Research Interests

I study how individuals make sense of the organizational contexts in which they find themselves, as well as how these sensemaking efforts influence various organization-level outcomes. In particular, I am interested in how individuals interpret and react to conflicting information in organizational settings. Because this entails disentangling beliefs, actions, and outcomes, I favor inductive, qualitative approaches that span multiple levels of analysis. Currently, I am pursuing this work through two distinct research streams. The first research stream uses the context of hybrid identity organizations to consider: 1) how individuals understand and navigate identity conflicts; and 2) how these navigation efforts influence organizational outcomes, such as innovation. The second research stream uses the context of entrepreneurial ecosystems – environments believed to nurture and sustain entrepreneurship through beneficial combinations of social, political, economic, and cultural conditions – to investigate how information asymmetries and misaligned interests among participants can lead individuals and organizations to make choices that they view as rational and beneficial, but are ultimately self-defeating.