Academics

My academic experience has been different than most. Starting out as a computer science graduate, I abruptly pivoted toward engineering after a short career as an IT professional. I pivoted again toward web development after just a year as a traffic engineer, to help my engineering superiors keep their project management software initiative alive (squava.com). At the same time, I was gradually turning toward management. Throughout my careers and advanced degrees, I have spent much of my time coding and remain skilled and flexible at solving new problems. By completing a doctoral program in organizational behavior, I paired my technical ability with the skill to identify important questions and create both theory and empirical studies to address those questions.

Education

PhD, Business Administration (Management)
University of Iowa, Aug 2022

MS, Civil Engineering (Structures and Transportation)
Brigham Young University, Aug 2013

BS, Computer Science
Brigham Young University, Aug 2007

Interests

Listening – Listening, and particularly the experience of feeling heard, is the focus of my dissertation. Though listening is most often studied by Communication scholars, listening is a vital element of our workplace experiences. In addition, it is likely that the kind of listening required at work is different from the kind of listening that is most beneficial at home or at school. While we know quite a bit about what it takes to be a good listener, we know less about what is required to help other people feel heard, and whether those requirements change based on the setting. My hope is to both help listeners understand their speakers and help them communicate to their speakers that they are listening, in real time and over time. Workplaces and societies stand to benefit greatly as we learn to help one another feel heard.

Self-leadership – Ever since reading the first three habits of The 7 Habits of Highly-Effective People, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of self-leadership. Questions like, “What is it that would inspire me to completely and consistently change my behavior,” “What has wounded me so deeply that I would consistently do (or not do) this particular thing,” and “What is it about my present perspective that might be preventing me from living up to the privileges I might otherwise have,” have excited me for quite a while now. I’m fascinated by mission statements, the effectiveness of courses on leadership, the power of articulating a vision, and the realities of executing that vision sustainably.

Negotiation – Perhaps my first introduction to management came as I took the Dynamics of Negotiation from Professor Rachael Goodwin at Brigham Young University. The principles excited me then. The potential fascinates me now. Not only do I hope to be a better negotiator someday but I hope to teach many to learn to use their skill to help both sides of the negotiation get what they really want and be better off together.

Engineering – The challenge of discovering, understanding, and often repairing mechanical things continues to fascinate me. I particularly love optimizing things and my “rabbit hole” fixation is usually upon some sort of local maximum or minimum (i.e., I don’t try new ideas as often as I try to make the current ideas as good as they possibly can be). As a recent example, two days ago I transformed code that was going to take 3 min 16 s per group into code that takes 11 s per group. Given that there are more than 900 groups, this is a significant transformation and was very exciting to me. It meant that code that previously took more than 4 hours to run (it didn’t finish) now takes less than 20 mins. In addition, this code allows us to analyze data pertaining to team membership and turnover that we otherwise would not be able to analyze.

Research

Toward Feeling Heard: Workplace Consequences of Meeting Speaker Expectations for Functional and Emotional Support – Dissertation research under consultation with Eean Crawford (Chair), Daniel Newton, Rong Su, Jennifer Nahrgang Craig, and Stephen Courtright; Proposal date: 28 Jan 2022.

Supervisor-Supervisor Fit: How Co-Leaders’ Behavioral Fit Impacts Team Coordination and Cohesion – Ongoing research with Stephen Reid, Troy Smith, Stephen Courtright, and Shawn McClean; final data analysis / early writing stage. To be presented at SIOP 2022.

Climate-Focused Diversification: How Organizations Respond to the Climate Change Challenge Through Impression Management of Strategic Change – Ion B. Vasi, Bradley Mecham, Kang Pyo Lee, and Stephen Reid; writing phase.

Fortune 500 Companies and Their Public-facing CSR Communication – Ongoing research with Bodi Vasi, Stephen Reid, and Kang Pyo Lee; late data collection phase.

“Multiple Team Membership and Unit Performance, a Longitudinal Examination – Third-year paper, with Eean Crawford, Greg L Stewart, and Daniel Newton; Completion date: 25 Jan 2022.

The Stabilizing and Destabilizing Effects of Multiple Team Membership on Unit Turnover – Ongoing research with Eean Crawford, Greg L Stewart, Michael Montanye, and Thomas Ptashnik; theory and writing stage.

Provider Burnout Following Listening to Patients – Ongoing research with Daniel Newton and Greg L Stewart; data collection and analysis stage.

Developing New Measures for Research on Impression Management – Data collection and analysis using R under Bodi Vasi with Kang Pyo Lee; awarded Iowa Initiative for Artificial Intelligence ($10,000) grant, Nov 2019.

A Longitudinal Examination of Multiple Team Membership and Unit Performance – Data collection and analysis using R under Eean Crawford with Greg L Stewart; Presented in a symposium at the 2019 annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston, Massachusetts.

Making Sense of Sustainability: Justification and Transparency in Oil and Gas Companies’ CSR Strategies – Research under Bogdan Vasi and Sara Rynes-Weller, with Inga Popovaite; Presented at the 2019 INFORMS Organization Science Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Also to be presented at the 2019 EGOS Colloquium in Edinburgh, UK.

Speaking Up in the Presence of Subgroups: When and Why Team-Level Voice Impacts Individual-Level Performance – Data collection under Christina Li, Brady Firth, and Amy Kristof-Brown with Michael Montanye; Presented in a symposium at the 2018 annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Chicago, Illinois.

The intrapersonal effects of anger expression on moral emotion and subjective value in negotiation – Data collection for David Hunsaker, Dr. McKenzie Rees (Notre Dame), and Dr. Teng Zhang (McNeese State University), University of Utah, Late 2016

Eye tracking in negotiation: Tracing the effects of anger on negotiator eye movements – Data collection for David Hunsaker, Dr. Trafton Drew, and Dr. Elizabeth Tenney, University of Utah, Early 2016

Teaching Philosophy

I like teaching classes, but what really gets me going is application. I love it when our time together doesn’t just result in discoveries that blow your mind but in practices that change your life. Do I have any experiences with this? In my Leadership and Personal Development class, I helped the students see themselves differently, develop mission statements, adopt daily habits, and interact with others better. In my Dynamics of Negotiation class I helped the students get beyond bargaining over positions and see negotiations as opportunities for both parties to benefit from the interaction.

My Great Adventure