The Ethnography of Organizational Change

Q: What are the key questions guiding your work?

A driving interest for me is how organizations can change for the better—to be more effective and desirable places to work.

I’ve completed several research projects that look at how people who have expertise and knowledge, but not formal authority or positional power, can have their ideas heard and acted upon to improve how their organizations function.

I’ve also done research on how people can collaborate effectively across professional boundaries—how they can bridge different departments, roles, priorities, backgrounds and ways of seeing the world to meet common organizational goals.

Q: How do you approach these questions?

I’m an organizational ethnographer. My approach is to immerse myself in the lived experience of people in organizations through on-site observations and in-depth interviewing. This type of ethnography is a systematic, rigorous way of documenting people’s work lives in order to inductively find ways of addressing organizations’ and employees’ challenges.

I’m drawn to complex real-world problems. In the early days of COVID, I did a project with a hospital as part of a team of faculty and doctoral students at SOM to understand the process that allowed the implementation of changes proposed by frontline workers that improved both the pandemic response and overall operations. I’m finishing research looking at ways that women working in male-dominated fields can be allies for other women.

But I can’t simply pursue questions that I find compelling; I have to find organizations that are courageous and curious enough to open their doors to an outside researcher. The field work can take years to complete, and I need ongoing access to all levels of the organization. In exchange, organizations get an objective, third-party take on things that they’re struggling with and the chance to uncover root causes and potential solutions.

Q: What’s it like to do the work?

When you read about organizations and organizational dynamics in a textbook, it all sounds so rational and orderly. But as everyone who has worked in an organization knows, there are subcultures, politics, and hierarchies. Navigating all that isn’t orderly or completely rational.

I think ethnography is a really important way to keep our theories about organizations grounded in reality. It does that by capturing the full richness and complexity of organizational life.

In terms of what it’s like to do the work of documenting that complexity, organizational ethnography forces humility. When I enter a research site, I think maybe I have a sense of what the solutions to the problems will be. But inevitably, as I start to go deeper into the complex web of organizational relations and power dynamics, I’ll realize I don’t even fully understand the problem, let alone have answers, at the beginning of a project.

It’s very humbling, but inspiring too— constantly being exposed to new ideas, learning from the wisdom of people who are different than me. I love getting to spend time thinking deeply about puzzles and challenges people in organizations are facing and how to make progress on them.

Q: Would you give an example?

I conducted a multi-year ethnographic study of mental healthcare delivery to active-duty soldiers in the U.S. Army as part of an interdisciplinary team. The high suicide rate among soldiers and veterans had been widely reported. Clearly mental health in the military is important, but I was particularly interested because despite the military spending billions of dollars to address the issue, things weren’t improving.

When I first joined the project, I began by observing and interviewing a broad range of services to get a picture of all the different things being done to improve soldier mental health care—outpatient mental health, inpatient mental health, resilience trainings, substance abuse support, and so on.

There were so many different ways to approach the problem, but through spending time on the ground, I learned that one of the top things that mattered for soldiers to get better was their company commander allowing them to leave work to go to their mental health appointments and follow the recommendations that their mental health provider made—to, say, sit out a stressful training exercise or not be around weapons while they were recovering.

Suddenly, this big, wide-open project narrowed down to this core leverage point of understanding what organizational structures and relationship-building tactics would let company commanders and outpatient mental health providers work together in ways that benefited soldiers most.

Q: What did the structures look like?

I examined three different structures. In one, the mental health providers embedded with a brigade. In another, a pool of providers worked with soldiers from every company within a brigade. And finally, in a third structure, providers were assigned to work with the commanders and soldiers of specific battalions within a brigade. That was the organizational structure that worked best. It most effectively fostered collaborative relationships between mental health providers and commanders.

The embedded structure led to providers being co-opted. The pooling system didn’t support collaboration between providers and commanders; both groups held onto negative stereotypes about the other. In the structure that had commanders and mental health providers assigned to work together, they got to know each other. The company commanders were generally super-macho men in their 20s and 30s. They had the power to accept or reject providers’ recommendations. They were evaluated on their company’s mission readiness, and some mental health treatments meant soldiers were not counted as mission ready. The mental health providers were civilians, typically older, and more than half were women.

