Paul E. Spector

University of South Florida | USF · Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences

Objectives: This paper provides a quantitative review that estimates exposure rates by type of violence, setting, source, and world region. Design: A quantitative review of the nursing violence literature was summarized. Data sources: A literature search was conducted using the CINAHL, Medline and PsycInfo data bases. Studies included had to r...

A widespread methodological concern in the organizational literature is the possibility that observed results are due to the influence of common-method variance or mono-method bias. This concern is based on a conception of method variance as being produced by the nature of the method itself, and therefore, variables assessed with the same method wo...

This paper makes a case for the necessity of inductive and abductive approaches to research in occupational health science and the broader organizational sciences. Three forms of scientific inference are described: induction (exploratory research that generalizes from observations), abduction (deriving explanations for observations), and deduction...

The cross-sectional research design, especially when used with self-report surveys, is held in low esteem despite its widespread use. It is generally accepted that the longitudinal design offers considerable advantages and should be preferred due to its ability to shed light on causal connections. In this paper, I will argue that the ability of the...

A survey of 330 hospital RNs assessed burnout, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and perceptions of work assignments. Understanding how travel nurses' work experiences differ from the experiences of staff nurses can help nurse leaders determine the best approaches to manage and support these nurses.

Many corporate scandals are made possible by organizational leaders asking subordinates to act in unethical ways. However, the response to unethical requests is not uniform––while some employees reluctantly comply, others blow the whistle, while others exploit the opportunity for personal gain. This study examines these responses by analyzing 110 s...

Introduction The leadership literature has been dominated by the study of broad styles rather than the identification of specific key behaviors. To address this deficiency, a mixed method approach was utilized to explore how follower behavioral descriptions of their leaders would relate to potential outcomes of trust in that leader and job satisfac...

The Oxford Handbook of Cross-Cultural Organizational Behavior comprises 28 chapters organized in six sections that provide the most recent and compelling evidence that cross-cultural and global perspectives are essential to understanding organizational behavior. Part I of the Handbook begins with a discussion of fundamental theoretical and methodol...

The objective of this study is to analyze the responses to the action/state orientation surveys administered to freshman and junior students in engineering and psychology majors and explore the individual survey responses as potential predictors of the students’ academic performance using statistical methods including machine learning algorithms an...

Cyberloafing occurs when employees use electronic devices for nonwork activities while at work. It can have both constructive (means of regulating stress) and destructive (form of counterproductive work behavior) impact. For jobs where there is a fixed schedule of work versus break time, defining cyberloafing is clearcut. In other jobs where employ...

In this Cambridge Companion, global thought leaders in the fields of workplace stress and well-being highlight how theory and research can improve employee health and well-being. The volume explains how and why the topics of workplace stress and well-being have evolved and continue to be highly relevant, and why line managers have great influence o...

Despite converging theoretical arguments regarding non-linear relationships between workload and employee attitudes (i.e. job satisfaction) and mental well-being outcomes, prior empirical support for these curvilinear effects has been mixed. In this study we offer and test two potential explanations that may help to reconcile this discrepancy. Firs...

Widespread concern has been raised about the possibility of potential biasing factors influencing the measurement of organizational variables and distorting inferences and conclusions reached about them. Recent research calls for a measure-centric approach in which every measure is independently evaluated to assess what factor(s) may uniquely bias...

The burgeoning occupational callings literature has shown that feeling called to a job is associated with an array of positive job-, career-, and health-related outcomes. However, recent studies have begun to indicate that there may also be a "negative side" of callings. The present study builds on this emerging perspective to examine whether feeli...

Organizational leaders can make a large, positive impact on their employees during crises. However, existing research demonstrates that social support is not always effective in helping employees cope with stress, and existing research has not fully identified features of support attempts that determine their effectiveness. Using mixed methods, the...

This chapter is part of Job Satisfaction: From Assessment to Intervention that only the publisher can distribute. Details are here: https://paulspector.com/books/job-satisfaction/

This book is only available from the publisher, Routledge. I have a description with a link to the publisher here: https://paulspector.com/books/job-satisfaction/

A high workload has long been considered a harmful stressor that adversely affects employees. In the current study, we propose that work underload also has negative implications for employees, and that there is a curvilinear relationship between daily workload and rumination. These negative consequences can carry over to the next day. We collected...

