David A Hofmann

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Kenan-Flagler Business School

Organizational failures often cause significant harm to employees, the organization itself, and the environment. Investigations of failures consistently highlight how key employees behaved in (perhaps unintentionally) unethical ways that de-prioritized safety, such as investing fewer resources in safety (vs. other priorities) over time. Drawing on...

The ability to detect differences between groups partially impacts how useful a group-level variable will be for subsequent analyses. Direct consensus and referent-shift consensus group-level constructs are often measured by aggregating group member responses to multi-item scales. We show that current measurement validation practice for these group...

Starting with initiatives dating back to the mid-1800s, we provide a high-level review of the key trends and developments in the application of applied psychology to the field of occupational safety. Factory laws, basic worker compensation, and research on accident proneness comprised much of the early work. Thus, early research and practice very m...

The design and use of standard processes are foundational recommendations in many operations practices. Yet, given the demonstrated performance benefits of standardized processes, it is surprising that they are often not followed consistently. One way to ensure greater compliance is by electronically monitoring the activities of individuals, althou...

Airports are complex systems characterized by unique and unpredictable safety challenges. Analyses of safety policies and practices focusing on organizational level (e.g., safety culture and climate) may overlook the importance of individual workers' safety perceptions. The current research highlights two factors that play important roles in shapin...

The Hawthorne Effect is a prevalent observer effect that causes behavioral changes among participants of epidemiological studies or infection control interventions. The purpose of the review is to describe the origins of the Hawthorne Effect, to understand the term in relation to current scientific literature, to describe characteristics of the Haw...

Background The failure rates for implementing complex innovations in healthcare organizations are high. Estimates range from 30% to 90% depending on the scope of the organizational change involved, the definition of failure, and the criteria to judge it. The innovation implementation framework offers a promising approach to examine the organization...

The development and deployment of standard processes is a foundational recommendation in many operations practices. Yet, given the demonstrated performance benefits of standardized processes, it is surprising that they are often not followed consistently. One potential way to ensure greater compliance is by electronically monitoring the activities...

To deliver high-quality, reliable, and consistent services safely, organizations develop professional standards. Despite the communication and reinforcement of these standards, they are often not followed consistently. Although previous research suggests that high job demands are associated with declines in compliance over lengthy intervals, we hyp...

Leaders can be positive and influential, motivating people in the organization to perform at their best. Leaders can also be controlling and abusive, using their elevated status as a way to misuse power. These different leadership styles can have relative effects on the individuals that report to the leader as well as to the organization as a whole...

In order to deliver high quality, reliable, and consistent services safely, organizations develop professional standards. These standards may be adopted from external agencies (e.g., professional industry groups, external regulators) or developed through the internal documentation and proliferation of best practices. Despite the communication and r...

Although there have been several attempts to address the conceptual ambiguities in the literature discussing organizational climate, organizational culture, and their interrelationship, there remains much confusion and a general lack of clarity about what these two constructs represent, as well as how they may interrelate. In order to provide some...

Diseases often spread in hospitals because health care professionals fail to wash their hands. Research suggests that to increase health and safety behaviors, it is important to highlight the personal consequences for the actor. However, because people (and health care professionals in particular) tend to be overconfident about personal immunity, t...

Although ideological messages are thought to inspire employee performance, research has shown mixed results. Typically, ideological messages are delivered by leaders, but employees may be suspicious of ulterior motives—leaders may merely be seeking to inspire higher performance. As such, we propose that these messages are often more effective when...

In a series of studies, we develop and validate an approach to studying momentum fluctuations over the course of organizational change to better understand the dynamics of change processes. The first study experimentally examines momentum fluctuations in a controlled change context and explores individual predictors of variance in momentum. The sec...

Extraversion predicts leadership emergence and effectiveness, but do groups perform more effectively under extraverted leadership? Drawing on dominance complementarity theory, we propose that although extraverted leadership enhances group performance when employees are passive, this effect reverses when employees are proactive, because extraverted...

