My research explores what leaders can do to unite people around an ultimate vision despite all factors that divide them (e.g., intergroup conflict, physical distance, and hierarchies). Additionally, I also study the intersection of leadership and emotions at work, specifically I work on how leaders can foster a positive emotional culture among their employees. To explore these research questions, I employ a variety of methods, including field studies, lab/field experiments, archival studies, and content analyses.
How Leaders Unite People around a Vision
My first stream of research explores how leaders can communicate an ultimate common goal/vision and how they can unite people around it despite all the factors dividing them. The extent to which leaders articulate a common goal is central to our understanding of not only how leaders inspire action to realize the goals, but also speaks to the core of leadership itself, because leading is defined as the process of influencing others to achieve a common goal. In my own research, I seek to understand how leaders can effectively communicate a vision to unite people toward achieving it. In doing so, I also investigate various facilitating and inhibiting conditions for leaders to be able to unite people around a common vision. This is because rallying people around a shared vision rarely is a matter of communicating a vision, but there is also always more involved in terms of individual and organizational contingencies.
How Leaders Shape an Emotional Culture
"Emotions are not noise. They're data" - Sigal Barsade
Emotions serve as more than just a glimpse into an individual's psyche; they act as a multifaceted lens through which we can comprehend the culture of teams and organizations. My second stream of research seeks to understand how leaders create an emotional culture in their teams, departments, and organizations. While my first stream of work investigates how leaders can create a collective sharedness around what the organization aims to achieve in the future, the second line of my research explores how leaders can build collective deep assumptions, values, and norms a social unit has about which emotions they should express or suppress as they work together.
Research Under Review
[1] Bilgin, B., van Knippenberg, D., Hoever, & de Haas, M. [topic: Visionary leadership and hierarchy]. Under review: Journal of Applied Psychology.
[2] Bilgin, B., Carton. A., & van Knippenberg, D. [topic: Leader communication and corporate volunteering]. Under review: Administrative Science Quarterly.
Research In Progress
[3] Bilgin, B., Dietz, B., & van Knippenberg, D. [topic: External and internal vision communication]. Being finalized to be submitted to the Organization Science.
[4] Nederveen Pieterse, A., Hoever, I., & Bilgin, B. [topic: Goal-orientation and instrumentality in team performance]. Being finalized to be submitted to the Journal of Applied Psychology.
[5] Creary, S., Seegars, L., Bilgin, B., & Martin, A. Signs of performative vs. authentic acts of allyship. Target: Academy of Management Journal. Data analysis.
[6] Bilgin, B., van Knippenberg, D., Hoever, I., & Stam, D. The vision impossible. Data collection for the Study 2.
[7] Bilgin, B., O’Neill, O. A., & van Knippenberg, D. Leadership and the emotional culture of companionate love. Data collection.
[8] Bilgin, B., Dietz, B., & van Knippenberg, D. A Visionary Communication Intervention: A Field Experiment. Data collection.
Other Publications
[9] Zhang, J.W., Chen, S., Tomova, T., Bilgin, B., Chai, W. J., Ramis, T., Shaban-Azad, H., Razavi, P., Nutankumar, T., & Manukyan, A. 2019. A compassionate self is a true self? Self-compassion promotes authenticity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(9), 1323–37.
[10] Zhang, J. W., Howell, R. T., Chen, C., Goold, A. R., Bilgin, B., Chai, W. J., Ramis, T. 2022. ‘I have high self‐compassion’: A Face‐Valid Single‐Item Self‐Compassion Scale for Resource‐Limited Research Contexts. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 29 (4), 1463-1474.
(June, 2024) My dissertation defense. Rotterdam, Netherlands.
(October, 2022) The 11th Annual Doctoral Consortium of Wharton-INSEAD Alliance, Philadelphia, PA.