This meta-analysis quantitatively summarizes the effect of workplace safety training interventions on safety performance antecedents (safety motivation, knowledge, and climate) and safety performance (safety compliance and participation). One hundred unique samples from 90 published reports representing a wide variety of industries were included in...

There has been growing criticism of the established practice of automatically including control variables into analyses, especially with survey studies. Several authors have explained the pitfalls of improper use and have provided some best practice advice. I build upon this foundation in suggesting a programmatic approach to the use of control var...

Remote work is rapidly increasing in popularity, and much remains to be known about this new means of working. Across three studies using disparate methodologies, this research investigates remote work stressors, their relations with employee burnout, and the role of supervisor support. Study 1 provides a qualitative investigation of stressors expe...

Using two diverse cross-sectional samples (n = 361, 579), the authors investigated measurement impediments in current behavioural methods of operationalising workplace mistreatment by examining perceived intensity and intention attributions. Results indicated that bullying and incivility, assessed using common measures and analytical techniques, ha...

This chapter provides an overview of research methods to study workplace ostracism. It begins with a content analysis of 95 published workplace ostracism studies showing that the most often used designs are longitudinal/time-lagged (44%), cross-sectional (27%), and multiple data source (26%). Ostracism is most often measured with survey methods usi...

Most stress research focuses on the effect of workplace stressors on frontline employees. However, less research has focused on how employees affect leaders’ stress. The purpose of this study is to highlight an important yet neglected type of stressor crossover: from employees to their leader. The current study used multisource data (i.e., subordin...

Contemporary trends in business have focused on enhancing the employee work experience. Proponents argue that doing so will improve employees’ productivity and ultimately the firm's performance. However, critics argue that job satisfaction has only a modest relationship with an employee's job performance, and therefore, such an investment will like...

The popularity of online learning is growing exponentially. Accordingly, it is critical to understand how we can facilitate the learning experience for users in these unique online environments. Past research consistently finds that one important antecedent of online learning outcomes is social presence. However, there is limited research related t...

Are your workdays created equal? Common wisdom suggests that employees experience Mondays differently from Fridays. However, few studies distinguish among workdays, inherently assuming that the employee experience is uniform across the workweek. In the current study, we examined the trajectories of employees’ experiences of job satisfaction and job...

Since 2009, over 176 million patients in the United States have been adversely impacted by data breaches affecting Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-covered institutions. While the popular press often attributes data breaches to external hackers, most breaches are the result of employee carelessness and/or failure to comply with i...

In this commentary I note that there are three roles in journal peer review. Gatekeepers evaluate the quality of a submission to help editors make a decision about accepting an article. Developmental is providing feedback and suggestions to help authors improve their work. Author is someone who has input into decisions concerning the writing of an...

Most existing safety research focuses on climate and leadership, with most leadership studies investigating transformational leadership, which is likely to be more impactful when exhibited by executives that by frontline supervisors. Therefore, focusing on frontline supervisors, we investigate how leaders who “walk the talk”, by directly modelling...

Customer-directed counterproductive work behavior or CWB (harmful acts directed toward customers), a significant concern for service organizations, has become a topic of increasing interest in recent years. Although the predominant view in the literature is that customer-directed CWB represents a retaliatory response to customer mistreatment, tempo...

While social support is generally considered a helpful resource for employees, it can also serve as a job stressor. Unhelpful workplace social support (UWSS) is any action taken by a supervisor and/or colleague that the recipient believes was intended to benefit him or her but is perceived as unhelpful or harmful. Two studies, one qualitative and o...

This chapter summarizes a meta-analysis of 72 studies (n= 20,701) that link customer mistreatment (abusive, nasty, and rude behavior of customers toward employees) to psychological, attitudinal, and behavioral strains. Results showed that customer mistreatment related significantly to a variety of psychological and attitudinal strains (emotional ex...

Employees spend approximately 2 h per day engaging in cyberloafing (i.e., using the internet at work for nonwork purposes) behaviors, costing organizations almost $85 billion dollars per year. As a result, cyberloafing is often considered a counterproductive type of withdrawal behavior. However, recent research suggests that cyberloafing may have s...

