Debra L. Shapiro Directory Page
Debra L. Shapiro
Dean’s Chair in Organizational Behavior
Ph.D. Northwestern University
Dr. Debra L. Shapiro (Ph.D., Northwestern U) is the Dean’s Chair in Organizational Behavior and Clarice Smith Professor of Management at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Before joining Smith’s faculty, she was the Willard J. Graham Distinguished Professor at the U of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School (where she was on faculty from 1986 to 2003). At both business schools (as Associate Dean and Assistant Dean, respectively), Shapiro led the school’s PhD program (from 1998-2001 at UNC and 2008-2011 at UMD).
Shapiro’s external leadership roles include her serving from 2019-2023 on the executive board of the Society for Organizational Behavior (SOB) and her serving, for the Academy of Management (AOM), as: Chair of AOM’s Conflict Management Division, Representative-at-Large on AOM’s Board of Governors, Associate Editor of The Academy of Management Journal, and member of AOM’s Executive Committee (from 2012-2017) which included being AOM President (in 2016). One of the key AOM initiatives spearheaded by Shapiro (along with former AOM President Paul Adler) is “TLC@aom”— which is the creation of AOM’s annual Teaching and Learning Conference.
Shapiro's research focuses on strategies for managing various types of conflicts/challenges in organizations (e.g., coworker- and intra-team disagreements, employees’ perceived injustice, unethical employees, transgressing leaders, leader-departures, calls for justice via allyship, and organizations’ tarnished image following organization- and/or industry-related scandals). Her work aims to promote integrative agreements, organizational justice, ethical work behaviors, and positive work attitudes. She has received the International Association for Conflict Management’s (IACM’s) 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award and, over the course of her career, six “Best Paper Awards” from the Academy of Management’s Conflict Management Division and IACM. In 2019 Shapiro was named among the top 100 most influential organizational behavior (OB) authors— specifically, among the top .6% out of 16,289 citations for authors in OB textbooks; and, in 2021 (as well as after this) has been named among the top 2% researchers worldwide.
Shapiro’s research is published in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Academy of Management Annals. She has co-edited two books: “Managing Multinational Teams: Global Perspectives” (published by Elsevier in 2005) and “The Psychology of Negotiation in the 21st Century Workplace: New Challenges and New Solutions” (published by The Psychology Press/Routledge in 2012).
Shapiro has received numerous teaching awards, including the 1997 PhD Teaching Award from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, the 2008 Allan Krowe Teaching Award from UMD’s Smith School, and the Smith School’s Distinguished Teaching Award for several years, most recently in 2022-23. She is an elected Fellow of: the Academy of Management, the Society for Organizational Behavior, Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the Ethics & Compliance Initiative.
Shapiro’s h-index is 63, and her Google Scholar citation count is nearly 26,000.
Selected Publications
Ding, W.W., Lee, H.J., & Shapiro, D.L. 2023. Are entrepreneurs penalized during job searches?: It depends on who is hiring. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 17(4): 713-740. (impact factor= 6.4).
Leavitt, K., Barnes, C., & Shapiro, D.L. in press. The role of human managers within algorithmic performance management systems: A process model of employee trust in managers through reflexivity. Academy of Management Review.
Ganegoda, D., Shukla, J., & Shapiro, D.L. in press. Garnering support for social justice: When and why is “yes” likelier for “allies” versus “disadvantaged group advocates”? Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 182: pages not yet known.
Borut, L., Kluger, A.N., Reis, H., & Shapiro, D.L. in press. How (if at all) do perceptions of supervisor’s listening differ from general relationship quality?: Psychometric analysis. Journal of Business & Psychology.
Lucas, J.W., Hanges, P.J., Beavan, K., Epistola, J., Forgo, E., & Shapiro, D.L. in press. Perceptions of espoused versus enacted culture around sexual misconduct and other offenses among U.S. military service members. Armed Forces and Society.
Mesdaghinia, S., Eisenberger, R., Xueqi Wen, Z., Lewis, B., Qiu, F., & Shapiro, D.L. in press. How leaders drive followers' unethical behavior. Journal of Management.
Lu, S., Wang, L., Ni, D., Shapiro, D.L., & Zheng, X. in press. Mitigating the harms of abusive supercision on employee thriving: The buffering effects of employees' social-network centrality. Human Relations.
Farh, C.I., Liao, H., Shapiro, D.L., Shin, J., & Guan, O.Z. 2021. “Out of sight and out of mind? Networking strategies for enhancing inclusion in multinational organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 106(4): 582-598.
Leavitt, K., Qiu, F., & Shapiro, D.L. 2021. Using electronic confederates for experimental research in organizational science. Organizational Research Methods, 24: 3-25. (Note: An earlier version of this is in the 2019 Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings).
Levi, A., Shapiro, D.L., Fried, Y., Markoczy, L., & Noghani, F. 2019. When everyone works harder for fewer rewards, is it fair? Implications of “organization-wide hardship” for managing and studying organizational fairness. Group & Organization Management, 44(2): 396-424.
