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:
In Spring 2023, I will be teaching the following courses:
*Denotes a graduate-level course
Copyright 2015