Three studies experimentally investigated response formats of agreement (A) and frequency (F) to determine their effect on correlations between often used measures of job stressors and strains. Study 1 used a within-subject design where respondents were given two sets of the same 6 stressor measures that varied in A versus F formats, as well as mea...

In the present study, we investigated the relationships between objective overqualification, perceived overqualification, and job satisfaction based on the tenets of P-E fit theory, a commonly-used theoretical framework in the overqualification literature. Specifically, we tested whether employee perceptions of overqualification mediate the relatio...

This study used an experience sampling design to examine the spillover effects of experienced workplace incivility from organizational insiders (coworkers and supervisors, respectively) and organizational outsiders (patients and their visitors) on targets' work‐to‐family conflict, and to test the mediating effect of burnout and the moderating effec...

Purpose Surprisingly, most studies have failed to demonstrate a strong correlation between organizational constraints (conditions at work that make doing a job difficult) and job performance. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the view that constraints are a direct barrier on performance and take an alternative approach whereby constraints...

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is defined as behavior that harms organizations and people in organizations. There has been a growing interest among scholars in understanding CWB from a multilevel perspective. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, this article reports results from two multilevel studies of how abusive supervision, workgr...

Past research has traditionally examined stressors as predictors and strains as outcomes. However, some recent research has found evidence of reverse causality between various stressors and strains, demonstrating that the relationship between these types of variables may extend beyond the traditional stressor-strain framework. The current study bui...

The current study investigated the relationship between demands for organizational citizenship behaviors and future displays of organizational citizenship and counterproductive work behaviors. Such demands are conceptualized as organizational constraints, coworker failure, and supervisor pressure to commit organizational citizenship behaviors. The...

We combined three independent streams of workplace climate research, safety, violence prevention, and civility, to devise a general safety climate scale that explicitly addressed a variety of risks. A confirmatory factor analysis suggested that a higher-order factor may be responsible for the similarity in relationships across these safety-related...

Illegitimate tasks are tasks that violate norms for what the employee should do as part of the job, and have been found to harm employees’ well-being. The current research uses a mixed methods design to examine the role of attributions on the two types of illegitimate tasks: unreasonable and unnecessary tasks. A sample of 432 engineers described a...

Over the past decades, user engagement has become central to product success more than ever before. However, while engagement has been studied extensively in various disciplines, these bodies of knowledge are siloed. One indication of this separation is that there is no existing user engagement measure that can be used consistently and reliably acr...

Engagement on online learning platforms is essential for user retention, learning, and performance. However, there is a paucity of research addressing latent engagement measurement using user activities. In this work in progress paper, we present a novel engagement score consisting of three sub-dimensions -cognitive engagement, emotional engagement...

Workplace cyberloafing (personal use of the internet during working hours) has been recognized as a form of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) that can harm organizations. In this study, we take an opposing view and argue that cyberloafing can serve a potentially positive function in that it can help employees cope with workplace boredom. We des...

Daily diary studies use the same set of measures repeatedly for several days. Within the work stress domain, these studies are able to isolate the effects of daily exposure to stressors within people from the general level of stressors between people. This meta-analysis investigated both content-related and methodological aspects of workplace stres...

In their focal article, Aguinis et al. (2017) provided a bibliometric analysis of our six industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology textbooks, noting among other things the sources, articles, and authors we collectively cited the most. Their analysis provides information about what we cited but not why. In this commentary on their article, our...

The goal of this study was to test cross-cultural/cross-national differences in the association between coworker interpersonal justice and coworker conflict and the implications of such differences for employee effectiveness. Harmony is a central value in China but is less important in the United States, and the individual value of harmony may infl...

This chapter discusses how the control and strategic management of resources plays a role in the occupational stress process. Building upon prior resource theories of stress, the idea is developed that control of external and internal resources, and not resource acquisition or maintenance, is a vital element that contributes to a strain response to...

We extend attribution and stakeholder theory in the context of crisis reputation management by examining differences in stakeholder perceptions in the form of organization-related blame. We presented eight stakeholder groups with factual information surrounding the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and asked them to indicate the extent to which they blam...

The current study examined passive leadership as a potential antecedent of two commonly studied workplace stressors (i.e. workload and work–family conflict), and investigated its negative effect on employee burnout and physical symptoms via these stressors. We collected two waves of data from 274 focal participants, and one wave of data from their...

