Karin A. Orvis

• Doctor of Philosophy
• U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences

Purpose Over the past two decades, research has shown a growing consensus that 70% to 90% of organizational learning occurs not through formal training but informally, on-the-job, and in an ongoing manner. Despite this emerging consensus, primary data on the nature and correlates of informal learning remains sparse. The purpose of this study was to...

There has been significant debate in the literature on technology-mediated training about the appropriate role of learner control. This paper defines learner control as giving trainees the ability to make choices about how they proceed through the learning environment. Two perspectives are explored. First, this paper considers learners’ stated pref...

Purpose – The extant research has not been consistent in the way motivation is conceptualized and measured in learning contexts, with prior research utilizing five different types of motivation derived from three theoretical frameworks – self-determination theory, expectancy theory, and the expectancy-value model. The purpose of the present study w...

Videogames are increasingly being used as instructional tools within education, workforce, and military contexts. Yet, additional research is needed to better understand what (and how) videogame-based training design attributes impact trainee performance in this type of training context. Goals/goal-setting and performance feedback represent two suc...

This study investigated the role of peer mentoring and voluntary self‐development activities (i.e., capitalization) in anchoring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students to their college majors. Online data were collected from 214 undergraduate students. As hypothesized, mentoring was positively related to capitalization, and both...

Purpose This study examines the issue of change in newcomers’ employer-based psychological contract obligations over time, viewing change as a potentially important determinant of perceived contract breach and subsequent employee attitudes and behaviors. Design/Methodology/Approach Data were collected using a three-wave longitudinal design from new...

While videogames can easily be tailored to provide “adaptive training,” little research exists examining whether this benefit enhances training outcomes. The current study investigated three task difficulty manipulations and the moderating role of personality. Participants engaged in six 7-minute missions in a videogame-based training task. Opennes...

This study sought to investigate what happens to trainee performance when an individual sets an unrealistically difficult performance goal early in training, which results in a large goal-performance discrepancy. Data from 185 trainees participating in a videogame-based training environment demonstrated that a single large discrepancy negatively im...

While prior research has identified several individual characteristics and contextual factors influential on an employee’s quantity of self-development participation, no research has examined multiplicative effects among these factors. This study investigated person-situation interactions among five individual characteristics (e.g., openness to exp...

This paper investigates the moderating role of specific Big Five personality traits on the relationship between learner control and training performance in an e-learning environment. Specifically, we examined the role of openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Participants completed a video-based e-learning program with either...

The underrepresentation of women and minorities in computer science and engineering is well documented, as are the challenges that students pursuing these majors face. Complementing the research on how engineering and computer science students cope with challenges, this qualitative study investigated how students capitalize on development opportuni...

Instructional video game development is occurring in both the commercial game development and the instructional design/development communities, but regularly in isolation from one another. While many proclaim that game-based learning offers an instructional revolution, the empirical results on instructional effectiveness have been mixed. These mixe...

This paper examines the benefits and limitations of learner control functionality in the e-learning environment. A quasi-experiment with 237 learners was conducted to examine the role of high-level learner control (i.e. enabling trainee ‘choice’ to complete an e-learning program with or without interactive learner control features versus completion...

Reports an error in "Conscientiousness and reactions to psychological contract breach: A longitudinal field study" by Karin A. Orvis, Nicole M. Dudley and Jose M. Cortina (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2008[Sep], Vol 93[5], 1183-1193). Six correlations in Table 1 on page 1187 are incorrectly reported. A corrected table is presented in the erratum,...

Organizations are moving toward self-development as a means to supplement formal leader development programs. However, the highly individualized nature of self-development presents unique challenges for evaluation. We suggest a mixed methods approach, including not only a summative evaluation (i.e., examining self-development outcomes), but also em...

Videogames are increasingly being used for military training. One assumption is that the majority of soldiers play videogames regularly; however, research by Orvis, Horn, and Belanich (2009)20. Orvis , K. A. , Horn , D. B. and Belanich , J. 2009 . An examination of the role individual differences play in videogame-based training . Military Psycholo...

Videogames are emerging as an increasingly popular training tool in the military. Given this trend, it is important to investigate factors that maximize the effectiveness of this training medium. The present research analyzed the impact of trainee attributes (i.e., prior videogame experience, videogame self-efficacy, and goal orientation) on game-b...

[This paper is a companion piece for a presentation to be given as part of a panel discussion on the topic “Leveraging Virtual Reality and Computer-Based Games for Training”]. Our paper describes: the establishment of a testbed to support behavioral research on training applications of online distributed multiplayer gaming systems, several of the i...

This experimental study investigated the mechanisms by which learner control influences learning in an e-learning environment. The authors hypothesized that learner control would enhance learning indirectly through its effect on trainee reactions and learner engagement (in particular, off-task attention), such that learners who were more satisfied...

The authors examined the role of employee conscientiousness as a moderator of the relationships between psychological contract breach and employee behavioral and attitudinal reactions to the breach. They collected data from 106 newly hired employees within the 1st month of employment (Time 1), 3 months later (Time 2), and 8 months after Time 1 (Tim...

Instructional video game development is occurring in both the commercial game development and the instructional design/development communities, but regularly in isolation from one another. While many proclaim that game-based learning offers an instructional revolution, the empirical results on instructional effectiveness have been mixed. These mixe...

Video game-based environments are an increasingly popular medium for training Soldiers. This research investigated how various strategies for modifying task difficulty over the progression of an instructional video game impact learner performance and motivation. Further, the influence of prior video game experience on these learning outcomes was ex...

Personal computer (PC)-based videogames are emerging as an increasingly popular training tool in the U.S. Army. The present research represents a follow-up investigation to Orvis, Orvis, Belanich, and Mull in (2005) with regards to the impact of trainee characteristics in videogame-based training environments. Specifically, this follow-up research...

Researchers of broad and narrow traits have debated whether narrow traits are important to consider in the prediction of job performance. Because personality-performance relationship meta-analyses have focused almost exclusively on the Big Five, the predictive power of narrow traits has not been adequately examined. In this study, the authors addre...