Rachel Saef

Research Interests

My research focuses on individual differences in the workplace. More specifically, I investigate the role of personality in shaping emotional, cognitive and behavioral reactions to various features of workplace situations (e.g., diversity, unfair treatment, multitasking), and the implications of these reactions for important outcomes like worker well-being, job attitudes and performance. I also study measurement issues and ways to improve personality assessment (e.g., contextualizing our measures, machine learning).

Frequently Taught Classes

PSYC 332: Personality Psychology
PSYC 471: Industrial-Organizational Psychology
PSYC 615: Personnel Psychology

Representative Publications

Tay, L., Woo, S. E., Hickman, L. and Saef, R. (2020). Psychometric and Validity Issues in Machine Learning Approaches to Personality Assessment: A Focus on Social Media Text Mining. European Journal of Personality, 34, 826-844.
Saef, R., Porter, C. M. and Woo, S. E. (2019). Getting off on the Right Foot: The Role of Openness to Experience in Fostering Initial Trust between Culturally Dissimilar Partners. Journal of Research in Personality, 79, 176-187.
Saef, R., Woo, S. E., Carpenter, J. and Tay, L. (2018). Fostering socio-informational behaviors online: The interactive effect of openness to experience and extraversion. Personality and Individual Differences, 122, 93-98.
Porter, C. M., Parrigon, S. E., Woo, S. E., Saef, R. and Tay, L. (2017). Cultural and intellectual openness differentially relate to social judgments of potential work partners. Journal of Personality, 85, 632-642.
Woo, S. E., Keith, M., Su, R., Saef, R. and Parrigon, S. (2017). The curious dynamic between openness and interests in creativity. In G. J. Feist, R. Reiter-Palmon, and J. C. Kaufman (Eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research (pp. 44-63). Cambridge University Press.
Jebb, A. T., Saef, R., Parrigon, S. and Woo, S. E. (2016). Need for cognition. In A. Lipnevich, F Preckel, and R. Roberts (Eds.). Psychosocial Skills and School Systems in the Twenty-First Century: Theory, Research, and Applications. Springer.
Woo, S. E., Saef, R. and Parrigon, S. (2015). Openness to Experience. In J. Wright (Ed.). The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd Edition. Elsevier.