Building a healthy workplace
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| Suzy Fox, Ph.D. |
The associate professor of human resources and employment relations is carrying on several research projects that delve into her interest in various workplace issues. Active in an organization called Successful Women Worldwide, Fox and researchers from several other countries are studying the definition and criteria for women’s professional success across and within different cultures.
Her main research interest, however, is studying how to “eliminate challenges to a healthy workplace, especially what we call Counterproductive Workplace Behavior (CWB),” Fox explains.
With the University of South Florida’s Paul Spector, Ph.D., Fox studies the ways that employees engage in CWB (defined as any behavior that harms or intends to harm the organization or its employees, such as bullying or aggression) as a specific response to job stress. Their book, Counterproductive Workplace Behavior: Investigations of Actors and Targets (APA Press), came out in 2005.
Most recently, Fox and Spector are finding that two types of employee behavior they’d conceptualized as opposites—CWB and what they call Organizational Citizen Behavior (OCB), or behavior above and beyond the call of a job description—in fact often coexist within the same individuals.
“This summer, we’re working on determining the correlation between CWB and OCB,” Fox says. “It’s early in the process, but what we’re suggesting is that employees who need to do more to pick up the slack for colleagues will do it. At the same time, they’re resentful about those coworkers and show it.”
Fox’s several other research projects include a survey of academics to determine how job stress affects both tenured and tenure-track professors. With Lamont Stallworth, Ph.D., professor of human resources and employment relations, she’s also looking at how violence, bullying and job stress affect teachers in grades K-12.
GAIL MANSFIELD