Research Statement
Rachael Goodwin
The power to lead, and its implications, complexities, and moral consequences, fascinates me. Past research has taught us much about how powerful leaders emerge and how power affects individuals and groups within organizations, but I believe there are still many important insights about power, particularly for minorities, whistleblowers, and victims, waiting to be uncovered. What power do observers’ moral values have to influence workplace perceptions of, and opportunities for, victims and whistleblowers? How do male majority groups affect women’s anticipated power or cognition (e.g. construal), and their subsequent desires to lead? My research speaks to these and other issues related to power, gender, cognition (i.e. construal), and leadership emergence. I also explore attitudes towards perpetrators and victims, whistleblowing, and unethical behaviors (e.g. sexual harassment, discrimination) that create obstacles for women (and other minorities) on their path toward leadership. I use survey-based field research, experimental paradigms, experience sampling, text analysis, qualitative interviews, and archival data analysis to investigate these important research questions.
Moral Perceptions of Victims, Perpetrators, and Whistleblowers
Social media and news cycles produce countless examples of indictments related to allegations of sexual harassment. We investigate the consequences of harassment denials for #MeToo victims, with Samantha Dodson, Michelle Chambers, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Morteza Deghani (University of Southern California), Jesse Graham, and Kristina Diekmann. Using a state-of-the-art neural network to code for moral language in our archival data sets, we use 324,783 Tweets to examine high-profile #MeToo accusations to reveal how alleged harassers’ responses to these accusations (apologies v. denials) affect public perception of victims and harassers. We find that denials are associated with higher levels of moral vice language toward victims, whereas apologies are associated with higher levels of moral virtue language toward victims. Our experimental data replicates these results and demonstrates that moral language mediates the relationship between responses and desire for future interaction with victims at work, supporting our findings that sexual harassers’ denials encourage moral vice language toward, and future mistreatment of, victims at work. This work was presented as a focal point for a symposium that won the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division Best Symposium Award (2020). This paper is currently under review at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While most people have intentions to report discriminatory and unethical acts, many do not. In a paper with Jesse Graham and Kristina Diekmann, we use Halmburger, Baumert, and Schmitt’s (2016) integrative model of moral courage to examine several individual difference variables (gender, trait moral courage, narcissism, agreeableness, and moral foundations) and one situational variable (multiple opportunities to report) that play an important role in taking morally courageous action against sexual harassment. We find that trait-like moral courage (positively) and narcissism (negatively) predict behaviors combatting sexual harassment. Our results provide insights into the psychological processes involved in the moral courage to oppose sexual harassment. Earlier this year, this work was published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology (2020).
Building on theories of deontic justice, I also research the workplace implications of himpathy – feelings of sympathy toward an alleged male perpetrator and feelings of anger toward a female victim of sexual misconduct (Manne, 2017). Working with Samantha Dodson, Michelle Chambers, Jesse Graham, and Kristina Diekmann, we use the context of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault by Judge Brett Kavanaugh to measure attitudes the day testimonies by both parties were given and a few weeks after the September 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. We find that higher endorsement of “binding values” (in-group loyalty, authority, and purity) predict increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims (Study 1). Observers’ high endorsement of binding foundations, are also more likely to feel himpathy, as they are more sympathetic toward Judge Kavanaugh and angry with Dr. Ford. Using a similar scenario but in an organizational context, we also found that anger toward the accusing victim of sexual misconduct and sympathy for the alleged perpetrator mediated the relationship between binding moral values and victim judgments (blame, responsibility, and credibility) (Studies 2-3). Importantly, we found a similar pattern of results in our #MeToo Twitter data (Study 4), wherein we randomly selected tweets to be blind-coded for the presence of anger and sympathy toward victims and perpetrators. We also find evidence that binding moral concerns indirectly influence observer’s support for levying punishments toward alleged perpetrators and victims of sexual misconduct (Studies 5-6). This work was recently presented at the Academy of Management (Aug 2020) and is currently under review at the Academy of Management Journal.
