What are typical work hours here?
Do teammates do things together outside work?
If I have an idea for changing something, what’s the best way to raise it?
Those are questions a new member of any organizational team might have.
How they get those questions answered has been a topic of interest to Dale T. Miller, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor of organizational behavior; Jennifer Dannals, who received her PhD from Stanford GSB in 2018 and is now an assistant professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth; and Emily Reit, a current Stanford GSB doctoral student.
Those are questions a new member of any organizational team might have.
“A common assumption is that people just copy the behavior of the highest-ranking leaders in a group, rather than paying attention to anyone else,” Dannals says. “That’s always rubbed me the wrong way, partly because I hadn’t done that as a PhD student within the academic hierarchy. I believed lower-ranked people matter more in our perceptions of social norms.”
“Clearly, leaders have many avenues of influence,” Miller says. “But in this case, we thought lower-ranking people might have an advantage.”
Study co-leads are, Jennifer Dannals, a 2014 Lieberman Fellow, and Em Reit, a 2020 Lieberman Fellow.
