Debra R. Comer

Hofstra University · Management and Entrepreneurship

Purpose The authors used signaling theory to explain negative perceptions of individuals on the autism spectrum (IotAS) in the job interview and explored whether parasocial contact could improve perceptions. Design/methodology/approach Participants were randomly assigned across six experimental conditions. Some received information that IotAS' soc...

We investigate the effects of performance feedback on a subsequent performance task and the mediating role of sadness. Drawing on the appraisal tendency framework, we expect that negative performance feedback increases sadness, which then spills over to negatively affect performance on a future task. In addition, we expect two individual traits—fee...

We investigate the effects of performance feedback on a subsequent performance task and the mediating role of sadness. Drawing on the appraisal tendency framework, we expect that negative performance feedback increases sadness, which then spills over to negatively affect performance on a future task. In addition, we expect two individual traits—fee...

Management educators have been advised to cultivate their students’ character. Yet they lack the instructional resources they need to do so. We were inspired by the principles and techniques of the Jewish spiritual practice of Mussar to put students on a personalized path of continuous character improvement. According to Mussar, everyone has some m...

The Next Phase of Business Ethics: Celebrating 20 Years of REIO. Volume 21. Chapters: Prelims Introductory Essay: The Next Phase of Business Ethics Special Section: 20 Years of REIO Reminiscences on the Founding of REIO: Dr Clarence Walton's Quiet Influence A Big Picture Aproach to (C)SR: Where are We Now? 25 Years with The Moral of The Story The...

This article considers the implications of jus in bello for jus post bellum by exploring the relevant differences between victims of different sides in World War II: the Jewish Holocaust victims and the German civilians bombed by the Allied air forces. Some assert a moral equivalence between the catastrophes these two groups endured [Appleyard, Bry...

Walzer insists that his supreme emergency argument morally legitimises Churchill’s 1940 decision to bomb German civilians. We contend, however, that it is morally deficient. We contend, further, that if Walzer’s argument had been presented to the leaders of the Church of England in 1940 as justification for the bombing of German civilians, the Chur...

At the end of their article in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Douglas R. May, Matthew T. Luth, and Catherine E. Schwoerer state that they are “hopeful in outlook” about the “evidence that business ethics instructors are….able to encourage students…to develop the courage to come forward even when pressures in organizatio...

Management instructors are continually challenged to create learning activities in online courses that duplicate the same opportunities to develop managerial skills afforded to students in traditional face-to-face courses. The purpose of this experiential exercise is to provide online students an opportunity to develop the soft skills all managers...

Creativity is more important than ever in today’s knowledge-based economy. Although many students doubt their own creativity, very few exercises are designed to help them access this ability. We believe that self-expression and self-reflection are important for understanding personal creative ability. Jung introduced the mandala to promote these tw...

We develop a model of factors that enable morally courageous actors to carry on even after encountering organizational opposition. The model specifies that durable moral courage facilitates continued moral action and that demoralization inhibits it, and presents the perceived manageability of the organizational response as a factor affecting the ex...

Compliance-based programs are vital, yet they are not sufficient to foster sustained ethical behavior in organizations. We explain why principled performance requires more than obedience to following rules. To exceed a moral minimum, the typical baseline of compliance must be supplemented by a proactive commitment to moral action. That is, organiza...

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's creation of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) in 1999 inspired great hopes. As we explain, however, the noble initiatives of the UNGC are undermined by the arms industry. Arms are expensive. The expenditure on arms diverts a nation's "resources from 'productive' to 'unproductive' ends." The arms...

We consider in this article how the largest corporations in Apartheid South Africa used an in-house magazine to manipulate their shareholders' perceptions of the current political scenario. We argue that in that era, business felt compelled to respond to the portrayal of events in South Africa presented by the international media. Furthermore, we e...

Because most undergraduate students are digital natives, it is widely believed that they will succeed in online courses. But factors other than technology also affect students’ ability to fulfill the role of online learner. Self-reported data from a sample of more than 200 undergraduates across multiple online courses indicate that students general...

Moral courage is an important element of ethical strength in organizational settings. The topic of moral courage in the workplace has begun to attract increased scholarly attention and it is time to bring together current findings, models, and insights. The five papers in this proposed symposium include both empirical and conceptual studies of key...

