I co-direct a lab with Dr. Linda Shanock who is also an I/O Psychologist and a member of the Organizational Science faculty. Together with our graduate and undergraduate students, we have numerous projects on-going or in the planning phases. Please take a moment to explore our website (http://pages.charlotte.edu/palm/) to see what research we are currently working on, learn about our students, and even apply to be a research assistant.
Most of my research has looked at how we can better measure a job applicants personality and use those measurements to predict his or her performance on the job. My colleagues and I have looked a several different issues around this theme:
- How should an organization decide which traits to measure?
- Are we able to make better predictions if we ask applicants about their personality at work?
- If applicants “fake” on a test, does it hurt the quality of predictions we can make using their scores?
- Can we design a test that is difficult for applicants to fake?
- What kinds of things can we do if we suspect that an applicant is faking on the personality test?
- Are there traits that capture a person’s motivation?
I am also interested in other ways of assessing current or potential employees, such as cognitive ability tests and the assessment center method.
I have also been doing some research with my colleagues in cognitive psychology to look at how we can use automation as a training aide. If we are training people to do a very complex task, can we help them learn better by automating part of the task while they learn. I am really interested in whether this approach might be more beneficial for some people than for others.