Lunch With Alex
Lunch With Alex is a conversation-driven podcast hosted by Alex Szymanski, featuring candid discussions with MBA candidates from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Each episode explores leadership, career paths, and what it really means to balance ambition with the MBA experience.
Lunch With Alex
Lunch With Alex #4 - Professor Corinne Bendersky
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Professor Corinne Bendersky is a Professor of Management and Organizations at UCLA Anderson School of Management with expertise in conflict management, leadership, and team effectiveness. She has conducted research on workplace conflict, diversity and inclusion, and status dynamics in teams, and has led large-scale workplace climate assessments for organizations such as the City of Los Angeles.
In this episode, Professor Bendersky shares insights on how leadership operates within high-performing teams, explaining how status is formed, why conflict should be structured rather than avoided, and how leaders can create environments where ideas are evaluated based on merit. She also provides practical advice for MBA students and professionals navigating team dynamics, leadership challenges, and high-pressure environments.
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So often we focus on what we need to convey and forget that this is also we're also kind of interviewing the company, and and um I think actually just demonstrating curiosity about the company and asking questions about the culture sends a very positive signal to a lot of recruiters.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to the Lunch with Alex podcast. Today's guest is someone who doesn't just study leadership and team dynamics, she teaches right here at UCLA Anderson. Professor Corinne Bendersky is a professor of management and organizations at UCLA Anderson and one of the leading scholars on conflict, status dynamics, and team effectiveness. She earned her PhD in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management and completed her undergraduate degree with honors at Oberlin College. At Anderson, she teaches across the full-time MBA, FEMBA, and executive education programs, helping shape how future leaders think about power, influence, and performance in teams. Dr. Bandersky, thank you so much for being here today.
SPEAKER_00Hi Alex, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01All right, so my first question is where did you grow up? Where are you from?
SPEAKER_00I'm a Jersey girl. I grew up in New Jersey, central central coast of New Jersey, uh, in between Princeton and Trenton, a little town called Lawrenceville.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. I'm from uh Bucks County, uh just outside of Philadelphia. When you first became fascinated about how people behave in groups, um, how did that kind of uh originate?
SPEAKER_00Uh I actually was initially really interested in conflict management and negotiations. And it was inspired when I was in high school. I went to a summer, month-long summer program that's called the Governor's School that New Jersey has on a variety of different topics. And mine was uh political science. And in the uh, as part of that month-long program, we did a little sort of mock negotiations or negotiations role play, like what you guys do in a lot of the classes here at Anderson. And it was a uh in retrospect, a super basic role play, but it was the first time I was exposed to um the difference between distributive and integrative interests and outcomes, and uh it really blew my mind. Like it was a very eye-opening experience. So from that point on, I um got really interested in trying to understand first internationally how to I studied international relations in college, how to negotiate peace treaties by the time I graduated college, I had gotten interested in mediation, but eventually got particularly interested in mediating conflicts that occurred at work. So I sort of moved away from international relations and more into workplace relations. And my original plan was to be a organizational mediator or ombus personally.
SPEAKER_01That's really cool. And so uh I'm curious what made you earn your PhD? Did you always want to be a professor? How did you go from being interested in gene dynamics at work to wanting to be an educator?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I didn't always uh like I said, I wanted to practice mediation and conflict management. Um, I was right after college trying to do some consulting for companies that were considering implementing various types of alternative dispute resolution practices and programs. And I was sure based on anecdotal evidence and kind of what was um common shared, you know, common shared wisdom at the time that organizations' conflict management uh efforts would be more effective if they offered a variety of complementary tools and resources. Um, but that of course would require a higher investment, financial investment. And there was just no evidence, no empirical evidence that the ROI would actually be better in terms of reduced conflict management costs or higher satisfaction or effectiveness. Um I am an only child and I was raised by two academics, and so I think I was just pulling myself that I might not go into academia. Uh, I realized that I had to raise to think much more academically, and so decided that um I could have a bitter better impact on the field by developing that, or at least um looking for the empirical evidence to back up that claim and then letting other people try to sell it.
