Before joining the Kogod School of Business as a management faculty member, Meredith Burnett was advised by peers outside the American University community to refrain from bringing her work experience into the classroom. To this day, she’s not sure why she received that advice; it could have stemmed from a tendency to maintain a strictly academic teaching setting or from a greater focus on theory and research during her PhD program. Now, however, Professor Burnett knows that her professional life is not only relevant to the courses she teaches but also deeply compelling to her students.
“To have the jobs I’ve had, I had to go get them,” she said. “When I tell students that, they become very interested in what I have to say in a way they weren’t before.”
With previous roles in major companies such as Shell and Pfizer, it’s no wonder that business students are interested in Burnett’s prior work. As a counselor for Shell, she worked on everything from sales and recruitment to physical and environmental safety, ensuring that local gas station owners working with Shell had what they needed to succeed. She eventually moved on to a healthcare representative role with Pfizer, where she consulted with physicians about the company’s prescription offerings. By the time she left to pursue her PhD at the University of Maryland, her experience had left her with many observations—and questions—about how businesses and the people within them interact.
“I was interested in why some people sit silently in meetings while others are very verbal and engaging, and how people’s comments towards others might contribute to their silence and reluctance to speak up,” she recalled. “I wanted to learn more about what shuts people down in organizations. And when I shared those frustrations in my PhD project, my colleagues said I need to look at HR and organizational behavior.”
That conversation led Burnett to research interests that she still pursues today. She studies behavior patterns and hierarchies within businesses and how human resources teams can use them to inform their decisions. Her published papers range in topics from what motivates a job seeker to apply for specific openings to how leadership behavior can dictate the behavior of employees. Understanding how personality affects interactions in business requires an interdisciplinary approach that combines marketing and management theories with psychological and sociological concepts; Burnett’s research and hands-on experience gives her the perspective to tackle that multi-pronged approach.
“When I was in sales and marketing, I could take these marketing theories and concepts to figure out how people make decisions about which gas station they go to or which products doctors choose for their patients,” she explained. “Then you learn from those theories and use them in an HR setting to explore how employees make benefits decisions if they have a cafeteria-style benefits plan. Now, suddenly, you have something that spans two research areas instead of just one.”
With such a wide range of perspectives, Burnett’s studies have involved methods such as surveys, field research, and controlled experiments. However, she’s learned from her years of work that relationships are remarkably fluid and that exploring those relationships requires an open mind. “Things happen at a societal level, and people’s perceptions and ideas all change,” she said.