About

Modern organizations are becoming increasingly flat and decentralized.  Practically speaking, such decentralized structures are the result of the widespread use of teams (rather than individuals) as a basic unit of work accomplishment.  Furthermore, the contemporary workforce is diversifying demographically at a rapid pace; more and more, organizations employ women, racial and ethnic minorities, and older individuals.  Thus, as organizations are becoming more team-based and demographically heterogeneous, one issue that arises is whether there are different implications of employing more versus less diverse teams of people.  Psychologists have long been interested in using team composition to predict group-level outcomes, but results from traditional psychometric research have been underwhelming, oftentimes indicating only minimal relations between seemingly consequential individual differences and work outcomes.  Our lab's research takes a multipronged, interdisciplinary approach to investigating issues involving diverse work teams, hybridizing psychological and network scientific theories and research methods.

​

Diversity in the Workplace

One of our primary research goals is to clarify the work-relevant implications of identifying as a member of a minority social group. Specifically, our lab is pursuing this goal via 2 independent streams of research: the first focusing on sexism in the workplace, and the second emphasizing invisible types of workplace diversity.

 

Benevolent Sexism and Women’s Work Outcomes

Sexism is alive and well in the contemporary workplace, where it takes on a variety of forms. The hostile variety—sometimes referred to as “old-fashioned” sexism—involves relatively unambiguous and identifiable displays of misogyny. Contrasting dramatically with unconcealed hostility, benevolent sexism is an (arguably) equally pernicious variety of sex-/gender-based discrimination at work. This involves a seemingly positive attitude toward women that, in reality, is actually sexist because it depicts women as weak, vulnerable, and in need of male protection. Benevolent sexism gains destructive momentum, in part, by hiding in plain sight. Symptomatically—while there is a clear disparity in hostile sexism between the genders—women are relatively embracing of benevolently sexist attitudes. However, while there has been ample research conducted on hostile sexism in the workplace, there have been a surprisingly few number of studies focusing on how benevolent sexism shapes work environments for women. Accordingly, our current primary stream of research attempts to unpack the relationship that benevolent sexism has to women’s affective, behavioral, cognitive, performance-based, and interpersonal work outcomes. 

 

Invisible Diversity at Work

We are also interested in exploring invisible individual differences that oftentimes go overlooked in the psychological literature, such as sexual orientation, disability status, socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, and nationality. Unlike visible stigmas such as race, which are superficially identifiable and therefore public knowledge, invisible stigmas lie below the surface and consequently go undetected unless the individual chooses to disclose them. For instance, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other non-heterosexual (i.e., LGBTQIA+) individuals are faced with the formidable challenge of invisible stigmatization in the contemporary workplace. Accordingly, our second stream of diversity-related research seeks to better understand the experiences of non-heterosexual individuals who are embedded in predominately heterosexual organizations.

 

Interdisciplinary, Self-Assembled, Virtual Work Teams

Contemporarily, there are a few major trends shaping organizations and work at a global level.  First, work groups are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary.  With simplistic jobs being redesigned (or performed by robots), the nature of work is getting progressively more complex.  One way managers are providing employees with the tools to tackle such formidable challenges is by creating interdisciplinary teams of workers, where individuals serve as representatives of their functional area of expertise. Second, modern teams are self-assembling with increasing frequency, meaning the component members are choosing to join forces with some degree of agency rather than being assigned to work with one another. Finally, globalization is serving to make the organizations across the world more tightly interconnected and—with the advent of the World Wide Web and web-related technologies—many work teams now function on a partially/strictly virtual basis. Based on these 3 trends in the workplace, our lab is interested in understanding the implications that team virtuality, interdisciplinarity, and assembly processes have for longitudinal team processes, interpersonal relationships, decision making, and—ultimately—performance.

​

Sleep and Teamwork

Modern-day employees are also working longer hours than ever before; currently, Americans clock more hours at work than either their parents or grandparents did.  The disproportionally large amount of time that today’s workers spend at work has two interesting implications: 1) individuals are spending a disproportionate amount of time socializing with coworkers, and 2) people have less time to devote to leisure activities, including sleep.

 

At the individual level, it is clear that sleep deprivation has a deleterious impact on workplace outcomes such as decision-making quality.  However, the impact of sleep quality on the team is a sparsely researched topic.  The majority of the extant team-level sleep literature has explored the inverse relation between sleep deprivation and performance in governmental teams such as Army, Navy, Air Force, and NASA teams. However, no research to date has attempted to unpack how sleep quality drives the formation of interpersonal relationships between teammates.

 

Recently, some teams researchers have begun to take notice of the potential practical application that health psychology topics have to their scholarly endeavors.  Most notably, Barnes and Hollenbeck (2009) brought to light the fact that sleep quality has not been adequately addressed in the teams literature, and called for a more thorough examination of how sleep impacts teamwork.  Thus, the purpose of this stream of research is to merge two disparate subfields of psychology—industrial-organizational and health—in order to answer the following question: how does individual sleep quality impact dyadic relationships, collective creativity, and decision-making in the workplace? Furthermore, our lab is interested in understanding how situational constraints such as stress may moderate these relations.