Research Interests and Summary

While completing my Ph.D. at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, I had the unique privilege of working with outstanding colleagues. Along with Terry Mitchell, Tom Lee, Brooks Holtom, and Miriam Erez, we developed and introduced the employee retention construct of job embeddedness (JE) in 2001. In fact, this was Brooks Holtom’s dissertation topic.

We published our first article on JE in 2001 in the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ). During this same time period, Tom Lee and I went onsite to a Fortune 500 corporation to collect employee survey data for our second Academy of Management Journal paper published in 2004. That article received international acclaim when it was featured in The Economist. If you have not heard, Tom Lee passed away in the summer of 2021. I will be forever indebted to him as a mentor, advisor, and friend. We will all miss you Tom!

Following the first set of job embeddedness publications, I worked with James Burton (Northern Illinois University) and Tomoki Sekiguchi (Kyoto University) to incorporate leadership (Leader-Member Exchange) in the study of JE and we subsequently published this work in Personnel Psychology. In addition, along with Tony Wheeler (now Dean of the School of Business Administration at Widener University) and Jonathon Halbesleben (Dean, Carlos Alvarez College of Business, University of Texas, San Antonio) we were the first to link Conservation of Resources Theory with JE in an Academy of Management Conference paper.

In addition to employee retention and turnover, I am interested in employee selection and leadership development. With my colleague Chris Wright (Department Chair, Psychology at San Francisco State University), we explored the utility of the popular (at the time) use of puzzle interview questions during employment interviews. We were skeptical about their use and utility in predicting job performance and wanted to learn more. In addition, we were interested in applicant reaction to these types of interview questions. We published two articles on the topic and received international attention when Chris Wright was interviewed by both TIME and NPR.

For more information about my research, please click on the link in the footer below for my Google Scholar site. Any questions? Please reach out to me at chris (at) sablynski (dot) com

I am always happy to help so please let me know what you need. Thank you!