Gerrit Wolf

Gerrit Wolf
Born	(1941-10-09) October 9, 1941 Evanston, Illinois
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Industrial and organizational psychologist, academic and author
Academic background
Education	B.S., Psychology Major Ph.D., Social Psychology
Alma mater	Hope College Cornell University
Academic work
Institutions	University of Arizona, Professor and Department Chair Georgia Tech, Full Professor Yale University, Assistant and Associate Professor Stony Brook University (SBU), Professor and Dean
Doctoral students	Jim Bettman Hugh Arnold David Herold Jack Nagel Larry Zahn Mark Sharfman

Gerrit Wolf is an industrial and organizational psychologist, academic, and author. He is a professor emeritus in the College of Business (COB) and emeritus Director of the Innovation Center at Stony Brook University (SBU).

Most known for his entrepreneurship research, Wolf focuses on wireless technology's impact on organizations and consumers and has published over 60 academic articles on conflict management, decision-making, and leadership. He held the Fulbright Alexander Hamilton Chair of Entrepreneurship in 1993, and served as the first Fulbright Chair of Wireless E-Commerce in 2001. Collaborating with his students, he has consulted for firms like Symbol Technologies and Ericsson.

Education

Wolf served as the Anchor Editor of the Hope College newspaper and earned his B.S. in Psychology with a major at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, in 1963, followed by attending the University of Vienna in Austria for Summer School in 1961. Subsequently, he pursued his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, completing his doctoral degree in 1967. During his early career, he also held summer roles, including salesman for Britannica, research assistant for a market research firm, and reporter for a Chicago newspaper.

Career

Wolf has held various academic positions, beginning as a Teaching Assistant at Cornell University's Psychology Department from 1964 to 1966, later serving as an Instructor until 1967. Afterward, he worked at Yale University, progressing from Assistant Professor to associate professor in the Administrative Sciences and Psychology Departments. He then taught at Georgia Tech and the University of Arizona before joining Stony Brook University in 1985. Additionally, he contributed to the COB SBU Summer School Business Program in Rome, Italy, from 2013 to 2017. He has been appointed professor emeritus at Stony Brook University's COB since 2022.

Wolf directed undergraduate studies at Yale University from 1971 to 1975 before assuming various administrative roles, including positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona. He served as Chair of the Management and Policy Department at U Arizona from 1981 to 1985, Dean of Stony Brook University's Harriman School from 1985 to 1991, and directed the Technology Management Executive Program from 1996 to 1999. Since 2000, he has been a University Senator at SBU and directed the Honors Business Program from 2003 to 2010. He also serves as an Advisor Board Member of the Clean Energy Business Incubator Program and has been the Director of the Innovation Concentration and SBU's Innovation Center since 2010. From 2015 to 2017, he advised the online MBA in Innovation and Shift Group and co-chaired the Pandemic Shift Program at the CoB from 2020 to 2021.

Wolf has held research appointments, including project manager and co-investigator on studies funded by organizations such as NSF and the National Center for Health Services Research, collaborating on the Pandemic International Research Team from 2020 to 2021 and serving as a co-investigator on the NSF project "Entrepreneurship in Engineering" from 2004 to 2011.

Research

Wolf's research delves into innovation, covering product/service design, commitment, and implementation by startups and firms, along with cooperation within and between teams, including leadership and intergroup competition through gaming.

Management and innovation

Wolf has contributed to innovation management, leadership, business development, entrepreneurship, organizational psychology, engineering education, and entrepreneurship development through his research. He extended Staw's research, exploring how problem-solving strategies affected allocation behavior post-setbacks, challenging previous findings, and suggesting a new perspective on escalation as a problem-solving process. In 1984, he introduced the life cycle model alongside Gregory B. Northcraft, utilizing the time-adjusted rate of return to assess the impact of sunk costs on decisions to continue or terminate failing ventures. He also presented a model outlining the antecedents of organizational slack and hypotheses detailing their impact on different types of slack resources.

Wolf addressed the integration of entrepreneurship into engineering education, drawing from experiences in an NSF-sponsored pilot program involving Stony Brook University and three Long Island institutions. In 2017, his case study at Stony Brook University illustrated how business school students transformed scientific ideas into market innovations through entrepreneurial activity.

Wolf also reconciled coding method discrepancies for dummy variables, proposing a general formula based on theoretical connections between multiple comparisons and dummy multiple regression, with diverse design examples, incorporating sample size assumptions.

Strategy

Wolf has studied strategic management, decision-making processes, organizational behavior, and human performance within organizations. His highly cited research introduced methods for evaluating agreement among judgments from a single group of judges on a singular variable regarding a solitary target, focusing on mitigating response biases for more accurate reliability estimates. Additionally, he reassessed the suitability of the r_wg statistic as an index of interrater agreement, addressing critiques by Schmidt and Hunter and supported by Kozlowski and Hattrup, while concentrating on interpreting r_wg in rating a single target and presenting a new derivation.

Wolf collaborated with Larry Zahn to investigate social exchange as an analytical framework, exploring actions, rewards, relationships, and interactions with experimental implications. He contrasted minimum resource theory with game theory solutions in three-person coalitions, emphasizing power dynamics and questioning theory application in hypothesis testing, alongside Martin Shubik. Their experimental duopoly game assessed the impacts of market structure, opponent behavior, and information, revealing nuanced insights into decision behavior responses over time. Additionally, alongside G. Lawrence Zahn, he studied leadership dynamics between superiors and subordinates. He employed a Markov model to simulate various relationship types and behaviors, highlighting mutual influence and implications for testing, selection, and training. He also extended the customer-contact model to enhance the design of high-contact service systems by proposing four key design features and a simple methodology, demonstrated through applications to savings and loan branches.

Awards and honors

• 1993 – Alexander Hamilton Chair in Entrepreneurship, Fulbright Fellow, SEED Foundation and University of Budapest
• 2000 – Fulbright Chair of Wireless E-Commerce, School of Economics and Royal Technology Institute

Selected articles

• Conlon, E. J., & Wolf, G. (1980). The moderating effects of strategy, visibility, and involvement on allocation behavior: An extension of Staw's escalation paradigm. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 26(2), 172–192.
• James, L. R., Demaree, R. G., & Wolf, G. (1984). Estimating within-group interrater reliability with and without response bias. Journal of Applied Psychology, 69(1), 85.
• Northcraft, G. B., & Wolf, G. (1984). Dollars, sense, and sunk costs: A life cycle model of resource allocation decisions. Academy of Management Review, 9(2), 225–234.
• Sharfman, M. P., Wolf, G., Chase, R. B., & Tansik, D. A. (1988). Antecedents of organizational slack. Academy of Management Review, 13(4), 601–614.
• James, L. R., Demaree, R. G., & Wolf, G. (1993). rwg: An assessment of within-group interrater agreement. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78(2), 306.