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Elizabeth examines social (dis)connection at work and the psychological, relational, and technological forces that shape these dynamics. Although workplaces are fundamentally social, people routinely experience disconnection: conversations avoided, disclosures held back, relationships never formed, and ties strained or severed. Across her work, she identifies three recurring patterns. First, people often misforecast socially connecting moments, overestimating their interpersonal costs and underestimating their rewards, and therefore avoid interactions that could have built connection. Second, people actively manage experiences of disconnection, developing strategies that help them navigate isolation and strain at work. Third, small, scalable relational and technological interventions can transform disconnecting moments into opportunities for connection, well-being, and performance. To study these dynamics, she draws from diverse literatures in organizational behavior and psychology. She uses a multi-method approach that includes laboratory and online experiments, dyadic and group interaction studies, experience sampling designs, qualitative methods, and field experiments. She follows best practices for open science, including preregistering studies and sharing data, materials, and code.
Elizabeth’s dissertation introduces and investigates self-imposed busyness: the extent to which individuals voluntarily occupy themselves with work-related tasks when they could otherwise rest. Across a multi-method program of research — including qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs, scale development and validation, a multisource field study of managers and employees, and an experience-sampling study — she shows that self-imposed busyness, far from being purely depleting, can foster productivity, self-worth, reduced anxiety, and ultimately thriving and resilience at work. The dissertation challenges dominant accounts of busyness as inherently harmful and reframes it as a strategy people use to navigate uncertainty and disconnection. Her dissertation is co-chaired by Professors Susan J. Ashford and David Mayer.
