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Russell Johnson

MSU Foundation Professorship Michigan State University

  • East Lansing MI

Russell Johnson's research examines the roles of leadership-based processes that underlie work attitudes and behaviors.

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Biography

Russell E. Johnson (johnsonr@broad.msu.edu) is an MSU Foundation Professor of management in the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. Previously, he was a member of the faculty at the University of South Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of Akron in 2006. His research examines the roles of motivation-, justice-, and leadership-based processes that underlie work attitudes and behaviors. He has published over one hundred and twenty research articles in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organizational Research Methods, Organization Science, Personnel Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, and Research in Organizational Behavior, among others. His research has been cited in popular press outlets such as Forbes, The Globe and Mail, Harvard Business Review, NBC's Today, NPR, Psychology Today, TIME, and Wall Street Journal. He is a past associate editor at Academy of Management Review and Journal of Applied Psychology, and serves on several editorial boards. In 2013, Dr. Johnson received the Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award for Science from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and in 2018 he received the Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of Academy of Management. Originally from Canada, he still dreams of one day playing in the National Hockey League for his hometown Calgary Flames and living in a two-story igloo with an attached garage for his zamboni and life-size cardboard cutout of Wayne Gretzky.

Industry Expertise

Research
Education/Learning

Areas of Expertise

Organizational Behavior
Consumer Behavior
Human Resource Management
Attitudes, Emotions & Personality
Leadership & Motivation
Consumer Trends

Accomplishments

Best Reviewer Award

2015

Journal of Organizational Behavior

Outstanding Reviewer Award

2015

Academy of Management Journal

Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award

2018

Organizational Behavior Division of Academy of Management

Education

University of Calgary

B.A.

Psychology

2001

University of Akron

M.A.

Industrial and Organizational Psychology

2003

University of Akron

Ph.D.

Industrial and Organizational Psychology

2006

Affiliations

  • Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology : Fellow

News

Organizational Change Management: Definition, Process, Models & More!

Blogarama  online

2022-05-17

No one likes change, and that is a fact. Most of us avoid stepping out of our comfort zone, and we always resist new ways of doing things. Yes, change is absolutely necessary for growth, but it’s also challenging.

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Late-night emails sent by bosses could be killing their team’s productivity

Vogue India  online

2022-10-11

The sentiment is seconded by studies that pinpoint an alarming lack of energy and scarcity of productivity the morning after. According to a study by the journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, upper-level managers who use their phones for work purposes beyond 9 PM find themselves feeling depleted in the morning, kickstarting a dangerous cycle of lower levels of work engagement during the day and hyperactivity to cram in more work at night. “Smartphones are almost perfectly designed to disrupt sleep. Because they keep us mentally engaged late into the evening, they make it hard to detach from work so we can relax and fall asleep,” says Russell Johnson, assistant professor of management at Michigan State University who has researched the subject.

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MSU researchers recognized in ‘2022 Highly Cited’ list

MSU Today  online

2022-11-18

Eleven Michigan State University researchers have been recognized in the 2022 Highly Cited Researchers List compiled by Clarivate Analytics.

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Event Appearances

Editor panel: Publishing in top-tier journals

Taiwanese Association of Industrial and Organizational Psychology International Conference,  Taipei, Taiwan

Leader cognition and behavior as outcomes rather than predictors: The influence of followers and team members

Durham University Business School  Durham, UK

Editor panel: Some musings about publishing in top-tier journals

Durham University Business School  Durham, UK

Research Grants

Narcissism and response distortion in a personality assessment

ACT Inc

2017

Implicit measures of implicit leadership theories

Army Research Institute

2019-2020

Summer Research Grant

Michigan State University, Eli Broad College of Business

2020

Journal Articles

The Dynamism of Daily Justice: A Person-Environment Fit Perspective on the Situated Value of Justice

Organization Science

2021

Despite the generally positive consequences associated with justice, recent research suggests that supervisors cannot always enact justice, and responses to justice may not be universally positive. Thus, justice is likely to vary in both how much it is received and the employee reactions it engenders. In order to understand the range of justice responses, we develop a dynamic theory of justice by using person-environment fit to take both the value that an individual places in justice and the justice they received into account.

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Backlashes or boosts? The role of warmth and gender in relational uncertainty reductions

Human Resource Management

2023

Both men and women who violate gender stereotypes incur backlashes, or penalties, for these transgressions. However, men who engage in warm, communal behaviors occasionally receive a boost (or benefit) for this female-stereotyped behavior. To understand how and why warmth and gender interact to predict backlashes or boosts, we integrate uncertainty reduction theory with the stereotype content model and examine warmth by gender interactions.

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Distances and directions: An emotional journey into the recovery process.

Journal of Applied Psychology

2023

Positive emotions stemming from leisure activities are often promoted as a way to achieve a state of recovery, in particular by counteracting negative emotions experienced throughout the workday. Yet the recovery literature frequently takes an undifferentiated view of both the positive emotions employees experience as well as the negative emotions employees are recovering from. This implicitly assumes that all positive emotions are equally effective in facilitating recovery from all negative emotions.

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