Mission

Groups rise, and fall, based on leadership. This principle applies to small coalitions as readily as it applies to corporations, schools, and governments. Wherever you find people united around a common cause—regardless of the usefulness or morality of that cause—you will always find a much smaller number of individuals pointing the way. In the Psychology of Ethics, Leadership, Innovation/Creativity, and Narratives (PELICAN) Lab, we believe that leaders have a significant impact on our world and thus merit significant scientific attention.

It makes no difference whether one is the chief of a small tribe of hunter-gatherers or the CEO of a multinational firm, all leaders are evaluated based on their success at doing two things—protecting and growing the resources of their group. Wherever valued resources are found, groups can be found competing for them. The PELICAN Lab focuses on studying three critical skills that leaders use to protect and grow the resources of their groups: 1) making sense of crises, 2) generating solutions to complex problems, and 3) building and maintaining trust.

First, leaders play a central role in making sense of crises. Crises refer to events that are perceived as significant threats to the physical or psychological resources of a group. This process, called sensemaking, involves integrating information from a dizzying array of sources into a coherent narrative. Narratives provide groups with a shared mental model, or lens, that helps members to “speak the same language”, reach similar conclusions, and forge a collective identity.

Second, leaders impact groups by helping them to more efficiently exploit existing resources and explore avenues for new resources. Technology, consumer tastes, competition, regulations, and other key environmental forces are always changing. In such an environment, standing still is a sure recipe for extinction. Creativity is the process of generating novel and useful ideas. Creative ideas provide the raw material for innovation, the process of implementing new products or processes.

Third, groups rarely have all of the resources that they need to survive on their own. So, they must form alliances with other groups who they can trust. Members within the same group must also trust each other in order to effectively coordinate their efforts. When trust breaks down, the group’s position and resources become vulnerable to external threats. To build and maintain trust, leaders must pay attention to ethics. Ethics is the perception by those within and outside the group that members of the group can be trusted to “play by the rules.” Rules do not just mean formal laws and policies; rules also include unwritten norms and expectations about how groups ought to function.

As I-O psychologists, our mission is to discover novel, evidence-based, and practically useful insights that inform science and practice. We do this by investigating original, “big picture” research questions with the potential for broad application, and by drawing on a diverse range of data sources and methods that reveal fresh perspectives on old questions. By advancing knowledge in this domain, we strive to inform managerial decision making and organizational interventions in ways that strengthen the positive effects and reduce the negative effects of leadership on our world.