Profile & Research

Two things drew me into graduate studies in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan after an omnibus BA majoring in psychology with courses in abnormal, personality, physiological (now called neuroscience), comparative, developmental (now called life-span), social, and educational psychology: organizational was the only specialty in psychology that dealt with normal, adult, human beings in their everyday lives. It was a relief to leave behind the clinical, medical, and abnormal issues, as well as the study of subhuman creatures, and learn about the behavior of adults in organizations. Furthermore, I freed myself of the “medical” or “illness” model of behavior in organizations by focusing on positive aspects of organizational behavior.

The self-fulfilling prophecy in management, or the Pygmalion effect, has been a mainstay of my research. It is positive psychology in action, as it focuses especially on the beneficial effects of high manager expectations on subordinates’ performance as well as managers’ and subordinates’ self-expectations and self-efficacy. All positive things come together when managers have high expectation: they communicate them, wittingly or unwittingly, to their subordinates, who respond with enhanced self-efficacy, augmented work motivation, and greater productivity. Self-fulfilling prophecy in management is an area that is bursting with potential for practical application that can bring about substantial positive outcomes at near-zero cost.

A second area of POS is my stress-respite research. This line of research began as a novel way to study the effects of job stress on strain, namely, to gather repeated observations of participants’ stress and strain both on the job and during off-the-job respites. The pattern of rising and falling levels of stress and strain confirms the hypothesized detrimental effects of stress on strain. At the same time, they also reveal the positive impact of off-the-job respites on individual well-being. Once having realized this, the respite from job stress emerged as a phenomenon worthy of research in its own right. Over the years my students, colleagues, and I have studied a variety of respites in diverse samples, including annual vacation, business trips, active reserve military service, and sabbatical leave among university academicians. We have shown that all these respites are positive experiences that reduce strain and provide for the replenishment of depleted psychological resources. Furthermore, personal characteristics (e.g., self-efficacy, gender) as well as features of the respite (detachment from the back-home workplace, perceived control, quality of the respite) moderate the amount of stress-relief and resource accretion individuals achieve during their respites.

There are clear practical implications for managing organizational respites to maximize their positive impact on individuals and the organizations that employ them. However, the positive effects of respites fade out soon after returning to routine work. Having amassed internally and externally valid evidence for the salutogenic value of respites, the next challenges are to find ways to retard fadeout, as well as ways to simulate the regenerative power of respites while on the job.