My programmatic area of research is centered on the topic that first persuaded me to pursue a degree in organizational psychology: learning. With an applied lens I examine learning, which can be characterized by knowledge, skill, or ability, in the arenas of self-regulation and motivation, training and development, and personnel selection/HRM. I am also interested in group dynamics and leadership especially as they are related to these topics. My interests and work in these areas are described in some detail below.
Self-regulation
My primary research interest is the self-regulation of effort, attention, and performance and its influence on individual and organizational performance. My research in this area helps answer important questions for organizations such as how to motivate employees to complete very difficult (or very easy) tasks, how to structure the work-day, and how to keep employees on-task in the face of the multiple sources of distraction confronted at work.
I recently published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin on the antecedents and outcomes of on- and off-task thought (Randall, Oswald, & Beier, 2014). We did so by integrating overlapping literatures that assess attention regulation and mind wandering using the resource allocation model (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989) as a theoretical framework. We found that task-unrelated thought (i.e., mind wandering, off-task thought) was negatively related to task performance, whereas task-related thoughts were associated with improved performance: these effects were more pronounced for more complex tasks and with greater time-on-task.
My dissertation builds upon my past research on the self-regulation of attention by developing an intervention to help people in a self-directed online learning environment to stay on task. By targeting a domain in which significant firm resources are invested and yet execution is almost entirely discretionary (e-learning), this project helps provide tangible solutions for the problems that mental disengagement introduces to individual and organizational performance.
As an applied scientist, I evaluate the usefulness of theories such as mind wandering and mindfulness in terms of their relevance to organizational research and managers in organizations. This has resulted in two manuscripts in preparation, a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Randall & Beier, 2014) that was one of the top 15 “most-favorited” sessions of the conference, and several other research projects and questions for the future.
Training
Along with my interests in self-regulation and attention, I am very interested in the acquisition of complex skills and knowledge, and how such expertise is utilized by teams and leaders to facilitate successful performance. I will highlight a few projects in this domain.
The first is an experiment that evaluated the impact of the after-action review, or traditional debrief, on team performance, knowledge, and team-efficacy (Villado, Zimmer, Randall, & Zajac, manuscript in preparation). Our findings suggest that teams who review performance episodes perform better than those who do not, but that the structure of the review (expert-led vs. team-led) does not matter. A second follow-up to this project includes examining perceptions of team members as to who emerged as the leader and to determine the characteristics of successful leaders and teams (Villado, Zajac, Zimmer, & Randall, manuscript in preparation). Finally, in an individual (i.e., non-team) training paradigm, we found that as individuals develop expertise in an area, and especially when faced with unforeseen task changes (i.e., adaptive performance), the way individuals organize their knowledge of the domain also changes to reflect this new information and experience (Zimmer, Villado, & Randall, under review). This evidence informs how to train individuals who perform in a dynamic environment.
In the next five years I anticipate future work in the science of learning and training in a more applied setting than I have previously been exposed to. Opportunities for funded and non-funded research abound in medical, oil, military, and airline industries as they are especially interested in research that can enable trainees to develop expertise more quickly (that is also more resistant to skill decay), to be more adaptive, and to function well as part of a team.
Personnel Selection
My third area of interest focuses on issues of personnel selection, specifically the practice of retesting in employment settings. Opportunities to re-take an assessment multiple times as part of a selection or promotion process present significant challenges for human resource management in terms of the meaning and interpretation of multiple test scores.
A major research endeavor in this area has culminated in the production of two different manuscripts: The first addresses issues of construct contamination and criterion-related validity in retesting that was published at the Journal of Business and Psychology (Villado, Randall, & Zimmer, 2015). The second identifies individual differences, including race, sex, and personality that contribute to retest score gains and evaluates how it affects adverse impact. This project is published in the Journal of Personnel Psychology (Randall, Villado, & Zimmer, In Press).
My interest in this area has also led to a few additional projects to more broadly evaluate, both theoretically and empirically, the phenomenon of retesting. First is a review article that is being revised for resubmission (Randall & Villado, Human Resource Management Review) that critically examines what is known about retesting, and what organizations can do to protect test scores from any error associated with retesting. Second, we are also currently conducting a meta-analysis on the construct–method distinction in the retesting literature that will offer sound guidelines for research and practice (Villado, Randall, Zimmer, Rottmann, & Zajac, work in progress).