Workplace Emotions | Organizational Behavior
A leader who shows a human range of emotions during a product recall comes across as powerful.
Brent Smith
Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education
Associate Professor of Management and Psychology – Organizational Behavior
Organizational Behavior
Dr. Brent Smith is an award-winning organizational psychologist and has educated, coached, and consulted for over twenty years. Dr. Smith currently serves as the Senior Associate Dean of Executive Education. He previously was a faculty member at London Business School and Cornell University and taught at UC Berkley, Oxford University, INSEAD, Columbia, DTU, and the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.
Dr. Smith has taught over 200 executive programs around the globe for companies including Shell, ExxonMobil, IBM, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Saudi Aramco, Goldman Sachs, Genentech, DeBeers, Microsoft, Citibank, RedBull, Royal Bank of Scotland, among many others. He served as leadership faculty for the corporate universities of TOTALEnergies, Lufthansa, Tenaris, NOV, and Eaton Corporation and is a founding board member of the MD Anderson Cancer Center Leadership Institute.
Dr. Smith co-developed the coaching programs for the MBA programs at Cornell University and London Business School, and used them as models for the Rice Business Executive MBA. He helped develop internal coaching programs for a large investment bank, an international energy company, and a major hospital system. In 2003, he developed the “Leader as Coach” Executive Education program, which he taught until 2016. Dr. Smith has been an active coach since 1997. His practice focuses primarily on the development of executive teams.
Research Interests:
- Goal setting
- Human resource management
- Interviewing
- Motivating employees
- Organizational behavior
- Performance evaluations
- Personal selection
- Teams
- Change management
- Employment
- Ethics
- Influencing people
- Leadership
Intellectual Contributions
Book Chapter
Smith, D. B. & McDaniel, M. (2011). Questioning Old Assumptions: Faking and the Personality-Performance Relationship. In M. Ziegler, C. MacCann, & R. Roberts (Eds.), New Perspectives on Faking in Personality Assessments. New York: Oxford University Press.
Article
Madera, J. & Smith, D. B. (2009). The Effects of Leader Negative Emotions on Evaluations of Leadership in a Crisis Situation: The Role of Anger and Sadness. Leadership Quarterly, 20, 103-114.
Article
Peterson, R. S., Smith, D. B., & Martorana, P. (2005). Choosing between a rock and a hard place: The choices are never simple when data are scarce and the questions important: A Reply to Hollenbeck, DeRue, and Mannor (2006). Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 6-8.
Article
Schneider, B., Hanges, P. J., Smith, D. B., & Salvaggio, A. (2003). Which comes first: Employee attitudes or organizational financial performance? Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 836-851.
*Recipient of the Scholarly Achievement Award, Academy of Management, Human Resources Division
*Recipient of the Outstanding Publication Award, Academy of Management, Organizational Behavior Division
Article
Schneider, B., Smith, D. B., Fleenor, J. & Taylor, S. (1998). Personality and organizations: A test of the homogeneity hypothesis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 462-470.
*Recipient of the Scholarly Achievement Award, Academy of Management, Human Resources Division
Working Paper
Smith, D. B. From Specialist to Generalist: The role of self-complexity in leadership transitions.
Working Paper
Smith, D. B. Reexamining Personality at Work: A role-identity and social-cognitive framework for organizational personality research.
Working Paper
Smith, D. B. Understanding Faking and Response Distortion from an Identity Perspective: Personality, Multiple Selves, and Identity Negotiation in the Workplace.
Working Paper
Smith, D. B. Fit and Identity Congruence: Examining the Psychology of Person-Organization Fit.
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