Jacob Eisenberg (BA, MA, PhD): My Research

Where do I Come From?

Having worked in a business school environment for the past seven years exposed me to the wide diversity of colleagues’ functional backgrounds sensitising me to my own scholarly approach and to the, often implicit, research traditions I have been following. Both my research interests and my research methodology have been shaped by the years I spent in two postgraduate Psychology programmes in Canada and the US. Compared to most of my colleagues in the Management area, my research is of the ‘Micro’ nature. My general research interests lie in classical Organisational Behaviour issues revolving around questions such as what affects organisation members’ behaviours, emotions, cognitions and motivations. I see the organisation as a complex social system and I am interested in studying the dynamics of individuals and groups in this system. While most of the research I conducted used quantitative methods, I have been using qualitative methods as well. Overall, my approach to the issue is pragmatic and non-ideological, believing that I should use the most fitting methodology for the research question asked and the design employed.

Following the Muses: Research on Motivation and Creativity

The research topic I have most interest in is creativity. My interest in this topic started already during my undergraduate psychology studies, when I looked into the issue of gifted children. Following a final paper in an MA course that looked at the connection between Organisational Culture and Creativity, I got ‘hooked’ on the theme of factors affecting creativity in organisations. I am less interested in identifying highly-creative individuals and more in the mechanisms that exist in groups and organisations that make ‘typical’ members more (or less) creative. This led me to look at the effects of evaluation and external motivators on creative performance.

My PhD was in Social & Organisational Psychology and dealt with the effects of several types of rewards on the motivation and creativity of individuals and groups. To study these topics I used simulation of creative group tasks (such as creating marketing slogan for a new product) and an experimental design where the type of reward was manipulated and members’ motivation and creativity assessed. Some of my findings indicate that performance-based individual rewards lead to higher intrinsic motivation among individuals compared to non-performance based rewards and performance-based group rewards. However, when we look at effects on group-level creativity, we find that performance-based individual rewards resulted in significantly lower creativity than the other two rewards. In the past five years I have worked further on the topics of incentives, creativity and motivation and have conducted a survey-based field study that examined how extrinsic motivators (e.g., monetary bonus) and intrinsic motivators (e.g., interest in the task itself) relate to the type of incentives used in an organisation and, in turn, to members creative behaviour.

Two other recent topics of interest include affect (or, in a less technical language, emotions) and identification. In past years I have been involved in several research projects in these two areas:

Who Am I? Research on Organisational Identification

People tend to identify, to varying degrees, with groups or organisations they belong to. Organisational identification can be a strong force affecting members’ attitudes and behaviour in and towards organisations. In a recent project I collected data in a multinational software company that was undergoing major restructuring and organisational changes. I was interested in how three ‘levels’ of member identification, identifying with the organisation, identifying with their work-group and identifying with their profession, would relate to each other and influence employees’ attitudes (e.g., commitment to their company) and performance. I suggested that in times of radical change, members’ identification with their organisation drops and that they find more psychological security in identifying with their profession. This project involved a survey-based quantitative data collection supplemented by interviews and open-ended questions. It is also a good example for my methodological interest in multilevel issues in organisations, that is, phenomena that crosses individual, group and organisation levels.

How Do You Feel About It? Researching Emotions in Organisations

In the past decade the study of emotions at the workplace has truly flourished. Part of my work has involved theoretical development of models relating affect and creativity. Specifically, I have been trying to answer the question of under which circumstances would negative emotion lead to increased creativity and under which context would positive emotions do the same. Presently, I am collaborating with two colleagues from the US on a Meta-Analysis of empirical studies attempting to answer this question.

I have been also exploring the role of emotions in organisations with my two current doctoral supervisees. Brona Russell is looking into the role of emotions in commercial negotiations, aiming to specify and test a model that describes the type of emotional episodes occurring during buyer-purchaser interactions and examines how situational factors interact with the emotions negotiators experience to affect their decision making quality. The research of my other supervisee, Jennifer Evans, combines my interests in several areas, looking into identification at the organisational, departmental and professional level and how individuals construe these social identities through group membership (collective) and through role relationships (relational). She also seeks to investigate how these identity construals and their potential inconsistencies relate to felt threats to one’s professional reputation in a work-group context and, consequently, the influences these factors have on trust and process innovations in public organisations.

Beware of Serendipity: What Happens When Unexpected Things Happen to Nice Researchers?

While I try to be self-disciplined and stick with my interests in the three broad research areas I described above, sometimes the combination of unhealthy amounts of curiosity about new topics, a social personality predisposition and serendipity conspire to stir me away from my good intentions (a warning is due here to early-career and doctoral colleagues: do as I say, not as I do). The most recent example of this is my collaboration with two nice Spanish colleagues. It all started in a nastily rainy day in Munich as Sebastian and I were dropped off in the middle of suburban Munich, ahead of the upcoming Annual EURAM conference. As it happened:

We were both trying to get to the same hotel;
Contrary to expected, we were dropped quite far from it;
It was traffic peak time and none of the taxis was stopping for us;
As I mentioned, it was wet. In fact, it was VERY wet.
We managed to get a taxi eventually and reached, totally soaked our hotel. Following this bonding experience we had dinner and chatted about our research interests. Half a year later, I was invited to join a research project in-progress that looked at how employees’ social networks help them adopt to major information technology change at work. While I had no background in the area and my co-authors came from a different area (MIS), I was interested in social networks for few years so it was a good opportunity to learn more about the subject. And fast. We ended up writing a paper that we presented in the annual Academy of Management meeting and, subsequently sent to a journal. Now, 2+ years later, with many revisions and a bit of luck, this paper is scheduled to appear next year in JMIS (J of Management Information Systems), one of the leading journals in MIS (typically, ranked among the top three).

It’s in Your Culture

Finally, I have a keen interest in cross cultural aspects of organisations; within this context, I seek to understand how cultural differences and dynamics affect and moderate some of the topics I have been researching. One of my current major projects involves multi-country data collection in order to investigate how individuals from different cultures conceive the concepts of creativity and innovation, using several instruments, including the Semantic Differential and Schwartz’s Value Survey.

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