Ernest O'Boyle

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Indiana University Bloomington

Even when guided by strong theories and sound methods, researchers must often choose a singular course of action from multiple viable alternatives. Regardless of the choice, it, along with all other choices made during the research process, individually and collectively affects study results, often in unpredictable ways. The inability to disentangl...

Previous studies have found that workplace mistreatment positively relates to depression, a critical mental health disorder. However, it is unknown whether mistreatment affects all individuals’ depressive symptoms equally. Drawing from the hopelessness theory of depression and the stigma literature, we suggest that Blacks suffer from greater depres...

As applied fields, management, industrial-organizational psychology, and related disciplines seek to make their knowledge relevant to business practitioners. But the current dissemination model is inefficient, leading some to conclude that the gap between academics and practitioners poses one of the most pressing problems in management today. Using...

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to hel...

No research question is compelling enough nor a meta-analytic procedure advanced enough to overcome an ineffectual search or inaccurate coding process. The bulk of attention towards meta-analyses conducted within the organizational sciences has been directed at establishing the types of research questions meta-analyses are best equipped to address...

To address the low reproducibility and replicability of research, Open Science Practices (OSPs) have been developed. Yet, despite increasing awareness of their potential benefits, there has been only little implementation. As journals can act as gatekeepers for scientific discoveries, a potential tendency not to mention OSPs on their websites may h...

Samples drawn from commercial online panel data (OPD) are becoming more prevalent in applied psychology research, but they remain controversial due to concerns with data quality. In order to examine the validity of OPD, we conduct meta-analyses of online panel samples and compare internal reliability estimates for scales and effect size estimates f...

Open science refers to an array of practices that promote openness, integrity, and reproducibility in research; the merits of which are being vigorously debated and developed across academic journals, listservs, conference sessions, and professional associations. The current paper identifies and clarifies major issues related to the use of open sci...

We review the development of path model fit measures for latent variable models and highlight how they are different from global fit measures. Next, we consider findings from two published simulation articles that reach different conclusions about the effectiveness of one path model fit measure (RMSEA-P). We then report the results of a new simulat...

Guzzo et al. (2022), in their focal article express concerns that rewarding open science practices, particularly in scholarly publishing, may harm the practical relevance of our research. They go on to urge greater reliance on conceptual replication over direct or exact replication to verify claims in our field. Although we concur with the majority...

There is increasing concern that the veracity of research findings in a number of scientific disciplines, including psychology, may be compromised by questionable research/reporting practices (QRPs). QRPs, such as hypothesizing after results are known, selectively deleting outliers, and “p-hacking,” bolster findings by giving the appearance of stat...

The primary goal of science is to “get it right,” meaning that scientists seek to accurately document the world as it is. While erroneous conclusions and flawed theories can and do occur, they can only be tolerated as long as reliable mechanisms of self-correction exist. Unfortunately, in recent years, an array of evidence has emerged suggesting th...

Tournament theory posits that some organizations are modeled after sports tournaments whereby individuals are incentivized to compete and win against other members of the organization. A persistent criticism of tournament theory is that rank-order success of employees is entirely dependent on non-interacting or at least non-cooperating entities. To...

Study preregistration promotes transparency in scientific research by making a clear distinction between a priori and post hoc procedures or analyses. Management and applied psychology have not embraced preregistration in the way other closely related social science fields have. There may be concerns that preregistration does not add value and prev...

We revised the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ), which measures variations in sensitivity to harm (idealism) and to moral standards (relativism). Study 1 identified the core components of the measured constructs theoretically and verified those features through confirmatory factor analysis (n = 2,778). Study 2 replicated these findings (n = 10,7...

Controlling impulses and overcoming temptations (i.e., self-control) are key aspects of living a productive life. There is a growing yet disperse literature indicating that sleep is an important predictor of self-control. The goal of this meta-analysis is to empirically integrate the findings from multiple literatures, and investigate whether sleep...

