Steven Schlachter

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Central Arkansas

Research has confirmed that employee job referrals result in positive job seeker and organizational outcomes. Yet, little research has been conducted on the motivating and demotivating forces behind a referrer’s decision to recommend a potential job candidate to one’s company. Based on underlying notions in pay-for-performance theories, we explain...

A mixed methods study that investigates both the motivations and the outcomes of participation in employee resource groups.

Employee resource groups (ERGs) are within-organization groups, staffed by employee volunteers, which have evolved since their inception in the 1960s. Originally called affinity groups, they began when racial tensions escalated in the United States and were focused on diversity and inclusion goals. Recently, their purpose has transformed to include...

Baseball great Yogi Berra once said “ninety percent of this game is half-mental” (Berra & Kaplan, 2003). We investigate how self-efficacy--belief in one’s own ability--influences performance in the minor leagues of professional baseball following a player’s trade. We argue that these trades act as external cues that signify to the player his object...

Employee engagement has gained in popularity exponentially. However, with all the practitioner and academic interest in the topic, there continues to be inconsistent definitions, low reports of causal research and we suggest missing answers to an important question: engaged in what? In order to explore this issue, we apply role theory to specifical...

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which bring together employees with shared identity or purpose, have been expanding around the globe. ERGs can be a recruiting and retention tool, providing member benefits of career growth, developing friends and providing expanded purpose at work. Given their popularity, they are of interest for researchers. Thus,...

Although the practitioner and the academic literatures both note the importance of ethno-racial diversity in the nonprofit sector, we pursue a better understanding of this sector’s ethno-racial diversity dynamics by exploring the drivers of ethno-racial diversity at multiple organizational hierarchy levels—boards of directors, executive staff teams...

Much discussion has recently been placed not only on the role of diversity but also narcissism in both organizations and society as a whole. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between narcissism and an individual’s thoughts, opinions, and attitudes on diversity. Given that narcissism, by definition, causes an inward focus,...

The topic of employee engagement has received tremendous attention. With this large body of work has come numerous definitions, varied measurement systems and diverse employee-based interventions designed to improve engagement. In this article, we suggest that a variant on this work, employee engagement intent, can provide a useful framework for re...

Employee referral hiring, an organization's use of current employees' social networks (referrers) to fill job openings with new hires (referred workers), is a popular organization practice. This topic has been studied for decades by scholars, and research remains vibrant across several disciplines. While reviews of recruitment methods and their inf...

Research has provided compelling evidence that employee referrals result in positive outcomes for organizations and job seekers, but it has been limited on how organizations can increase the likelihood of obtaining employee referrals. Using the theoretical lens of social exchange theory and tenets from expectancy theory, we tested two common assump...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that employee resource groups (ERGs) are a valuable addition to organizations and should be an important focus of research, particularly given the diversity and inclusion challenges faced by many businesses and communities today. Design/methodology/approach The authors review the ERG literature...

Recently, implicit methods have been employed as a method to understand the underlying attitudes of the participant while also bypassing the social desirability biases that explicit measures are vulnerable to. Unfortunately, the literature has not considered the viewpoints of the individuals who participate in this process and the face validity the...

Creativity and innovation are integral parts of competitive sustainability in today's organization. As such, businesses are always looking to maximize all their potential avenues for growth. A relatively unexplored group are employee resource groups (ERGs) which are “a gathering space within the workplace for employees who share a social identity”...