Organizational Behavior (OB)

Marie Mitchell: Abusive Supervision 2007-09-14 Mike interviews Marie Mitchell about a study she and Maureen Ambrose conducted examining the effects of abusive supervision on workplace deviance. Drawing on a sample of participants from a wide variety of organizations, they found that employees with abusive supervisors were likely to retaliate against their abusers, and were also likely to displace their aggression at other targets, including their coworkers and the organization in general.

Niro Sivanathan: Escalation of Commitment 2008-04-10 Mike interviews Niro Sivanathan about a study he and his colleagues recently conducted on the phenomenon of escalation of commitment, where people invest additional resources in failing projects. He talks about how escalation often occurs when people want to justify their past decisions. They find that escalation can be averted by providing people with self-affirming feedback, which reduces their need to self-justify their past decisions.

Oana Branzei: Trust in Cross-cultural Business Relationships 2007-11-02 Morela interviews Oana Branzei about a study she and her colleagues recently conducted that examined how trust develops and breaks in cross-cultural business relationships. Utilizing a sample of Canadian and Japanese students, they examined which signs people used to determine whether they trusted a potential joint venture partner. They found that the Canadians (an individualist culture) relied on signs that indicated something about the potential partner’s disposition, but the Japanese (a collectivistic culture) relied on signs about the context in which the joint venture would be embedded. She offers suggestions on how to build trust when dealing cross-culturally.

Roy Chua: Culture and Creativity 2015-07-03 Mike interviews Roy Chua about how cultural tightness and cultural distance affect creativity. In a study of hundreds of contests on an international crowdsourcing platform, Roy and his colleagues looked at who entered and won these creative contests. They found that people from tight cultures–cultures where norms are strong and people are punished for violating those norms–were less likely to enter and win foreign creative contests than people from loose cultures. This effect was even stronger when the culture of the country sponsoring the contest was very different (cultural distance) from the culture of the participants. Roy says companies need to target their creative efforts at different sources, depending on whether they come from tight or loose cultures.

Sabine Sonnentag: Recovering from Work 2008-07-29 Mike interviews Sabine Sonnentag from Universität Konstanz in Germany about a study she recently conducted on how people recover from work Sabine Sonnentag discusses how disengaging from work in the evening affects people’s moods.in the evening. Using Palm Pilots, participants reported their activities in the evening and their moods the following morning. Results indicated that detaching from work, relaxing, and engaging in challenging off-job activities greatly improved people’s moods the following day.

Sabrina Deutsch Salamon: Does Your Boss Trust You 2008-09-23 Morela interviews Sabrina Deutsch Salamon about her research on trust and the advantageous effects that nurturing manager trust in employees may have on organizational performance. Sabrina proposes that employees who feel trusted by their managers think more about how to achieve organizational goals in a manner that does not hurt the organization, rather than about how to maximize their personal objectives with little regard for the organization.

Sanford Devoe: Time is Money 2007-09-28 Mike interviews Sanford Devoe about the studies reported in the Academy of Management Journal and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. In these studies, Sanford and co-author Jeff Pfeffer of Stanford University demonstrate that people paid by the hour view time in the same way that they view money, but people paid by salary do not. People who view time as money were more likely to give extra time to work for additional pay, but were less likely to volunteer their time than salaried employees.

Scott DeRue: Team Downsizing 2008-04-28 Morela interviews Scott DeRue about a study he and his team recently conducted that examined how different structural approaches to downsizing affect team adaptation. Testing three approaches where either a junior team member or the team leader is downsized, they find that only the Eliminating Hierarchy approach (downsizing the team leader) provided enough of a trigger for teams to meaningfully adapt. Additionally, they find that teams composed of members high in extraversion and emotional stability adapted most effectively.

Stuart Bunderson: Work as a Calling 2009-02-24 Mike interviews Stuart Bunderson about his research on work as a calling. Drawing on rich philosophical and theological traditions, Stuart talks about how calling changes the way people think about their occupations. Using an unusual sample of zookeepers, he discovered what seeing work as a calling means both to the employee and to the organization.

Subra Tangirala: Employee Silence on Critical Work Issues 2008-03-17 Morela interviews Subra Tangirala about research he and Ranga Ramanujam did on the managerial and organizational implications of employee silence. They propose that managers can prevent employee silence by creating a procedurally fair climate within the organization, as well as increasing their employees’ workgroup identification and professional commitment.

