Recent Research ProjectsTimmerman, T.A. (2005). Beating the competition…literally!: Personal, situational, and target influences on aggression. Presented at the 2005 Academy of Management Annual Meetings, Honolulu, HI. This study was conducted to test the interactions between personal, situational, and target characteristics in the performance of aggressive behaviors. Aggression was operationalized as a batter being hit by a pitcher's thrown ball in Major League Baseball games between 1963 and 1992. Consistent with Tedeschi and Felson's (1994) social interactionist approach to aggression, pitchers were more likely to hit batters in situations that allowed them the opportunity to protect valued social identities. More importantly, three-way interactions revealed that the likelihood of being hit by a pitch in these "high-risk" situations depended on the background of the pitcher and the race of the batter. Consistent with the culture of honor theory (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), pitchers born in the southern United States were more likely to hit batters in these high-risk situations, but only if the batter was White. Pitchers not born in the South were more likely to target African-Americans in these situations. The discussion centers around the importance of personal (e.g., culture of honor) and target characteristics (e.g., target race) as they interact with situations to produce aggressive behavior.
Timmerman, T.A. (2005). Predicting voluntary turnover with broad and narrow personality traits. Presented at the 2005 Academy of Management Annual Meetings, Honolulu, HI. The purpose of this paper was to answer a call by Salgado (2002) and others that more research is needed on 1) the relationship between personality and turnover and 2) the relative validity of broad and narrow personality traits. At the domain level, Extraversion and Openness to experience were positively correlated with turnover. When organizational tenure and other control variables were considered, none of the Big Five personality domains were significantly related to turnover. At the facet level, several facets from each domain were significantly correlated with turnover before and after considering the control variables. The results do not support a personality-turnover relationship mediated by satisfaction. Instead, the results suggest that narrow personality traits have direct effects on turnover or they influence the perceived likelihood that leaving the organization will lead to better outcomes.
Timmerman, T.A. (2005). Applying Moneyball to the HRM function. Presented at the 2005 Society for the Advancement of Management International Conference, Las Vegas, NV. How do companies gain competitive advantage? This fundamental question has recently received insight from a surprising place: Major League Baseball. In the book Moneyball (2003), Michael Lewis describes the surprising success of the Oakland A's over the last five years. During this period, only one team (the New York Yankees) has won more regular-season games. But also during this period, only one team (the Minnesota Twins) has spent fewer payroll dollars per win. In other words, Oakland has mastered effectiveness (on the field) and economic efficiency (off the field). Lewis attributes Oakland's success to their ability to exploit inefficiencies in the labor market. Whereas other teams use invalid objective and subjective predictors of future performance, Oakland's data-driven approach has allowed them to buy more valuable skills at a discount. The purpose of this paper is to explore similar opportunities in the larger labor market. Some of the characteristics that are most in demand (e.g., work experience) also bring relatively little value to organizations. Some characteristics that bring more value (e.g., cognitive ability) are in less demand. This situation is identical to the situation in Major League Baseball that led to Oakland's success. In this paper, simulated data show the economic value associated with selecting employees based on more valuable characteristics for which there is limited demand compared to less valuable characteristics for which there is greater demand. The paper also discusses barriers that prevent other companies from imitating this approach, and thus make it a sustainable source of competitive advantage.
Timmerman, T.A. (2005). Are winning teams bought or made? Presented at the 2005 Society for the Advancement of Management International Conference, Las Vegas, NV. Organizations frequently face the decision to buy or make necessary resources. This decision is most often applied to manufacturing, technology, and processes. The same decision, however, can also be applied to human resource issues. Is it better to develop talent in-house or buy talent that has been developed by other organizations? The purpose of this paper is to explore this strategic question in the context of professional baseball. Two competing hypotheses were tested. The uniqueness hypothesis proposed that organization-specific developmental opportunities shared by teammates would produce sources of competitive advantage such that teams with more "homegrown" individuals would be more successful than teams that relied more on talent purchased from other franchises. The alternative hypothesis proposed that some tasks derive no benefit from shared experience. If this is true, we would expect no relationship between team performance and the proportion of team members who were developed by the team. Using archival baseball data from 1970 to 2002, results tended to support the uniqueness hypothesis suggesting that "making" teams is a better strategy (at least in this industry) than "buying" teams. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for other jobs and industries.
Timmerman, T.A. (2004). How beneficial are employee benefits? Presented at the Spring 2004 International Conference of the Allied Academies Meeting, New Orleans, LA. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the cost of employee benefits rose to 42.3% of payroll costs in 2002. The benefits with the largest costs are health care (15.2%), paid time off (11.6%), and retirement/savings plans (6.2%). Any other expense of this magnitude would likely be the subject of extensive cost/benefit analyses. Employee benefits, however, are typically not subjected to this type of analysis. Instead, employers assume that benefits provided produce enough savings or revenue to justify their expense. Indeed, it is often difficult to study the effects of benefits for several reasons. Primarily the difficulty arises from the fact that benefits tend to be constant within jobs within organizations. Therefore, to study the effects of different benefits, researchers must gain access to multiple organizations. In this study, data from the General Social Survey were used to examine the relationships between the presence/absence of various benefits and outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and intent to stay with the organization. Surprisingly, the results show few differences between the attitudes of individuals with benefits and without them. The only benefits that appear to be "beneficial" in this large, multi-organization sample are flexible hours, performance bonuses, and profit sharing plans.