Using meta-analytic techniques, relations among the Dark Triad personality traits – Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy – were examined in relation to outcomes associated with two different stages of the entrepreneurial process: entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial performance. From 39 independent samples (N = 11,819), we found t...

Questionable research practices (QRPs) can occur whenever one result is favored over another, and tests of mediation are no exception. Given mediation's ubiquity and importance to both theory and practice, QRPs in tests of mediation pose a serious threat to the advancement of psychology. We investigate this issue through the introduction of a strai...

Research Summary: Using meta-analysis, we investigate the extent to which General Mental Ability (GMA) and Emotional Intelligence (EI) predict entrepreneurial success. Based on 65,826 observations, we find that both GMA and EI matter for success, but that the size of the relationship is more than twice as large for EI. Our study contradicts and add...

This article encourages transparency in the reporting of meta-analytic procedures. Specifically, we highlight aspects of meta-analytic search, coding, data presentation, and data analysis where published meta-analyses often fall short in presenting sufficient information to allow replication. We identify opportunities where reviewers can request ad...

An expanding number of methodological resources, reviews, and commentaries both highlight endogeneity as a threat to causal claims in management research and note that practices for addressing endogeneity in empirical work frequently diverge from the recommendations of the methodological literature. We aim to bridge this divergence, helping both ma...

Research on employee misconduct has increasingly adopted behavioral measures in field settings, such as archival organizational records, to circumvent potential issues of external validity and social desirability associated with laboratory experiments and self-reported surveys. However, similar to the issues facing the criminal justice and educatio...

Peer review is a critical component toward facilitating a robust science in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. Peer review exists beyond academic publishing in organizations, university departments, grant agencies, classrooms, and many more work contexts. Reviewers are responsible for judging the quality of research conducted and submi...

Academic research on passion is much more complex than the extant literature or popular press portray. Although research on work‐related passion has progressed rapidly over the last decade, much remains unknown. We are now just beginning to recognize the different theoretical underpinnings and empirical operationalizations that work passion researc...

We investigated if growth mindsets—the belief in the malleable nature of human attributes—are negatively related to psychological distress and if they are positively related to treatment value and active coping. In the meta-analysis, we included articles published between 1988 and 2019, written in English, that reported on mindsets as well as a qua...

Samples drawn from commercial online panel data (OPD) are becoming more prevalent in applied psychology research, but they remain controversial due to concerns with data quality. In order to examine the validity of OPD, we conduct meta-analyses of online panel samples and compare internal reliability estimates for scales and effect size estimates f...

We offer best-practice recommendations for journal reviewers, editors, and authors regarding data collection and preparation. Our recommendations are applicable to research adopting different epistemological and ontological perspectives—including both quantitative and qualitative approaches—as well as research addressing micro (i.e., individuals, t...

Open science refers to an array of practices that promote openness, integrity, and reproducibility in research; the merits of which are being vigorously debated and developed across academic journals, listservs, conference sessions, and professional associations. The current paper identifies and clarifies major issues related to the use of open sci...

Most models of negative workplace behaviors (NWB) are individual in nature, focusing on individual attitudes (e.g., satisfaction) and general workplace perceptions (e.g., procedural justice) that motivate NWB. Less commonly considered are explorations of relationally based negative workplace behaviors- how NWB from Party A is related to reciprocati...

Moderated multiple regression (MMR) remains the most popular method of testing interactions in management and applied psychology. Recent discussions of MMR have centered on their small effect sizes and typically being statistically underpowered (e.g., Murphy & Russell, Organizational Research Methods, 2016). Although many MMR tests are likely plagu...

The well documented academic-practice gap has frequently been viewed as a problem to be solved via evidence-based management. Evidence-based management focuses heavily on aggregating and evaluating research evidence to address practical questions via meta-analysis and other forms of systematic review, as well as educating managers and management st...