Once they began working closely together, many providers quickly understood and reflected back to commanders, “He does care about his soldiers. He and his company also have this important mission, for example to build bridges in Afghanistan, and these are the challenges they’re facing.” And commanders saw that providers supported the mission and really could help their soldiers get better. It just put everyone in a different space and helped them come up with more win-win solutions. At the same time, these mental health providers regularly engaged with their fellow clinician colleagues in their clinics to avoid becoming coopted by the needs of the more powerful commanders.

Q: The research you published based on that work won awards. It’s being taught to PhD and MBA students at top schools. Those are markers of the work having an impact. How do you think about impact?

I’m proud of the work I do. It means a lot to me to know that this knowledge is being conveyed to students in the classroom.

It’s also important to me to contribute to my scholarly community. I do that by developing new theories of organizational behavior that explain certain organizational dynamics better than those that have come before.

I hope some of these theories can be applied beyond the specific contexts that I study. A generalizable theory is very powerful, but it will be up to other organizational behavior researchers to test that. If the field is working well, theories developed with this inductive approach and qualitative data will be causally tested with experiments and quantitative data to be full cycle.

Finally, I hope to help the organization that I’m studying. With the work on delivering mental health care to soldiers, after the papers were published, I got an email from the new clinical director for embedded behavioral health at the Office of the Army Surgeon General saying that they were using my findings to advocate for positive changes and that they had implemented new organizational structures and training for mental health providers. For a long time, that email was the only thing pinned to the bulletin board in my office. It served as my north star for what this type of work can do. Not every project can have that level of impact, but something very special about ethnography is that you can contribute back to the organization that opened its doors to you.

Q: When an organization brings an ethnographer in, is the outsider’s perspective part of what makes it work?

Talking with someone from outside the organization who will anonymize comments makes it a safe forum for people to share their thoughts and experiences. An objective, neutral third party who has observed and talked to all levels of the organization can get a holistic, almost bird’s-eye view that no one in the organization has.

Q: Where does organizational ethnography fit within the field of organizational behavior?

Organizational behavior is a pretty broad field. Some researchers take a psychological approach aimed at understanding individuals—how they make ethical decisions, for example. They often use experimental methods. Because of that focus on individuals, it’s referred to as micro.

The macro side of organizational behavior is rooted in sociology. Those researchers might be looking at organizational fields or industries and comparing how they evolve over time, for instance. They typically use quantitative methods to analyze large data sets.

My work falls between the two. Some people will use the word meso, bridging between the micro and macro, because my unit of analysis—individuals, teams, or departments within an organization—is akin to the micro approach while my focus on situated behavior in context is more sociological. Alternatively, you could describe my work as micro sociology.

Q: Why look at occupations?

One of the fundamental challenges for leaders is to create common goals everyone is working toward across the organization. That’s hard because in some sense, rather than being a single entity, an organization is a collection of departmental subcultures, and many of those subcultures are formed around occupations which may prioritize different goals.

It’s very unusual for someone to spend their entire career within one organization nowadays. When people hop from organization to organization, it’s often their occupation that anchors their identity and allegiance. Whether they’re HR professionals, accountants, scientists, engineers, or IT workers, people are often committed to and trained in a profession.

Looking at occupations can give us a wonderful lens into core organizational dynamics. If you view a problem through an occupational lens, you often see everyone doing good work by the standards of their occupation. The heart of the problem is unintended or unrecognized occupational dynamics. Occupations or departments often have priorities that conflict with one another.

One strong theme within my work has been that it’s not enough to simply point to the larger goals of the organization. It’s necessary to create structures and roles that help develop positive linkages and build bridges between different occupational departments. Instead of just hoping that marketing is talking with R&D, my research would suggest it might be valuable to assign somebody from the marketing department to work with specific R&D groups so that the liaison gets to know exactly what that R&D team is working on and what they care about. That person learns the other department’s jargon and is able to code switch so that they can effectively communicate. Building connection across groups can create real shifts in understanding toward working to achieve shared goals.

Q: Would you talk about your work on upward voicing? How can people with limited power bring about positive change in organizations?

