Frederick Morgeson
Professor of Management Michigan State University
- East Lansing MI
Expert in leadership, recruiting and hiring, job analysis and design, talent management, and organizational psychology
Media
Biography
Industry Expertise
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Faculty Excellence Award
Michigan State University
Best Paper Award
SAGE
Emerald Citations of Excellence Award
Emerald Group Publishing
Best Leadership Paper Award
Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership
Lewis Quality Award
Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University
Education
Purdue University
PhD
News
This Company Says Its Software Can Pick Soccer stars
Bloomberg Businessweek online
2017-10-09
BrainsFirst hasn’t submitted its software to the Dutch Association of Psychologists, which audits the quality of tests for students as well as human resources departments and health-care services. Nor has Sligte published any articles about the company’s methods or applied for a patent. “There’s basically no evidence for the claims they’re making,” says Frederick Morgeson, a professor of management at Michigan State University who specializes in organizational psychology. “That’s not to say it’s completely bogus, it’s just to say that we don’t know.”
Journal Articles
Are you really doing good things in your boss’s eyes? Interactive effects of employee innovative work behavior and leader-member exchange on supervisory performance ratings
Human Resource ManagementSchuh, S. C., Zhang, X., Morgeson, F. P., Tian, P., & van Dick, R.
2017
Organizations increasingly depend on employee efforts to innovate. However, the quality of relationships between leaders and employees may affect the recognition that employees receive for their innovative work behaviors. Drawing from a social cognition perspective, we tested a model in which leader–member exchange (LMX) moderates the impact of employee innovative work behavior on supervisory ratings of employee performance. Results from two multisource studies combining self, colleague, and supervisor ratings consistently showed that employees receive more favorable performance ratings by engaging in innovative work behavior when they have high‐quality LMX relationships. Moreover, we found that this interactive relationship was mediated by leader perceptions of innovative employee efforts, providing support for a moderated mediation model. Implications for the literatures on performance appraisal, LMX, and innovation are discussed.
One hundred years of work design research: Looking back and looking forward
Journal of Applied PsychologyParker, S. K., Morgeson, F. P., & Johns, G.
2017
In this article we take a big picture perspective on work design research. In the first section of the paper we identify influential work design articles and use scientific mapping to identify distinct clusters of research. Pulling this material together, we identify five key work design perspectives that map onto distinct historical developments: (a) sociotechnical systems and autonomous work groups, (b) job characteristics model, (c) job demands-control model, (d) job demands-resources model, and (e) role theory. The grounding of these perspectives in the past is understandable, but we suggest that some of the distinction between clusters is convenient rather than substantive. Thus we also identify contemporary integrative perspectives on work design that build connections across the clusters and we argue that there is scope for further integration. In the second section of the paper, we review the role of Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) in shaping work design research. We conclude that JAP has played a vital role in the advancement of this topic over the last 100 years. Nevertheless, we suspect that to continue to play a leading role in advancing the science and practice of work design, the journal might need to publish research that is broader, more contextualized, and team-oriented. In the third section, we address the impact of work design research on: applied psychology and management, disciplines beyond our own, management thinking, work practice, and national policy agendas. Finally, we draw together observations from our analysis and identify key future directions for the field. (PsycINFO Database Record.
The effects of managerial and employee attributions for corporate social responsibility initiatives
Journal of Organizational BehaviorVlachos, P. A., Panagopoulos, N. G., Bachrach, D. G., & Morgeson, F. P.
2017
Although Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can affect employees, we know little about how it affects them. Employees’ interpretation of CSR is important because of the paradoxical nature of CSR. When firms operate in ways that seem counter to their nature (i.e., pursuit of social good rather than profit), the causal attributions of affected employees are crucial to understanding their work-related behavior, as is the role of contextual factors such as leadership processes in shaping these attributions. Drawing from attribution and social learning theories, we develop a multi-level social influence theory of how CSR affects employees. We integrate managers as second observers in the baseline actor (i.e., firm) – observer (i.e., employee) dyad, whereas most attribution theory research has focused on single actor-observer dyads. Multi-source field data collected from 427 employees and 45 managers were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Managers’ genuine (self-serving) CSR attributions are positively related to employees’ genuine (self-serving) CSR attributions; and the strength of the relationship between managers’ and employees’ genuine CSR attributions depends on managers' organizational tenure. Employees’ genuine CSR attributions also are positively related to employee advocacy, whereas – interestingly – employees’ self-serving CSR attributions do not appear to harm employee advocacy.
Event System Theory: An event-oriented approach to the organizational sciences
Academy of Management ReviewMorgeson, F. P., Mitchell, T. R., & Liu, D.
2015
Organizations are dynamic, hierarchically structured entities. Such dynamism is reflected in the emergence of significant events at every organizational level. Despite this fact, there has been relatively little discussion about how events become meaningful and come to impact organizations across space and time. We address this gap by developing event system theory, which suggests that events become salient when they are novel, disruptive, and critical (reflecting an event’s strength). Importantly, events can originate at any hierarchical level and their effects can remain within that level or travel up or down throughout the organization, changing or creating new behaviors, features, and events. This impact can extend over time as events vary in duration and timing or as event strength evolves. Event system theory provides a needed shift in focus for organizational theory and research by developing specific propositions articulating the interplay among event strength and the spatial and temporal processes through which events come to influence organizations.
Pay Attention! The Liabilities of Respondent Experience and Carelessness When Making Job Analysis Judgments
Journal of ManagementMorgeson, F. P., Spitzmuller, M., Garza, A. S., & Campion, M. A.
2014
Job analysis has a central role in virtually every aspect of HR and is one of several high performance work practices thought to underlie firm performance. Given its ubiquity and importance, it is not surprising that considerable effort has been devoted to developing comprehensive job analysis systems and methodologies. Yet, the complexity inherent in collecting detailed and specific “decomposed” information has led some to pursue “holistic” strategies designed to focus on more general and abstract job analysis information. It is not clear, however, if these two different strategies yield comparable information, nor if respondents are equally capable of generating equivalent information. Drawing from cognitive psychology research, we suggest that experienced and careless job analysis respondents are less likely to evidence convergence in their decomposed and holistic job analysis judgments. In a field sample of professional managers, we found that three different types of task-related work experience moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average ΔR2 of 4.7%. Three other more general types of work experience, however, did not moderate this relationship, supporting predictions that only experience directly related to work tasks would prove to be a liability when making judgments. We also found that respondent carelessness moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average ΔR2 of 6.2%. These results link cognitive limitations to important job analysis respondent differences and suggest a number of theoretical and practical implications when collecting holistic job analysis data.
