Ronald Downey
Professor of psychology
Being involved in an organization means getting hired, assessed for promotions, receiving
training and dealing with cross-cultural and cross-gender work attitudes, among many
other issues.
Ronald Downey, professor of psychology at Kansas State University, has studied numerous aspects of the workplace as an industrial and organizational psychologist. He has assessed worker motivation, the best formats for peer evaluations, job attitudes of part-time workers, pay and promotion discrimination, the causes and consequences of job burnout, reducing and coping with job burnout, and job engagement.
Downey also has researched job performance in the U.S. Army. He has studied factors that indicate promotion in the Army, criterion performance measures of leadership and unit effectiveness in small combat units, and the Army training environment, among other aspects. All of these studies have been for combat units and the Army training environment, among other aspects, and all for the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Within the university community, he has studied the long-term outcomes of involvement in student government, a way to measure student satisfaction and engagement, characteristics of students seeking mental health services, stress and burnout patterns in the university, and other formulas to measure characteristics in the university setting.
Downey has studied pay discrimination in faculty salaries, employee's service orientation, employee satisfaction and service, factors contributing to job burnout, coping with stress, and what contributes to greater employee work engagement.
He has published more than 100 articles in professional journals, given more than 100 presentations, and written nine textbook chapters based on his research. He is currently an executive editor for the Journal of Psychology: interdisciplinary and applied. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of Management.
Downey received his doctorate in quantitative psychology and master's in psychology from Temple University. He received his bachelor's in psychology from the University of Texas.
Downey can be reached at 785-532-5712 or downey@k-state.edu. More details can be found on his home page.