Rupp, D.E., Shapiro, D.L., Skarlicki, D. P., & Folger, R. 2017. A critical analysis of the conceptualization and measurement of ‘organizational justice’: Is it time for reassessment? Academy of Management Annals, 11(2): 919-959.
Huang, L., Gibson, C.B., Kirkman, B.L., & Shapiro, D.L. 2017. Is traditionalism an asset or a liability for team-innovation? A two-study empirical examination. Journal of International Business Studies, 48(6): 693–715.
Shapiro, D.L. Hom, P., Shen, W., & Agarwal, R. 2016. How do leader-departures affect subordinates’ organizational attachment?: A 360-degree relational perspective. Academy of Management Review, 41(3): 479-450.
Goldman, B.M., Shapiro, D.L., & Pearsall, M. 2016. Towards an understanding of the role of anticipatory justice in the employment dispute-resolution process. International Journal of Conflict Management, 27(2): 275-298.
Kim, T.Y., Edwards, J.R., & Shapiro, D.L. 2015. Social comparison and distributive justice: East Asia differences. Journal of Business Ethics, 132(2): 401-414.
Shin, J., Seo, M., Shapiro, D.L., & Taylor, M.S. 2015. Maintaining employees’ commitment to organizational change: The role of leaders’ informational justice and transformational leadership. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 51(4):501-528.
Mayer, D., Nurmohamed, S., Trevino, L., Shapiro, D.L., & Schminke, M. 2013. Encouraging employees to report unethical conduct internally: It takes a village. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 121: 89-103.
Zavyalova, A., Pfarrer, M.D., Reger, R.K., & Shapiro, D.L. 2012. Managing the message: The effects of firm actions and industry spillovers on media coverage following wrongdoing. The Academy of Management Journal, 55(5): 1079-2012.
Kulik, C.T., Pepper, M.B., Shapiro, D.L., & Cregan, C. 2012. The electronic water cooler: Insiders and outsiders talk about organizational justice on the internet. Communication Research, 39: 565-591.
Shapiro, D.L., Boss, A., Salas, S., Tangirala, S., & Von Glinow, M.A. 2011. When are transgressing leaders punitively judged?: An empirical test. Journal of Applied Psychology, 6(2): 412-422.
Honors and Awards
- 2012 elected President-Elect, Academy of Management
- Associate Editor, The Academy of Management Journal (2005-2007)
- Named the Clarice Smith Professor of Management, University of Maryland, January 2006
- Elected to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management as a Representative-at-Large. April 2002
- Fellow, Academy of Management (2009)
- Fellow, Society of Organizational Behavior (2003)
- Fellow, Ethics Resource Center (2003)
- Named the Willard J. Graham Distinguished Professor of Management, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. December 2000
- Recipient of the Best Empirical Paper Award from the International Association of Conflict Management. 1999
- Recipient of the Best Paper Award from the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management. 1991, 1992, 1996, 2007
- Recipient of the Decade Paper Award from the Academy of Management Learning & Education. 2024
Consulting Work
U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Sara Lee, IBM, Allstate, and others, on issues regarding managing change, conflict/resistance, and team issues.
News
Research
Seeing Moral Symbols at Work Can Inspire Employees To Speak Up About Problems, Finds Research
Feel Included from Anywhere in a Global Organization
Insights
Three ways leaders can make tough decisions, and make them well
Academic Publications
“Garnering support for social justice: When and why is "yes" likelier for "allies" versus "disadvantaged group advocates"?” published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Organizations' members (e.g., employees and managers) as well as stakeholders (e.g., prospective and existing customers) typically care about issues of social justice, such as the fairness with which employees (representing different genders, races, and work-locations such as working onsite versus remotely) are treated. To ensure and/or maintain social justice for diverse employee-groups in organizations typically requires advocating for this-- and doing this persuasively. Should a man (or a woman) advocate for greater social justice for women? Should a White person (or Black person) advocate for greater social justice for people of color? Should onsite employees (or those working remotely) advocate for greater inclusivity for employees working from home? Existing literature lacks a clear answer to these questions. Via three studies (two experiment-based and one critical incident-based) we test when and why a social justice appeal garners more support when delivered by a disadvantaged group advocate (DGA) versus by an ally-- that is, by someone who does versus does not belong to the marginalized group named in the appeal, respectively. As hypothesized, significantly more support was shown for a social justice appeal by a DGA (rather than ally) when receivers identified strongly with the disadvantaged group; and this pattern reversed when this identification was weak. Also as predicted, this interaction-effect was mediated by receivers' perceptions of their similarity with the advocate, the appeal's credibility, and by their feelings of empathy. Our findings point to the need: (1) to broaden theorizing beyond demographic influences on the persuasiveness of a DGA versus an ally; and, relatedly, (2) to consider appeal-receivers' identification when choosing an advocate.
Deshani B. Ganegoda (associate professor at the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne); Jigyashu Shukla (assistant professor at the Willie A. Deese College of Business and Economics at North Carolina A&T State University); and Debra L. Shapiro (Dean's Chair in Organizational Behavior and Clarice Smith Professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at University of Maryland)