Building on this work, I examine the relationship between loyalty and whistleblower credibility with James Dungan (University of Chicago), Jesse Graham, and Kristina Diekmann. We identify a new mechanism for this relationship – psychological closeness. Despite systems in organizations to protect whistleblowers, whistleblowers still often face backlash. Part of the reason for this, is because whistleblowers are often seen as disloyal (Khan, 2018) rats, traitors, and snitches (Pope, 2018), and as such, people may not perceive them to be credible. In two pre-registered and replicated studies, examining Donald Trump’s whistleblower (Study 1) and Jeff Bezos’ whistleblower (Study 2), we predict and find that people loyal to the violator (Trump, Bezos), feel psychologically distant from their whistleblower, and subsequently, they will attribute greater blame, and less credibility, to the whistleblower. We examine similar relationships for whistleblower blame and employability. We show that loyalty moral concerns (i.e. loyalty in general, and loyalty to the violator) are particularly negatively related to perceptions of whistleblower credibility and employability, and that perceived psychological closeness to the violator help explain these relationships. We are currently in the process of developing an intervention to decrease psychological distance between observers and whistleblowers, to subsequently increase positive perceptions of whistleblowers at work. This work was recently presented at the International Association for Conflict Management annual meeting (2020).
Many of the above research projects related to moral perceptions were influenced by my earlier experiences writing a chapter on ethical values and attitudes, which was published in the Research Companion to Ethical Behavior in Organizations, Constructs and Measures (2014). In this chapter, my co-authors (James Carlson and Lori Wadsworth) and I explore the relationship between ethical values and attitudes, and we review and compare the research that emerged over the past several years, to outline future directions for organizational scholars to pursue.
Women and Leadership
This academic year (2020-2021), as a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School with the Women and Public Policy Program, I am collaborating with Hannah Riley Bowles (Harvard University) on developing a new theoretical framework for women’s crisis management while also completing my dissertation. My dissertation proposal was defended and accepted by all committee members earlier this year (June 2020). This dissertation uses construal level theory (Liberman & Trope, 2010) to investigate women’s likelihood to apply to majority male leadership opportunities. I theorize that women view a majority male leadership opportunity at a low construal because they expect they will have low power to influence others in such a context. In a pre-registered online study, I tested whether women considering majority male leadership opportunities are more likely to operate at low construal than men (Study 1), and I investigate whether this decreases women’s likelihood to apply to leadership (Study 2) compared to men. I also propose an online study to test whether women will be more likely to apply to leadership opportunities framed with low (vs. high) construal messages (Study 3a). As an alternative intervention, I further propose to test whether women will be more likely to apply to leadership opportunities framed with prevention (vs. promotion) focused messages (Study 3b). Finally, using a real-world leadership opportunity, I test whether women will be more likely to apply to leadership opportunities framed with low (vs. high) construal messages (Study 4). This dissertation suggests that women are less likely to apply to majority male leadership in part because they view the opportunity at a low construal, but they may be more likely to apply when the construal or the regulatory focus of language communicated in leadership recruiting materials fits with the low construal level women have when considering such leadership opportunities. To date, I have completed the first two studies for this dissertation. Data collection and analyses for the last two studies (field data) is estimated to be finished by the end of the year (December, 2020). I will defend this dissertation in May (2021). This research contributes increased theoretical and empirical understanding of why there still exists a discrepancy in the number of men versus women in leadership positions, and new insights for organizations wanting to increase women’s representation in organizational leadership. In the future, this research stream will also more broadly contribute to the literature on minority leadership emergence (e.g. with a focus on other types of minorities).