Within the constellation of employee misconduct, workplace deviance possesses the somewhat distinctive feature of violating organizational norms. Yet, the burgeoning research examining the social context surrounding workplace deviance typically fails to properly account for it. Interdisciplinary research has demonstrated that within organizations (...

Yu, Downes, Carter, and O’Boyle (2016) introduce a new technique to incorporate effect size heterogeneity into meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) labeled full information meta-analytical structural equation modeling (FIMASEM). Cheung’s (2018) commentary raises concerns about the viability of FIMASEM and provides its initial validati...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which chief executive officers (CEOs) deserve the pay they receive both in terms of over and underpayment. Design/methodology/approach Rather than using the traditional normal distribution view in which CEO performance clusters around the mean with relatively little variance, the autho...

Increasing precision of measurement is a goal of scientific advancement, but Nunnally's (1978) .70 benchmark for coefficient alpha (alpha) has remained the omnibus test for reliability for nearly 40 years. This likely arises due to there only being scattered empirical evidence of the degree to which the field has met or surpassed this standard. Usi...

For many scientific disciplines that rely on surveys and voluntary participation (e.g., organizational behavior, psychology), nonresponse bias (NRB) has been shown to bias estimates, create range restriction, and lead to both Type I and Type II errors. The present research endeavors to fill a methodological gap in the entrepreneurship literature by...

Structural equation modeling (SEM) serves as one of the most important advances in the social sciences in the past 40 years. Through a combination of factor analysis and path analysis, SEM allows organizational researchers to test causal models while accounting for random and nonrandom (bias) measurement error. SEM is now one of the most commonly u...

Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) make a compelling case against meta-analyses that focus on mean effect sizes (e.g., r xy and ρ) while largely disregarding the precision of the estimate and true score variance. This is a reasonable point, but meta-analyses that myopically focus on mean effects at the expense of variance are not examples of va...

Scholars increasingly recognize the potential of meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) as a way to build and test theory (Bergh et al., 2016). Yet, 1 of the greatest challenges facing MASEM researchers is how to incorporate and model meaningful effect size heterogeneity identified in the bivariate meta-analysis into MASEM. Unfortunatel...

This editors' introductory article to the Human Resources Management Review special issue on inductive research methods aims not only to provide an overview of the four main articles, but to provide guidance to researchers and gatekeepers about how best to conduct such research. We address four specific goals in the current article. First, we prese...

Despite multiple high-profile calls-across decades and from multiple stakeholders-to address the widening gap between science and practice, the relevance of research conducted in the management domain remains in question. To once again highlight this issue and, more importantly, identify solutions, we explore the grand challenge of the science-prac...

Employee ownership has been an area of significant practitioner and academic interest for the past four decades. Yet, empirical results on the relationship between employee ownership and firm performance remain mixed. To aggregate findings and provide potential direction for future theoretical development, we conducted a meta-analysis of 102 sample...

We use the meta-theoretical principle of cumulative advantage as a framework to understand the presence of heavy-tailed productivity distributions and productivity stars. We relied on 229 datasets including 633,876 productivity observations collected from approximately 625,000 individuals in occupations including research, entertainment, politics,...

The discussion regarding questionable research practices (QRPs) in management as well as the broader natural and social sciences has increased substantially in recent years. Despite the attention, questions remain regarding research norms and the implications for both theoretical and practical advancements. The aim of the current article is to addr...

A persistent concern in the management and applied psychology literature is the effect of common method variance on observed relations among variables. Recent work (i.e., Richardson, Simmering, & Sturman, 2009) evaluated 3 analytical approaches to controlling for common method variance, including the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) marker techni...

We use the metatheoretical principle of cumulative advantage as a framework to understand the presence of heavy-tailed productivity distributions and productivity stars. We relied on 229 datasets including 633,876 productivity observations collected from approximately 625,000 individuals in occupations including research, entertainment, politics, s...

Research in the field of medicine has indicated that the presence of research funding can lead to conflicts of interest, resulting in pressures to produce results that are palatable to the funding agency. Using a funding source typology, we examine if similar conflicts of interest exist in the field of management by analyzing over 156,000 effect si...

