Joseph Andrew Allen

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Family and Preventive Medicine

Background The Fire service Organizational Culture of Safety (FOCUS) survey is an assessment tool comprised of psychometrically validated metrics of safety climate, safety behavior, and downstream outcomes (organizational and injury) that are specific to the U.S. fire and rescue service. Methods This analysis consists of a descriptive summary of t...

Workplace meetings are often used to help accomplish individual, group, team, and organizational goals. Despite the relatively common occurrence of meeting lateness in U.S.-American samples, less is known regarding other cultural contexts. Following Conservation of Resources theory, we expect that employees from different cultures should experience...

Healthcare is a complex sociotechnical system where information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) intersect to solve problems experienced by patients and providers alike. One example of IS/IT in hospitals is the Ocuvera automated video monitoring system (AVMS), which has been implemented in more than 30 hospitals. The purpose of this stu...

People often offer an excuse or an apology after they do something wrong in an attempt to mitigate any potential negative consequences. In this paper, we examine how individuals employ social accounts when explaining their interpersonal transgression of meeting lateness to others in actual work settings. We examined the different combinations of so...

Insights into the behavioral profile of groups during meetings help us understand why some groups outperform others on meeting and work tasks. The presented studies investigate behavior-based group profiles in meetings and their relation to group performance. A total of 101 problem-solving meetings took place in two studies in a laboratory setting;...

Humor is a key indicator of the health of work groups, including during times of crisis. Moreover, studies of newly formed groups show that the type of humor used can change as members of a group get to know one another and form bonds. Yet in the context of a relatively established work group, can the nature of the group’s humor evolve in response...

Purpose: With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, employees suddenly had to work remotely and realize all work-related social interaction in virtual formats. The sudden shift to the virtual format came with new workplace stressors. To understand the stressors of remote work and videoconferences, we present two qualitative studies. The aim of this s...

Objective: The U.S. fire service experienced increased demands due to COVID-19. This qualitative study explored the pandemic's impact on work-life balance and safety. Methods: Five interviews and 10 focus groups were conducted with 15 fire departments in the COVID-19 RAPID Mental Health Assessment. Coding and multi-level content analysis were co...

Various job demands continuously threaten Emergency Medical Service (EMS) first responders’ safety and wellbeing. Drawing on Job Demands–Resources Theory, the present study examines the effects of the organizational context—safety climate—and the psychological context—emotional exhaustion—on safety behaviors and wellbeing over time. We tested our h...

Objective: Examine the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on fire service safety culture, behavior and morale, levers of well-being, and well-being outcomes. Methods: Two samples (SAVER, consisting of three metropolitan departments, and FOCUS, a geographically stratified random sample of 17 departments) were assessed monthly from May to October 2020. Fi...

Given the focal role that group and team meetings play in shaping employees’ work lives (and schedules), the scarcity of conceptual and empirical attention to the topic in extant organizational psychology research is a major oversight that stalls scientific understanding of organizational behavior more broadly. With the explosion of meetings in rec...

As more employees work in different locations, meetings become the primary opportunity for workgroup interactions. We explore how workgroup entitativity develops within successful meetings and grounds positive employee and group outcomes between meetings. Social identity theory and self-categorization processes explain how entitativity develops dur...

Meetings are at the core of organizational life. Yet, gender, as a central social cue, is poorly understood in this context. Here, we investigate how gender and humor, an integral communicative element, influence meeting experiences by analyzing a subsample of a larger database on meeting research with U.S. working adults across different industrie...

Burnout is a major psychological and physical health-related problem for workers in all fields, but especially for those in the fast-paced and rapidly changing world of healthcare. Burnout has severe consequences for patients, including medical error, and is a leading contributing cause of depression and suicide among healthcare workers. Organizati...

The purpose of this special issue is to bring more theory into meeting science by reviewing literature, identifying knowledge gaps, developing theoretical propositions drawing from different disciplines, and providing direction for future research. The special issue will open with a general overarching review of the literature on meeting science pr...

Objective: Ineffective meetings have been well-documented as presenting considerable direct (e.g., salary) and indirect costs (e.g., employee burnout). We explore the idea that people need meeting recovery, or time to transition from meetings to their next task. Doing so may reduce employee burnout. Methods: We used a quantitative survey of work...

An ultimate outcome of leading a team well and fostering real collaboration is the establishment of a positive team culture. A positive team culture is marked by core values and norms of behavior that value collaboration, top performance, shared goals, and mutual support. Healthcare teams with a positive culture consistently produce better results...

Leaders at high levels in the healthcare hierarchy, such as the CEOs and other top administrators in healthcare systems, have a great degree of decision-making authority and control of resources. They are in a position to drive change within the healthcare systems that they lead. Their effectiveness depends to some extent on implementing management...

