About

Bradford S. Bell is the William J. Conaty Professor in Strategic Human Resources and the Director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Maryland at College Park, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Michigan State University. Dr. Bell teaches courses in Human Resource Management, Training and Development, and Work Groups and Teams to both graduate and undergraduate students. His professional experience includes working in the management and organization development department of First USA Bank/Banc One, as well as serving as an HR consultant for multiple private and public firms. He is a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the American Psychological Association. His research interests encompass training and development, team development and effectiveness, and virtual work, with his work published in numerous reputable journals. Dr. Bell has also contributed chapters to edited research volumes, regularly presents at major conferences, and has received awards such as the Early Career Achievement Award from the HR Division of the Academy of Management.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Knowledge management
• Social Science
• Applied psychology
• Engineering
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• Public relations

Selected publications

• A Brave New World of Human Resources Research: Navigating Perils and Identifying Grand Challenges of the GenAI Revolution

  Journal of Management · 2025-04-10 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper reviews the transformative role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in Human Resource (HR) management, from a practice perspective, highlighting both opportunities and challenges and laying out a use-inspired future research agenda. This scoping review is grounded in insights from a unique Summit held in Spring 2024, which brought together HR academic scholars with dozens of Fortune 500 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) and their top technical leaders to discuss the workforce implications of GenAI. The paper identifies six key themes from the Summit practitioners: GenAI as disruptive and transformative, data as competitive advantage, adoption challenges, potential ethical abuses, the experimentation imperative, and the critical role of CHROs. These six themes provide a foundation for future research directions, which are discussed regarding six functional HR areas: recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, job and work design, talent management, and compensation and benefits. The research agenda in each area emphasizes the need for academic researchers to understand and address the practical challenges posed by GenAI. Overcoming these substantive challenges will demand meaningful effort and a keen willingness to learn, on the part of both HR leaders and scholars. The paper concludes with a call to action for management scholars to engage in use-inspired research that bridges the gap between academic knowledge and practical HR challenges.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Task Interdependence and Shared Leadership: A Structural Perspective on the Distribution of Leadership in Teams

  Group & Organization Management · 2025-01-14 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Shared leadership has consistently been shown to predict team effectiveness. However, research also indicates that different teams may require different configurations of shared leadership, and achieving maximum sharedness in leadership does not always guarantee superior team outcomes. This reality underscores the need for a normative theory of shared leadership that can extend our understanding of the construct and facilitate its adoption in organizations. Despite the significance of such a theory, little attention has been given to its development and our understanding of how shared leadership should be distributed across different teams remains quite limited. In this article, we adopt a structural perspective to propose that the task interdependence network can serve as a robust foundation for devising effective shared leadership strategies. Our conceptual framework outlines the nuanced implications of the task interdependence network—from determining the optimal level of shared leadership necessary for performance to identifying potential members for shared leadership responsibilities. In doing so, we emphasize that the specific implications of the task interdependence network may vary, rather than remain uniform, across different dimensions of shared leadership.

  PublisherDOI

• Organizational-Level Training and Performance: A Meta-Analytic Investigation

  Journal of Management · 2025-04-02 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  While extensive research has examined the relationship between human resource management systems and organizational performance, the impact of organizational-level training—defined as the quantity and quality of training that an organization provides to its employees—remains less understood. In this article, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between organizational-level training and organizational performance to determine the magnitude of the relationship and test a set of moderators of the relationship. Grounded in human capital theory, our meta-analysis employs a theoretically driven moderator analysis to identify the conditions under which organizational-level training significantly influences organizational performance. The results from 159 studies (N = 75,033) show that the relationship between organizational-level training and organizational performance is positive and significant ( ρ = .13, SD ρ = .17, 95% CI [.11, .16]). More importantly, the effect size differs significantly across several theoretical (e.g., training dimensions, type of human capital, outcome dimensions, and timing of measurement) and contextual (e.g., industry knowledge intensity, firm age, and region) moderators. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• It Matters How You Got There and Who Else Is Doing It: Examining the Effects of Two Social‐Contextual Characteristics of Working From Home