Timmerman, T.A. (2004). When are more heads better than one? Presented at the Spring 2004 International Conference of the Allied Academies Meeting, New Orleans, LA. The use of groups and teams in business and educational settings is obviously gaining in popularity. Despite their popularity, however, there are some activities in which group processes are more likely to interfere with performance and overwhelm any potential gains. The purpose of this study was to test Steiner's (1972) model of group performance relative to individual performance. In additive tasks, individual contributions are summed to create a group product. The first exercise in this study contradicts "common sense" by demonstrating that the number of ideas produced per person in a typical brainstorming session actually decreases as group size increases. In the second task, group members are required to estimate unknown quantities while working alone. Then the group is required to reach consensus through discussing the individual estimates. The results of this exercise demonstrate that 1) the average individual estimate is usually more accurate than the estimate achieved through group discussion and 2) the group average becomes more accurate with more individuals providing estimates. Finally, a disjunctive task is used in which group discussion typically produces greater performance than any statistical combination of individual estimates.
Timmerman, T.A., & Barger, B. (2004). Relationships between communication media and group processes. Presented at the Spring 2004 International Conference of the Allied Academies Meeting, New Orleans, LA. Groups have become more ubiquitous in educational and business settings as a popular means by which work is accomplished. One aspect of group functioning thought to promote group performance is the means by which group members communicate with each other to accomplish the group's objectives. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between choice of communication media and satisfaction with group processes. Previous research in the areas of organizational work groups and student work groups has identified the processes associated with group functioning (i.e., transition, action, interpersonal; Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). This paper attempts to answer the following question: Does the choice of communication media influence group members' satisfaction with the group's processes? Ninety students participating in group projects completed questionnaires related to the communication media they used for each group process. Results show that students were satisfied with transition processes the more they communicated with virtually any media. Satisfaction with action processes, however, was only associated with increased use of email. Finally, students were more satisfied with interpersonal processes when they relied on face-to-face communication. The results of this study may help educational and business groups communicate using the most appropriate media for each process.
How do applicants form an impression of an organization? Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Toronto, Canada. 2002 . In this paper I propose a model of the process by which applicants form impressions of organizations. According to social cognition research, organizations may vary in the extent to which they are perceived as coherent social entities. This variation has important implications for the way applicants form judgments about organizations.
Incomplete data in the study of teams: The case of cooperation and performance. To be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Management Association. Atlanta, GA. 2002 . This research examined the relationship between team cooperation and team performance with various types of missing data. Professional basketball teams (n = 389) were used because of the availability of complete data and because of the similarities between basketball teams and interdependent work teams in traditional organizations. Portions of the complete data set were deleted to simulate three different types of missing data. The significant relationship between cooperation and performance decreased when data were deleted randomly. The relationship became stronger when 10-30% of the data were deleted systematically according to individual contributions to the team.
Supervisor-subordinate racial similarity effects in actual job performance. To be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Management Association. Atlanta, GA. 2002 . Previous studies on race and job performance have found considerable evidence that White raters give higher ratings to White ratees and Black raters give higher ratings to Black ratees. The existing research, however, has been unable to establish whether these effects are due to bias or actual performance differences. Individual performance was examined as a function of individual race and manager race in a sample of professional basketball players (n = 6,907). Across five different performance dimensions, there was no evidence that employees performed better under a manager of the same race. This finding persisted for between- and within-subjects analyses.
Do Majority Team Members Welcome or Envy High-Performing Minorities? Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Washington, DC. 2001. . The purpose of this study was to explore a moderator and a mediator of the relationship between work team racial composition and work team performance. I hypothesized that the composition-performance relationship would be moderated by the relative performance of racial subgroups. Self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) theory (Tesser, 1988) was used to predict the performance of predominately Caucasian teams and predominately African-American teams when the majority members performed higher or lower than the minority members. In addition, I hypothesized that the relationship between the interaction described above and team performance would be mediated by team cooperation. I tested these hypotheses with an archival data source which contained objective indicators of individual performance, team performance, team cooperation, and individual race. In addition to the objective measurement of all variables, this particular data source (i.e., historical professional basketball statistics) was especially well-suited for this study for several reasons. Unlike other team studies, this archive provides data for a large number of real work teams (n = 693). Also, the highly interdependent nature of the work makes the results potentially applicable to a number of other organizational settings. Finally, this data source is unique in that the racial composition of the teams varies from 0% African-American to 100% African-American. The results largely supported the hypotheses. Overall, teams cooperated less and performed more poorly when Caucasians were in the majority but African-American team members performed better than the Caucasians.
