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Management professor Laura Graves and student Danielle Sohn are both interested in how the insights gained through the study of psychology can be applied to the field of management. |
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Meet the researchers:
That extra boost
Interview with Danielle Sohn
Danielle Sohn '03 is combining her senior year with her first year in Clark's
Graduate School of Management (GSOM)
program.* She spent her junior year studying at the
London School of
Economics. As a psychology major and management minor, she is researching a senior honor's
thesis under the direction of psychology professor
Jaan Valsiner and GSOM professor
Laura Graves.
Like Dr. Graves, Danielle combines interests in psychology and management. She hopes to become
a management consultant and help organizations leverage the advantages of global teams,
although she is still keeping other options open. In a recent interview, she talked about
her work.
What is your honors thesis about?
I've hypothesized that there are differences in cultural attitudes towards the bargaining and business merger process, and I've created and administered a survey to explore that. I want to understand how people perceive the merger process, both from a management and from an employee perspective. So on the survey I ask questions like:
- Would you prefer the management telling you about the merger in advance and soliciting your opinion?
- Would you rather have management make all the decisions?
- Does an individual's nationality play a role in how they communicate with others?
- Given a specific scenario (which I provided them), how would you go about conducting the negotiation process?
Did you spend a lot of time designing the survey?
I began working on it during the second semester of my sophomore year with Jaan Valsiner. At the time I was taking a class with him on cultural comparisons in psychology and anthropology. I drafted a questionnaire, and then, while I was in London for my junior year, I started sending it out to people. However, people indicated that it was too long. So when I returned to Clark at the beginning of this year, I decided to pretty much redesign the questionnaire from scratch.
That fine-tuning is pretty typical of the research process, isn't it?
Actually, designing the survey was probably the hardest part of the process. You have to decide what you want to look at, how you can look at it, what questions to ask that will give you meaningful answers. Do you want responses to the questions to be more qualitative or quantitative? If you don't spend the time to design a good questionnaire, the results will be useless.
Who participated in your survey?
About thirty students, both American and international, from Clark's Graduate School of Management. One of the reasons that I came to Clark for my undergraduate degree was because of Clark's large international community. There are students from all over the world. GSOM is a reflection of that. Most of GSOM's students have had some experience in the business world. I have survey participants from the United States, Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
Have you had a chance to start looking at your data?
A little. I hypothesized that there would be cultural differences in attitudes. It appears that there may be some differences, but I'm also finding some similarities. I'm not sure why this should be. Maybe my sample size needs to be larger or maybe it's because they're all Clark students. I have to look more at my results.
Does pursuing your own research make you more skeptical of what you read?
Yes, it does. But I think Clark does a good job of teaching you to question things. I also studied at the London School of Economics for a year, and that really made me think, too. We'd read different studies, get different points of view and have to give our own opinions. We'd see how a particular researcher picked out the data that helped his hypothesis. We'd questions why another researcher used one method as opposed to another. So you get different perspectives.
LSE was very hard, but I really do think that Clark prepared me for it, and I'm not just saying that. LSE and Clark complemented each other very well. Sometimes the case studies we were assigned at LSE were ones I'd already read at Clark. I would encourage everyone to study abroad, at least for one semester, or a year if possible. I don't think it matters where you go in the world, but you will learn so much about yourself and life in general.
What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of participating in research as an undergrad?
Participating in research really makes you work. It's not for everybody. You have to be very motivated and very driven, and you have to have long-term goals for yourself. But it's interesting. It really helps to go through the research process yourself. For example, in psychology you read a lot of case studies. Doing your own research gives you a better idea of what the case study authors went through. It's kind of fun. And I think participating in research complements classroom learning.
Research takes up a lot of time and involves a lot of work. But if you want to go to grad school, showing that you've done a research project from start to finish helps you get that extra boost--in a career as well.
I met with Jaan Valsiner yesterday and he said he's seen me grow. I don't know--I see myself everyday! But according to him, I've grown academically, and personally. So it's really nice to hear that all this work does pay off.
* and taking advantage of Clark's 5th-year free program.
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Additional Resources
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Danielle Sohn
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