SPEAKER_01That's really cool. Thank you for sharing, uh, Professor. And uh I'm curious, how did you end up on the West Coast? You know, what what brought you to Anderson? Was there a yeah?
SPEAKER_00No, I had um three job offers after grad school, and this is the one that worked out the best in terms of the mix of uh intellectual community and uh location, and worked great for my family. So we moved out in 2002. I think that makes it 23 years, moving on to 24 years. Yeah. Crazy.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for coming back.
SPEAKER_00You must love your job because uh it's the being a business school professor is the best job in the world. I mean, being being an academic, being a university professor and a research professor is great. Um, being a business school professor in particular is great because we're compensated well, uh, whereas you know, other particularly liberal arts faculty aren't always. Uh, we have incredible job security, we have incredible autonomy, and I get to um do I have a lot of variety in what I do. So um I do a lot of different types of research. I work with a lot of different types of collaborators and on teams. Uh, I teach, as you mentioned in your introduction, all different kinds of students at different stages in their career. I also train doctoral students in research, uh social science research. And I have a lot of opportunities to engage with practitioners and conduct translational science and and uh conversations with them. I also do a fair amount of consulting work, so I really kind of can do anything that I want, and it um and I am able to have a pretty positive impact.
SPEAKER_01That does sound like the best job in the world. Um wow, so thank you uh for that. I was uh reading uh that you uh are involved with the Hart, uh faculty chair of the Human Resources Roundtable. Can you tell me a little bit more about that, please?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sure. Heart is a uh professional association of human resources executives, primarily in the LA Southern California area. It's been around for over 35 years. It was originally founded by um Anderson faculty, um RG Kleingartner. I've been the faculty director for over a decade. We have a lot of um Anderson faculty who are in who get involved in the programs that are organized by our wonderful staff for our HR executive members and their direct reports. We that we have HR teams also, um some events, and also their um executive partners. So sometimes we have events that integrate HR and um CFOs or CEOs and other parts of the C-suite to really get that uh cross-fertilization going. Um, and as I mentioned, this is one of the examples of what I call translational science. So we really um learn from the membership what the biggest challenges they're facing right now are and what the issues they're um trying to learn about or problems trying to solve. And then we try to bring um cutting-edge scholarship from leading scholars from UCLA and also UC Irvine, USC, wherever you know we can find people who are doing the relevant research, to share with what they've learned and um help the members of HERT make evidence-based decisions. Uh, and then there's just a lot of um peer learning networking. We also have a lot of consultants in the human capital space come and share what they're doing, and so it's just a really nice uh forum for generating conversations across all of the different sort of stakeholder groups in human resources and personnel, people management practices.
SPEAKER_01Very cool. Thank you. Um I do want to start zooming in on your more recent research. Uh, in our last conversation, I think you mentioned the city of LA. Um sharing with our audience some of the cool things you've been learning.
SPEAKER_00Sure. Um, well, we're just on the cuff of starting a second wave of a project that we started in 2022, conducting. We being I'm the principal investigator, and I've got a team of um colleagues, faculty and PhD student colleagues, uh, conducting workplace, climate, and culture assessments uh for the public sector employees of the city of Los Angeles. Um, this excludes the school district, but otherwise, there's over 40 city departments and over 50,000 employees. And we've collected a mix of uh quantitative survey data, archival data, and qualitative data from interviews and focus groups and site visits. And um, we learned all kinds of really interesting things in 2022 when the city was like the rest of us coming out from the pandemic. There had also been a lot of activity in the summer of 2020 with the social justice protests that city employees were very deeply involved in. Um, and there had been some leadership changes. We collected the data in 2022 and produced customized feedback reports for leaders of all the departments for whom we had a large enough response rate to ensure we're protecting respondents, individual identities. Did a lot of this translational stuff, you know, feeding back what we had heard from their employees and making recommendations or actions they could take to improve the workplace environment and employee well-being. And uh then in 24-25, our Anderson Executive Education Group um administered a 10-week, eight or 10-week long uh training program for about a hundred employees of the city to develop their inclusive leadership skills. And those participants um had a project to implement changes to their department based on um the feedback reports they'd gotten as well as the education that they had received that in the uh executive education program. And then we are doing another round of this assessment just starting now. Tomorrow's the first site visit. I'll be spending the day at the Hollywood Um LAPD division and fire station uh 27, which is the LA fire department station that is actually literally literally on the same plot of land as the Hollywood Division Police. And so um both departments have had leadership changes. Um the Palisades fire and um uh the fires in Altadena were you know have really impacted the fire departments substantially. And um, we will also be doing site visits to the Department of Water and Power, which is actually the largest department in the city and does some has you know really fascinating different types of uh site locations and a whole lot of different roles. And so it'll be really great to get to learn more about what those employees do.
