About

Aaron Schmidt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts. His primary research interests focus on employee motivation and self-regulation, with particular attention to individual learning, team training, and performance. His work explores how individuals manage multiple goals amidst competing demands, examining factors such as contextual features and individual differences that influence the dynamic allocation of attention and effort. Schmidt's research also investigates responses to successful goal pursuit, including how individuals react when they are performing well and whether they tend to increase effort or become complacent, as well as the phenomenon of negative self-efficacy effects where perceived improvements in ability can lead to decreased performance. Additionally, he applies self-regulatory principles to training contexts, aiming to understand and improve learner decision-making, especially in high-control learning environments, and extends this understanding to team settings to promote more effective team learning and adaptive performance.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Engineering
• Sociology
• Cognitive psychology
• Applied psychology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Cartographic comparative analysis of undocumented farmsteads at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin

  2024-01-09

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Government acquisition of farmland within the present-day boundaries of Fort McCoy is defined by two consequential events: the founding of the installation in 1909, and its expansion in the early 1940s to provide training lands during World War II. Since the 1990s, Fort McCoy’s cultural resources manager (CRM) has sponsored archaeological investigations to determine the eligibility of former farmstead sites for the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Using geographic information systems (GISs) to compare historic cartographic sources, this project attempts to ascertain whether there are additional farmstead sites at Fort McCoy that may have been overlooked in existing archaeological investigations. Additionally, it provides a short summary of farmstead archaeological activity at Fort McCoy over the past 20 years, a brief historic context highlighting characteristics of farmsteads in the Upper Midwest, and a brief explanation of enhanced lidar techniques that personnel at Fort McCoy can explore for future use. Finally, an appendix provides a list of questions that may be used to conduct oral interviews with descendants of families who farmed within the present-day boundaries of Fort McCoy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Historic context for railroads at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin

  2023-10-03 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This report provides a historic context for the railroads that operated within the present-day boundaries of Fort McCoy. The objective of this historic context is to deliver a useful reference for future evaluations of railroad-related resources in the installation. Ultimately, the report is in-tended to save the installation time in determining potential areas of significance for future evaluations. This is accomplished through the creation of a broad historic context for railroading in the Midwest, establishing a survey of railroad history at Fort McCoy, and providing examples of areas of significance and National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) criteria commonly applied to the historic railroad resources of the Midwest. This report does not provide NRHP eligibility recommendations for any specific resources; however, possible research questions for further study are posited in the concluding chapter.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Everyday Work-Family Lives: Episodic, Dyadic, and Daily Investigations

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022

  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Applied psychology

  This symposium brings together several complementary approaches to examine the work-family interface including episodic, dyadic, and daily lenses. The four presentations focus on using daily diary methods to capture the dynamics involved in employees' work-family lives. The papers examine important outcomes such as work-family time allocation, energetic well-being, work self-esteem, and work-family conflict/enrichment. From four unique perspectives, this group of papers investigates employees' daily work-family situations through different theoretical angles including decision making, crossover, appraisal, and job demands-resources theory.

  PublisherDOI

• Working from home during COVID-19: A study of the interruption landscape.

  Journal of Applied Psychology · 2021 · 137 citations

  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  We examine how the shift toward intensive work-from-home during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted the experience of interruptions during work time. We conducted a two-wave survey of 249 employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on a conceptual framework and typology (Leroy et al., 2020), we examine changes in the prevalence of interruptions since-COVID-19 as a function of interruption type (intrusions, distractions, breaks, multitasking, and surprises), source (work-based vs. nonwork), and timing (pre- vs. since-COVID-19). We find a large increase in interruptions since-COVID, with the largest increases observed for nonwork intrusions, distractions, and multitasking. Women reported a greater increase in interruptions, particularly with regard to nonwork interruptions of all types, in addition to work-based intrusions, multitasking, and surprises, uncovering an important source of gender inequity. A dedicated unshared workspace at home was associated with fewer nonwork interruptions, while more nonwork responsibilities predicted more nonwork interruptions. Further differentiation of interruption types and sources was observed with regard to outcomes of interruptions. Nonwork interruptions predicted higher family-to-work interference, emotional exhaustion, and lower performance. Notably, these relationships varied meaningfully across specific interruption-type/outcome combinations, highlighting the value of differentiating interruptions by type. Work-based interruptions-especially intrusions and multitasking-were associated with higher work-family interference and emotional exhaustion, as well as lower performance. The results of this study provide valuable insights to help understand and, ultimately, improve work experiences in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic while also contributing to the broader literatures on interruptions and remote work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Interruptions and Task Transitions: Understanding Their Characteristics, Processes, and Consequences

