Research Statement

I investigate how organizations and leaders can combine cooperation and competition to design environments that maximize employee performance, motivation, and well-being.

Three obstacles hinder our ability to address it. First, no theoretical framework specifies the combined effects of encountering cooperative situations and competitive situations in the same environment. Second, different forms of cooperation and competition exist with different effects, which complicates decisions about how to structure cooperation and competition. Third, even if organizations change objective levels of cooperation or competition, employees may not subjectively perceive them as intended.

My research program is thus designed to tackle these obstacles in three interrelated streams of research. The first stream of research focuses on understanding how individuals navigate environments with inconsistent signals of cooperation and competition. The second stream identifies novel forms of cooperation and competition (e.g., rivalry) and novel consequences of cooperation and competition (e.g., autonomy). The third stream investigates the interpersonal and organizational challenges to designing such environments.