SPEAKER_01Fun fact, my uh sister just uh graduated as a state trooper in Pennsylvania. So she graduated from the Hershey Police Academy in December, um, and she's serving and keeping the streets safe. Uh anything that you learn, I will pass on to her, you know.
SPEAKER_00That's terrific. I love it. Good luck to her.
SPEAKER_01Um but uh yeah, okay. So moving right along. Um Professor, many of your research uh papers uh focus on uh status hierarchies in teams. Uh why do certain people's voices carry more weight in meetings, even if everyone is equally qualified?
SPEAKER_00So status is a uh it's a form of differentiation that occurs almost automatically, even when there are no formal roles or title differences, or people have equal power. So, for instance, in your MBA study groups, you don't have any formal differentiation, and yet uh I'm sure you can relate to, and I have substantial empirical evidence that there are status hierarchies that form that are based on differences in perceived uh respect, uh, esteem, prestige, largely based on anticipated contributions to meeting the team's goals, but also um status differences emerge in groups based on noisy signals of competence, like assertiveness or dominance and even um intimidation. Um, people also earn status based on their competence and their demonstrator demonstrated um value creation and contributions to the group. So it's a I like it because it's a very um complicated, kind of multi-faceted social negotiation that happens almost universally and often without people being consciously aware of why. Um, but there's a pretty high level of agreement, especially after the team members have had some interactions with each other. Um, our interactions tend to communicate and reinforce status differences through dominance and deference uh patterns, through influence and conversations and communication and things like that. Also, even nonverbal communication. Um, so to me it's just fascinating. Um, there's been a lot, there's a lot of research that predated mine on the emergence of status hierarchies and the um criteria or metrics or signals that people use to assign status. Um where I have contributed to that discourse is really thinking about, well, once the status hierarchy has emerged, what happens when somebody feels like they're underplaced? Or what if the sort of initially agreed upon highest member status member of the group turns out to not actually be a very strong contributor? Maybe they're um uh more self-oriented and they they take credit rather than um recognize the contributions others have made, or maybe they're not actually particularly competent and they um influence the group to make suboptimal decisions. So, how did those hierarchies change? And since I had been studying conflict uh and negotiations, um to me, this was just uh this was a particular form of social conflict that was likely to be negotiated in groups. And so once I started looking into that, I was able to really uh identify the phenomenon and learn more about it. And um it's driven a lot of my subsequent work.
SPEAKER_01But what you shared, Professor, reminds me of the activity, I think, of the Alaskan survival uh survival, yeah. And uh how false confidence uh influenced the group to make suboptimal decisions.