Continuous moderators (i.e., interactions) are some of most frequently hypothesized and tested relationships in organizational behavior human resource management and applied psychology, but there is relatively little information on their average magnitudes and conditions under which they vary. We meta-analyzed 15 years of continuous moderators publ...

Scholars are increasingly recognizing the potential of meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) as a way to build and test theory (Bergh et al., 2014). Yet, as MASEM is currently applied, it disregards variability in estimates of true score correlations. Specifically, evidence of moderation identified when establishing the bivariate corre...

Few empirical studies have focused on the competitive operations priorities of service industry firms. This research focuses on such firms, and proposes that firms that make a trade-off between priorities will be more profitable than those that do not make trade-offs. Specifically, this work surveyed community bank administrators to gather informat...

Recent empirical reviews have claimed a surprisingly strong relationship between job performance and self-reported emotional intelligence (also commonly called trait EI or mixed EI), suggesting self-reported/mixed EI is one of the best known predictors of job performance (e.g., ρ̂ = .47; Joseph & Newman, 2010b). Results further suggest mixed EI can...

We argue that changes in the nature of work in 21st-century organizations have led to the emergence of star performers—a few individuals who contribute a disproportionate amount of output. We describe how stars negate the long-held belief that the distribution of individual performance is normal and, instead, suggest an underlying power law distrib...

PurposeTo review and address current approaches and limitations to modeling change over time in social entrepreneurship research. MethodologyThe article provides a narrative review of different practices used to assess change over time. It also shows how different research questions require different methodologies for assessing changes over time. F...

Despite the alleged frequency of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) in the population, most samples exhibit exceedingly low base rates. One potential explanation for this incongruence is nonresponse bias, which leads to range restriction in the CWB distribution. We investigated this possibility by determining whether response rates within CWB re...

We examined the relationships between Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—the three traits of the Dark Triad (DT)—and the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. The review identified 310 independent samples drawn from 215 sources and yielded information pertaining to global trait relationships and facet-level relationships. We used meta-...

Publication bias is the systematic suppression of research findings due to small magnitude, statistical insignificance, or contradiction of prior findings or theory. We review possible reasons why publication bias may exist in strategy research and examine empirical evidence regarding the influence of publication bias in the field. Overall, we conc...

We argue that changes in the nature of work in 21st-century organizations have led to the emergence of star performers—a few individuals who contribute a disproportionate amount of output. We describe how stars negate the long-held belief that the distribution of individual performance is normal and, instead, suggest an underlying power law distrib...

The issue of a published literature not representative of the population of research is most often discussed in terms of entire studies being suppressed. However, alternative sources of publication bias are questionable research practices (QRPs) that entail post hoc alterations of hypotheses to support data or post hoc alterations of data to suppor...

Both leader–member exchange (LMX) and team–member exchange (TMX) measure the quality of reciprocal exchange among employees in the workplace. Although LMX focuses on supervisor–subordinate relationships while TMX examines the relationships among team members, both have theory-based and empirically proven relations with workplace outcomes such as jo...

In the past decade, interest has flourished in the empirical study of forgiveness in the wake of intergroup conflicts. In the current paper, we sought to empirically integrate the diverse predictors of intergroup forgiveness building on a tripartite model that incorporates affective, cognitive, and constraining features. Using a random effects appr...

We conducted a meta-analytic review of the relations between general mental ability (GMA) and the Dark Triad (DT) personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—to determine if individuals who display socially exploitative social qualities tend to be more intelligent or less intelligent. Across 48 independent samples, GMA showed n...

Using meta-analysis and structural equation modeling, we examine the unique and combined relationships between team psychological empowerment, its antecedents, and outcomes. First, we seek to extend the team psychological empowerment nomological network by including team members’ affective reactions as an outcome. In addition, we consider the moder...

