CAREER: Understanding workplace risk-taking behavior

冒险是创新、增长和社会变革的精髓。在未来充满不确定性的工作中，对愿意为组织及其成员的利益承担风险的员工的需求将会增加。然而，冒险在组织环境中起着双刃剑的作用。2008年金融危机和安然丑闻等多起企业灾难都可以追溯到银行家、投资者和会计师的鲁莽和不道德的冒险行为。事实上，风险承担者可以是他们的组织和社会的资产和负债。本项目考察了工作环境中风险承担的影响，并探讨了组织如何最好地识别和管理风险承担者，以利用他们对风险的偏好来实现组织和社会目标。尽管风险承担在组织生活中的重要性，但关于如何最好地选择、安置和管理工作中的风险承担者以最大化组织效率的研究很少。迄今为止的研究主要集中在高管的风险承担上，而对员工风险承担如何影响组织结果的了解较少。本项目整合了风险的经济学、进化论和心理学理论，通过纵向和多源调查研究来检验性格风险承担（即风险倾向）对员工绩效的作用；2)运用日记法了解员工冒险行为的内部动态；3)使用情境判断测试开发工作场所风险承担的情境化测量。除了了解谁在工作中承担风险之外，该项目还通过风险感知的视角揭示了员工的行为。最后，本项目针对管理学、心理学和人力资源开发专业的学生开发多学科的教育课程。该项目的结果将推动工作风险承担科学的发展，同时为行业和公众提供工作场所员工风险承担的有效评估。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Risk taking is quintessential for innovation, growth, and social change. In a future of work rife with uncertainty, there will be an increasing demand for employees who are willing to take risks for the benefit of their organization and its members. Risk taking, however, plays a double-edged role in organizational settings. Multiple corporate catastrophes, such as the financial crisis of 2008 and the Enron scandal, can be traced to reckless and unethical risky behaviors of bankers, investors, and accountants. Indeed, risk takers can be both assets and liabilities for their organization and the society. This project examines the impact of risk taking in work settings and explores how organizations can best identify and manage risk takers to leverage their appetite for risks toward achieving organizational and societal goals.Despite the significance of risk taking in organizational life, there is little research on how to best select, place, and manage risk takers at work to maximize organizational effectiveness. Research to date has primarily focused on the risk taking of executives, while less is known about how employee risk taking affects organizational outcomes. This project integrates economic, evolutionary, and psychological theories of risk to 1) examine the role of dispositional risk taking (i.e., risk propensity) on employee performance through longitudinal and multi-source survey studies; 2) understand the within-person dynamics of employee risk taking behaviors using daily-diary methods; and 3) develop a contextualized measure of workplace risk taking using a situational judgment test. Besides understanding who takes risks at work, the project also sheds light on employee behaviors through the lens of risk perceptions. Finally, this project develops a multi-disciplinary educational curriculum aimed at management, psychology, and human resource development students. Results from this project will advance the science of risk taking at work while providing industry and the public with a valid assessment of workplace employee risk taking.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.