Research & Projects

Listening to music at work is common and affects employee decisions and behaviors. I investigate how music influences individuals' instigated and prosocial actions at work. For example, I have current projects addressing the following:

• How does music listening affect others' perceptions of the focal listeners and, in turn, affect workplace dynamics, including coworker support? 

• How does the type of music affect individuals' task contributions? 

• How do song lyrics affect prosocial or self-interested decisions at work? 

To answer these questions, I use Spotify-based manipulations, data from Spotify (a popular music streaming platform), the stock market, and creative experiments. I intend to do further research on this area to explore how music can prevent employees from engaging in prosocial actions or result in receiving fewer prosocial actions from others.

This stream examines how social and task contexts, such as hierarchy or task uncertainty, shape prosocial actions. For example, I have current projects addressing the following:

• When and why high-status individuals are more likely to intervene against a mistreating supervisor? 

• Who is recognized and conferred leadership in teams and when based on task complexity: individuals who are actually competent or those with high socio-economic status? 

• Do hierarchies arise due to disciplinary background, and how does it hinder individual contributions in multi-disciplinary teams? 

I answer these questions by using creative in-person experiments, team-based or dyadic field studies, and archival studies. I intend to conduct further research to examine (a) when and why individuals' status or power portfolios can result in them being more or less prosocial at work and (b) develop interventions for prosocial hierarchy formations.

Self-regulation is a critical driver of prosocial behavior as burnout decreases prosociality. For example, I have current projects addressing the following:

• Is our existing burnout conceptualization accurate, and how can we measure it better? (this is part of my work as part of the Burnout Assessment Tool Consortium )

• How do individuals balance work demands and breaks during the day? Specifically, when do these attempts fail and backlash, leading to burnout?

I answer these questions through traditional field studies and experimental experiential sampling method studies. In the future, I intend to explore when some well-being constructs we deem harmful, such as mental distance, can be adaptive responses in certain situations and enable employees to stay prosocial at work. 

My dissertation focuses on the intersection of task context, music, and self-regulation. It introduces the improvisation mindset as a counterintuitive but highly effective strategy for dealing with task uncertainty, thus improving employee performance under uncertainty. 

I developed several (in-person, personal, ChatGPT-based) interventions and tested my ideas across five studies (one assumption check, one validation, and three online and in-person studies). I found that when this mindset is activated, individuals perceive uncertain tasks as if there were no uncertainty regarding their appraisals they improve better. My future studies will examine the durability of my mindset interventions and their relative efficacy over other mindsets, such as the growth mindset.