Research Program
Our research program intends to test innovative models of management practices, job attitudes (e.g., employee commitment), employee and team performance, and customer reactions by capitalizing on recent methodological advances in the field of behavioural research.
As our aim is to examine how the variables under scrutiny influence one another within causal sequences, we need to have access to an infrastructure of data in which such causal flows can be properly tested. The Global Experience Panel was created to achieve these goals.
Research themes
I – Change in Employee Commitment: Antecedents, Consequences, and Moderators
An important part of our research program will focus on within-person change in commitment across time, and how this change:
- predicts change in employee outcomes (e.g., job performance, extra-role behaviour, innovative behaviour),
- is explainable by change in characteristics of the work environment, and
- generates effects that are influenced by situational (leadership, management practices) and individual characteristics.
II – Individual and Team Outcomes: The Dynamic Effects of Management Practices
The collection of data from multiple employees within the same teams and from their supervisors and organizations, and the use of multiple waves of data collection will be the basis of another component of our research program, which addresses the effects of management practices on employee attitudes and performance at the individual and team levels.
III – Examining Positive and Negative Interactions between Employees and Customers
Our research program also focuses on testing models of customer reactions to positive and negative service encounters with frontline employees (e.g., salespersons). The data currently available have greatly limited our ability to fully understand the process of relationship-building between employees and customers.
As a key limitation, prior data often represent only one view (i.e., employees vs. customers) instead of integrating a more relevant dyadic perspective. As a result, the dynamic process of relationship-building is imperfectly captured with the “usual” static, cross-sectional, and single-source surveys. The creation of longitudinal databases integrating both employees’ and customers’ perspectives would allow us to address many under-researched issues related to their “positive” and “negative” interactions.
Methodology
I – Longitudinal research designs
Our research program requires the use of longitudinal survey data in order to properly test our hypotheses regarding within-person change in target variables.
Longitudinal studies allow data collection on several periods of time to measure evolution on a given theme.
II – External, non-self-reported sources of rating
To the extent that organizational researchers use employee reports on job attitudes and perceptions as predictors of various dimensions of behaviour (e.g., performance, organizational citizenship behaviour), integrating supervisors’ ratings will help reduce the different biases caused by self-reporting.
Part of our research program will also rely on customer ratings of service employees’ behaviour (e.g., when assessing the links between management practices and service performance). This part of our program is in line with the increased attention of researchers to the employee-customer interface and the willingness to test models that link how psychological and behavioural processes on both sides relate to one another.
III – Incorporating measures of the social context
A final feature of this research program is that we intend to measure aspects of the social context, which we define as the structure of relationships in which employees and customers are embedded, and that influences the emergence and dynamics of attitudes and behaviour.