Compliance-based programs are vital, yet they are not sufficient to foster sustained ethical behavior in organizations. We explain why principled performance requires more than obedience to following rules. To exceed a moral minimum, the typical baseline of compliance must be supplemented by a proactive commitment to moral action. That is, organiza...

Neither moral philosophy nor history provides a satisfactory explanation for Oskar Schindler's extraordinary rescue of more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark does. Although Schindler's Ark is technically a work of fiction, that generic label obscures its contribution as a fictionalised account of true events. B...

This paper examines the problem of vituperative feedback from peer reviewers. We argue that such feedback is morally unacceptable, insofar as it humiliates authors and damages their dignity. We draw from social-psychological research to explore those aspects of the peer-review process in general and the anonymity of blind reviewing in particular th...

Purpose – Patience is underestimated in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of patience and the individual and organizational benefits it confers. Then, the paper discuses emotional self-regulation and explain how two self-regulatory techniques can affect the patience of individuals in organizations. Design/methodolo...

We present this special issue on positive organizational ethics (POE) to highlight those pursuing positive subjective experiences, positive attributes of individuals and groups, and positive practices that contribute to ethical and virtuous behavior in organizations. Although prior research has offered some insight in this area, there is still much...

This article addresses educators’ concerns about using asynchronous online discussions in lieu of face-to-face discussions. Drawing from research on asynchronous online education and Bloom’s taxonomy, the authors introduce the system of “original examples” and “value-added comments” that they have developed to promote engaging and meaningful discus...

We argue that Oskar Schindler is a moral exemplar. Oskar Schindler and other moral exemplars should, according to Mayo, be emulated. Emulating Schindler when he acted as a moral exemplar could have led to others' being helped during truly terrible times. Yet, had officialdom at that time known what Schindler was doing, he would have lost his life,...

The authors present an efficient and easy-to-implement experiential exercise that reinforces for students key concepts about task groups (i.e., group cohesiveness, conflict within groups, group effectiveness, group norms, and group roles). The exercise, which uses a documentary about the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album to demonstrate the co...

This article introduces an experiential exercise that enhances students’ ability to identify ethical issues and to respond to them in ways that consider the relationship between organizational factors and ethical action. Students identify a required number of ethical incidents in their workplaces during a specified period. Students submit a written...

This article explores the relationship between the Personal Ethical Threshold and workplace spirituality. We begin by reviewing our concept of the Personal Ethical Threshold, or PET, defined as an individual’s vulnerability to organizational pressures that can derail moral intentions. Next, we consider how individuals resolve their intrapersonal co...

Across geographical regions and academic disciplines, faculty members are lamenting the rise in behavior problems in the classroom. We present here a review of the literature on classroom incivility and a categorization of uncivil behaviors. Next, attributing classroom incivility, in part, to cultural characteristics of our current undergraduates,...

We present an instrument developed to explain to students the concept of the personal ethical threshold (PET). The PET represents an individual’s susceptibility to situational pressure in his or her organization that makes moral behavior more personally difficult. Further, the PET varies according to the moral intensity of the issue at hand, such t...

Purpose To derive and apply a new composite performance metric to top performing US companies in order to identify consistently excellent performers and explain their success over the last half‐century. The ten firms topping the list for this new composite performance metric represent the “best of the best” of American corporations during the fifty...

This article presents a role-play exercise to make the topic of whistle-blowing personally salient to undergraduates. Students identify with the prospective whistle-blower, whose decision affects several stakeholders. The protagonist merely suspects her manager of stealing, until she hears concrete evidence of his thefts from her assistant manager,...

This paper examines antecedents and consequences of faculty women’s academic–parental role balancing, defined as the process of experiencing greater interrole facilitation/enhancement than interrole conflict/depletion. It is posited that childcare responsibilities affect the career–family challenges academic women face, i.e., dueling tenure and bio...

The authors recommend that management educators add the works of Dr. Seuss to their repertoire of teaching tools. After describing why instructors should use Dr. Seuss’s stories to foster understanding of concepts in management and organizational behavior, the authors describe a Seuss-based project at two levels that (a) helps students identify and...

Workplace bullying has a well-established body of research internationally, but the United States has lagged behind the rest of the world in the identification and investigation of this phenomenon. This paper presents a managerial perspective on bullying in organizations. The lack of attention to the concept of workplace dignity in American organiz...

Increasingly, corporate philanthropy includes not only monetary donations, but also employees' service contributions to community projects. Using concepts from role theory, this paper proposes that employees' readiness to volunteer interacts with their perceived link between company-sponsored community service and salient organizational rewards and...

