Faculty
Front row: Susan Mohammed, Alicia Grandey, Rick Jacobs, Sam Hunter
Second row: Rustin Meyer, James LeBreton, Greg Loviscky, Kisha Jones
Not pictured: Amie Skattebo, Jason Williams, Barbara, Watters
Research/Graduate Faculty
James L. Farr Ph.D. 1971, University of Maryland, Professor Emeritus
Although officially retired (as of June 30, 2013), Dr. Farr is currently working in the Psychology Department on a part-time basis, primarily involved in the development of online degree programs.
Research interests: Personnel selection, criterion development, work motivation, performance feedback seeking and giving; issues related to older workers’ job performance and motivation; innovation and creativity.
Alicia Grandey Ph.D. 1999, Colorado State University, Professor
Alicia Grandey’s primary stream of research is on emotional labor, or the regulation of emotions and expressions to perform one’s work role (i.e., “service with a smile”). The majority of my research examines the conditions under which emotional labor predicts performance (i.e., customer satisfaction, supervisor ratings) and personal health (i.e., job satisfaction, burnout). I seek students who are curious and proactive about learning, open and responsive to suggestions, and able to integrate and use a variety of theories and methods (experience-sampling, field surveys, observation, lab experiments).
New research questions of interest include (1) does emotional labor influence broader nonwork outcomes such as family or personal health behaviors, (2) how and why do we manage seemingly “positive” emotions such as pride in a work context; (3) how do social characteristics (e.g., race, culture) determine the performance and health outcomes?, and (4) how does emotional climate/culture (e.g., authenticity versus positivity) determine attractiveness and stress of employees?
Click HERE for more information about Dr. Grandey's research lab.
Sam Hunter Ph.D. 2007, The University of Oklahoma, Associate Professor
Research interests: Two broad, yet overlapping domains: leadership and innovation management. Within the area of leadership, my interests revolve understanding darker leader behaviors including leader error and leader deviance. In addition, I have focused recent research efforts on leadership requirements for engaging unique subordinate populations such as employees on the autism spectrum. Within the area of innovation, my interests focus on the enhancement and development of innovation in the workplace with a particular emphasis on the innovation context and the role of leaders in managing that context. Across both areas of interest, I take a multilevel perspective to understanding and investigating relevant constructs. Secondary interests include: teams, organizational climate, shared leadership, and alternative research methods such as historiometric analysis.
For more detailed information please visit my lab website.
Rick R. Jacobs Ph.D. 1978, University of California: Berkeley, Professor
Rick Jacobs will be serving as a Research Fellow at the Army Research Institute as part of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. Specifically, ARI has put together an expert panel on classification (or job assignment) to address the question of, "How can the Army improve the assignment process to increase Soldier-job fit by considering non-technical predictors (e.g., personality, temperament, work-interest) and criterion (e.g., motivation, job-fit, discipline)?" Dr. Jacobs will be joining a distinguished panel including Leaetta Hough, Fred Oswald, Ann Marie Ryan, Neal Schmitt and Paul Sackett.
Research interests: Assessment Centers and their use in assisting college student’s preparation for leadership careers, testing and the relationship between validity and adverse impact, adverse impact – its definition, measurement and factors that complicate its explanation, as well as the role of experience in understanding performance.
For more detailed information please visit my blog.
Kisha S. Jones Ph.D. 2013, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Assistant Professor
Kisha Jones' research seeks to increase diversity and inclusion in the workplace by understanding how organizations can build and maintain fair, diverse, and inclusive work environments that people from all backgrounds can succeed in. Specifically, she studies how factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, and mental illness impact career entry, recruitment, selection, and retention. Her research seeks to identify how diversity can be increased and managed in organizations by understanding the ways that personal characteristics of workers (e.g., knowledge, skills, abilities, vocational interests, race/ethnicity, gender, etc.) influence their attraction to, interest in, and selection for jobs. Her work also involves ascertaining the strategies that organizations can use to attract, hire, retain, and support employees with these diverse qualities. This research overlaps with various topics in recruitment, personnel selection, adverse impact, and organizational justice.
James LeBreton Ph.D. 2002, University of Tennessee, Professor
My research focuses on measuring implicit or unconscious aspects of personality and understanding how these aspects of personality are related to human behavior. During the last 17 years I have been involved in the development and validation of several tests designed to measure implicit motives. Most of this work has focused on the measurement of the motive to aggress and linking it to outcomes such as counterproductive work behavior, leadership, team processes & performance, and test faking. I have also published in the areas of research methods and statistics. My current projects focus on issues associated with 1) relative importance of predictors in multiple regression, 2) interrater agreement and reliability, and 3) analyzing multilevel and longitudinal data.
For more detailed information please visit my lab website.
Rustin Meyer Ph.D. 2009, Purdue University, Assistant Professor
Rustin Meyer's research focuses on workplace applications of interactionism—the belief that human behavior is a joint function of individuals and the situations they experience. Toward this end, Rustin’s primary streams of research focus on better understanding individuals and work situations in mutually commensurate ways. This includes (a) improving our theoretical and empirical conceptualization of “situational strength” (the idea that various situational characteristics restrict the expression and, therefore, criterion-related validity of dispositional characteristics); (b) creating an updateable, hierarchical taxonomy that categorizes types of situations on the basis of their defining characteristics; and (c) refining interactionism-relevant research methods.
For more detailed information please visit my lab website.
Susan Mohammed Ph.D. 1996, The Ohio State University, Professor
Susan Mohammed’s research program broadly focuses on investigating the drivers of effective teamwork and performance, with specific emphases on team composition/diversity, team cognition/mental models, and the integration of time in team research. Although she has investigated a wide range of individual differences in teams (e.g., demographics, cognitive ability, experience, Big Five personality traits), her more recent work examines the conditions under which temporal diversity (e.g., time urgency, pacing style, polychronicity) is helpful or harmful for team performance. In addition, Dr. Mohammed’s team mental model research highlights the importance of team members being “on the same page” with what and how work needs to be accomplished. Recent work has emphasized the need for team members to also reach agreement on when work needs to be completed. A second line of research is devoted to the factors that affect decision making, with current studies focusing on decision styles.
Teaching Faculty
Greg Loviscky, Ph.D. 2000, Pennsylvania State University
Amie Skattebo, Ph.D. 2009, Pennsylvania State University
Barbara Watters, Ph.D. 1989, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Jason Williams, Ph.D., Central Michigan University
For additional faculty information, please visit the PSU Psychology Department Website.