Caroline Bartel
Associate Professor, Department of Management | The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business
Austin, TX, UNITED STATES
Understanding how to keep employees engaged in the workplace, especially during organizational change
Areas of Expertise (4)
Organizational Identification Processes
Organizational Behavior
Collaboration
Managerial, Group and Organizational Decision Making
Biography
Dr. Caroline Bartel is an associate professor in the department of Management. Her research and teaching focus on sustaining employee engagement in the workplace, particularly in organizations and professions undergoing change.
Dr. Bartel has studied how organizations in various industries (e.g., consulting, consumer products, news publishing, and broadcasting, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications) can maintain the motivation, performance, and commitment of employees during times of organizational growth as well as decline (layoffs and downsizing). She has examined an array of change initiatives, such as corporate citizenship and community outreach, virtual work and telecommuting, and organizational restructuring (e.g., implementing self-managed teams).
Her current projects focus on how organizations facing threat and uncertainty manage their identity and culture, and the subsequent impact on individual and group effectiveness (e.g., productivity, learning, and innovation).
Dr. Bartel teaches to diverse audiences, having designed undergraduate and graduate courses, and executive training seminars at the University of Michigan, New York University, and UT Austin. Her courses focus on how individual and group behavior are shaped by structural, social, and political forces within organizations.
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Education (3)
The University of Michigan: Ph.D., Organizational Psychology
The University of Michigan: M.A., Organizational Psychology
State University of New York at Stony Brook: B.A., Psychology
Articles (7)
Caroline Bartel Citations
Google Scholar
Listing of top scholarly works by Caroline Bartel.
Assessing Collective Affect Recognition via the Emotional Aperture Measure
Cognition & Emotion
2016-01-01
This article addresses the need for a methodological approach for assessing collective emotion recognition by introducing the Emotional Aperture Measure (EAM). Three studies provide evidence that collective affect recognition requires a processing style distinct from individual emotion recognition and establishes the validity and reliability of the EAM.
Managing to Stay in the Dark: Managerial Self-Efficacy, Ego Defensiveness, and the Aversion to Employee Voice
Academy of Management Journal
2014-08-01
Soliciting and incorporating employee voice is essential to organizational performance, yet some managers display a strong aversion to improvement-oriented input from subordinates.
The Social Negotiation of Group Prototype Ambiguity in Dynamic Organizational Contexts
Academy of Management Review
2013-10-01
This article focuses on how the changing nature of work and working today elicits prototype ambiguity in groups—a shared perception among group members that the attributes, attitudes, and actions that define and describe the typical group member are unclear.
Knowing Where You Stand: Perceived Respect, Organizational Identification and Physical Isolation Among Virtual Workers
Organization Science
2012-05-01
This research investigates the relationship between virtual employees' degree of physical isolation and their perceived respect in the organization. Respect is an identity-based status perception that reflects the extent to which one is included and valued as a member of the organization. We hypothesize that the degree of physical isolation is negatively associated with virtual employees' perceived respect and that this relationship explains the lower organizational identification among more physically isolated virtual employees.
When Does Voice Prompt Action? Constructing Ideas that Trigger Attention, Importance and Feasibility
Best Paper Proceedings, Academy of Management
2010-08-01
The article discusses the notion of employee voice in the context of the characteristics of the ideas that employees convey. It explores how factors such as perceived importance and feasibility predispose managers to take action on issues that have caught their attention and to identify characteristics of the ideas associated with those perceptions. Ways in which employees can more effectively sell their ideas by constructing and presenting them to lead managers to take action are explored.
The Role of Narratives in Sustaining Organizational Innovation
Organization Science
2009-01-01
Sustaining innovation is a vital yet difficult task. Innovation requires the coordinated efforts of many actors to facilitate) the recombination of ideas to generate novelty, real-time problem solving, and linkages between present innovation efforts with past ...
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