been over the last several years. While I am still interested in this topic, I am kind of scaling back my work in this area. Second, I am interested in the concept of social competence or social skills. This is an old literature that is really kind of a mess. My students, colleagues and I are looking at what social competence is and how to measure it. We are also interested in starting to develop a comprehensive theory of social competence and associated workplace outcomes. Ultimately, we would like to better understand how social competence is realted to workplace issues such as leadership. Third, and primarily through the interests of my students, I have been developing an interest in leadership. As I already noted, leadership is an important potential application for our work on social competence. However, I am also interested in issues of leader derailment, self-awareness on the part of the leader (do they hold accurate perceptions about themselves), and how personality is related to issues of leadership.

Diversity Communication

Organizational "Diversity" as a concept, organizational initiative or lofty goal is a pervasive part of contemporary organizational life.  As the demographic landscape rapidly changes in American society, organizations too must respond to how "differences" are constructed, maintained, abused, reproduced, recast, etc.  A valuable and significant component missing in much of the diversity discussion is how communication plays a role in (re)constructing this phenomena.  Often we hear diversity "management", diversity "education", "organizational" diversity, but how often do we hear diversity "communication", which in my opinion, is at the heart of interpersonal, group, and organizational functioning.  This research attempts to place communication as a construction/function (use of metaphors, narrative explanations of diversity, commodification of diversity, diversity and language, diversity as symbol) at the center of this important discussion.

Virtual Team Socialization

How are team members socialized (formally or informally) in a virtual team environment?  Are the communication socialization processes similar or different than traditional team socialization?  What are the personal, organizational, and societal implications of this socialization (mentoring, social vs task communication, productivity, relationships between team and organization).

Organizational Dialogue

How do traditionally underrepresented groups, primarily African Americans, perceive their participation and engagement in organizational discourse?  What factors (present or antecedent) enable or constrain inter-ethnic, inter-racial, or inter-cultural communication in the organizational context.   

Doug Pugh

Research by James Gross and Oliver John suggests there are stable individual differences in the way individuals express emotions and regulate their emotions. One important distinction is between suppression, or masking one's true emotions, versus reappraisal, which involves cognitively reevaluating the situation in order to change the actual emotion that is felt. This distinction parallels the concepts of surface acting versus deep acting found in the "emotional labor" literature on customer service (Emotional labor is the idea that some jobs, e.g., customer service jobs, require the explicit manipulation and regulation of employee emotion to serve organizational ends). Research further shows that the effects of reappraisal and suppression are different: suppression, for example, consumes more regulatory resources. Potential research questions include:

1. Do stable individual differences in tendencies to use suppression versus reappraisal that have been found in the laboratory affect important outcomes in the field, for example, the quality of an employee's service delivery or in the ratings of an employee's job performance? In other words, do suppressors perform worse than individuals who use reappraisal?

2. Do the effects of suppression versus reappraisal tendencies vary depending on the demands of the job?

3. Does suppression produce decrements in later cognitive task performance (as has been found in laboratory studies).

4. What exactly is "emotional dissonance". The literature says it’s the tension/stress produced when we express emotions that diverge from those we’re actually experiencing. But both the empirical data and theoretical rationale for the concept of emotional dissonance are quite inconsistent. Does it really cause stress to smile when you’re unhappy? Or are the negative outcomes found in research more the result of being unhappy in the first place?

Steven Rogelberg

I have an eclectic set of topics I am interested in.  My interests are in:

Cliff Scott

My research efforts are united by an interest in the role of everyday organizational talk as it shapes identity formation and safety/risk culture in organizations. For some time now, scholars of management and organizational communication have been concerned with identity formation, and much of this work has been concerned (rightly) with the impact of these discursive processes on the experiences of individuals in the workplace (e.g., in terms of discrimination, burnout, harassment, etc.). Alternatively, my research seeks to explore the impact of talk on group- and organization-level sensemaking as it shapes collective, material health and well being at work. That is, if we assume that organizing is a collective process by which we collaboratively interpret and respond to the organizational environment, does our sense of who we are shape what we "see" in the environment and the set of possible responses we imagine? Specifically, my work explores the capacity of everyday talk to shape how we interpret and respond to a variety of social and material risks in organizational life. Applied research topics include: occupational safety, emotion management, high reliability organizing, dirty work, meetings, and informal socialization processes. Current research projects include:

• An exploratory study of retrospective sensemaking among first responders during post-incident critique meetings;
• An analysis of how people appraise the effectiveness of meetings;
• An ethnographic study of how firefighters use talk to appraise and negotiate occupational hazards; and
• A structurational model of organizational socialization processes.