We pay a lot of attention to being the heroic visionary who raises tons of great ideas—and that type of contribution is important—but organizations could also make a lot of positive change if we listened to ideas from a wider range of people. What might it do for organizations if people who have expertise but don’t have a position of authority were listened to and had their voices supported and amplified?

For one of the projects in this area, I collaborated with two colleagues from graduate school on a study of primary care clinics that had assembled teams to improve care delivery. The teams included physicians and nurses as well as medical assistants, secretaries, and even patients. We studied their weekly meetings for over two years.

There is a big literature on upward voicing in organizations. It had found that ideas presented by people who don’t have power tend to just get ignored. And, indeed, we tracked 208 instances of upwardly voiced ideas being rejected in the moment—exchanges that under a cross-sectional, quantitative approach would be coded as “rejected voice.”

But this is a good example of ethnography making a big contribution to organizational behavior because, over time, we saw that many rejected ideas actually lived on. We called it the voice cultivation process. What happened was the ideas were referenced, echoed, or voiced again by other team members, sometimes months later and even after the original voicer has left the team. Eventually, 49 of the 208 initially rejected, upwardly voiced ideas were implemented.

When we find instances where the literature may be incomplete or out of touch with organizational reality, it makes the whole field stronger. And knowing there are instances of upward voiced ideas being accepted, we can start to understand the tactics that can be used to help support other people’s good ideas.

Q: Did you dream of being an organizational ethnographer as a kid?

I feel very lucky that it all worked out for me to find this path. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I didn’t know this kind of job existed as a kid. I didn’t know anyone who was a PhD-trained academic. Few people I knew in high school left the state. But I did want to see the world and was thrilled to attend Columbia University for undergrad where I was recruited for swimming.

It took a while to grow into the idea that I might want to be an academic. I worked in a psych lab as an undergraduate. Graduate students at the lab encouraged me to consider getting a PhD. That stuck with me, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my career running experiments in a lab. When I graduated, I got a job as a human capital consultant at Deloitte. While I was working, I learned that if you do a PhD at a business school, it’s potentially more applied, more interdisciplinary. That was the sweet spot for me.

Even then, it was serendipity that in my first semester at MIT Sloan I was exposed to organizational ethnography by some of the best in the field. I was hooked; I was so taken by the holism of it, the sense of taking on these extremely challenging puzzles that take months or even years to figure out. There’s something fulfilling about even the process itself.

Ethnography is one of those disciplines that can change you for the better because of continually having to put yourself in new, often uncomfortable situations and talking to people who are very different than you. I’m constantly surprised and learning. And I’m so grateful to get to do this work.

Q: How does being at Yale SOM shape your work?

Yale SOM’s “business and society” mission aligns with much of my research, such as working with public sector and nonprofit organizations and studying topics that touch on healthcare, mental health, upward voicing, and gender inequality.

The Yale SOM organizational behavior group is also one of the few departments in the country that really fosters meso-level research. Organizational behavior departments can get balkanized into micro or macro. Our group is committed to fostering a pluralistic approach. The problems facing organizations today are multifaceted and complex; we need the strength that comes from employing a diversity of methods. And on a personal level, I find it enlightening and stimulating to be in a group where I’m always getting varied viewpoints on organizations.

Q: Where do you want your research going in the years to come?

I want to continue to work on important questions as opportunities arise. I think there’s a crucial role for ethnography right now as we’re adapting to big changes brought on by technology and the new models for work after the pandemic. For example, remote work is no longer available only to those in elite jobs and occupations, but to large swaths of the economy. Artificial intelligence and other technologies are changing the way work is done. Ethnography a great method for getting a front-row seat to how organizations and employees are responding.

With my Yale SOM colleague Laura Adler and Emma Zhang from sociology, we’re launching a study on the impact of remote and flexible work options on family well-being and the careers and household division of labor among dual-income couples.

Another area I’m interested in is the impact of AI on work. One of my PhD students, Elisabeth Yang, is looking at how healthcare professionals actually use AI in their day-to-day work. It’s fascinating research that explores how they grapple with false positives and the different dynamics that AI is unleashing. Elisabeth is a joy to work with.

It’s important to me to train the next generation of researchers how to conduct rigorous organizational ethnographies. I want to pass down knowledge about this valuable method given the unique insights it can provide.