About me

I grew up in Western Massachusetts and went to undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania to study psychology with a focus on group dynamics. After doing research in a behavioral economics lab and on social psychology with Professor Paul Rozin, I found my way to working with Professor Sigal Barsade in the Management department. After taking several doctoral classes with her during my senior year and conducting a senior honors thesis I was hooked and knew I wanted to pursue a PhD in Organizational Behavior. After working briefly for Capital One in Washington, DC, I returned to Penn to complete a PhD.

To enable both team effectiveness and well-being, scholars suggest that individuals should manage their emotions at work. Despite this imperative, teams within organizations often struggle to manage their emotional dynamics given the challenges of social hierarchy. On the one hand, teams often follow the anti-emotion norms of bureaucratic hierarchy and suppress their emotions, which has harmful consequences for burnout and performance. On the other hand, when teams do allow the expression of emotions, norms for expression may often prioritize the emotional experience of leaders and powerful members of the social hierarchy, reinforcing power disparities that suppress information-sharing, produce conflict, and increase loneliness. Thus, managing emotions within social hierarchy is a complicated – and oftentimes problematic – endeavor for individuals and teams at work. In my work I seek to understand how team members can collaborate across the social hierarchy through interpersonal emotions and social relationships to create more empathetic, diverse, and effective teams and organizations.

In my first stream of research, I seek to understand how teams collectively engage in bottom-up processes to construct themselves through shared emotion culture and mental models of membership. In particular, I investigate how interpersonal emotions and social relationships facilitate these bottom-up processes. In my second stream of research, I investigate when and how interpersonal emotions and social hierarchy combine to facilitate team effectiveness. I explore how leaders sequencing positive emotions during team early team life and negative emotions around the midpoint as well as team members managing leader emotions are both critical interpersonal emotional behaviors that positively impact team member performance. I propose that contextual factors such as timing, ordering, and team member behaviors impact the interpretation and effectiveness of emotion-laden behaviors. In my third stream of research, I seek to understand how emotional accountability provides a means through which individuals, and leaders in particular, can take personal responsibility for how their emotions impact others. Whereas work on emotion contagion and interpersonal emotions explores how our emotions may impact others, this work does not consider how people may feel different levels of accountability for that impact. I argue and find evidence that feeling accountability for the impact of one’s emotions on others may change how individuals manage their emotions, and in doing so, positively impact critical outcomes such as team effectiveness. I address the research questions above both theoretically and empirically, employing a variety of methods including longitudinal multi-source field surveys, team field-experiments, laboratory experiments, and conceptual papers.