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
- Eight-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. What makes you proactive can burn you out: The downside of proactive skill building motivated by financial precarity and fear. Conditionally accepted at the Journal of Applied Psychology. 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
Lebel, R.D. (2017). Moving beyond fight and flight: A contingent model of how the emotional regulation of anger and fear spark proactivity. Academy of Management Review, 42(2), 190-206. https://doi:10.5465/amr.2014.0368
Academic Area
Organizations and Entrepreneurship