Benjamin Schneider

Benjamin Schneider is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and Chair of the Industrial and Organizational Psychology Program.

Ben has two major streams of research, each of which has several subcategories. One research stream concerns the role of manager personality in understanding the structure, strategy, and climate/culture of organizations. This research program is based on a series of papers Ben did in the 1980s culminating in a piece called "The People Make the Place" (Personnel Psychology, 1987). Since then Ben has written several conceptual pieces on what has come to be called the ASA framework.
His second stream of research concerns research directed at understanding organizational designs for service quality. In this work Ben early demonstrated the linkage between employee experiences of work and the service quality experiences of the customers they serve. Ben and his colleagues (as well as others), have subsequently replicated this work several times (see Schneider, White and Paul, Journal of Applied Psychology, 1998). This research has resulted in numerous journal publications related to service quality and also to organizational climate. Thus, the research on employees of service organizations has had organizational climate as a foundation construct.