Don Zhang
Associate Professor Louisiana State University
Areas of Expertise
Biography
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.
Answers
- How can understanding decision-making help organizations build healthier, more successful workplaces?
Decision-making happens at every level of an organization, from C-suite strategy to an employee's daily tasks. Decades of research show that human judgment is prone to biases due to our reliance on mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Understanding and improving decision quality benefits all areas of organizational functioning, leading to sounder strategies, better hires, and more effective policies. Decision science offers a large toolbox of strategies that can enhance choices at both the micro-level (e.g., hiring) and macro-level (e.g., firm strategy). By using these tools, everyone can improve their own work and the overall effectiveness of the organization. Ultimately, applying the science of decision-making helps an organization shift from a reactive, "gut-feel" culture to a more deliberate, evidence-based one.
- What are the biggest mistakes hiring managers make in interviews—and how do they affect who gets the job?
The single biggest mistake is treating an interview like an informal chat rather than a structured assessment. When managers “go with their gut,” they open the door to unconscious biases that have a profound effect on who gets hired. This lack of structure allows biases like the halo effect (where one positive trait overshadows everything else) and affinity bias (our tendency to favor people like us) to take over. As a result, managers often hire the person they like the most, not the person who is most qualified. The solution is a structured interview. This involves two simple but powerful steps: First, Define the criteria first: Identify the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) for the role before looking at a single resume. Next, Use a consistent rubric: Ask all candidates the same job-related questions and score their answers using a pre-defined rating scale. This process transforms hiring from a subjective guessing game into an evidence-based decision, leading to fairer outcomes and a more talented workforce.
Education
Michigan State University
B.S.
Psychology
Bowling Green State University
M.A.
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Bowling Green State University
Ph.D.
Industrial and Organizational 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
Affiliations
- Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM)
- Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)
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