Linda Shanock 

4. What are the implications of supervisor and organizational support for work stress and employee well-being?

Wei Zhao

1. How would multinational corporation corporations (MNC) choose their organizational structures and practices (such as HR practices) when they are faced with the dual institutional pressures from both the home country and the host country?
2. How important are organizational identity and product image in determining product’s market price? How do firms construct a positive organizational identity and product image to establish an advantageous place in market competition (e.g., in the California wine industry)?
3. What are the consequences of classification systems in shaping organizational identities (including collective identities) and delimiting boundaries in an organizational field?
4. What are the main changes and characteristics of organizational practices during China’s market transition processes?
5. How is reputation constructed in an organizational field such as an industry? How are the reputation patterns affected by the structure of an organizational field? For example, why do we see distinct scholarly reputation patterns across disciplines?

Denis Arnold

I am interested in business and human rights, corporate ontology, environmentally sustainable business practices, ethics and labor practices, ethics and the pharmaceutical industry, and labor practices and ethics.

Peter Davis

I am interested in entrepreneurship, family businesses, global strategic management, and new ventures.

John Kello

Jo Ann Lee

1. How do personal values affect work/family conflict?
2. Are multiple roles (e.g., paid worker, parent) helpful or overwhelming?  The boundaries proposed by the expansionist theory of multiple roles need to be established.
3. General:  Factors related to retirement decisions.

Roslyn Arlin Mickelson
I am interested in how school and classroom composition (gender, SES, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, immigration status) affect long-term (educational and occupational attainment, attitudes, social cohesion and democratic values) and short-term educational outcomes (achievement, social identity). I’m surveying the extant US social science literature with the goal of identifying what we currently know,  identifying gaps in the research record, and creating a research agenda to fill those gaps.  I am investigating how adolescents’ educational performances are influenced by their perceptions of the opportunity structure that awaits people like them (in terms of their own gender, social class, and ethnicity).

Bill Siegfried

Technology is playing a much larger role in the selection and recruitment of individuals. My research concerns the impact these technologies have on potential applicants. One technology I am particularly interested in is computer adaptive tests (e.g. the computerized GRE). Computer adaptive tests (CAT) differ from conventional tests along numerous dimensions that may create a qualitatively different test taking experience for the test taker. My research investigates how specific features of CATs, such as the type of items, the difficulty of the items, the ability to navigate within the test (e.g. skip items and come back to them later), and so on, affect test takers both in terms of their performance on the test and also their reactions to the test (did they like it, did they think it was fair, was it anxiety provoking, were they motivated, etc.). Other potentially interesting aspects of CATs include test takers perceptions of performance while taking the test and their reactions to feedback regarding their performance and interventions that may improve test takers’ reactions such as providing pre test explanations regarding how CATs work. In addition to these specific interests, I am also interested in reactions to selection procedures in general and the impact of other technologies in personnel psychology.

I have also been researching issues related to diversity and how organizations can better manage a diverse workforce to improve the bottom line. Much of this work has to do with an organization’s diversity climate and how this climate might relate to turnover, absenteeism, sales performance, etc. Some more recent questions concern issues such as: perceptions of leadership in a diverse climate and how diversity at different levels of an organization affects employees at other levels. For many of these issues I have assembled some archival data sets that may be potential data sources to address some of these questions.

There is a substantial amount of research suggesting that employees experience job stress and even burnout due to overload, customer troubles, role ambiguity, etc. However, there has been relatively little (almost none) research examining consequences of interpersonal stress, specifically stress caused by interpersonal interactions with coworkers. Although coworkers could obviously contribute to overload, etc, I am primarily thinking of coworker's interpersonal styles. Perhaps coworkers also contribute to the emotional labor at work. (In other words, "Because I must continue to work with you, I can't express how your interpersonal style drives me crazy.") Overall, the idea is to focus on coworker relationships. I am also examining how types of control workers have (e.g., interpersonal, political skill, self-efficacy) influence stress and strains. Finally, I am expanding my personality research to include an examination of individual differences in the dispositional tendency to experience evaluation anxiety arising from the social context of organizations.