A conference held recently at the Naveen Jindal School of Management brought together academics and practitioners who are well-accomplished in the field of organizational behavior and human resource management to discuss groundbreaking research related to the field.
Members of the Personnel and Human Resources Research Group gathered March 1-2 at the annual event hosted this year by the Jindal School.
Dr. Hasan Pirkul, Caruth Chair and Jindal School dean, welcomed the attendees.
“This is the beginning of the golden age of business school research,” he said. “There is so much change in everything we do. Information technology drives the way we work. When I am interviewing job applicants I always ask them what they are working on because I am curious about their research. There are some exciting things going on.”
Dr. Riki Takeuchi, the Dr. Joseph Picken Distinguished Professor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Jindal School, organized the day-and-a-half long conference.
After each presentation, attendees were invited to ask questions, share information or ideas, and make suggestions about the research.
“The topics presented range from AI, assessment centers, dirty work, leadership, time and research methodologies,” said Takeuchi, a professor in the Organizations, Strategy and International Management Area, “but the highlight of the conference is the very active knowledge exchanges among the conference attendees, including the presenters.”
Takeuchi’s research centers on understanding social exchange relationships among various organizational constituents. He also studies strategic human resource management with a focus on the employer-employee relationship, and organizational behavior, broadly focusing on social exchange relationships with an emphasis on organizational justice and organizational citizenship behaviors.
“I am interested in understanding international assignment experiences for expatriates and spouses through multiple theoretical lenses,” he said, “and explaining the complexity associated with the adjustment process.”
His conference presentation was “Time After Time? Conceptualizations of Time in Organization Science.”
“I want to see if there is a way to synthesize all the different ways of looking at time, but I don’t know if that would contribute anything,” Takeuchi told attendees. “I am very early in the process of considering this idea and I am hoping you can provide some ideas to help me decide what my focus should be. In my limited search of the literature, there are different concepts of time, but no over-arching concepts of what time is.”
Dr. Paul Sackett, a professor of psychology and liberal arts at the University of Minnesota and founder of PHRRG, opened the conference with his presentation, “My Fifty-Year Journey with What Assessment Centers Measure: The Latest Chapter.” He discussed various exercises used by assessment centers in job candidate evaluations and the ways they have evolved during his career.
Major themes in his work include the tension between designing selection systems to maximize job performance vs. to maximize ethnic, racial and gender diversity; the measurement and prediction of counterproductive behavior in the workplace; the assessment of managerial potential; and the role of personality in personnel selection.
Dr. Brian Swider’s presentation, “Dirty Work History and Future Career Success: Does the ‘Dirt’ Stick?” considered whether being employed in so-called dirty jobs, including construction, garbage collecting, debt collecting, and exterminating, among others, impacts future employment or salaries. Swider is an associate professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.
“Our findings were that holding dirty jobs has cumulative effects on career prestige and income,” he said. “Managers believe they can hire these people at a discount.”
Dr. Herman Aguinis, a professor of management at the George Washington University School of Business, discussed best practices for “rigorous, credible, and impactful research” in his presentation on Research Methodology.
“The knowledge and methods are constantly evolving,” he said. “This is what we know now and these are (now) the recommended practices. You do things to the best of your experience and knowledge, and then you send the paper off.”
Artificial intelligence and its effect on personnel selection was the focus of a presentation by Dr. Fred Oswald, director of graduate studies in Rice University’s Department of Psychological Services. “Project AI: An Agenda for AI-Based Employment Testing” included a discussion of laws about AI’s use that are being considered or discussed.
“Laws pertaining to AI are largely being discussed by politicians trying to be responsive to voters,” he said. “These laws are largely not concerned with the principles and standards, and that is a problem.”
Other presenters were Dr. Evan Sinar, a research scientist for Global Candidate Intelligence; Dr. Nathan Podsakoff, a professor and department head in Management/Organizations at the University of Arizona; Dr. Leslie DeChurch, chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University; and Dr. Zhen Zhang, the O. Paul Corley Distinguished Chair in Organizational Behavior and Administration at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. Their research topics included AI, the CEO effect, mediating models and shared leadership.
This was Takeuchi’s first time to organize the PHRRG conference and he was pleased with the results.
He has been a group member since 2018 and has presented four times at the annual conference.
“I do this because I can present my research ideas in a very constructive and developmental atmosphere, even though the ideas may not be as well refined as I would like them to be,” he said. ”I always receive numerous well-intended comments and useful feedback from these well-established scholars in the field.”