Why are medical errors so common? We identify primary sources of medical error as system factors (both local workplace policies and procedures and broader societal and governmental requirements and technological advancements), teamwork factors, and individual factors. These three levels of influence interact and operate concurrently as healthcare p...

A critical individual-level solution involves increasing self-awareness and greater understanding in terms of one’s personality traits, especially in terms of how one reacts to stressful circumstances. Some personality traits, such as moderately strong extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, hardiness/resilience, and generalized self-effica...

High reliability organizations (HROs) are those in which error control is critical, because the consequences of error can be so catastrophic. Healthcare is a clear example of an HRO, in which error can have catastrophic consequences and must be controlled. It is now widely acknowledged that burnout, so prevalent among healthcare providers, greatly...

The prevailing business model in which most medical practices, hospitals, and larger healthcare networks operate is a volume-based, fee-for-service model. Income to the healthcare provider is based substantially on the number of patients seen. As a consequence, there is pressure on the healthcare provider to see as many patients as possible. It is...

Burnout among physicians and other healthcare providers is a crisis of epic proportions, both in the United States and in other countries as well. Of the many negative outcomes of this stress-related syndrome – and there are many – medical error is especially troubling. Doctors and others who are experiencing the syndrome are more likely to make mi...

As important as individual solutions and team-based solutions are, there is a critical third level of potential solutions that can and should be implemented, namely, system-level solutions. Some of these broader solutions can be implemented fairly directly by leaders in local healthcare systems, including individual practices and hospitals. One esp...

At the broadest systems level, there are several possible national healthcare systems. Hypothetically, there might be a free-market approach to healthcare, in which there would be little or no government regulation. No country has implemented such a system, and even if it were possible, it is not clear that burnout risk to healthcare providers woul...

Burnout is a specific work-related syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Sufferers experience physical and mental exhaustion, cynicism and a sense of depersonalization, and reduced feelings of efficacy; these are the defining facets of burnout. The syndrome shows itself in a variety of dysfunctiona...

As centrally important as the role of the leader is in establishing and sustaining teamwork, the team members themselves obviously play critical roles as well. Certainly, beyond initial team formation (“forming”) most of the work of the team is coordinated by the team members themselves, without close moment-by-moment supervision by the team leader...

Beyond understanding one’s own personality, possible associated risk factors for burnout, and personality-based strategies to reduce that risk, it is critically important for individuals to attend to self-care. Self-care strategies are relatively easily implemented and are largely under the control of the individual. Such self-care strategies cente...

Increasingly, teams are the main, essential working unit in most organizations. The values of true teamwork are widely recognized. And the primary responsibility for developing a team to its highest potential rests with the team leader. The vast literature on leadership highlights a number of distinctive “styles” of leadership, including charismati...

Many of the stress-management/burnout-reduction strategies outlined in previous chapters are well known to doctors and other healthcare providers. They are the strategies that trained medical professionals advise their patients to follow. But the data show conclusively that medical professionals are often not good at following their own advice. Ind...

The prevalence of burnout among physicians and other healthcare providers is at distressingly high, record levels, such that burnout among practitioners may be fairly characterized as a crisis. While the medical career has many benefits and is widely respected, many of the requirements of the job, especially the growing workload, make it especially...

The data strongly support the position that social support is a powerful source of stress reduction and, thus, a valuable tool for managing burnout. Indeed, much of the stress-management literature suggests that social support is the single most powerful of the whole array of stress-reduction strategies available to and recommended for individuals....

Objective: Investigate the associations between drug abuse and the preva- lence of the engagement and burnout dichotomy in law professionals. Methods: Eligible participants completed a questionnaire where odds ratios of drug abuse and other confounding variables and their association to engagement or burnout were calculated using multiple logistic...

Academic health centers are essential in many communities, providing health professions education and patient-focused services. These institutions often serve as anchor institutions for community-engaged efforts to serve underserved populations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the central nature of academic health centers, and the well-being of commu...

Academic Medical Centers (AMC) are unique healthcare resources that offer services to their local communities. As societal priorities shift, AMCs are identifying approaches to practice community engagement. Although many examples of AMCs exist in the literature, few have targeted resources for specific health topics like occupational health. This c...

We test entitativity, a group member’s feeling of groupness, as a theoretical explanation of successful meetings. Specifically, characteristics known to contribute to meeting success (e.g., participation and meeting relevance) are tested as specific instances of entitativity antecedents (interactivity and similarity of goals). Entitativity is furth...

The stress and violence to fire-based emergency medical service responders (SAVER) Systems-Level Checklist is an organizational-level intervention to address stress and violence in emergency medical service (EMS), focused on the development of policy and training. Fire and EMS leadership, first responders, dispatchers, and labor union representativ...

