Elizabeth’s research examines how people gain, limit, and lose access to connection at work. Across two connected streams, she studies how strategies used to regulate and sustain the self can reshape both employees’ psychological and social resources and the relational environment others encounter, and how miscalibrated expectations can lead people to avoid potentially rewarding social experiences. She also examines how organizations can reduce these barriers by embedding opportunities for connection into the structure of work.
Her dissertation develops these ideas through the case of self-imposed busyness. It introduces the “Busy Bee Effect,” defining self-imposed busyness as voluntarily continuing to engage in work when rest is available. Across qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs, scale development and validation, multisource surveys, and a two-week experience-sampling study of workers and their partners, she finds that self-imposed busyness generates feelings of productivity and self-worth that support thriving and resilience at work. This research challenges perspectives that treat continued work solely as a demand from which employees must recover, showing that chosen work can also generate psychological resources. In related work, she examines the strategy’s relational consequences, finding that visible busyness may discourage others from approaching even when interaction would be welcome. Her dissertation is co-chaired by Professors Susan J. Ashford and David Mayer.
More broadly, Elizabeth draws on research across organizational behavior and psychology to investigate how everyday choices, expectations, and organizational conditions shape workplace relationships. She uses a multimethod approach that includes laboratory and field experiments, live dyadic and group interactions, experience-sampling designs, multisource surveys, and qualitative fieldwork. She is committed to open-science practices, including preregistering studies and sharing data, materials, and analysis code.