Dr. Barbara Bunker
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D., Columbia University
Office: 362 Park Hall
Phone: (716) 645-3650 x. 362
E-mail (will open in a new window)

Fall 2006 Course Offering:
PSY 437 - CROSS CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
(Click to download a draft of the syllabus.)

Spring 2007 Course Offering:
PSY 408 - SMALL GROUP PROCESSES
(Click to download a draft of the syllabus.)

Summary of Research Interests:

My scholarly contributions are in three major areas. First, as an organizational/social psychologist, I have focused on planned change processes in groups and organizations. My most recent work has been in mapping a new field of intervention practice, Large Group Interventions, which are ways for the whole organization to come together and participate in decisions. I began this work with a special issue of The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, in 1992. I have now completed a book Large Group Interventions: Engaging the whole system for rapid change (with Billie Alban, 1997) that describes all the methods currently available and compares them.

Closely aligned with investigations of organizational change is my interest in the changing role of women in work organizations. In 1998, I collected interview data on a new generation of senior executive women in Japan (parallel to work I did in Japan in the 1980s). I have also studied women and competition and commuting couples.

Most recently, I have been conceptualizing and doing research on trust in organizations, a requirement for collaborative change efforts. In several book chapters (with Roy Lewicki), we have developed a staged model of trust development and types of trust. We are now collecting data about the dissolution of trust in work settings and refining an instrument to measure these forms of trust.

Representative Publications:

• Bunker, B. B. (in press). Managing conflict through large group methods. In Deutsch, M. R., & Coleman, P. Handbook of cooperative conflict resolution: Theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  
• Bunker, B. B., & Alban, B. T. (September,1996/dated 1997). Large group interventions: Engaging the whole system for rapid change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  
• Bunker, B. B., & Rubin, J. Z. (Eds.). (1995). Conflict, cooperation, and justice: Essays in honor of Morton Deutsch. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  
• Bunker, B. B., & Alban, B. (Eds.). (1992). Large group interventions. Special Issue of The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 28, 4.
  
• Bunker, B. B., Zubek, J. M., Vanderslice, V. J. & Rice, R. W. (1992). Quality of life in dual-career families: Commuting versus single-residence couples. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 54, 399-407.
  
• Lewicki, R. J., & Bunker, B. B. (1996). Developing and maintaining trust in working relationships. In R. M. Kramer & T. Tyler (Eds.), Trust in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.