Organization and Strategy Seminar（2016-16）

Topic: Finding Needles in a Haystack: Applications of Big Data Techniques in Organizational Research

Speaker: Wei Wang , University of Central Florida, USA

Time: Tuesday, 8 November, 10:00-11:30 am

Location: Room 109, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

In recent years, there is a rapidly growing interest in Big Data among management scholars. Despite the excitement and opportunities it brings, big data has also posed critical challenges to many researchers, primarily due to its ever complex nature that is beyond the scope of conventional research methods. With six empirical studies, this presentation demonstrates social network analysis and text mining as effective analytical techniques that can not only tackle the relational and unstructured aspects of big data, but also generate novel theoretical advancement for organizational research. Specifically, with the network autocorrelation modeling and ego-network analysis, the first three studies reveal that organizational behaviors including job satisfaction and voluntary turnover are indeed subject to social contagion effects, and the contagion effect is enabled by ego-network density (i.e., bounding social capital). The last three studies draw on the effort-recovery theory and investigate the national work stress and happiness on social media (e.g., Twitter) by using the language inquiry and word count technique. These studies have highlighted the powerful potentials of big data techniques for organizational research.

Biography:

Dr. Wei Wang is an assistant professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Central Florida, where he is the director of the Computational Psychology Laboratory (http://computationalpsychology.org/) that is focusing on applied psychometrics and social networks in the context of big data analysis. Dr. Wang has presented 34 national and international professional conference papers, and published 25 scholarly papers, in the journals including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Networks, Applied Psychology: An International Review, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Motivation and Emotion, Obesity (a Nature journal), Personality and Individual Differences, Applied Psychological Measurement, and Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. Dr. Wang is the recipient of the 2016 Academy of Management Best Convention Paper Award. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology (2013), M.S. in Statistics, and M.A. in Social-Personality Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!