Disney’s animated feature The Lion King is presented as a vehicle for fostering undergraduate management and organizational behavior students’ experiential learning and application of fundamental leadership concepts (bases of power and leader skills, traits, and behaviors) and more complex leadership themes (a leader’s need to overcome self-doubt,...

In Crichton's best-selling novel Disclosure, a high-level manager who rejects the sexual advances of his new boss (who is also his ex-lover) is accused by her of sexual harassment. Meanwhile, their high-tech West Coast company is being considered for possible acquisition by a New York publishing conglomerate that would appear to be intolerant of ev...

Survey responses from 134 human resources managers (50 from drug testing and 84 from nontesting organizations) indicated that representatives from drug testing organizations were no less likely than their counterparts from nontesting organizations to know that drug tests cannot assess performance impairment. However, awareness of this limitation of...

Disagrees with B. M. Rienzi and M. J. Allen's (see record 1994-42924-001) explanations as to why requests for manuscripts were ignored more often by presenters at regional vs national conventions. Comer suggests that poster presenters who are affiliated with research-oriented institutions are more apt to deliver papers at national conferences. The...

Disagrees with B. M. Rienzi and M. J. Allen's (see record 1994-42924-001) explanations as to why requests for manuscripts were ignored more often by presenters at regional vs national conventions. Comer suggests that poster presenters who are affiliated with research-oriented institutions are more apt to deliver papers at national conferences. Thes...

Social loafing is the decline in member effort that often occurs in groups. This paper discusses factors that may contribute to social loafing, and proposes a model integrating these factors. The model attempts to move social loafing research from the laboratory to the workplace. Recommendations are offered for reducing social loafing in work group...

Dissipative self-organization, a theoretical framework with roots in physics and biochemistry, has often been proposed as having relevance to change in social systems. Specifically, the processes and design features associated with dissipative self-organization have been used to describe the dynamics of social groups and organizations, especially i...

Workplace drug testing, particularly urinalysis, has proliferated in the last few years. Despite widespread support for biological testing, research suggests that not all drug use diminishes performance and that testing may fail to deter the most potentially harmful substance abuse. There is no solid empirical evidence that drug testing is associat...

The benefits of experiential exercises for making conceptual material more dynamic and relevant, thus enhancing students' learning and developing their skills, are well documented. Presented here is an easy-to-administer roleplay that enables students to integrate a wide range of concepts covered in a typical organizational behavior course. Partici...

Comments on L. R. Goldberg's (see record 1993-17546-001) history of the Big Five framework of personality traits and elaborated on its use. The reasons why industrial/organizational psychologists de-emphaszied the impact of personality on the job peformance in the late 1960s and 1970s and re-emphasized it in the 1980s are addressed. (PsycINFO Data...

Comments on L. R. Goldberg's (see record 1993-17546-001) history of the Big Five framework of personality traits and elaborated on its use. The reasons why industrial/organizational psychologists de-emphaszied the impact of personality on the job peformance in the late 1960s and 1970s and re-emphasized it in the 1980s are addressed.

Although textbooks of organizational behavior and management commonly include chapters on power and organizational politics, they uniformly ignore how to develop competency in these areas. Yet students would benefit from learning that organizational politics affects decision making and that their own political behavior can reflect both organization...

Comments on S. Riger's (see record 1991-27670-001) article on gender dilemmas in sexual harassment (SH) policies and procedures. It is lamented that Riger did not frame her discussion within the larger context of managing demographic diversity in the workplace and that she did not extend her analysis of gender-based differences to propose specific...

Comments on S. Riger's (see record 1991-27670-001) article on gender dilemmas in sexual harassment (SH) policies and procedures. It is lamented that Riger did not frame her discussion within the larger context of managing demographic diversity in the workplace and that she did not extend her analysis of gender-based differences to propose specific...

Two studies focused on the particular processes by which organizational newcomers acquire information from their peers. Analysis of semistructured interviews with 30 nonsupervisory professional new hires at one organization and of questionnaires completed by 73 new hires from a variety of organizations and occupational groups indicated the types of...

How can clinical laboratory managers retain employees as the shortage of medical technologists grows? They can help to ensure that new employees become satisfied and productive by using peers as agents for socialization. According to results from both oral interviews and written questionnaires, peers bring newcomers "on board" by providing key info...