“Trying to Get to What’s True”: The Value of Research

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Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.

Kevin Cool: Hi everybody. Kevin Cool here, host of If/Then, a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. We hope you’ve enjoyed our second season. Today, we have something extra, a special bonus episode featuring Deborah H. Gruenfeld. Deborah is a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior who recently became a senior associate dean at the GSB. I spoke to her during our first season for an episode about navigating workplace power dynamics. Power is one of her areas of expertise. We invited her back to talk about research, why it matters, and how it improves our work and our lives. I hope you enjoy it.

Well, first of all, thank you for being here. This is your second visit to our show, it’s great to have you back.

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: It’s great to be here.

Kevin Cool: I want to start with just a very fundamental question, which is, why is academic research important?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Yeah, thank you for asking. It’s a great question, and it’s one that seems to be more important today than it has been for a long time. The easiest way for me to address that question is to say that one of the key challenges with survival is to understand the world around us and to understand cause-effect relationships in the world, and we all as individuals have learned most of the things that we know through firsthand experience, and what we learned through firsthand experience often does not generalize to the rest of the world. So the nice thing about research is that it provides tools and methods and an approach to learn about what’s true in the world, taking into account that what we learned from firsthand experience is not reliable, and so research helps us build a body of knowledge about what’s actually true that we can trust.

Kevin Cool: And how would you say that research, and let’s talk specifically about the business school now, what difference does that research make? In other words, when it gets out into the world, how do those insights become influential or impactful?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Yeah. One of the ways in which the research at the business school, I think, is impactful and makes a difference is evident in some research that you discussed on an episode of the podcast this year with Amir Goldberg and his research on organizational culture. A lot of organizations struggle with the challenge of innovation and becoming more innovative, and everybody understands that one of the greatest challenges to innovation is culture.

And his research basically looked at the question of, where are new ideas coming from in the organization? Are they coming from people at the fringes of the organization, are they coming for people at the center of the organization? And by collecting a gigantic amount of data, where he was able to control for factors that might explain effects that were separate from what he was measuring, enabled him to identify very clearly that innovation tends to come from the outside of organizations, and to look a little bit into why those innovations weren’t having the effect that they were able to have. So it’s a great example of using research to get a handle on some really burning questions that organizations have been struggling with for a long time.

Kevin Cool: And is it important that the research, say, coming out of the GSB, or really most research institutions, is not proprietary? In other words, it’s not coming from a corporation that would then try to leverage that for their own needs, does that make a difference?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: It definitely makes a difference, and we think one of the key practices among academic researchers is that we always have to take steps in designing our research to counter our own biases and our own hopes about what the outcomes of our research are going to be, and that’s a very difficult thing to do if you’re trying to understand what causes certain kinds of effects and you have a real investment in the answer to that question. So yeah, it’s a very important aspect of the way science is conducted within the GSB and elsewhere, that the practices around it, the ability to get your research published in a peer-reviewed journal, it all requires that you have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect against the possibility that you’re discovering what you hope is true.

Kevin Cool: In a nutshell, you can believe it, right?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Yes, that’s right, reliable and also generalizable. People often learn firsthand lessons about their own organizations, or may even do research in their organizations, that they falsely assume applies to other organizations because they don’t understand that there are very specific circumstances in which they’re operating. And so, what’s true for them may not be true more broadly, or even what was true for them in this instance is not going to be true next time. One of the things that’s been observed is that for companies that go through mergers and acquisitions and have a successful outcome once, they tend to use mergers and acquisitions again and again and again, assuming that they were successful because they’re good at it.

Kevin Cool: Right, go back to the well.

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: That’s right.

Kevin Cool: So you’ve listened to the episodes from our second season, they were all, to me, quite interesting and I learned so much. But Brian Lowery’s, for example, was so different than some of the others and comes at an angle that was very unusual, he talked about the self and how that actually matters if you’re a business leader or managing an organization. I’m just curious, what do you enjoy about learning about your colleagues’ research and ideas?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Yeah. It’s a great question, and I’m just grinning over here because I love the way Brian thinks and his approach to that question about the self is very philosophical, and a few steps removed, if you don’t think deeply about it, from what managers might care about. We have a tendency, when we’re managing someone, to look at their outcomes and attribute all of their outcomes to something stable in the person. So we say, “That person is great with numbers, not a good people person. I can see leadership potential in this person, but I can’t see it in that person.” And we have a tendency to think of the potential of a person in terms of things that are fixed inside them.

And part of what Brian’s approach made me think about was how the things we say to the people we manage actually influence who they are and how they develop. The impact of the manager is much more profound, actually, on an individual’s success in an organization than that manager might realize. So that’s what it made me think about, was how managers may underestimate the approach they take to interacting with their subordinates, they may underestimate the impact on what they say and how they relate to those people on how they perform in the future.

