Research

Generally, my research tries to answer the question: "Why do people do 'bad things' at work?" Specifically within the context of these three topics:

1. Workplace mistreatment: My PhD focused on workplace bullying, a severe form of interpersonal mistreatment. I am also interested in and have done work with other, related concepts, such as abusive supervision, incivility, and customer mistreatment.

2. Bystanders: There's a lot of research on workplace mistreatment as a dyadic (i.e., two-person) phenomenon, but workplaces are social arenas and employees may witness others being mistreated. I am interested in understanding what causes bystanders to respond in certain ways and how these responses worsen, or improve, the bullying process. 

3. Unethical behaviour: I am interested in the field of behavioural ethics. I study other forms of organisational deviance, such as counterproductive work behaviour and its antecedents. I am also interested in understanding how we conceptualise unethical behaviour: What does 'unethical' mean, and for whom? How do we justify doing unethical things? Do we even see ourselves as committing ethical wrongdoings (e.g., through moral disengagement)? 

I try to answer these questions from a psychological perspective using primarily quantitative methods.  

Outside the above areas, I am interested and have experience in workplace safety and intervention evaluation research. I am also the academic advisor on an MKTP grant studying team agility.