Organizational Behavior & Human Resources Management

Description of the video:

My research falls within the broad field of organizational behavior, and I'm very interested in leadership and leadership processes. And under that umbrella of leadership, I tend to look at ambivalence or cognitive tensions. Individuals can hold positive and negative evaluations about a situation, and that creates this cognitive tension. So I tended to look at how ambivalence influences leadership processes and how the leader interacts with followers. So one of my most recent projects, we looked into leadership ambivalence and the impact of that in team performance. And we found that when leaders experience ambivalence, their teams perform better. And one of the reasons for that is because the leaders tended to ask more questions, right? The leaders are still trying to figure out, they experience that cognitive flexibility, that behavioral flexibility that they needed to understand all the pieces, all the information before making decisions. And when the leaders are experiencing this ambivalence and asking questions, they are role modeling helping behaviors. So their followers also ask more questions among themselves, they uncover hidden information, they anticipate some potential issues that they would face in the projects, and because of that, they perform better. The project, in the end, the performance of the team is better. And this particular effect is important when the projects are interdependent and complex. And guess what? Leaders are important in those particular situations. So to test the research model that I've just described, we conducted a few studies. In one of them we called lab study, or laboratory experiment, we manipulated the leader ambivalence for some of the participants. And for the other participants, we didn't. we actually manipulated indifference and for participants that were in the ambivalence condition they actually interacted more with the followers and their teams performed better compared to the teams that they were led by an indifferent leader we also partnered with consulting company to conduct a field study. And for that particular study, we sent surveys early in the project to the leaders. So we captured their ambivalence state very early in the life of the project. And then we followed those projects over time. About two months Later, we measured leaders seeking behaviors from the followers and also measured followers seeking behavior among themselves. And then two months later, we measured team performance. So yes, to test this model, we conducted different studies, used different methodology, lab experiments, and also field studies.

Description of the video:

My research interests focus in three primary areas. So I look at emotions and affect in the workplace, things like emotional regulation and emotional labor, so when we would have to fake or modify our emotions to meet display demands in our environment. I also look at justice in the workplace, so how we feel about our boss, perceptions and behaviors, and how that might affect how we actually engage in work. And then I also look at decision-making biases, so biases like escalation of commitment, when we might continue with a failing course of action because it's really tied to our identity or we've spent a lot of time working on it already. So one project I'm really excited about right now is investigating the idea of malicious compliance. So malicious compliance is an idea that exists outside of scholarship. We can think of this as seeing, driving by maybe a car wash and seeing on the sign someone saying, you know, my boss told me to change this sign, so I did, right? Right. So it's following the spirit or rather the like ignoring the spirit of the law and following instead kind of what you want to do or kind of rule you might want to prove differently like this. And so this is a really interesting thing because we tend to think about bad behaviors in the workplace as being stuff that violates organizational rules. And malicious compliance is the opposite of that. It's it's circumstances where we're actually following the rules, but we're hurting the organization as a result. So an example of this could be someone who's been working in an organization for, let's say, 10 years, and technically he's not allowed to wear shorts to the workplace, but he doesn't interface with clients. There's no reason he should not be able to wear shorts, and so he does, and it's never been a problem. However, he gets a new boss who says, not allowed to wear shorts anymore. You have to wear pants, and he looks really closely at the employee manual, and there's nothing about him not being able to wear a skirt, and so he wears a skirt. He writes a beautiful kilt with lots of colors, and he shows up, and his manager is like, this is not according to what we said. He looks in the manual and he says, look, look more closely. I'm very much allowed to do this. And so, again, not following maybe the spirit of what the rule was intended, but following the letter of the law to prove a point. And this is something I find really interesting. I look at this both from a qualitative and quantitative perspective, so people's descriptions of malicious compliance, as well as how they might measure it. Thank you.