Benjamin Ostrowski

PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior & Theory at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University

Goal: Address wicked challenges by understanding how to formulate effective problems, enhance creativity through collaboration, facilitate rapid adaptation, and reliably collect, analyze, and present data.

In a world driven by innovation and increasingly powered by teamwork, understanding how organizational teams leverage skills and expertise is crucial to helping solve society's biggest problems. I am motivated to help teams tackle challenges in a variety of contexts by formulating novel and useful problems, generating connections across domains, and making the most of their talents and resources.

In my dissertation, which received the Paul S. Goodman Doctoral Dissertation Award, I am particularly interested in examining two interrelated research questions:

  • How do organizational teams formulate the problems that they go on to solve?

  • How do these teams leverage their talents and resources when solving those problems?

I employ field- and lab-based methodologies to answer my motivating questions, including field experiments, archival data analysis, surveys, inductive qualitative analyses, and laboratory experiments. This approach combines the rich contextualization of field-based work with the precision of lab-based work, thereby providing a more comprehensive understanding of my phenomena of interest.

My research has been supported by grants from the U.S. Army Research Office and the Office of Naval Research, been featured in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, and I have analyzed data from and consulted for a number of field sites, including engineering research centers, health care facilities, improv comedy theaters, and innovation contest organizations. It has been a pleasure to work closely as an advisee of Dr. Anita Woolley.

Outside of research, I am the executive director of SCORE, a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization promoting racial equity in my home state of CT.


Research Topics

  • Enhancing creativity through collaboration

  • Capitalizing on expertise

  • Understanding how to formulate effective problems

  • Facilitating rapid adaptation

Education

  • A.B., Psychology, Brown University, 2017

  • M.Sc., Organizational Behavior & Theory, Carnegie Mellon University, 2019

  • Ph.D. Candidate, Organizational Behavior & Theory, Carnegie Mellon University, Exp. 2022