Kevin Williams

Faculty Expertise and Achievement

Kevin Williams currently serves as Interim Dean of the Massry School of Business.

Williams joined the faculty of UAlbany’s Department of Psychology in 1987 and served as Dean for Graduate Studies from 2010 to 2023. Before that, he served as director of undergraduate advising in Psychology from 1994-2005, graduate director from 2005-2007, and department chair from 2007-2010. He has also been area head for the industrial-organizational psychology and the social-personality graduate doctoral programs.  The recipient of the President’s and Chancellor’s Excellence Awards in Teaching in 2007, Williams is known for his devotion to students. In 2002, he was honored for excellence in undergraduate advising in the psychology department.

Research Interests

Williams’ research and teaching interests focus on the application of psychology to organizational settings.

His major areas of research are:

• Human motivation and performance, where he studies the self-regulatory processes that guide goal strivings and goal revision over time
• The psychology of blame, where his work explores the social-cognitive processes that underlie the allocation of blame for accidents
• Employee assessment and appraisal, where his work seeks to identify best practices for assessing and evaluating employee aptitude and performance

His research appears in such journals as Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Performance, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Academy of Management Journal. Williams received his PhD in psychology from the University of South Carolina in 1984.