Paul Spector

Distinguished University Professor Emeritus

Paul E. Spector, Ph.D. splits his time between being a part-time professor in the Muma College of Business where he teaches executive Doctor of Business Administration students and being a part-time organizational behavior science contractor for Tampa General Hospital. He spent 38 years in the psychology department at USF, retiring in 2020 as a distinguished professor. His pioneering work over the past nearly 45 years has developed groundbreaking new concepts, research methods, and measuring instruments for organizational behavior that have become the standards throughout the field. He is also considered a pivotal leader in the emerging interdisciplinary field of occupational health psychology. Dr. Spector and his colleagues (Fox and Miles) were among the first to coin the phrase "counterproductive work behavior," and published an inaugural study characterizing these behaviors. They described links between workers' job stress and perceptions of being treated unjustly/unfairly and ruptured the long-held concept that negative employee behavior was due to the employee's own attitudes. Another large portion of Dr. Spector's research focuses on improving the quality, vigor, and effectiveness of quantitative research methods and improvements to research design. His work provided evidence overturning longheld assumptions about the relationships among variables within a survey, and advanced improved procedures. Dr. Spector is a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and Southern Management Association. He was noted in Indiana University and Stanford University studies as among the 10 most influential management researchers worldwide. His I-O textbook, published by John Wiley, is now in its ninth edition. He blogs at: https://paulspector.com/. Dr. Spector earned his bachelor's, Master's, and doctoral degrees from the University of South Florida.

Earned Awards

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