  Human Resource Management · 2024-11-04 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Drawing on self‐determination theory, this study advances our understanding of employees' experiences working from home (WFH). Specifically, we examine the effects of two social‐contextual characteristics of WFH arrangements: whether employees voluntarily initiate their arrangement ( WFH initiation) and the proportion of WFH employees in a unit ( WFH density ). We conducted multilevel analyses on a multisource dataset drawn from organizational HR records and two surveys of 2115 WFH employees in a Fortune 500 organization. Employees who voluntarily initiated WFH, rather than at their employer's direction, experienced higher job autonomy and lower isolation. WFH employees in units with a lower proportion of other WFH employees experienced higher job autonomy. WFH initiation and WFH density also had effects on several distal employee outcomes, including job satisfaction, organizational knowledge, and turnover intentions, through their effects on job autonomy and isolation. Our findings provide valuable insight into the experiences of WFH employees and call attention to two important, yet understudied, factors that shape these experiences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Motivation in Virtual Teams: A Dynamic Exploration of Trajectories and Contextual Associations

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Engaging effectively in a virtual team demands a high level of motivation from team members. Yet, little is known about how the motivation of individuals in virtual teams changes over time, particularly in connection to various facets of team context. Employing a problematization approach and social motivation theory, this research adopts a sequential mixed-methods design to delve into the trajectories of motivation of individuals working in virtual teams and their associations with the team context – distinguished between team characteristics and team dynamics. First, a latent class growth analysis on 3,428 individuals nested in 639 virtual teams revealed three distinct trajectories of individual motivation - consistently high, decreasing, and increasing motivation patterns. Whereas varying team dynamics were significantly linked to the diverse motivational trajectories, team characteristics displayed no association with the distinct patterns of individual motivation. Second, findings from a subsequent qualitative study uncovered underlying rationales for these quantitative results. Findings suggest that team characteristics were less consequential for the motivation of virtual team members due to their diminished salience during task-oriented activities. The evolvement of team dynamics and concurrent motivation was contingent on the perceived proximity between individuals and their virtual team. We discuss implications for both theory and practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multiple status signals in multinational teams: Implications of lingua franca proficiency and task expertise for informal leadership

  Group & Organization Management · 2024-10-21 · 1 citations

  article

  Lingua franca proficiency and task expertise coexist in multinational teams as prominent status signals that are often relied upon to infer a member’s competence. These personal attributes, however, do not always suggest consistent information since those with lower lingua franca proficiency might be more expert at the task and vice versa. In examining their joint implications, we draw on status characteristics and expectation states theories to identify the signaling nature of each attribute. Unlike the categorically specific quality of task expertise, lingua franca proficiency possesses characteristics commensurate with both specific and diffuse signals: it represents a social group and, at the same time, carries valid information about performance for certain tasks. Using archival (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) data, we explore how the hybrid nature of lingua franca proficiency shapes its interaction with task expertise and implications for subsequent leadership outcomes. We provide further evidence for the generalizability of our findings through a supplemental study that includes 18 interviews with current members of multinational teams across various organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• Team Membership Change and Team Effectiveness: The Role of Informational Attributes

  Small Group Research · 2023 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  This study examined the impact of informational attributes of team membership change on affective emergent states and team effectiveness, and how members’ emotional intelligence (EI) shapes this impact. Results from two laboratory studies showed that change predictability and rationality affected team potency and identification. These emergent states had unique effects on team effectiveness over and above the effects of team process. Results also showed that members’ EI moderated the effects of change predictability and rationality. These findings emphasize the importance of membership change attributes, affective emergent states, and team composition in determining team effectiveness after a membership change.

