Mark Maltarich

I teach Organizational Behavior (MGMT 376) to undergraduates, Competing Through People (MGMT 770) to the Professional MBA students, and Consulting and Organizational Development (MGMT 730) in the Master of Human Resources program.

Many students in my undergraduate class will soon be facing workplace issues for the first time — discipline, motivational problems, organizational politics and leading people. I aim to leverage the knowledge from a long line of management research to prepare students to ask the right questions to address these issues successfully. I emphasize the role of the situation — there’s almost never one right answer that always works, but if you can recognize the swing factors, there’s a right answer for every situation.

I’m interested in how life gets complex when individuals are put into groups or teams. I ask questions like: How do individual skills and abilities combine to drive group performance? When does diversity on teams help or get in the way? When is conflict productive? Should we pay teams based on group performance or reward individuals for their contribution? Why do people leave a group, and what happens to the rest when they do?

I also research the way we measure and analyze data for studying groups, which is more complicated than the ways we treat individuals.

Simply put, my research can help managers design team-based work, form work teams and lead teams to be more satisfied and perform better.

One example project asks why the research has had problems finding a benefit for firms that fire workers more freely. My co-authors and I argue that the downside of firing is the same as when people quit — there are costs for replacing and training new workers, and you can end up shorthanded for a while. In the long term, though, weeding out the worst employees should be a good thing because you can replace them with better workers. We show that this is true and explain why prior studies have found something different.

I have several collaborations involving doctoral students, and I have worked on projects with undergraduates for special projects like honors theses. My work presents some opportunities for exceptional undergraduates to get exposure to data analysis and scientific writing.

To me, the most exciting thing about my work is the opportunity to create knowledge — I start with a question that nobody knows the answer to, make progress toward an answer and share it with others. In the field of teams, I find this especially exciting because teams are used in so many workplaces to get work done. That means the answers I find have the potential to make an impact on the real world.

I have two children, which occupies a lot of my time. I sometimes coach their sports teams, and I coached a team that competed in a Lego robot competition. I enjoy making music — I play guitar in a couple of pretty bad bands, and I also play banjo. I recently took up running, and I have completed two half marathons.