Advance

SPRING 2014

Advance, Cornell ILR School's publication for alumni and friends.

Issue link: https://advance.epubxp.com/i/362921

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 7 of 15

Assistant Professor, Department of Organizational Behavior How did you frst get interested in researching trust in organizations? When I was an undergraduate, I did an internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital. I sat in on meetings where I observed different levels of status and sources of power in the room, but everyone had the same goal — caring for the patient. This got me inter- ested in how people with the same goals could build trust and overcome barriers. What are some of the issues you explore around building trust at work? A lot of my work examines building trust in situations where one group poses a threat to another's identity, and looking at the emotional reactions people have. Consider marketing staff and engineers. The marketers want to market a product a certain way, but the engineers might see it differently. I am uncovering how people regulate other people's emotions to relieve threats and to signal, "I really want to work together." Is there a discovery that stands out for you? In work I was involved in at Massachusetts General Hospital and with MIT, we were looking at "hand-offs" — when one medical provider transfers responsibility for a patient to another medical provider. Our focus was on analyzing people's voices. We found that it was not just what they said that had an impact on the quality of the hand-off, but how they said it — in other words, how the sound of their voice communicated that they were engaged in the conversation. Are there research questions that you want to address in the future? I'd like to look more closely at the role of emotions in organizations, and how emotions like compassion, empathy and guilt can help us coordinate work. In some organizations and lines of work, there can be this idea that you should leave emotion at the door. But, it might be that certain emotions can actually help people work better together. In addition to investigating trust and emotion, I want to con- tinue exploring both how and when gender diversity helps project teams and small businesses thrive. Did you ever want to be something other than an educator and researcher? Having an academic career has always been my interest. The biggest challenge in college was fnding the right feld. I discovered organizational behavior when I worked on a learning organization project designed to help inner-city school teachers develop leadership skills. This experience provided an intellectually rigorous environment, and I saw that I could make a difference in people's lives. I knew this was for me. 6

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Advance - SPRING 2014