  PublisherDOI

• Virtual Team Leadership: An Integrative Framework

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  articleSenior author

  Research on virtual team leadership has relied on theories developed for dyadic leader-member relationships or has focused on the informal authority executed by team members, leaving many questions regarding the role of formal leaders unanswered. Integrating Bell and Kozlowski’s (2002) and Hill and Bartol’s (2016) theoretical perspectives with the functional leadership framework, we posit that formal leaders who engage in certain guiding and empowering functions enhance collective performance by enabling their virtual teams to self-manage. A scenario-based experiment and a 10-week field study of 70 virtual team leaders and 376 members in two Fortune 500 organizations generally support our theorizing. The field survey further shows that the effects of the formal leadership functions at both the individual and team levels are moderated by media richness. More commonly studied dimensions of virtuality including geographical dispersion and technological reliance had negligible moderating roles. We discuss our contributions to the virtual teams and leadership literatures and offer practical guidance for those who are charged with managing in a virtual environment.

  PublisherDOI

• New Approaches to Studying Virtuality at Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Virtual work, which involves interactions between employees who are not in person and occur using electronic rather than face-to-face communication, has burgeoned in recent years to encompass a broad range of employees in different types of work arrangements across varied work contexts. Yet, existing approaches to studying virtuality have primarily focused on professional knowledge work contexts, involving a high degree of virtuality, and using more traditional communication media such as email to facilitate virtual interactions. Thus, there is a need to extend the dominant lenses used in past research on virtuality to better reflect the realities of the contemporary and future workplace. This requires research to understand virtuality in previously underexamined contexts, such as those with varying degrees of virtuality (e.g., hybrid work), more complex work configurations at different levels (e.g., multiteam systems), and those involving the use of newer and emerging communication technologies (e.g., social media, virtual reality). These extensions to virtual work research may also require new approaches to conceptualizing and measuring virtuality. This panel symposium will shed light on these new approaches to studying virtuality, with the goal of developing a more nuanced understanding of how a broader range of employees in more varied contexts experience virtual work. Our panel of virtual work scholars will discuss their research that is breaking new ground in this area. We will draw on these insights to engage symposium participants in an interactive discussion to identify important future directions for advancing the study of virtuality at work.

  PublisherDOI

• Multiple Team Membership Arrangements: Putting the Worker Front and Center

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  There are indicators we are entering a new era for MTM research, by moving beyond the structural approach that has characterized MTM research to date, to focus on important and under-researched issues, such as the nature of employees’ experiences in an MTM context. Although team research suggests that the experiences of members impact team functioning, these lines of reasoning have not, until recently, made their way to MTM research. To overcome this limitation, this symposium showcases five papers that use a variety of theoretical perspectives, research designs (i.e., qualitative, quantitative), contexts (e.g., healthcare, automotive manufacturer, online panels), methodologies, and analytical methods (i.e., meta-analysis, content/thematic analysis). The symposium focuses on surfacing and advancing unanswered questions that extend theory and can offer fruitful directions for MTM research by examining critical individual and team level outcomes (e.g., individual/team performance, individual counterproductive and organizational citizenship behavior, individual learning, individual turnover intentions, organizational commitment) in the experiences of MTM employees across their teams (e.g., goals, functions, roles). We hope to provide a forum to advance unanswered questions that offer fruitful directions for MTM research. The Pros and Cons of Multiple Team Membership: Exploring Underlying Mechanisms & the Role of Overlap Author: Rebecca Grossman; U. of Central Florida Leveraging Expertise in Interorganizational Collaboration: Roles of Goal and Expertise Awareness Author: Esther Sackett; Santa Clara U. Keeping the Balls in the Air: Job Crafting in Multiple Team Membership Author: Helene Tenzer; LMU Munich School of Management Examining MTM Time Fracture, Attention, Residue, and Personal Resources in Predicting Performance Author: Manuel J. Vaulont; Northeastern U. Team Memberships, Work-Related Strain, & Performance: An Interdisciplinary Multilevel Meta-Analysis Author: Sal Mistry; U. of Delaware

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Steve W. J. Kozlowski

  University of South Florida

  34 shared

• Adam Kanar

  Brock University

  15 shared

• Darin Wiechmann

  Bristol-Myers Squibb (Germany)

  14 shared

• Ann Marie Ryan

  14 shared

• Christopher J. Collins

  10 shared

• Rebecca Toney

  9 shared

• Kenneth G. Brown

  9 shared

• Morell E. Mullins

  Xavier University

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Early Career Achievement Award by the HR Division of the Aca…