• About

    I completed my Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York in 2019. After holding a one-year appointment as a Lecturer of Management in the School of Business and Economics at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, I accepted an offer in 2020 to join the Department of Psychological Science at Missouri University of Science and Technology. My two primary areas of research can be categorized in the domains of organizational socialization and goal setting.

  • Research

    Adjustment and Socialization of Organizational Newcomers

    One of my primary lines of research focuses on the processes that enable the successful adjustment and socialization of organizational newcomers. To this end, in a recent paper in the Review of Educational Research, I meta-analytically reviewed the effectiveness of first-year seminars as measured by their observed effect on the one-year retention rate and the first-year grades of participants. The results indicate that the average first-year seminar has only a very small positive effect on grades (d = 0.02) and only a slightly larger positive effect on retention (d = 0.11). An examination of the significant moderators, however, suggests that the effectiveness of first-year seminars can be improved for both retention and academic performance. These findings have direct implications for the design and implementation of first-year seminars and other similar newcomer orientation practices in educational settings because they provide evidence-based guidelines for modifying existing seminars.

    Goal Setting and Motivation in Work and Achievement Settings

    My other line of research mainly focuses on the processes that comprise goal setting. My dissertation examines how the different affective states that individuals experience can influence the difficulty level of their chosen goal. The adopted measurement model is based on the circumplex model of affect, which describes how the two independent dimensions of affective valence (i.e., the degree of pleasantness of an affective state) and affective arousal (i.e., the intensity of an affective state) combine to form four distinct quadrants: activated positive affect, deactivated positive affect, activated negative affect, and deactivated negative affect. This is the first study to adopt a four-quadrant perspective of affect when studying its relationship with goal level. Thus, the study can clarify some of the inconsistent findings in the literature by examining the previously unexplored relationship between deactivated affective states (e.g., feeling calm) and goal level as well as exploring affective arousal as a moderator of the affective state-goal level relationship.

    Projects in other domains

    Apart from my two primary research streams, I also have been involved in other projects. For example, a recent paper in Learning and Individual Differences finds that proactive personality explains incremental variance in both academic citizenship behaviors and counterproductive academic behaviors, beyond the effects of standardized test scores and high school grades. Further, proactive personality predicts more unique variance in academic citizenship behaviors than conscientiousness. A recent paper in the Journal of Career Assessment finds that social status mediates the positive relationship between social self-efficacy and job satisfaction as well as between social self-efficacy and task performance.

  • Publications

    Permzadian, V., & Credé, M. (2016). Do first-year seminars improve college grades

    and retention? A quantitative review of their overall effectiveness and an

    examination of moderators of effectiveness. Review of Educational Research, 86,

    277–316. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654315584955

     

    Islam, S., Permzadian, V., Choudhury, R. J., Johnston, M, & Anderson, M. (2018).

    Proactive personality and the expanded criterion domain of performance:

    Predicting academic citizenship and counterproductive behaviors. Learning and

    Individual Differences, 65, 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2018.05.016

     

    Luo, Y., Permzadian, V., Fan, J., & Meng, H. (2018). Employees’ social self-efficacy

    and work outcomes: Testing the mediating role of social status. Journal of Career

    Assessment. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072718795401

  • Teaching

    I have taught the following courses:

    • Industrial-Organizational Psychology (Spring 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018)
    • Organizational Psychology (Spring 2022)
    • Principles of Statistics (Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016)
    • Psychology of Personality (Fall 2013)
    • Introduction to Psychology (Fall 2017)
    • Principles of Management and Organizational Behavior (Fall 2019, Spring 2020)
    • Human Resource Management (Fall 2019)
    • Training and Development (Spring 2020)
    • Organizational Psychology* (Spring 2017)
    • People Analytics* (Spring 2017)
    • Training and Development(Spring 2021, Spring 2022) 
    • Personnel Selection(Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022)
    • Industrial-Organizational Psychology* (Fall 2021, Fall 2022)

    In Spring 2023, I will be teaching the following courses:

    • Organizational Psychology 
    • Training and Development

    *Denotes a graduate-level course

  • Contact

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