SPEAKER_00We we teach what we know, indeed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That was uh I learned a lot during Phil Week. Um, Phil, uh, for those listening, is that um from the inclusive leadership class that Professor Um Mendersky taught. And one of the biggest things that I learned was psychological safety. Yeah, I had never heard that before by MBA. Um, do you know the origin of that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Or yeah, that's uh that's a phenomenon that has was um um initially coined and studied by Amy Edmondson studied the construct and the phenomenon of psychological safety um back in the 90s. I think it was actually for her dissertation, and she was looking at um group dynamics around learning and what happens you know when when teams make mistakes, um, and also eventually uh over time also trying to understand voicing, dissenting opinions, and decision-making processes. And uh although she's she's had a long and incredibly productive, prolific research career, this idea that people vary in how or groups vary in how comfortable their members feel um voicing their opinions, and in particular, voicing dissenting opinions, and in particular voicing dissenting opinions uh directed to people who are higher status or higher power, you know, or higher up in the group hierarchy than they are. Um, and yet the extent to which people do participate and do share their concerns or do raise uh questions to test assumptions and do share information, etc., massively impact and massively in an empirical sense, but then also just qualitatively in terms of people's satisfaction and their feelings of inclusion and belonging, um, and also just the quality of decisions made, um, the ability of the group to leverage all of the information, utilize all of the resources that the members of the team bring. So it's for me also it's a very resonant idea, and it's a very powerful uh powerful phenomenon. It's a very um like it's a very empirically valid and uh construct and and robust findings. And so it's one that uh we all the the faculty in my area, you know, really feel very confident is extremely important in generating group performance. And then I think it's one that really resonates with a lot of students.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was I was definitely mind-blown because I've heard about healthy and unhealthy work cultures, toxic cultures, but like psychological safety was a new lens and a new perspective uh that I think really opened up the eyes of many of my my call colleagues and co-work co-workers and classmates. Um so thank you for for teaching us.
SPEAKER_00I would think I'd like to think of it as a mechanism that explains a lot of like why is a toxic environment problematic. It's toxic because people have low psychological safety. Why is uh an inclusive environment effective? It's effective because people have high psychological safety, right? And so it's really something that explains the why um in understanding how people behave just differently in different environments.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Um so I did want to spend the the second half of our our time together with um, you know, maybe kind of geared towards our audience and those who may be listening that are uh current MBA students, prospective MBA students. But before that conversation, is there anything else about your research that you would like to share with the world?
SPEAKER_00Uh no, uh well, yes, of course, I can talk about it forever, but I think maybe enough and maybe thank you for watching.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Um so Anderson students typically fall into three different categories: enhancers, switchers, or explorers. Uh, what advice do you have for each group?
SPEAKER_00So I think um it's really important to have a clear sense of why you're getting your MBA and what your objectives for how it's going to transform your career actually are. And Enhancer, Switcher, Explorer, I guess these are three different sort of pathways to career transformation. Um, but for all of them.
SPEAKER_01um i i really encourage our students to go beyond thinking about getting the certification and the networking to what can you learn from this experience that will enable you to pursue a fulfilling and um purpose optimizing purpose maximizing career going forward thank you very much um and professor many students will be pursuing afr which is the Anderson facilitated recruiting and interviewing for summer internships uh for next summer how should they assess the culture of a company during the interview process I think it's a great question because so often we focus on what we need to convey and forget that this is also we're also kind of interviewing the company and and um I think actually just demonstrating curiosity about the company and asking questions about the culture sends a very positive signal to a lot of recruiters.
SPEAKER_00For culture the key uh two big things to really try to understand our values and norms and so if you can say I'm really curious to uh learn about the culture of this uh this organization uh can you tell me what some of the key values are and follow up with you know like a day in the life what are some of the the behavioral norms or expectations that people for have for how they show up and interact with each other that's very good advice day in the life thank you um next one is about uh negotiations uh maybe any tips on reviewing evaluating negotiating a job offer yeah um think of it as a long-term relationship and while it is important to um you negotiate fair and appropriate and equitable compensation and compensation that's going to motivate you and make you feel really good about um the value how your value is being recognized by the company I think it's also extremely important to think long term about uh developmental opportunities about mentorship about how you would see yourself how you can see yourself or aspire to growing and developing within that company um I it's likely that people will switch jobs but uh no matter what think if you can identify up front or anticipate what some of the um potential concerns that you might have besides compensation would