James W. Beck, Ph.D., Director
James Beck is an Associate Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Waterloo. He joined the faculty at Waterloo as an Assistant Professor in 2012, was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2017, and became Director of the WORC Group in 2025. James teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on personnel selection, job performance, work motivation, and advanced statistical techniques. His research is primarily in the domain of work motivation, studying how individuals make difficult decisions about how to allocate finite resources like time and energy across multiple competing demands at work. This research has been continuously funded since 2014 by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Dr. Beck is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Business and Psychology, and he is a long-serving editorial board member at the Journal of Applied Psychology and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.