Background: Safety climate is an upstream predictor of safety behaviors (e.g., safety compliance), organizational outcomes (e.g., burnout, engagement), and safety outcomes (e.g., injuries). The Fire Service Organizational Culture of Safety (FOCUS) survey, which was psychometrically validated, measures the industry-specific safety climate of the US...

This paper investigates the degree to which meeting success can be predicted through holistic, acoustic-prosodic measurements. The analyzed meetings are taken from the Parking Lot Corpus in which 70 groups of three to six students discuss the traffic situation at their university and come up with parking and transportation recommendations. The numb...

Meeting lateness—that is, meetings starting past the pre-scheduled time—can be viewed as a disruption to the temporal pacing of work. Previous research in the United States indicates that late meetings produce less optimal outcomes, but empirical insights concerning the extent to which experiences of meeting lateness are similar or different across...

As communication technology capabilities have improved and the globalization of the workforce has resulted in distributed teams, organizations have been shifting towards virtual teams and virtual meetings over the last decade. This trend has been accelerated with current work-from-home orders due to COVID-19. Even though virtual collaboration has,...

While volunteers provide the backbone for many nonprofits, the volunteer rate is the lowest it has been since tracking started in 2002. Among the many other duties of volunteers in various organizations, most volunteers are expected to provide good customer service to nonprofit organization clients. Emotional labor is a key aspect of good customer...

Research on teams and teamwork has flourished in the last few decades. Much of what we know about teams and teamwork comes from research using short-term student teams in the lab, teams in larger organizations, and, more recently, teams in rather unique and extreme environments. The context in which teams operate influences team composition, proces...

Law professionals are an understudied population that is integral to society. Limited research indicates lawyers experience poor mental health, decreased wellbeing, and suicidality. This cross-sectional study recruited 654 law professionals and responses to a depression scale, the patient health questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9) were compared with the genera...

Volunteers are an essential part of the economy and impact our communities by helping nonprofit organizations provide services to those in need. Finding practical strategies to facilitate engagement within volunteer workforces is one way to address how nonprofit organizations can retain their volunteers. We hypothesize that meetings between volunte...

Retaining productive volunteers is an essential issue nonprofit organizations face, as volunteers help extend nonprofits' services to their target populations. The current study examined two facets of communication, perception of voice (i.e., upward communication) and satisfaction with communication (i.e., downward communication), as well as traini...

Introduction: FOCUS, the Fire Service Organizational Culture of Safety survey, has evolved from a research to practice enterprise within the United States fire and rescue service. The FOCUS tool was developed through a FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Research & Development grant. Then it moved to practice in the field. To date over 35,000 firefigh...

Many non-profit organizations rely on volunteers to further their mission, but volunteer rates linger at only 25% of the population. Increasing the volunteer rate can positively impact society in a myriad of ways, including benefits to for-profit organizations. One potential way to increase volunteerism rates is by aligning volunteering with work-r...

People often offer an excuse or an apology after they do something wrong. In this paper, we examine how giving an excuse, an apology, or no explanation after arriving late to a meeting influences the attitudes and behavioral intentions others form toward the late arrival. Additionally, we examined how a group-related factor (complaining) and the la...

Groups and teams are the backbone of modern organizations and the driving force behind innovation. Employees come together to pool their efforts, join forces, develop creative ideas, and make decisions in one key social context: the workplace meeting. This volume presents novel perspectives and state-of-the art research insights into the management...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate how a key meeting design characteristic, meeting size, affects the relationship between meeting effectiveness and task performance through employee engagement. Design/methodology/approach A three-wave time-lagged survey design was used to gather data concerning meeting experiences from employees...

Since the opening of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s (UNO) Community Engagement Center in 2014, both university and community building partners have been guided by a set of core values. Established by a community/university task force after months of focus groups, community conversations, and other data gathering activities, these values have...

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...

Most employees participate in workplace meetings, and their experiences in meetings can vary greatly, which can lead to positive or negative effects on both job attitudes and behavior. In this study, we examined the effect that a meeting attendee’s competence in the meeting topic had on their participation in the meeting and their perception of mee...

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) responders deliver patient care in high-risk, high-stress, and highly variable scenarios. This unpredictable work environment exposes EMS responders to many risks, one of which is violence. The primary goals of this systematic literature review were to (1) define the issue of violence experienced by EMS responders an...

Most people in modern organizations do not like meetings. Frustration from the fact that there are too many meetings is a likely culprit because there at least 55 million meetings each day in the US with many millions more held around the world. The prevalence and impact of meetings suggests that they are a grand challenge to human well being. This...

First responders are on the front line of patient care and service, but research has shown that they are also on the front line of exposure to violence. Currently, there is a lack of evidence-based interventions that prepare first responders to handle violence on the job. With the increase in emergency medical services (EMS) call volume and reports...

