Research

My research examines how people navigate work relationships across social differences and how these relationships impact their careers. I focus on relationships shaped by marginalization and power dynamics, developing this agenda in two complementary research streams.

How People Navigate Relationships Across Social Difference

In my first research stream, I examine how people exercise agency when deciding whether, with whom, and where to engage with others across social differences and amid identity threat and uncertainty.

Evaluator Selection, Identity, and Creative Careers (title redacted while under review)

Angela Ianniello, Beth Schinoff, and Curtis Chan

First-authored manuscript · Under review at the Academy of Management Journal

We develop a model of audience selection and identify two orientations comics adopt as they interpret the career and identity risks associated with evaluation: generalists who seek evaluation from a broad range of audiences and specialists who limit evaluation to audiences they perceive as safe for their social identities. This paper reframes evaluator selection as an identity-driven strategy that creative workers use to decide whether and how to interact with different people, and helps us understand how these choices shape their careers.
59 interviews · 35 hours of observation

Surfacing safety: How job seekers assess workplace safety and inclusion during career transitions

Angela Ianniello, Bess Rouse, and Judy Clair
First-authored manuscript · Preparing manuscript for submission to the Academy of Management Journal

We introduce a temporal threat assessment concept to show how individuals combine past experiences and expectations of future risks with their personal and situational factors, such as family status, when assessing career opportunities and balancing them against perceived safety and threats. These assessments shape the career trade-offs people are willing to make and where they choose to advance their careers.
60 interviews

How Contexts Shape Relationships Across Social Difference

In my second research stream, I examine how context shapes when and how social differences impact work relationships. I investigate various settings—such as private homes, contentious organizational changes, and polarized sociopolitical environments—to understand when and how identity, status, and power shape work relationships

Generative resistance: The importance of enabling differences

With Jean Bartunek, Hans Hansen, and Mara Cable

Published in Organization Theory

Theorizes resistance as a generative process that can keep meaningful differences visible, prevent less dominant perspectives from being erased through premature consensus, and foster learning and identity.

Managing invisible stigmatized identities in uncertain and polarized times

With Judy Clair

Forthcoming in Research in Social Issues in Management

Examines how organizational policies and responses to sociopolitical pressure reshape the risks people face when deciding whether to disclose invisible stigmatized identities.

The 5 Ws of relationship context

With Beth Schinoff, Elana Feldman, Julianna Pillemer, and Emily Heaphy

Drafting a proposal for the Journal of Applied Psychology

Examines how context shapes who forms work relationships, what those relationships entail, when and where they unfold, why they form, and how they develop.

Dissertation

Rethinking Working from Home: Cross-Domain Work Relationships in Private Settings

How do people navigate cross-domain work relationships when the organizational context that typically structures them is absent?

Research on cross-domain work relationships typically examines relationships that remain anchored in a shared organization, such as workplace friendships. My dissertation asks what happens when that organizational anchor is removed.

Through a qualitative study of the relationship between working parents and paid in-home caregivers, I examine a relationship in which one person’s home is another person’s workplace. This setting reveals how work relationships are defined and negotiated when organizational norms and scripts no longer structure interaction.

Emerging findings

Relational cues reshape the psychological contract.
Language and care tasks influence what becomes expected, permissible, or difficult to refuse, with implications for voice and exit.

Work relationships can become resources for identity work.
Cross-domain work relationships can function as relational resources for professional identity work.

Practical significance

75+ million domestic workers worldwide · 2+ million in the United States

Domestic workers enable others, particularly women, to participate in the workforce, while also navigating careers, identities, and work relationships of their own.