Tanya Menon: Do You Threaten People? 2007-10-25 Mike interviews Tanya Menon about a series of studies she and Leigh Thompson conducted that examine people’s perceptions of interpersonal threat. They introduce the phenomenon of threat immunity, where people believe that they are more threatening to others than others are to them. She explains how understanding threat immunity can enhance both performance feedback and negotiations.

Terri Scandura: Mentoring at Work 2008-03-18 Mike interviews Terri Scandura regarding her body of research on mentoring at work. She discusses the relationship between mentoring and leadership, the effects of gender on mentoring relationships, and how dysfunctional mentoring relationships occur. She finishes by giving recommendations to both mentors and mentees on how to start and maintain a good mentoring relationship.

Terry Mitchell (part 1): The Unfolding Model of Turnover 2007-07-24 In this interview, Terry Mitchell talks about research he and Tom Lee have conducted in examining voluntary turnover. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that people quit because they are dissatisfied with their jobs, their research has discovered that this is just one of four reasons why people leave their jobs. He discusses pre-emptive actions managers can take to combat voluntary turnover.

Terry Mitchell (part 2): Job Embeddedness 2007-07-24 This is part two of a two-part interview with Terry Mitchell, where he talks about research he and Tom Lee have conducted in examining voluntary turnover. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that people stay in their jobs because they are satisfied, their research has discovered people often stay because they are stuck by factors both inside and outside the organization. Terry talks about ways that managers can help their employees to become more embedded, and thus reduce voluntary turnover.

Todd Rogers: Future Lock-in 2008-02-28 Mike interviews Todd Rogers about a series of laboratory experiments he and co-author Max Bazerman performed on the future lock-in effect. They found that people are more likely to choose what they think they should when the decision will be implemented in the distant future. In contrast, when the decision will be implemented immediately, people are more likely to choose what they want, not what they think they should.

Adam Grant: Task Significance 2008-02-07 Mike interviews Adam Grant about a series of field experiments he performed on task significance” the sense that one’s job has a positive impact on the wellbeing of other people. Adam found that increasing task significance dramatically improved employee job performance.

Amir Erez: Charismatic Leadership and Emotions 2008-05-27 Mike interviews Amir Erez of the University of Florida regarding two studies he recently performed examining how charismatic leaders influence their followers through emotional contagion. He and his colleagues found that although charismatic leaders tend to be in better moods than non-charismatic leaders, it is the leader’s expression of positive moods (through behaviors like smiling and laughing) that influences followers.

Astrid Homan: Team Diversity 2007-09-20 Mike interviews Astrid Homan about an experiment that examined the effects of team members’ beliefs about the value of diversity on team performance. Astrid and her co-authors found that although objective diversity had no effect on performance, team members’ beliefs about the value of diversity did. Specifically, diverse teams that valued diversity performed better than homogeneous teams and diverse teams that did not value diversity.

Batia Wiesenfeld: Is More Fairness Always Preferred 2008-02-01 Morela interviews Batia Wiesenfeld about her research on justice and the counterintuitive effects a person’s self-esteem may have of the perception of fairness. Batia proposes that managers should take a customized approach to dealing with fairness issues in the workplace based on their employees’ notion of self worth and their commitment to the organization.

Brad Kirkman: Power Distance and Transformational Leadership 2010-09-23 Mike interviews Brad Kirkman about his research on how culture affects leadership. Brad discusses how the cultural value of power distance affects how followers respond to leaders. When followers espouse low power distance values, transformational leadership greatly affects follower perceptions of fairness and citizenship behaviors.

Brent Scott: Subordinate Charisma and Fair Treatment 2008-01-04 Mike interviews Brent Scott about a paper he recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology with co-authors Jason Colquitt and Cindy Zapata-Phelan. They found that employees who were rated as more charismatic by their managers received higher levels of interpersonal and informational justice from their managers. This effect was due to the sentiments (positive and negative feelings) managers held toward their employees.

