Jone L. Pearce is Distinguished Professor of Organization and Management in The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine (Ph.D., Administrative Sciences from Yale University, 1978). Her field is organizational behavior, and she conducts research on the mutual effects of organizational control systems and interpersonal processes. Her earliest work was on organizational volunteers, in particular focusing on how their lack of compensation affected their attitudes and how their work was managed. Later work branched into the study of compensation and trust and status more generally, with the most recent studies centered on how interpersonal relationships are used as a substitute for the formal organizational controls. Her current work is focused on trust, favoritism, and exploitation of workers.
Professor Pearce’s research has had an important impact on her field. To cite just a few indicators of the influence of this work: her work on the organizational behavior of volunteers is considered foundational in this field, as well as forming the basis for a broadening our understanding of over-sufficient justification effects more generally. The compensation work was recognized by the Human Resources Management Division of the Academy of Management with their Scholarly Achievement Award and by the Academy of Management with an award for the best paper published in the Academy of Management Journal. Finally, her recent international work has already been recognized. For example, an early empirical paper on the reasons why mangers rely on their personal relationships in China has been widely cited as the first in the burgeoning study of relationship-based management in developing countries, and her work on the role of interpersonal controls in organizations has resulted in invitations to edit special issues on the topic in Applied Psychology: An International Review and The Academy of Management Review. In other international work, drawing on the procedural justice literature, she has demonstrated that the interpersonal and particularistic interpersonal control systems characteristic of most organizations in developing (and newly developed) nations results in negative participant psychological effects, despite being the culturally normative systems in these societies. This work has already resulted in numerous invitations to provide keynote addresses at international meetings, and has been particularly important to colleagues in the countries transforming from communist to market systems. Finally, she serves or has served on the editorial boards of the most prestigious scholarly journals in her field.
There are numerous indicators of the quality and impact of her research. She has over nearly 100 scholarly publications. One measure of impact is a citation count which can be found on Web of Science or Google Scholar as noted above, and the many invitations, and write essays on concerns in her field Finally, the ultimate indicator is her induction as a Fellow (invitations only to the most distinguished 1%) of the Academy of Management, a Fellow in the American Psychological Association, a Fellow of the International Association for Applied Psychology in its founding year to induct Fellows, and a Fellow of the British Academy of Management.
Her impact on her field is also reflected in her work with doctoral students and young scholars. She has served on the doctoral committees of over twenty doctoral students, chairing the dissertation committees of twelve graduates. They have all gone on to successful scholarly careers, making important contributions to the sub-fields of goal setting, careers, identity group choice, justice, and international human resources management. All of the students whose dissertation committees she has chaired have received tenure at their universities. Further, one of her most important contributions to her field has been her active involvement in the development of young scholars outside North America. She has served on doctoral dissertation committees for scholars at universities in Hungary, Norway, Chile, and Great Britain, is frequently invited to present at doctoral consortia, and serves on the Scientific Committee for Tilburg University (The Netherlands), the Scientific Council, Advance Grants Programme, European Research Council of the European Commission, the British Research Excellence Framework (Social Sciences Panel), and the Irish Research Council Grants Council.
Her work also has gained attention outside the scholarly community. She has provided expert testimony before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Compensation and Employee Benefits (of the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service). Journalists throughout the United States seek her comments (as can be seen in her lengthy listing in Lexis-Nexus). She has contributed opinion pieces to The Los Angeles Times and over the years provided countless speeches for local business and community groups.
She also has been a very dedicated classroom teacher. She has won the school-wide teaching awards twice for her MBA teaching, as well as many other specialized teaching awards.
Finally she has provided extraordinary service to her scholarly discipline, as well as to her university, as her colleagues, school and university administrators have come to he time and again to ask that she provide a needed service. The committees and offices are too numerous to list, but among the most prominent are: elected to the governing boards of five scholarly associations, and as President of two, the Western Academy of Management and her primary scholarly association the Academy of Management). He service to her university includes service three separate tours of duty as associate dean, she was the founding Doctoral Program Director, and interim dean for over two years. She has served on Vice-Chancellor, Executive Vice Chancellor, Chancellor and University of California Presidential search committees. She has been her Area’s Coordinator for more than half the time that role has existed, and has extensive campus and university-wide Academic Senate service.