In another leadership project with Samantha Dodson, Cheryl Wakslak (USC), Jesse Graham, and Kristina Diekmann, we explore whether people tend to describe male leaders more abstractly, and view them as more visionary, than female leaders. Building on prior research showing that female leaders are perceived as less powerful than men (Carli, 1999), and that power acts as a form of distance that leads people to be construed more abstractly (Bar-Anan, Liberman, & Trope, 2006; Trope & Liberman, 2003), we propose that female leaders elicit less abstract construal than male leaders as evidenced in others’ descriptions of those leaders (i.e., the extent to which leaders are described using more concrete vs. abstract language). In two archival text analysis studies, one using RateMyProfessor.com student evaluations and the other using the New York Times Annotated Corpus, we find that male leaders are described more abstractly, compared to female leaders. Relatedly, using an Implicit Association Test, we also find that people implicitly associate women as detail-oriented, and men as visionary. Over the past several months we have been piloting experiments to understand how these construal elicitations may be associated with other gender differences in organizational outcomes (e.g. hiring decisions). We recently collected our last study for a hybrid IAT-experimental study, to identify how these implicit views of men and women leaders affect hiring decisions. This work was presented at the Academy of Management (Aug 2019). We are currently writing and editing our manuscript to submit it to the Academy of Management Journal.
To further increase our understanding of women and leadership, my co-authors and I investigate why women may have lower desires and intentions to apply for leadership in male-dominated domains. In a paper with Samantha Dodson, Jacqueline Chen, and Kristina Diekmann that was published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly (2020), we examine the interaction between gender and gender composition of the leadership opportunity on leader candidates’ expected interpersonal power, desire to lead, and intentions to pursue the leadership opportunity. Informed by research on gender and perceptions of power (Chen & Moons, 2015), and the model of goal directed behavior (Perugini & Bagozzi, 2001), we show that women, compared to men, expect less interpersonal power when applying for a leadership opportunity, but only for a majority male opportunity. This difference in expected interpersonal power explains why women have lower desires to lead and intentions to apply for a majority male leadership opportunities, compared to men. We emphasize the importance of increasing women’s expected interpersonal power to increase women’s representation in leadership. I am also currently writing a review paper building on this work to increase theoretical understanding of minorities’ desires, intentions, and behaviors toward leadership pursuit. This will be submitted to the Academy of Management Review.
Despite concerted attempts to increase workplace equity, workplace discrimination remains a ubiquitous problem in organizations (Cortina et al., 2013; Dipboye & Halverson, 2004). In an experience sampling project with Samantha Dodson, Kathryn Coll, Jesse Graham, and Wilhelm Hofman (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum), we investigate how modern workplace discrimination – low-level, subtle behaviors that isolate or handicap others – differentially affect employee power, self-esteem, and gender differences in attributions of workplace discrimination. Collecting data for over two years from various workplaces, we captured in-the-moment reports of discrimination at work to show that women are more likely to report experiencing a discriminatory event, compared to men, and these events decrease women’s feelings of state power, which then leads to lower state self-esteem. However, we also find that other blame attenuates the effects of lower power on state self-esteem, such that people who highly blame others are less likely to think lesser of themselves when thy feel powerless. Through survey signals and text messages, our experience sampling survey was completed over 2,600 times. This work was presented at the International Association of Conflict Management in July (2020), and it is currently in the writing stage, to be submitted the Journal of Applied Psychology in February (2021).
Future Work
In the next few years, I plan to conduct more research in each of my primary areas of research, and to expand my research streams. For example, with McKenzie Rees, Samantha Dodson, and Kristina Diekmann I am investigating the relationships between status, construal, and compassion, with the aim to discover a way to help leaders focus on status (rather than power) to increase compassion in the workplace. In one pilot study and another pre-registered study, we show that focusing on increased social status is related to increased compassion. In the coming months we will investigate whether leaders who focus on status think more concretely, and subsequently, are more compassionate than leaders who focus on power, who think more abstractly, and subsequently, are less compassionate. We will also explore the role of gender in the relationship between status and compassion. This paper was recently presented at the International Association for Conflict Management annual meeting (2020).