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) is a commonly used life satisfaction scale. Cross-cultural researchers use SWLS to compare mean scores of life satisfaction across countries. Despite the wide use of SWLS in cross-cultural studies, measurement invariance of SWLS has rarely been investigated, and previous studies showed inconsistent findings....

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the importance of safety climate in the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and to assess occupational callings as a boundary condition for the effect of safety climate on safety behaviors. Methods: EMS professionals (n = 132) participated in a three-wave survey study. Hierarchical linear regressi...

This chapter explores the relationship between two focal social stressors (interpersonal conflict and organizational politics) and psychological strains (job satisfaction and psychological symptoms). We also examine an unexplored mechanism of how self-efficacy and active coping might protect employees from negative effects of social stressors.

In this paper we review the contribution that researchers have made to the field of human resource management (HRM) using the method of meta-analysis. First, we summarized results of a content analysis of the most frequently studied HRM topics and topic combinations found in 407 papers published in the major HRM peer-reviewed outlets. Specifically,...

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...

Using survey data from 459 employed individuals, the conditional indirect effects of three types of interpersonal conflict at work on strains and performance through surface acting were tested. Results indicated that task, relationship and non-task organizational conflict were positively related to depressive and physical symptoms and negatively re...

Organizational constraints are contextual factors that interfere with task performance. Study 1 was a meta-analysis of constraints-performance studies that found a smaller than expected relationship. Two additional studies were designed to understand why constraints fail to relate as expected to performance. Study 2 found support for the rater-bias...

Background: Safety climate, violence prevention climate, and civility climate were independently developed and linked to domain-specific workplace hazards, although all three were designed to promote the physical and psychological safety of workers. Purpose: To test domain specificity between conceptually related workplace climates and relevant...

This paper describes two studies of a new relational variable social burden and its implications for employees' well-being, job attitudes and counterproductive work behaviours. Social burden is defined as behaviours from colleagues that elicit the focal employees' social support. Across two separate samples (540 nurses and 172 university employees)...

The stressor organizational constraints, reflecting aspects of the work environment that inhibit or interfere with an individual's performance of job tasks, is prevalent in the workplace. This meta-analysis summarizes findings concerning the relationships of organizational constraints with other variables. Using five search methods, we located 84 r...

A content analysis of the two leading WOHP journals (Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and Work & Stress) from 2010 to September 2014 revealed current practices in research design, sampling, and statistics, as well as the popularity of six major topics. Five suggested future trends are discussed that we feel will move the field forward in a...

The temporal direction of the relationships between violence prevention climate and both physical violence and verbal abuse was investigated in a longitudinal study of newly graduated registered nurses. A sample of 126 nurses, recruited into the study while students, completed similar surveys at approximately 6 and 12 months after graduation that a...

Statistical control is widely used in correlational studies with the intent of providing more accurate estimates of relationships among variables, more conservative tests of hypotheses, or ruling out alternative explanations for empirical findings. However, the use of control variables can produce uninterpretable parameter estimates, erroneous infe...

In the current study we examined the role of four dimensions of political skill (social astuteness, interpersonal influence, networking ability, and apparent sincerity) in predicting subsequent workplace aggression exposure based on the proactive coping framework. Further we investigated their buffering effects on the negative outcomes of experienc...

The modern workplace contains many physical and interpersonal hazards to employee physical and psychological health/well-being. This chapter integrates the literatures on occupational safety (i.e., accidents and injuries) and mistreatment (physical violence and psychological abuse). A model is provided linking environmental (climate and leadership)...

Contextual factors play a vital role in employee mistreatment. This chapter deals with the definition and scope of contextual factors, including a distinction between the objective environment and its idiosyncratic perception by employees. Several mechanisms are offered to explain the effects of context on mistreatment, including the stressor strai...

Illegitimate tasks, a recently introduced occupational stressor, are tasks that violate norms about what an employee can reasonably be expected to do. Because they are considered a threat to one's professional identity, we expected that the daily experience of illegitimate tasks would be linked to a drop in self-esteem and to impaired well-being. W...

This study used cross-sectional data from 579 nurses to examine main and interaction effects of workplace aggression and theoretical nuances on employee strain. Perceived intensity of aggression and intention attributions by the target, power of the perpetrator in relation to the target, and perceived visibility of aggression by the target all serv...