Don Zhang
Associate Professor Louisiana State University
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Research Focus
Workplace Risk-Taking & Employee Selection
Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on workplace risk-taking, judgment and decision-making, and employee recruitment and selection. He applies organizational surveys, experimental interview studies, and psychometric modeling to reveal how personality and situational factors drive risky behavior and to sharpen hiring practices and decision quality at work.
Education
Bowling Green State University
Ph.D.
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Bowling Green State University
M.A.
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Michigan State University
B.S.
Psychology
Accomplishments
Reviewer of the Year, Journal of Business and Psychology
2021
Media Appearances
4 LSU professors awarded National Science Foundation's most prestigious early-career grant
The Advocate online
2022-07-24
Don Zhang
Zhang will use $430,000 to study risk-taking behavior in the workplace.
The impetus behind his work, Zhang said, comes from research he and his colleagues have conducted over the past five to 10 years profiling people who take risks and trying to measure risk preferences.
"What I'm aiming to do, with the generous support of NSF, is to take a lot of the good work that we've done so far and apply it to the work context," he said. "Trying to understand, if you're an employee who is a risk-taker, what does that mean in terms of your performance and behavior at work."
Articles
Development and Validation of the Calculated and Spontaneous Risk‐Taking Scale (CASPRT)
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making2025
Risk preference is a key concept across social, economic, and decision sciences. While existing measures assess risk taking either as domain‐specific preferences (e.g., finance and health) or as a general trait, they have largely overlooked individual differences in the narrow, domain‐general aspects of risk preference. Drawing from a dual‐process framework, we advance a multidimensional domain‐general measure of risk preference. We develop and validate the Calculated and Spontaneous Risk‐Taking Scale across seven studies (N = 2116).
The bright, dark, and gray sides of risk takers at work: criterion validity of risk propensity for contextual work performance
Journal of Business and Psychology2024
Although risk takers are traditionally seen as liabilities, a growing body of research suggests that risk takers may be critical for organizational achievements because of their courage and willingness to take risks for the benefit of others. Despite the prevalence of risk taking in studies of strategic management and organizational behavior, we know very little about the implication of risk propensity on employee work performance. In this paper, we conceptualize contextual performance—behaviors that fall outside of normal job expectations—as a form of workplace risk taking.
Improving the statistical performance of oblique bifactor measurement and predictive models: An augmentation approach
Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal2024
Oblique bifactor models, where group factors are allowed to correlate with one another, are commonly used. However, the lack of research on the statistical properties of oblique bifactor models renders the statistical validity of empirical findings questionable. Therefore, the present study took the first step to examine the statistical properties of oblique bifactor models through Monte Carlo simulations. Study 1 showed that the classic oblique bifactor measurement models had severe convergence issues in many conditions. Even for converged replications, both factor loading and group factor correlation estimates were severely biased.
Eliciting risk preferences: is a single item enough?
Journal of Risk Research2023
Economists and psychologists frequently use single-item measures of risk preferences despite potential limitations in reliability and criterion validity compared to their multi-item counterparts. This can be particularly problematic when individual differences in risk preferences are used to predict real-world economic, health, and financial outcomes. In this paper, we compare a popular single-item measure of risk preference, the General Risk Question (GRQ), to multi-item measures of domain-general and specific risk preference measures. I
The illusion of validity: how effort inflates the perceived validity of interview questions
European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology2023
Interviewers are often confident in the validity of their interview questions. What drives this confidence and is it justified? In three studies, we found that question creators judged their own interview questions as more valid than when the same questions are judged by an evaluator. We also found that effort expenditure inflated the perceived validity of interview questions but not question quality. Question creators’ perceptions of validity were primarily driven by their self-confidence, and not the question quality. As an intervention, we nudged participants into holding more favourable attitudes towards better questions (i.e., structured questions) by allowing them to choose a subset of them from a pre-written list.
Affiliations
- Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM)
- Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)
Event Appearances
Keeping Up with Open Science: Teaching, Self-Teaching, and Training on Open Science
2022 | Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Seattle, WA
Horsesized duck or duck-sized horses? Pros and cons of odd-ball interview questions
2019 | Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Washington, DC
“Can you hear me now? Good. Communicating Science Effectively
2018 | Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Chicago, IL
Research Grants
Center for Promotion of Academic Careers through Motivational Opportunities to Develop Emerging Leaders in STEM (LS-PAC MODELS).
Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence
2018- 2023
Media