Background: Conducting post-fall huddles is considered an integral component of a fall-risk-reduction program. However, there is no evidence linking post-fall huddles to patient outcomes or perceptions of teamwork and safety culture. The purpose of this study is to determine associations between conducting post-fall huddles and repeat fall rates a...

Between 57 and 93% of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) responders reported having experienced verbal or physical violence at least once in their career. Therefore, the primary goal of this study was to develop a systems-level checklist for violence against fire-based EMS responders using findings from a systematic literature review and outcomes fro...

Purpose Emotional labor is generally seen as a response to organizational display rules, which seek to guide the employee’s emotional expressions in such a way as to benefit the organization – generally by increasing customer satisfaction and fostering a positive regard for the organization itself. This study aims to investigate the degree to which...

Objective: To evaluate the implementation and outcomes of evidence-based fall-risk-reduction processes when those processes are implemented using a multiteam system (MTS) structure. Data sources/study setting: Fall-risk-reduction process and outcome measures from 16 small rural hospitals participating in a research demonstration and disseminatio...

Although multiple factors have been found to induce burnout in volunteers, studies examining relationships among volunteer coworkers as a potential stressor are sorely lacking. Through the lens of conservation of resources (COR) theory, we investigated coworker (i.e., from both paid and unpaid coworkers) incivility as a predictor of burnout in a sa...

Teams are an integral tool for collaboration and they are often embedded in a larger organization that has its own mission, values, and orientations. Specifically, organizations can be oriented toward a variety of values: learning, customer service, and even meetings. This paper explores a new and novel construct, organizational meeting orientation...

Safety concerns are a critical issue for individuals and teams in high reliability organizations (HROs). As HROs with positive safety climates often have fewer accidents and injuries, understanding which approaches can improve safety climate is paramount. The purpose of the current study was to investigate how leaders’ behavior in after-action revi...

This is an ideal reference for those looking to understand, study, and practice community engagement and outreach. It discusses the different ways individuals - including faculty, administrators, and management in organizations - engage in their communities. It supplies case studies, best practices, and theoretical approaches to the study of commun...

Drawing from theory on humor styles, impression management, and workplace meetings, we conducted two survey studies of working adults to examine the role of positive and negative humor on meeting satisfaction. We began by investigating the positive effects of humor on meeting satisfaction as moderated by impression management. In an online survey o...

Meetings are routine in organizations, but their value is often questioned by the employees who must sit through them daily. The science of meetings that has emerged as of late provides necessary direction toward improving meetings, but an evaluation of the current state of the science is much needed. In this review, we examine current directions f...

Meetings are ubiquitous across organizations, yet researchers have paid scant attention to the role of meeting leaders in affecting meeting outcomes. Because meetings are important discursive sites, the style of a meeting leader may influence subordinate views of the meeting and leader. Using a sample of working adults, we first demonstrated that m...

Volunteer coordinators' leadership plays a central role in the efforts to retain volunteers and increase their commitment to an organization; however, research on volunteers' perceptions of their leaders is scarce. Given the challenges of leading volunteers, we present two studies to investigate the effectiveness of consideration and initiating str...

Meetings are a frequent occurrence in today’s work environment and yet they remain understudied empirically. This study focused on better understanding the relationship between hierarchical distance in meetings and emotional labor. More specifically, we investigated the direct effect of surface acting and deep acting on hierarchical distance, respe...

We explored group and organizational safety norms as antecedents to meeting leader behaviors and achievement of desired outcomes in a special after-action review case—a post-fall huddle. A longitudinal survey design was used to investigate the relationship between organizational/group safety norms, huddle leader behavior, and huddle meeting effecti...

Most workplace phenomena take place in dynamic social settings and emerge over time, and scholars have repeatedly called for more research into the temporal dynamics of organizational behavior. One reason for this persistent research gap could be that organizational scholars are not aware of the methodological advances that are available today for...

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP, Division 14 of the American Psychological Association [APA]) maintains Guidelines for Education and Training to provide guidance for the training of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists. The 2016/2017 revision combines separate documents for master’s- and doctoral-level traini...

Debriefs are a type of work meeting in which teams discuss, interpret, and learn from recent events during which they collaborated. In a variety of forms, debriefs are found across a wide range of organizational types and settings. Well-conducted debriefs can improve team effectiveness by 25% across a variety of organizations and settings. For exam...

Interdisciplinary teams play an important role implementing innovations that facilitate the quality and safety of patient care. This article examined the role of reflexivity in team innovation implementation and its association with an objective patient safety outcome, inpatient fall rates (a fall is an unintended downward displacement of a patient...

Meeting lateness is pervasive and potentially highly consequential for individuals, groups, and organizations. In Study 1, we first examined base rates of lateness to meetings in an employee sample and found that meeting lateness is negatively related to both meeting satisfaction and effectiveness. We then conducted 2 lab studies to better understa...