Evidence establishes that employees often expand their roles to take on broader responsibilities in response to direct requests from others. However, surprisingly little research has investigated the interpersonal influence processes through which individuals convince others to expand their roles. We develop a conceptual framework to explain how se...

In this article, we develop and meta-analytically test the relationship between job demands and resources and burnout, engagement, and safety outcomes in the workplace. In a meta-analysis of 203 independent samples (N = 186,440), we found support for a health impairment process and for a motivational process as mechanisms through which job demands...

Although scholars often assume that individuals seek out experts when they need help, recent research suggests that seeking help from experts can be costly. The authors propose that perceiving potential help providers as accessible or trustworthy can reduce the costs of seeking help and thus encourage individuals to seek help from experts. They fur...

IntroductionTheoretical Issues in Multilevel ResearchMeasurement Issues in Multilevel ResearchSources of Variance and Assessing RelationshipsMultilevel Statistical Approaches: WABA and HLMConclusion NotesReferences

Hospital nurses have one of the highest work-related injury rates in the United States. Yet, approaches to improving employee safety have generally focused on attempts to modify individual behavior through enforced compliance with safety rules and mandatory participation in safety training. We examined a theoretical model that investigated the impa...

Several recent reviews of industrial accidents have given increased attention to the role of organizational factors as antecedents to the accident sequence. In the current study, three group-level factors (i.e., group process, safety climate, and intentions to approach other team members engaged in unsafe acts) and one individual-level factor (i.e....

Safety climate has been shown to be associated with a number of important organizational outcomes. In this study, we take a broad view of safety climate—one that includes not only the development and adherence to safety protocols, but also open and constructive responses to errors—and investigate correlates within the health care industry. Drawing...

The present study investigated the relationship between performance goal orientation and performance on a complex task. It was hypothesized that cognitive interference would mediate this relationship. In addition, it was hypothesized that cognitive ability would moderate the relationship between cognitive interference and task performance. A three-...

The current research examines the judgment processes of third-party evaluators of sexual harassment situations. Four situational variables were hypothesized to influence ratings of situation appropriateness and judgments of sexual harassment. The evaluator's gender and personality also were hypothesized to influence both ratings. Participants were...

A significant body of research has documented two achievement goal orientations that individuals can adopt prior to performing a particular task. These orientations have typically been referred to as “task-oriented” or “ego-oriented,” each of which has different implications for task performance and related perceptions. The majority of this researc...

By viewing behavior regularities at the individual and collective level as functionally isomorphic, a referent-shift compositional model for the Big 5 personality dimensions is developed. On the basis of this compositional model, a common measure of Big 5 personality at the individual level is applied to the collective as a whole. Within this frame...

We present the results of two longitudinal studies that examine how the level of project completion affects decisions and worker outcomes. In a lab study, we find that as a project approaches completion, task completion is rated as increasingly more important and economic motives (e.g., finishing on budget) as increasingly less important. We also f...

Leadership has often been cited as playing a critical role in safety performance, particularly in the practitioner literature. Although safety climate and culture research often reference leadership in an indirect way--for example, by tapping into employee perceptions of leaders' commitment to safety--there has been proportionally very little resea...

We review and extend the arguments of Chen, Mathieu and Bliese by providing some foundational and guiding questions to assist researchers in multi-level construct validation. First, we suggest that all multi-level researchers need to gain a firm understanding of the difference between individual and collective constructs. Second, we make a distinct...

The present study integrates role theory, social exchange, organizational citizenship, and climate research to suggest that employees will reciprocate implied obligations of leadership-based social exchange (e.g., leader-member exchange [LMX]) by expanding their role and behaving in ways consistent with contextual behavioral expectations (e.g., wor...

When confronted with multilevel data, e.g., when individuals are nested within work groups, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) [Bryk, A. S., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1992). Hierarchical linear models. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications.] can provide a powerful analytical approach. Using the common data set and the theoretical framework presented in th...

Examines the commonalities, differences, and continuing questions in multilevel analytical techniques. The chapter is organized into 4 sections. The 1st section describes a number of dimensions that differentiate the indices often used to justify aggregation of lower-level data to a higher level of analysis. In the 2nd section, the authors describe...