To further investigate the effect of intrapersonal power at work, I have been working with Jacqueline Chen and Ninjara Janardhanan (London School of Economics) to show that group members have less intrapersonal power in leadership groups when a single identity (e.g. gender) is made salient. Across three studies, we demonstrate that both men and women have low expected power when gender identity is salient, regardless of the gender composition of the group. We will continue to explore why this is, and how we can increase expected power of those who may be likely to focus on a gender identity in leadership groups. This work was presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in February (2020). This groups and teams project has been on hold for much of this year (because of the COVID-19 pandemic), but we hope opportunities to collect groups and teams data will soon improve.
While much of my research already uses multiple methods, I have a desire to continue to expand my knowledge of research methods, particularly via grounded theory and qualitative research, to capture rich data within organizations. Last year I teamed up with Joel Gardner and Lyndon Garrett (Boston College) to learn more about their approach to qualitative research. We have narrowed our questions of interest throughout the data collection process, to focus on the processes and outcomes of perfectionism. Interviewees reveal how job insecurity, demanding expectations, a focus on detail-orientation, and the high stakes environment in competitive ballet companies increase the cognitive load associated with the unattainable goal of perfecting movements. Subsequently, the processes of perfectionism leads dancers to experience a lack of self-compassion, poor mental health, inconsistent performance, and a lack of satisfaction with their work relationships, but not their work in general. In the future we hope to attenuate some of the negative effects associated with perfectionism at work with a self-compassion intervention. This project will be submitted to be submitted to the Positive Organizational Scholarship research conference (2021).
I have also teamed up with Alex Anderson and Cheryl Wakslak (USC) to collect and analyze field data from matching supervisors, supervisees, and coworker groups to examine how supervisors experiencing less power may be perceived by their employees as less effective supervisors because they avoid difficult conversations at work. In our first group of findings, from our data collection last fall (2020) we found that supervisors who perceive greater power at work feel more psychologically safe at work. In our second round of collecting field data this past fall (2021) with matching supervisors, supervisees, and coworkers, we found that psychological safety mediates the relationship between supervisors’ felt power at work and their willingness to address difficult conversations and issues. We are currently developing a series of experiments to pair with this field data, with the aim to increase supervisors’ willingness to tackle difficult issues at work. This research will be submitted as a conference presentation at the next annual Academy of Management meeting (2021).
While much of my research is situated in the gender domain, it has implications for theory and research on minority groups more broadly. For example, extending my work on reporting sexual harassment (Goodwin et al., 2020) with Devin Rapp, Kristina Diekmann, and Jesse Graham, we find that people who value individualizing values (care, fairness), are more likely to report sexual harassment than those who value binding values (loyalty, purity, authority). We are currently collecting data to identify whether this relationship between individualizing values and reporting discrimination also holds for other types of discrimination as well, including racial discrimination. We are currently piloting an intervention to help increase discrimination reporting. This work will be submitted as a conference presentation at the International Association for Conflict Management annual meeting (2021).
Conclusion
The power to lead is ubiquitous in organizations and is a critical determinant of organizational success. At an individual level, my research provides a more novel understanding of obstacles (e.g. discrimination) women encounter on their path to leadership; illustrating how, when, and why women’s power to lead may be thwarted. At the group level, my research provides further understanding of the link between group gender composition and expected power to lead. It also brings to light the conflicting influence of ingroup-loyalty and other moral values on perceptions of victims and whistleblowers. I am hopeful that my research will continue to help managers and employees to be more aware of the challenges that women, victims, and whistleblowers encounter at work. I also offer ideas to help employers understand how to increase workplace opportunities for these groups. Moving forward, I will continue to expand this work for both individuals and groups, and for minorities in general, by studying a broad array of topics (e.g. power, ethics, leadership, diversity) which are essential for empowering inclusive organizations.