Morrie Mendelson
Organizational behaviour and human resource management
“My research interests in human resources and organizational behaviour relate to a broad theme of organizational health and employee wellness. Within this theme, I have a number of ongoing research projects that attempt to identify and assess multiple predictors of employee attitudes and stated behaviour as a result of perceptions of leadership within employees’ organizations.”
Dr. Mendelson’s most recent study, with Dr. Jasmine Alam, Chris Cunningham, Adam Totton and Carrie Smith asked the question “Are Leaders with Postgraduate Degrees Perceived to be More Transformational? A Quasi-Experimental Field Study,” (published in 2019 in the Leadership & Organization Development Journal vol. 40(2), pp. 259-273).
Current projects
Alam, J., Gauthier, M., Goodarzian, R., and Mendelson, M. B. Exploring the relationship between employee engagement, management and transformational leadership.
Carroll, T., and Mendelson, M.B. Why does workplace bullying occur? Assessing multiple predictors of targets’ and perpetrators’ experiences of workplace bullying.
Wegener, M. and Mendelson, M.B. The role of CSR expectation violations on employee retention: A vignette approach.
Van Buskirk, K., Mendelson, M.B., Rinehart, S., & Adisesh, A. Justice perceptions of workplace bullies, victims and bystanders.
“My broad research activities in the fields of social and industrial psychology, organizational behavior and human resources, marketing, and social responsibility, have had three broad areas of impact, all of which can be argued, tie in with the broad theme of healthy organizations.
First, with training at the undergraduate and master levels in both experimental and survey based research designs, my research has resulted a greater understanding of the antecedents to dysphoria and depression, more specifically, as a result of greater levels of self-focused attention and as a result of adult and childhood abuse.
Although this stream of research does not appear immediately related with organizational health, the impact of these experiences on current and future employees, their families and ultimately organizations and society as a whole are important to understand in order to mitigate through primary, secondary and tertiary interventions (address the causes, the behavior, and the consequences).
In a related manner, my research seeks [has contributed to] a greater understanding of the impacts that unhealthy work events and environments negatively affect employees’ levels of stress and illness, job insecurity, work attitudes, and even their children’s academic achievement. We also now have a clearer understanding of the relationship between how employees perceive their leaders and human resource management practices on work attitudes linked with many employee and organizational level outcomes and even on self-reported reasons for being absent from work.
The findings of this research add to a growing body of research demonstrating the positive and negative impacts of organizational policies and leadership behaviours on employee attitudes and behavior. My research has also crossed the boundaries of psychology and organizational behavior by focusing on the impacts that positive employee practices (internal marketing) has on external marketing outcomes.
The third broad area of focus is in the area of gender and status. In one study, we demonstrated that the status of groups as perceived by men and women is gender typed. More specifically, gender norms are so inherently ingrained in society, that we unconsciously label groups described with “feminine” adjectives as having lower status than those described with more “masculine” adjectives.
This finding has important implications and may help explain the difficultly women have in reaching pay equity and status within organizations. In another study, we demonstrated that women in the Middle East report lower levels of job satisfaction than their western counterparts and that their satisfaction level is related to their religious affiliation, age, and gender pay gap.”
