People
Paul Spector
Distinguished Professor Emeritus and
External Graduate Co-Advisor
CONTACT
LINKS
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, University of South Florida, 1975.
RESEARCH
I am interested in both research methodology and in how organizational factors, work-nonwork interface, and personal characteristics interact to affect employee health, safety, and well-being. My methodology interests focus on the connection between design, measurement and statistics and in the nature of scientific inference. I have studied the proper use of control variables, and common method variance. My health and safety interests fit into the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of occupational health psychology. My students, colleagues and I study accidents/injuries at work, counterproductive work behavior (things people do that harm coworkers and employers such as aggression and theft), interpersonal conflict, job attitudes, job stress and workplace violence. We also study how personality affects each of these areas.
Research Synopsis
We have several research thrusts going on at the current time.
1. Counterproductive work behavior: We are studying potential antecedents of these behaviors to better understand why they occur.
2. Workplace violence: We are studying how the climate of an organization contributes to violence.
3. Common and uncommon method variance.
4. Job stress: We are studying the impact of illegitimate tasks, organizational constraints, and workload.
SPECIALTY AREA
Industrial-Organizational
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Arvan, M. L., Pindek, S., Andel, S. A., & Spector, P. E. (2019). Too good for your job? Disentangling the relationships between objective overqualification, perceived overqualification, and job dissatisfaction. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 119.
Gray, C. E., Spector, P. E., Lacey, K. N., Young, B. G., Jacobsen, S. T., & Taylor, M. R. (2019). Helping may be harming: Unintended negative consequences of providing social support. Work & Stress.
Spector, P. E. (2019). Do not cross me: Optimizing the use of cross-sectional designs. Journal of Business and Psychology. [Designated Hot Paper (top .1% papers cited) by Clarivate Analytics, December 2019; Received 2019 Editor’s Commendation from JBP.]
Spector, P. E., Rosen, C. C., Richardson, H. A., Williams, L. J., & Johnson, R. E. (2019). A new perspective on method variance: A measure-centric approach to the identification and control of extraneous sources of variance. Journal of Management, 45, 855-880.
Zhou, Z. E., Meier, L. L., & Spector, P. E. (2019). The spillover effects of coworker, supervisor, and outsider workplace incivility on work-family conflict: A weekly diary design. Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Andel, S. M., de Vreede, T., Spector, P. E., Padmanabhan, B. P., Singh, V., & de Vreede, G. J. (2020). So social features help in video-centric online learning platforms? A social presence perspective. Computers in Human Behavior.
Kessler, S. R., Lucianetti, L., Pindek, S., & Spector, P. E. (2020). "walking the talk": the role of frontline supervisors in preventing workplace accidents. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.
Kessler, S. R., Pindek, S., Kleinman, G., Andel, S. A., & Spector, P. E. (2020). Information security climate and the assessment of information security risk among healthcare workers. Health Informatics Journal, 26, 461-473.
Pindek, S., Zhiqing, Z. E., Kessler, S. R., Krajcevska, A., & Spector, P. E. (2020). Workdays are not created equal: Job satisfaction and job stressors across the workweek. Human Relations.
Spector, P. E. (2020). Mastering the use of control variables: The hierarchical iterative control (HIC) approach. Journal of Business and Psychology.