Richard Kopelman

Richard E. Kopelman is an American academic, researcher and a management scholar. He is a Professor of Management at the City University of New York’s Baruch College.

Kopelman has published over 150 research papers, chapters and professional articles on work motivation, productivity, careers, organizational performance, and human resource management. He recently completed a 20-year project whereby he conceptualized, validated, and developed instrumentation for the Cube One Framework. Kopelman is the author of Improving Organizational Performance: The Cube One Framework (Routledge, 2020) and previously, Managing Productivity in Organizations: A Practical, People Oriented Perspective (McGraw-Hill, 1986).

Education Kopelman completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1965 and 1967, respectively. He received his doctoral degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business Administration in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1974.

Organizational performance Kopelman has conducted extensive research on the improvement of organizational performance. He has investigated the effects of objective feedback, merit pay, job redesign, performance appraisal format, organizational structure, and alternative work schedules on job performance and productivity. He conducted a longitudinal and multilevel study to investigate the relationships between a newly developed construct—Perceived Organizational and Family Support (POFS)--with organizational commitment, work-family conflict, and job search behavior.

Kopelman also co-authored the initial research that provided construct validity evidence for another new measure, the Job Search Behavior Index (JSBI). Kopelman and colleagues have co-authored four articles and a chapter that yielded the development of a construct valid measure of Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y. After 60 years and several studies that failed to find support for McGregor’s seminal theorizing, in 2015, he published an article demonstrating the validity of Theory X/Y as predictors of individual and group performance. The keys to finding support rested on distinguishing between X/Y attitudes and X/Y behaviors; conducting a multilevel, multi-source analysis; and using hierarchical linear modeling to examine the performance effects of McGregor’s theorizing at individual and workgroup levels.

Construct validity research Kopelman has conducted applied construct validity studies with regard to several projects. In the 1980s, he pioneered in developing a measure of work-family conflict. He developed and validated a measure of job search behaviors (the Job search Behavior Index) that was substantially superior in predicting employee turnover in comparison to the widely used measures of intention to remain and intention to leave.

Kopelman contributed to updating the Study of Values. The updated version substituted more current exemplars of value orientations (e.g., Bill Gates in place of Henry Ford) and used identical items for male and female respondents. He and his colleagues also published several studies pertinent to the construct validity of four measures of narcissism; they also found relationships to the performance and satisfaction of salespeople.

Cube One Framework Kopelman has conceptualized and conducted extensive research on the Cube One Framework, which holds that successful organizations are need-satisfying places. More specifically, organizational performance is related to the frequency of the enactment of enterprise-, customer- and employee-directed practices. Organizations that enact High levels of all three sets of practices are in Cube One; organizations with Low levels of the three sets of practices are in Cube 27.

Awards and honors 1972-1973 - William B. Harding Fellowship, Harvard Business School 1980 - Outstanding Contributed Paper, American Institute for Decision Sciences 1987 - Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching, Baruch College 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993 - Teaching Excellence Award, School of Business and Public Administration, Baruch College 1999 - Award for Overall Excellence in Research, Service, and Teaching, City University of New York 2000 - Lifetime Achievement Award, American Compensation Association 2005 - Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Baruch College