Statement of Research Interests in Positive Organizational Scholarship

The following summarizes some of my recent research that seems to relate to positive organizational scholarship as I understand it.

Massimo Bergami and I have been studying social identity in organizations and have investigated its impact on citizenship behaviors. We find that the stronger the social identity (in terms of self-awareness of membership, affective commitment, and collective self-esteem), the more employees behave altruistically, conscientiously, courteously, and with civic virtue and sportsmanlike behavior toward coworkers. We also have studied the relationship of social identity with procedural and distributive justice, involvement, turnover, and other aspects of behavior.

Willem Verbeke and I have examined the role of emotions in the workplace, especially with respect to such boundary spanners as salespeople. We began with an investigation of the nature and consequences of sales call anxiety, a form of social anxiety, and then turned to the study of such negative emotions as embarrassment, shame, and envy. Most recently, we have examined the positive consequences of guilt and its interaction with empathy. We also compared how Dutch and Philippine salespeople differ in their responses to shame, finding negative consequences for the former, positive consequences for the latter.