About

Patrick Flynn, PhD, is the Matthew and Soogi Hong Fellow and an assistant professor of management in the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University. He joined the college from the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business, where he completed his doctorate degree in organizational behavior and human resources. His research focuses on dynamic individual and group-level processes, with particular emphasis on event-based adaptation and team citizenship behaviors. Flynn’s work has been published in reputable outlets such as the Journal of Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Operations Management. His research has also been featured in various media outlets including CNBC, MSN, Wallethub, Spectrum News, and the Raleigh News & Observer. In addition to his research, he serves on the editorial board of Group & Organization Management. Flynn’s teaching includes courses on people analytics and management consulting practicum at the undergraduate level, as well as leadership consulting practicum at the MBA level.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Clinical psychology
• Economics
• Sociology
• Applied psychology
• Operations management
• Econometrics
• Cognitive psychology
• Management
• Environmental health
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Business
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Chemistry
• Knowledge management
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• You’re Dismissed: A Shift Towards an Involuntary Turnover Research Agenda

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  This panel symposium brings together a number of esteemed turnover scholars to discuss the existing gaps in the involuntary turnover space, alongside avenues for promising future research. Specifically, attendees will gain insights through a moderated panel discussion of the evolving realm of involuntary turnover—both from macro and micro perspectives. Specific topics in this panel discussion include, but are not limited to, 1) naturalistic decision-making in involuntary turnover, 2) managerial decision-making for performance driven termination and subsequent impact on teams, 3) multi-level downsizing approaches for theory and analysis, 4) the positive and negative consequences of involuntary turnover and the challenges in measurement, and 5) the influence of biases and emotions in termination decisions.

  PublisherDOI

• Improved Ear Verification with Vision Transformers and Overlapping Patches

  ArXiv.org · 2025-03-30

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Ear recognition has emerged as a promising biometric modality due to the relative stability in appearance during adulthood. Although Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been widely used in image recognition tasks, their efficiency in ear recognition has been hampered by a lack of attention to overlapping patches, which is crucial for capturing intricate ear features. In this study, we evaluate ViT-Tiny (ViT-T), ViT-Small (ViT-S), ViT-Base (ViT-B) and ViT-Large (ViT-L) configurations on a diverse set of datasets (OPIB, AWE, WPUT, and EarVN1.0), using an overlapping patch selection strategy. Results demonstrate the critical importance of overlapping patches, yielding superior performance in 44 of 48 experiments in a structured study. Moreover, upon comparing the results of the overlapping patches with the non-overlapping configurations, the increase is significant, reaching up to 10% for the EarVN1.0 dataset. In terms of model performance, the ViT-T model consistently outperformed the ViT-S, ViT-B, and ViT-L models on the AWE, WPUT, and EarVN1.0 datasets. The highest scores were achieved in a configuration with a patch size of 28x28 and a stride of 14 pixels. This patch-stride configuration represents 25% of the normalized image area (112x112 pixels) for the patch size and 12.5% of the row or column size for the stride. This study confirms that transformer architectures with overlapping patch selection can serve as an efficient and high-performing option for ear-based biometric recognition tasks in verification scenarios.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reinvigorating Capital Improvement Planning: Changing the Face of Project Prioritization

  Proceedings of the Water Environment Federation · 2025-09-16

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• From Intent to Impact: a Proactive Event Approach for Amplifying Sustainability Across Time

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How context shapes collective turnover over time: The relative impact of internal versus external factors.

  Journal of Applied Psychology · 2024-09-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Despite the prevalence of research on the consequences of collective turnover (TO), we lack an understanding of how, when, and why changes in the external environment influence collective turnover. The present study extends context emergent turnover and threat-rigidity theories to consider temporal changes in rates of collective turnover brought on by an external disruption. We also conduct variance decomposition to evaluate the relative influence of internal and external factors on collective turnover and examine how changes in the external environment impact relative influences. Finally, we examine the role of collective engagement in explaining patterns of collective turnover over time. Our study is based on a large, geographically dispersed U.S. firm. Findings from a two-phase longitudinal model reveal that rates of collective turnover change over time in ways that are predictable from threat-rigidity theory. Variance decomposition analysis finds that internal store-level factors explain substantially more variance than external factors, but the balance changes in response to an external disruption. We also show that collective engagement can mitigate increases in collective turnover. Results inform theory regarding the relative importance of internal versus external factors in influencing collective turnover and provide a framework for predicting how contextual change in the external environment impacts collective turnover over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• When Does Entrepreneurs’ Impression Management Enhance Their Networking Performance? The Cross-Level Moderating Role of Collective Altruism

