R. David Lebel
Associate Professor of Business Administration and Ben L. Fryrear Faculty Fellow

Contact

364 Mervis Hall
rdlebel@katz.pitt.edu
412-648-1020

Profile

David Lebel is an Associate Professor of Business Administration and Ben L. Fryrear Faculty Fellow at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. His award-winning research focuses on two topics. First, he examines how negative emotions such as fear and anger influence our behavior, asking when these emotions might have functional or dysfunctional effects for people at work. Second, he examines when employees are proactive, such as speaking up with ideas for improvement, being innovative, or taking initiative. From this line of research he hopes to help organizations create settings that foster these behaviors.

Dave has been recognized for his outstanding teaching at the Katz School of Business, receiving multiple teaching awards. Dave’s teaching interests include organizational behavior, organizational change, and communication at work. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D., he was a management consultant with Deloitte, providing strategy and operations expertise to public sector clients, and was an analyst for a large $15 billion privately held supply chain organization.

Awards and Honors

  • Nine-time winner of the Katz School of Business Excellence in Teaching Award
  • Outstanding Faculty of the Year as voted by the EMBA-Healthcare Class of 2022
  • Doris & Douglas Bernstein Award for Faculty Teaching Excellence (2016-2017, 2019-2020)
  • Katz School of Business Excellence in Research Award (2015-2016)
  • BNY Mellon CSR Fellow and Research Grant (2013-2016)

Degrees

  • PhD, Organizational Behavior, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
  • MS, Management, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
  • BS, Economics, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Recent Publications

Lebel, R.D., Yang, X., Parker, S., & Kamran-Morley, D. (2023). What makes you proactive can burn you out: The downside of proactive skill building motivated by financial precarity and fear. Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(7), 1207-1222. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001063

Patil, S. V., & Lebel, R. D. (2019). “I want to serve but the public does not understand:” Prosocial motivation, image discrepancies, and proactivity in public safety. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 154, 34-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2019.07.002

Lebel, R.D., & Patil, S.V. (2018). Proactivity despite discouraging supervisors: The powerful role of prosocial motivation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(7), 724-737 https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000301

Academic Area

Organizations and Entrepreneurship

CV

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