Douglas T. Breeden - Duke University's Fuqua School of Business

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Ashleigh Shelby Rosette Assistant Professor of Management Research Focus: Negotiation; privilege and diversity in the workplace Courses: Dynamics of Bargaining (Cross Continent and Duke Goethe); Managerial Effectiveness (Daytime) Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, who is an assistant professor of management, focuses her research on two distinct areas. She studies negotiations, specifically observing how people use strategic behaviors (such as emotions and aggressive offers), to negotiate the best deal for themselves, but her primary research interests involve diversity in the workplace. She notes that she is pleased to have struck a balance between more traditional negotiation research and the newer, less explored area of workplace diversity, and that her varied interests have allowed her to remain immersed in and continuously excited about her research. Rosette’s diversity research centers on privilege and leadership. “Privilege refers to the many unearned advantages that accrue on the basis of any single group membership,” Rosette explains. In her work, Rosette finds that people with privilege frequently perceive their unearned advantages as normal, and this presumption sometimes prevents them from seeing the perspective of their coworkers who do not have such privilege. Rosette offered the following example, “A male executive may experience camaraderie with his other male colleagues and not understand a female colleague’s relative difficulty in developing her own social network at work.” Other hot diversity topics Rosette is studying involve race and gender issues within the context of leadership. A recent project that she and her colleagues have just completed showed that racial bias exists in business-leader prototypes, and this bias can help explain more favorable evaluations of white versus nonwhite leaders. Rosette says that when people think of leadership, they usually think of the leader as white and when this expectation is not met, leadership evaluations can be lower than when it is met. Rosette and her Fuqua colleague Sim Sitkin and PhD students Leigh 28 exchange Tost and Morela Hernandez are examining how women in top leadership positions develop rivalries with each other that stem from tokenism and perceptions of threat and competition. “Research on how top leaders view each other has been contingent on the male paradigm,” says Rosette. “However, more women are becoming top executives every day, and we wanted to know how their experiences differed from men’s experiences and how they differed from the experiences of women at lower levels in the organization.” A different project that Rosette and other colleagues recently completed also looked at women in the executive suite. However, instead of focusing on how women leaders view each other, the project looked at how other people view women leaders. “We found that women managers were viewed as more effective than men managers on both developing relationships and task competence only when they were in top leadership positions and they had a proven, demonstrated record of success,” says Rosette. Rosette’s teaching in courses like Managerial Effectiveness ties directly into her research. “Managerial Effectiveness teaches first-year students about learning how to manage diverse perspectives in the work place,” says Rosette, discussing the Daytime MBA core course she taught this past fall. “Ann Hopkins is one case in which students get to see how differences prevail in an organization.” Ann Hopkins, a famous Harvard Business School case taught in many MBA programs, is about sexual discrimination and involves a lawsuit brought by a woman who was denied partnership at Price Waterhouse (the court ruled in Hopkins’ favor). First-year Daytime MBA students praised Rosette for the way in which she managed the controversial Ann Hopkins case discussion. In Rosette’s classroom, students were encouraged to think about the many barriers organizations face as their employees and managers become more diverse. This particular case tends to generate a lively classroom discussion. “It can be a difficult discussion to manage,” acknowledges Rosette. “When discussing such emotionally charged issues such as gender differences in the workplace, the professor has to be careful so that she is perceived as an unbiased facilitator and not as a biased advocate.” “I’ll never get bored,” laughs Rosette when discussing her teaching and research. “These are exciting topics to be discussing in the classroom and to be researching. Sometimes people will agree with me and at other times they won’t, but they will be engaged with the topic, that’s for sure.”
Mary Frances Luce Professor of Marketing Research focus: Health care marketing and decision making Courses: Health Care Marketing (The Duke MBA—Daytime and Weekend Executive); Business Management Principles and Tools for Nephrologists in the 21st Century (Executive Education); Seminar in Consumer Behavior (PhD) A Fuqua graduate who returned to the marketing faculty in 2003, Mary Frances Luce (PhD ’94), seeks to understand the role of emotion in decision making, particularly in situations involving high-stakes decisions and health-related decisions. Luce and her research collaborators are working to bridge the gap between marketing knowledge and health behaviors. “Many people in marketing are interested in explaining the behavior of the consumer population,” Luce said, “and marketing has lots of tools that get people to adopt certain behaviors.” Luce notes that one challenge of applying marketing thought and knowledge to health behaviors is the intervening role that emotion can play in health-related decisions. “For example, it is quite common for a woman who has a mammogram to receive false-positive test results,” says Luce of her interest in the emotional responses women have to the experience of false positive test results—since for a time these women are forced to live and cope with the possibility that they may have breast cancer. In many cases women may be dissuaded from having regular mammograms because of the fear of a possible cancer diagnosis that is generated by a false positive test result, especially in combination with the physical discomfort of the actual mammogram process. On the other hand, says Luce, the stress of a false positive test can be counterbalanced by the feeling of vulnerability it elicits in many women because “it makes them think, which can be motivating toward testing and protective behavior.” Luce and her colleague Barbara E. Kahn have found that you can decrease these women’s levels of anxiety by providing them with some simple coping behaviors and interventions to help them manage the stress of false positive test results. Luce also explores the emotions that are generated by the process of making decisions. This is joint work with Fuqua colleagues Jim Bettman and John Payne. The team has explored emotions that are generated by considering the tradeoffs that are inherent in most decisions. Of particular interest to Luce are situations that are considered “low probability/high consequence.” Such decisions are fundamentally different from general consumer decisions, says Luce. In low probability/high consequence decision situations, people will seek to minimize and manage the emotions that result from the decision process, which in turn will alter the person’s decision. “In the past, researchers might argue people would opt out of certain decisions because they were conserving cognitive resources, a view that can make consumers sound ‘lazy,’” she says, “but we’ve since learned that sometimes people don’t do the right thing because it is emotionally costly.” For instance, in the domain of car purchases, people are often willing to sacrifice safety for price when shopping for a new car. “People want a safe car, but safety is not the only factor they consider when shopping. In order to manage the emotions that are brought about when considering ‘what if’ scenarios about the need for car safety, we shoppers may use another consideration to rule out choices,” Luce says. For example, people may exclude all cars over a certain price, and then use safety as a key consideration within their remaining purchase options. In the process of trying to manage their emotions, people may initially rule out the safest car by labeling it “too expensive,” even if it is only slightly more expensive than the car they ultimately end up purchasing. Luce’s work has led her to conclude that people often want to simplify their decision-making processes in a way that minimizes the emotional costs of tradeoffs. “So it is easier to use some sort of rule to eliminate a choice from consideration than to go through the emotional exercise of weighing the pros and cons of a particular option,” she notes. Luce cites Duke’s intellectual environment and focus on interdisciplinary work as driving forces behind her decision to return here. She also credits her students with providing new perspectives and insights to her work. “There are great synergies between the classroom and my research,” she says. A resident from Duke University Medical Center participates in Luce’s Duke MBA—Daytime health care marketing course, and provides an interesting counterpoint to discussions of health care marketing strategy and tactics. “And in turn, I think it helps the resident to see the ways in which health care marketers affect physicians,” says Luce. Luce also teaches in The Duke MBA—Weekend Executive program and finds that hearing about health care managers’ problems first hand provides her with new questions to explore in her research. “We have a broken health care system, but it is not clear how to fix it,” she says. “We have many opportunities to bring management tools into the marketplace to help bring about positive change. My teaching here at Duke helps me see tremendous opportunities to bring research to bear on the practice of health care communication and marketing.” summer 2007 29
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Douglas T. Breeden - Duke University's Fuqua School of Business

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