  Group & Organization Management · 2024-08-29 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  There is debate in the literature regarding when impression management motivates networking performance for self and others, and how well individuals perform tasks when the driving motivation is to look good. We take a novel approach to this quandary, integrate social exchange with sensemaking theories and research, and examine how networking group characteristics enable entrepreneurs to make sense of, and interpret, their collective environment and subsequently determine how they should behave to look their best. We identify collective altruism as an important group characteristic affecting how impression management tactics influence entrepreneurs’ willingness to help fellow group members. Findings from a sample of entrepreneurs ( n = 189) engaged in Business Network International (BNI) groups ( k = 24), illustrate that the relationship between entrepreneurs’ exemplification and the revenue they generate for others’ ventures and their own was more strongly positive when collective altruism was higher. Similarly, the effects of entrepreneur supplication and intimidation on revenue generated for others’ ventures were positive in groups with higher collective altruism. We discuss implications for theory and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• New Frontiers in Employee Voice Research

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Employee voice is a major concern of management scholarship. This symposium explores new lines of thought in employee voice research. A concern in contemporary voice literature is the intricate social dynamics that involve multiple voice actors and diverse voice channels. In addition to the well-examined role of voicer, interest is growing in other voice actors, such as voice endorsers, voice cultivators, voice allies, and voice implementers. This evolution of the voice literature coincides with the development of digital technology that has dramatically transformed when and where employees work and, consequently, how, when and the way employees communicate and speak up their ideas, concerns and suggestions. The digitization of the workplace challenges many conventional understandings of employee voice that were developed when people took it for granted the traditional ‘physical’ workplace and in-person communications. In this symposium, we bring together an internationally diverse team of scholars to discuss and extend the voice literature theoretically, empirically and methodologically (e.g., applying machine learning techniques to analyze big data on e-voice) with a shared focus on employee voice processes in the new workplace environment. More specifically, the symposium includes five presentations, in which authors 1) apply machine learning techniques to explore employees’ online voice activities, 2) report novel empirical insights about voice rejection and subsequent idea generation processes, 3) theorize about issue-selling processes specific to environmental issues, 4) share conceptual developments of employee voice as learned pattern of behavior within teams as network configurations, and lastly 5) examine employee voice in remote/virtual contexts. These studies also cover individual, team, and firm levels of analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• From Intent to Impact: A Proactive Event Approach for Amplifying Sustainability Across Time

  Journal of Management · 2024-03-22 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We extend event system theory (EST) to conceptualize proactive events and examine how event duration, timing, criticality, and disruption are related to two phases of change associated with an organizationally initiated event. Specifically, we explore the impact of a new sustainability monitoring system on energy consumption using longitudinal archival data from 87 manufacturing units of a Fortune 200 multinational firm. We use a variant of mixed-effects discontinuous growth modeling (DGM) to test EST propositions related to initial and longer-term changes associated with implementing the monitoring system. Results indicate that while the new sustainability monitoring system is effective in reducing within-unit energy consumption on average, there are significant differences in change magnitude between units. The magnitude of change during the pre-post phase was related to between-unit differences in event duration, timing, criticality, and disruption. Longer-term change patterns were related to between-unit differences in managerial criticality behaviors. The results empirically validate several of EST’s core propositions and provide an illustration of how DGM can be modified to study events that vary in onset and duration across entities.

  PublisherDOI

• The Biophilia Effect for Management: Consequences and Implications

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  articleSenior author

  In recent years, contact with nature has received the attention from both researchers and practitioners (Klotz & Bolino, 2021). Companies have increasingly adopted the biophilic work design to bring greenspace to the workplace (Prigg, 2018; Sears, 2016; Wilson, 2019) or encouraged employees to go outdoors into nature (Klotz, McClean, Yim, Koopman, & Tang, 2022). One explanation has to do with Wilson’s (1984) biophilia hypothesis, which argues that contact with the natural world enhances human well-being. Although this biophilia effect has received both theoretical and empirical attention, management research has just begun to explore the effects of nature on employees. Papers in this symposium aim to address several important unanswered questions, using a mixed of methods, ranging from qualitative field study, to experienced sampling, and to randomized controlled experiments.

  PublisherDOI

• From the Complex Present to the Risk-Laden Future of Trust: Over the Mountain & Into the Frying Pan

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  This symposium brings together preeminent scholars within the domain of organizational trust to develop novel constructs and methods in the trust literature, as well as to further explore trust in the turbulent workplace of the present and the potentially ominous future. The papers vary in levels of analysis and provide different perspectives on factors affecting trust or factors affected by trust.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kevin W. Bowyer

  University of Notre Dame

  17 shared

• Dawn L. Hershman

  Columbia University Irving Medical Center

  16 shared

• Joseph M. Unger

  Fred Hutch Cancer Center

  16 shared

• Danika L. Lew

  Fred Hutch Cancer Center

  16 shared

• Gary V. Burton

  Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport

  16 shared

• Anne F. Schott

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  16 shared

• Charles Kuzma

  FirstHealth of the Carolinas

  16 shared

• Carl W. Sharer

  Fred Hutch Cancer Center

  16 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Management

  North Carolina State University

  2019

• M.S., Business Administration

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  2013

• B.S., Business Administration

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  2011

Awards & honors

• Matthew and Soogi Hong Fellow