be down the road and and um include those in your job offer in your contract especially non financial uh rewards and opportunities those are sometimes easier for companies to agree to and also signal your uh commitment or your enthusiasm to having a long-term relationship with the company so even asking for things like developmental opportunities or uh coaching resources you know being able to to um have opportunities to move around the company in order to um experience different facets of the of the organization all of those things um should align with the company's interests in developing your from specific human capital as well absolutely that is that is really good advice another one is uh going to be personal to the FEMBAs the fully employed MBAs because uh most of us have jobs and we're gonna have to make a decision whether to stay with our job or to leave the job for another company and do bigger and better things. So do you have any any advice before putting in a two-week notice uh it goes back to the uh answer I had to your first question about advice for the three different categories of employees what are you looking to do what are you trying to achieve and are you able to achieve that at your current company especially by uh sort of renegotiating your your role in that company now that you have achieved you know you've earned your MBA that should be associated with a pretty substantial not just increase in you know bump in salary and compensation but an expansion of your role or an opening of new opportunities um for you so you can kind of you've just invested a lot in yourself and now the company if uh the company should be rewarding you for that investment and giving you the growth opportunities that you aspire to um that's great that's a win-win but maybe they don't maybe they uh sort of still it it's a more of an incremental modification and and uh reward than what you feel like you've worked for then that might be an indication that you're better off leaving great thank you very much um so the the next question is about electives uh many of us are in our first year um I know you teach some electives so uh do you have any any classes that you recommend or which classes will you be teaching or usually teach uh well first of all for like I I do recommend looking at the specializations because those do map out a bunch of electives that are coherent thematically um and can be really helpful for providing guidance to students as they're figuring out what they do as they get into electives. I personally teach electives on um teams one is it's called um optimizing team performance and another one on employee motivation employee motivation and the future of work um I sometimes teach an August block uh course on short course on performance management as well um so I would hope any of those uh could be interesting and would love to have many of Gemba students enrolled in them.
SPEAKER_01Awesome wonderful another thing kind of a year in the horizon two years in the horizon for us is going to be uh doing a capstone um whether it's GAP or entrepreneurship through acquisition or BCC um do you have any tips or you know anything that uh you've seen over the years that has worked or not worked I think consider all of your options and pursue the ones that are best aligned with helping you integrate what you've learned and uh transform your your learnings into helping to push forward your career goals as much as possible. Well that pretty much uh wraps up you know all most of the questions that I had uh for for today thank you so much for your time professor uh do you have any final thoughts to our listeners um yeah well you you have written me a uh question that I actually kind of liked that you didn't ask which is what advice would you give to your younger self?
SPEAKER_00And I would say you know for me this is a good question to ask what advice do I give to a young professional? And for my answer to that is to appreciate that there are many paths that your career can take. And there are many paths to a happy and satisfying professional career that your life can take. And I find for myself that I was most anxious and stressed out if something wasn't working out and I felt like there was an obstacle on the particular pathway I was on and I felt stuck. And I've gotten the most um I've I've I've gotten overcome those obstacles the most or been least anxious when I confront a challenge when I keep in mind that there are many different directions. There are pathways around this obstacle um and even though maybe I've invested in going down this path for a while there are probably uh other ways in which I can leverage the skills that I've developed here and pursue something different that's going to be a um uh a more satisfying journey so give yourself a little grace and um optimism that things will work out even if the thing right in front of you is presenting a challenge.
SPEAKER_01That is excellent. Thank you so much for your your generosity professor uh and thank you for joining our listeners today this conversation was a masterclass on how status conflict and leadership actually operate beneath the surface of high performing teams for everyone at Anderson and anyone preparing to step into consulting tech finance entrepreneurship or public leadership these dynamics aren't theoretical they shape who gets heard how decisions are made and ultimately who succeeds one of my biggest takeaways that conflict isn't something to avoid it's something to structure well and leadership isn't about dominating the room it's about creating conditions where the best ideas surface regardless of who they come from if you're listening and you're in in an MBA program or considering one I hope this episode challenges you to think differently about you how you show up in Teams, how you express dissent, how you manage status and how you create space, safe space for others. Professor Wendersky, I'm grateful for your um your teaching and your willingness to share your insights with us uh to everyone listening thank you for tuning in to lunch with Alex today if this episode resonated with you uh please share it with a classmate and I'll see you in the next conversation thank you thank you Alex