My Research: Workplace Stress, Leadership, Resilience & Neuroscience
I don’t just share the research, I do the research! I’m currently a PhD Candidate at Concordia University in Canada and have been studying neuroscience, management, and work-related stress for over a decade. My research focuses on why the same job stressors impact employees differently and combines survey-data, laboratory experiments, and reviews of existing literature.
My Research Overview
My research asks a central question: why do the same work-related stressors impact employees so differently - energizing one person but depleting the other? Early in the stress process, your brain must first determine whether a demand you’ve encountered is a challenge you can rise to, a threat that will disrupt your goals, or ultimately not relevant to you. This cognitive and physiological process is called appraisal and it’s the focus of my research.
I examine the conditions that shape appraisals: the leadership employees experience, the predictability of the demands they face, and the physiological resources that let people recover and stay resilient over time.
What distinguishes my approach is the consistent integration of organizational behaviour theory with neuroscience and physiology. I combine controlled laboratory experiments, physiological measurement, and field to capture stress processes as they actually unfold in the body and in real work settings.
Research Approach
Theory-first, mechanism-focused. My research is grounded in a long-standing framework called the transactional theory of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and the challenge-hindrance framework.
Multi-method by design. I pair experiments (for causal inference) with longitudinal field studies (for real-world generalizability) and physiological measurement (to observe stress responses as they happen).
Organizational neuroscience. A throughline across my projects is the integration of insights, perspectives, and measurements from neuroscience. Stress appraisals, resilience, and recovery are biological processes with physiological signatures that have to be considered.
Practice-relevant. The ultimate goal of every project is to provide insights and concrete recommendations that organizations can use to support employee wellbeing.
1. Predictability as a Distinct Feature of Job Demands
Most research on fluctuating workloads has treated unpredictability as interchangeable with variability, assuming that demands which change a lot are also demands employees can't foresee. In practice, that's often false: a tax accountant's workload spikes every spring, and an ER nurse can predict a surge in injuries every Halloween. Both face highly variable demands that are also highly predictable.
My dissertation isolates predictability as its own construct and tests, through a controlled laboratory experiment paired with physiological monitoring and a longitudinal field study, whether predictable demands are more likely to be appraised as challenges and unpredictable demands as hindrances.
2. Transformational Leadership and Employees' Stress Appraisals
My graduate thesis examined how leadership shapes the appraisal process itself. Using a four-wave survey design, I found that employees who experienced more transformational leadership appraised job stressors more positively and that this relationship was explained largely by one psychological state in particular: psychological empowerment, employees' sense of competence, meaning, and control over their own work.
The practical implication is that leadership development and stress management are not separate levers. Helping employees see their work as meaningful and within their control may do more to shift how they experience stressors than simply teaching coping skills or promoting positive mindsets about stress.
3. Rethinking Resilience Through a Neuroscience Lens
My third research stream reconceptualizes employee resilience not as a fixed personality trait, but as a biological resource. This work identifies three conditions that are necessary to build and replenish resilience: moderate adversity (which builds coping capacity, in contrast to adversity that is too extreme or chronic), social interactions (which buffer the stress response through well-documented neuroendocrine pathways), and recovery (without which resilience is depleted rather than restored, regardless of how capable an employee is).
The practical upshot for organizations: resilience training that only builds individual coping skills is incomplete. Sustaining resilience also requires designing jobs with the right level of challenge, fostering genuine social connection at work, and protecting real opportunities for recovery.
What Connects These Projects
Taken together, this research program traces a single arc: work environments shape how a demand is appraised; resilience determines how well employees recover from that demand over time. Both halves of the story depend on treating employees' psychological experience of stress as inseparable from what is happening in their bodies, which is why physiological measurement runs through all three projects rather than being treated as a specialized add-on.