  Academy of Management Annals · 2020 · 88 citations

  • Cognitive psychology
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  Frequent interruptions and task transitions are an inescapable reality of modern organizational life, yet the relevant research spans across numerous seemingly disconnected domains that paint an incomplete and often inconsistent picture regarding the detrimental and/or beneficial consequences of such transitions, thus undermining the potential for this body of research to inform theory and practice. In this study, we review research relevant to interruptions such as intrusions, breaks, distractions, and discrepancies, as well as relevant work on multitasking and multiple goal self-regulation. In so doing, we identify ambiguities in the existing literature, and shed light on shared and unshared features across studies and fields to bring some coherence and start reconciling existing knowledge. At a theoretical level, our review reveals that behaviors on a task and the related interruptions and task transitions cannot be fully understood without taking into account the system of goals, within which they are embedded. We highlight that how people decide what to pay attention to and when to stop a goal pursuit to engage in another; have important emotional, cognitive, and performance implications; and provide directions for advancing knowledge on interruptions and task transitions.

  PublisherDOI

• Efficient proximal resource allocation strategies predict distal team performance: Evidence from the National Hockey League.

  Journal of Applied Psychology · 2019-04-15 · 12 citations

  article

  distal success. We drew upon self-regulatory theories to predict that the trade-off between proximal and distal concerns is managed by allocating resources according to the demands of the situation. Specifically, we predicted that the tendency to allocate resources according to goal-performance discrepancies would improve distal performance. We tested our hypotheses using data from 5 National Hockey League (NHL) seasons. As expected, NHL teams used goal-performance discrepancies to allocate a key resource-playing time of their most valuable players. More importantly, between-team variance in resource allocation strategy accounted for significant variance in distal performance (end of season record). These results provide evidence that strategic reductions in resource allocation to proximal performance episodes is a fundamental self-regulatory process necessary for facilitating long-term success. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Interrupted Work: An Integrated Review of Task Transitions and Future Directions

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2019-08-01

  article

  Frequent interruptions and task transitions are an inescapable reality of modern organizational life, yet the relevant research spans across numerous seemingly disconnected domains that paint an incomplete and often inconsistent picture regarding the detrimental and/or beneficial consequences of such transitions, thus undermining the potential for this body of research to inform theory and practice. In this review we review research relevant to interruptions as intrusions, breaks, distractions, discrepancies, as well as relevant work on multitasking and multiple goal self-regulation. In so doing, we identify ambiguities in the existing literature, shed light on shared and unshared features across studies and fields to bring some coherence and start reconciling existing knowledge. At a theoretical level, our review reveals that behaviors on a task and the related interruptions and task transitions cannot be fully understood without taking into account the system of goals, within which they are embedded. We highlight that how people decide what to pay attention to and when to stop a goal pursuit to engage in another have important emotional, cognitive and performance implications and provide directions for advancing knowledge on interruptions and task transitions.

  PublisherDOI

• Self-Regulation Theory

  The SAGE Encyclopedia of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2nd edition · 2017-01-01

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The effect of regulatory focus on attention residue and performance during interruptions

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2016-11-01 · 42 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Work-family conflict among IT specialty workers in the US

  Community Work & Family · 2016-09-20 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  Specialty workers are a source of critical, locally scarce technical skills. This study aimed to understand the experience of work-family conflict among specialty workers in the US by exploring the process of transitioning from working in their home countries to working in the US. While participants perceived initial difficulties in adapting to the new environment, over time, they experienced lower work-family conflict in the US compared to working in their own home countries. In their home countries, where work and family domains were considered separate and culturally defined boundaries separating these domains are rigidly maintained; these participants relied heavily on family support to manage work-family conflict. Moving to the US, where greater integration of work and family domains is prevalent, these participants managed work-family conflict by revisiting altered demands, accessing alternate organizational resources and learning new skills to create and maintain work-family boundaries. This study contributes to the nascent body of literature on work-family relations in the context of international migration by highlighting a specific case of Indian specialty workers who adopt different boundary-spanning strategies to manage work-family conflict in changed social and working conditions. In essence, participants managed work-family conflict by using enhanced autonomy to increase flexible working and accessing other resources such as supervisory support and organizational flexible working policies.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James W. Beck

  University of Waterloo

  14 shared

• Richard P. DeShon

  9 shared

• Sophie Leroy

  University of Washington Bothell

  6 shared

• J. Kevin Ford

  Michigan State University

  6 shared

• Paul B. Hoover

  5 shared

• Debra Steele‐Johnson

  Wright State University

  5 shared

• Russell S. Beauregard

  Intel (United States)

  5 shared

• Ronald P. Messner

  Jewish General Hospital

  4 shared