Researchers have been giving increased attention to the role larger organizational variables play in safety and accidents. Although generally neglected by this research, the nature of the exchange relationships between individuals, leaders. and the organization appears to have safety-related implications. The present research linked leader-member e...

We address gaps in the multilevel organizational theory development literature by critically examining the structure and function of collective constructs. Structure emerges from interaction and can, over time, come to influence systems of interaction. Functions represent the causal outputs of constructs and provide a mechanism for integrating cons...

If successful safety interventions are to be developed and implemented, the underlying causes of accidents must be accurately identified. Using two different samples and research designs, we investigated the influence oftwo contextual factors, safety climate and communication, on accident interpretation. The results for both samples indicated that...

Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in modeling the multilevel nature of organizational data. Although most organizational researchers have chosen to investigate these models using traditional Ordinary Least Squares approaches, hierarchical linear models (i.e., random coefficient models) recently have been receiving increased att...

Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in model ing the multilevel nature of organizational data. Although most organi zational researchers have chosen to investigate these models using traditional Ordinary Least Squares approaches, hierarchical linear models (i.e., random coefficient models) recently have been receiving increased a...

Several theories of driving behavior have suggested that individuals will react to environmental changes in a compensatory fashion such that riskier behaviors result from perceptions that the environment has become safer. Specifically, both Peltzman (1975) and Wilde (1982a) have proposed such compensation mechanisms, although Wilde takes a more str...

Within the process industries (e.g., chemical and nuclear power plants), safety is of paramount importance. Although there has been much research investigating safety issues in these industries, the current paper reviews and integrates literature pertaining to individual, micro organizational, and macro organizational influences on safety. This pap...

Alternative conceptions of the relationship between job perceptions and job satisfaction were tested using survey responses from 450 engineers. One model, based on Job Characteristics Theory (JCT) (e.g., Hackman & Lawler, 1971), predicted that job perceptions lead to job satisfaction (JP → Sat). A second model, based on Social Information Processin...

The question of whether work performance criteria are dynamic has been addressed by applied psychologists for many years. Despite this attention, there are few definitive answers. This article provides both theoretical and methodological arguments for refocusing investigations into dynamic criteria toward the study of intraindividual change and int...

Problems related to the behavior of individuals in the nuclear environment have been found to influence not only the likelihood that a nuclear power plant (NPP) will be involved in an incident, but also the ability of the organization to deal with the incident once it has begun. A program which has the objective of identifying and assessing organiz...

Cross-sectional research investigating seniority, tenure, and age as they relate to job performance has demonstrated an initial positive linear increase followed by a plateau. Investigations into the stability of performance have demonstrated that individuals change their rank order over time. Taken together, these findings suggest that the curvili...

The study of individual performance over time has been primarily focused on either the mean change or the relative stability of performance. These methods of investigating individual performance, however, can obscure intraindividual change patterns. The utility of estimating individual growth curves is demonstrated using longitudinal performance of...

Due to the inherently hierarchical nature of organizations, data collected in organizations consist of nested entities. More specifically, individuals are nested in work groups, work groups are nested in departments, departments are nested in organizations, and organiza-tions are nested in environments. Hierarchical linear models provide a conceptu...

The examination of teachers' job-related reactions has recently become a popular topic of research investigations. However, strictly focusing on teachers' affective reactions (e.g., satisfaction) may provide a somewhat limited view with regard to improving teacher attitudes. Research has demonstrated that job perceptions act as a precursor to job s...

This report describes the state of the art in military collective performance measurement methodologies, particularly those used in the Army. The research, which is based on a large literature review, covers past, present, and emerging training systems and performance measurement issues. It discusses problems in collective training research, such a...

An accepted axiom, and one that seems quite reasonable, is that the longer you hold a job the more proficient you become at performing that job. This study investigated the relationship between seniority and job performance. 'No different studies are reported. In Study 1, the sample consisted of both entry-level police and firefighters and first-le...