Chip Hunter and Sherry Thatcher: Job Performance 2007-10-04 Mike interviews Chip Hunter and Sherry Thatcher about their study of the effects of stress on job performance among employees in a bank that had recently undergone a restructuring. They found that the effects of stress on performance depended upon the employees’ levels of commitment and job performance. For employees who were highly committed and/or had high levels of job experience, stress led to higher performance. In contrast, for employees who had low levels of commitment and/or job experience, stress led to lower job performance.

Christopher M. Barnes: Harmful Help 2008-07-23 Mike interviews Chris Barnes of Michigan State University about an experiment he and his colleagues conducted that looked at helping in teams. They find that providing back up help for team members sometimes harms both short-term and long-term team performance. Helping teammates can prevent team members from completing their own work, and can enable the help recipients such that they come to rely on the back up from their team.

Christina Maslach: Early Warning Signs of Burnout 2008-08-05 Mike interviews Christina Maslach of the University of California-Berkeley about her research on employee burnout. Her most recent study found that employees who show one of the symptoms of burnout will likely show full-blown burnout a year later, if their jobs also have one of the accompanying conditions leading to burnout.

Christine Porath: Incivility at Work 2016-08-04 In this episode, Christine Porath talks about what happens when people are incivil at work. She highlights research that shows negative effects of incivility on creativity, performance, and leadership. Many leaders aren’t even aware when they are acting with incivility, so she discusses ways that leaders can get feedback about how civil they are. She also discusses what individual leaders and organizations can do to increase civility at work.

Debra Shapiro: Lost in Translation 2007-07-21 In this interview, Debra Shapiro talks about a recent survey that examined why management research is often not applied in management practice. The “lost in translation” problem occurs when academic researchers do not present their results in ways that make sense to practitioners. The “lost before translation” problem occurs when management research does not address questions that are even of interest to managers. Dr. Shapiro discusses the causes and possible solutions to these two problems.

Derek Avery: Perceived Discrimination 2008-05-22 Morela interviews Derek Avery about a study on discrimination he conducted using national Gallup polling data. Derek talks about how two types of dissimilarity” prototypical dissimilarity and demographic dissimilarity” lead to different perceptions of discrimination. Interestingly, they found that the community in which people live also affects the degree to which they feel discriminated against at work.

Jay Carson: Shared Leadership in Teams 2007-12-27 Mike interviews Jay Carson about a study he recently published in the Academy of Management Journal with co-authors Paul Tesluk and Jennifer Marrone. They found that coaching by an external leader was a critical factor in the emergence of shared leadership, particularly when the internal team environment was poor. In turn, shared leadership was associated with higher team performance.

Jenny Hoobler: The Glass Ceiling 2011-01-17 In this podcast, Mike interviews Jenny Hoobler about why the glass ceiling effect still persists for executive women. Jenny talks about the results of her study that show that managers tend to perceive women as having lower levels of fit with their jobs because they perceive them to have high levels of family-to-work conflict. (Interestingly, this effect holds even for women who were single and had no children!) As a result, women whose managers perceived them as not being a good fit for their jobs were promoted less often. Listen to the podcast here.

Joel Brockner: Procedural Fairness, It’s a Good Deal 2008-01-15 Mike interviews Joel Brockner about a 20+ year stream of research on procedural fairness. Joel summarizes numerous studies that showed how the fairness of an organization’s policies and procedures for making and communicating decisions is one of the most important factors in determining employee attitudes and behaviors.

Marcus Butts: Electronic Communication in Nonwork Time 2016-03-16 Marcus Butts talks about what happens when employees receive emails or texts from work after they have left work for the day. Surprisingly, he and his co-researchers find that certain kinds of nonwork time electronic communications actually make employees feel good. But organizations need to be careful about the emotional tone of nonwork time emails, and be sensitive as to whether their employees are integrators–people who make little distinction between work and personal time–and segmentors–people who make strong distinctions between work and their personal lives.

Joshua Margolis and Andy Molinsky: Necessary Evils 2008-08-18 Morela Hernandez interviews Joshua Margolis and Andy Molinsky about a study they recently conducted that examined how individuals performing “necessary evils” respond to the reality of causing harm to others and how different response styles to this experience affect their subsequent treatment of the target of their actions. Investigating the experiences of managers, doctors, police officers, and addiction counselors, Joshua and Andy find that different response styles are dependent on the psychological engagement and disengagement of those performing “necessary evils”.