Publication bias (PB) exists when the published literature is not representative of the population of studies. PB has largely been ignored or dismissed in entrepreneurship research as there is a general belief that only fields entrenched in dominant theoretical paradigms are capable of suffering from PB. We tested this presumption by re-analyzing t...

The present work summarizes the theoretical foundations and empirical findings regarding the relation between family involvement and firm performance. From a theory-based perspec-tive we integrate evolutionary psychology and agency theory and describe how conflicting predictions can be made regarding the relation between family involvement and firm...

Drawing on 50 unique samples (from 37 studies), the authors used meta-analytical techniques to assess the extent to which job burnout and employee engagement are independent and useful constructs. The authors found that (a) dimension-level correlations between burnout and engagement are high, (b) burnout and engagement dimensions exhibit a similar...

This review builds on self-control theory (Carver & Scheier, 1998) to develop a theoretical framework for investigating associations of implicit theories with self-regulation. This framework conceptualizes self-regulation in terms of 3 crucial processes: goal setting, goal operating, and goal monitoring. In this meta-analysis, we included articles...

We revisit a long‐held assumption in human resource management, organizational behavior, and industrial and organizational psychology that individual performance follows a Gaussian (normal) distribution. We conducted 5 studies involving 198 samples including 633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and amateur and professional athletes. Resu...

We reviewed studies of the Dark Triad (DT) personality traits--Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy-and meta-analytically examined their implications for job performance and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Relations among the DT traits and behaviors were extracted from original reports published between 1951 and 2011 of 245 independ...

This meta-analysis builds upon a previous meta-analysis by (1) including 65 per cent more studies that have over twice the sample size to estimate the relationships between emotional intelligence (EI) and job performance; (2) using more current meta-analytical studies for estimates of relationships among personality variables and for cognitive abil...

Reports an error in "Decomposing model fit: Measurement vs. theory in organizational research using latent variables" by Ernest H. O'Boyle Jr. and Larry J. Williams (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2011[Jan], Vol 96[1], 1-12). In this article the sample size of Study 18 in Table 1 (p. 6) is incorrect. The sample size for Study 18 should have been 17...

This research examines the relationship between the code of ethics adopted by businesses in a country and the ethics positions of the inhabitants of that country. Ethics Position Theory (EPT) maintains that individuals' personal moral philosophies influence their ethical judgments, actions, and emotions. The theory, when describing individual diffe...

A common myth among organizational researchers who use structural equations is that adequate fit values from the composite (overall) model speak directly to the adequacy of the proposed theory. However, this is a fallacious assumption, as significant misspecification among the theoretical paths between constructs can occur and be missed when there...

Research on counterproductive work behavior (CWB) has largely focused on the individual traits and perceptions that enhance or decrease CWB. Although useful, we propose that a multilevel perspective offers greater insight into CWB antecedents and outcomes by acknowledging the nested nature of the individual within the work group. We review the CWB...

Empirically, the confluence of family involvement, ethics, and performance is a sparse research area. The authors explore a rich theoretical framework relating family involvement, ethical focus, and firm performance and empirically test a mediated model using a sample of 526 family businesses. The results illustrated that a firm's ethical focus med...

Goodness-of-fit indices have an important role in structural equation model evaluation. However, some studies (e.g., McDonald & Ho, 2002; Mulaik et al., 1989) have raised concerns that overall fit values primarily reflect the fit of the measurement model, and this allows significant misspecification among the latent variables to be masked. Using an...

This paper first reviews the various measurement model options for linking latent variables to indicators that are available to human resource management (HRM) researchers. A special emphasis is placed on the option of parcels, created by combining subsets of items to form indicators. Next, a review is presented of 27 articles from the major HRM jo...

Ethics position theory (EPT) maintains that individuals’ personal moral philosophies influence their judgments, actions, and emotions in ethically intense situations. The theory, when describing these moral viewpoints, stresses two dimensions: idealism (concern for benign outcomes) and relativism (skepticism with regards to inviolate moral principl...