Kevin Cool: So one of the misperceptions I had when I came to the GSB, having been at Stanford a long time, but having not really been familiar with the business school itself, I assumed that a lot of the research centered on economics or management practices, and to some degree, that’s true, but it’s been remarkable to me the breadth and range of topical areas, subject areas and disciplines that research at the GSB covers, social psychology, politics, you name it, on and on and on. What does that breadth say, one, about what business schools need to be focused on at this point, and then how does that breadth translate into the wider world?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: I think what the breadth of research expertise you see in the business school here indicates is that there is an appreciation and understanding for the complexity of causality in outcomes around business, and there are many ways to look at what are the underlying causes of effectiveness, for example, what are the underlying causes of failures and ineffectiveness, and people trained in different disciplines have different lenses through which they ask these questions. And when people are running a business or trying to manage a business, like a researcher in a particular area, they know what they know, they have the expertise that they have, but they aren’t able to evaluate the impact of factors that would never occur to them.

There are so many ways to understand what matters in terms of running organizations effectively, and having multiple perspectives allows you to have a greater breadth. So for example, our students who come here know how to think about organizational effectiveness and what really matters from the point of view of accounting and finance and marketing, but also psychology and economics and politics and all of these topics. So they’re coming out of the business school with a much more well-rounded perspective on business than many business leaders would otherwise have. The hope is that they’re more sophisticated in their ability to understand causality in the problems that they’re facing on the job.

Kevin Cool: It almost sounds to me like what you’re describing is not even necessarily a choice or an emphasis, but an imperative, right, because it is a complicated world?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I wish I knew the history, I suspect a lot of business schools don’t think about training business leaders in this way. But I think we’re very fortunate and it’s one of the facets of the GSB that distinguishes us from some of our competitors is how much we believe in the idea that researchers who are trained in disciplines unrelated to business on the surface have very useful insights about how business works and how to intervene in ways that would lead to effectiveness.

Kevin Cool: So given that complexity and assuming that it’s not going to get less complex going forward, what gives you confidence that this research will continue to matter and to make a difference?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: There’s a great synergy at the GSB between faculty and students and the fact that we have to face one another regularly in the classroom, they push us and we push them. And we come into the classroom with the knowledge and expertise that we have and the ideas that we have about what important problems are and how to approach them, and they challenge us sometimes on that and tell us about their experiences in their organizations, and they let us know about things happening on the ground that we would never know. So I think it’s a really nice synergy in that way.

Kevin Cool: So we have a new season coming up, if you were just in the chair as a listener, maybe you have specific research that’s out there that we haven’t covered yet, what do you think we should include?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Great question. I don’t think you’ve spoken with Ashley Martin. So Ashley has a bunch of interesting projects that you might want to look at. One has to do with gendering of objects and gendering of technology products in particular, so things like why does Siri have a female voice and how does the design of products that has gender imbued in it affect people’s responses to the products, and she has a bunch of interesting findings. She finds that people are more attracted to products that have a gender, they’re more attracted to female objects than male objects, and she talks about that a little bit, but there’s some very interesting implications there for consumer behavior in particular. I’m working on a paper on grace and I’m going to be collecting some data on grace.

Kevin Cool: That’s a fascinating topic.

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: It’s like the opposite of power.

Kevin Cool: And goodness knows we need more of it right now.

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: 100%. It’s a topic that really fell out of favor after World War II. People associated the idea of grace with manners and etiquette, and it seemed elitist, instead of performing for one another in a way that makes everybody maximally comfortable, we should just try to be ourselves. And I think some of what we’re seeing in society today is a reflection of the consequences of not thinking it’s important to act in ways that put others at ease.

Kevin Cool: Yeah. Part of what I was eager to have you talk about was just those things that you just did, because you get very animated when you’re talking about these, and it reminds me of, I think, part of the reason we even work at a place like the GSB, is there’s this innate optimism to research and the research enterprise, people are trying to solve problems, and in some cases, sometimes they literally change the way we view something forever, right?

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Yes, absolutely, I think that’s right. Just to articulate what that excitement looks like for me is there’s just a real joy in discovery and also rediscovering things. So having the opportunity to see the world anew over and over again is very exciting to me, so there is something very optimistic about it. But it’s also there’s joy in the creative process, and some of it is very much problem-focused and some of it really is just more focused on trying to get to what’s true, and I think all of us who enter careers in science are hooked by that question. And sometimes it takes us in directions that don’t seem obviously applicable to solving problems, but the answers to the questions about what’s actually true are important nonetheless, even if you can’t figure out exactly how to apply them today.

Kevin Cool: Well, thank you so much for being here with us again, it was a delight again to speak with you, and yes, good luck in this new role and everything that goes along with that.

Deborah H. Gruenfeld: Thank you, Kevin. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Cool: If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. I’m your host, Kevin Cool. Our show is written and produced by Making Room and the content and design team at the GSB. Our managing producers are Michael McDowell and Elizabeth Wyleczuk-Stern. Executive producers are Sorel Husbands Denholtz and Jim Colgan. Sound design and additional production support from Mumble Media and Aech Ashe. A special thanks to all those who made this second season of If/Then possible.

For more on our faculty and their research, find Stanford GSB online at gsb.stanford.edu, or on social media @StanfordGSB. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider sharing it with a friend or colleague, and remember to subscribe to If/Then wherever you get your podcasts, or leave us a review, it really helps other listeners find the show. We’d also love to hear from you. Is there a subject you’d like us to cover, something that sparked your curiosity, or a story or perspective that you’d like to share? Email us at ifthenpod@stanford.edu. That’s I-F-T-H-E-N-P-O-D, @stanford.edu. Thanks for listening.