Dissertation Proposal Awards

 

Emily Stiehl is a forth year doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at the University of Pittsburgh.  Her primary research interest is the impact of poverty on work outcomes and behaviors.  Specifically, she is interested in how and why living in poverty affects an employee at work.  This research considers the costs of paying low wages, beyond those reflected in the balance sheet.  Specifically, she investigates how poverty can have a detrimental impact on worker stability and performance, and the broader impact it has on the individual, the organizational and the larger society.  

 

It seems obvious that low wages may lead to a series of adverse consequences for the individual and the organization—in fact, other fields have already documented the effects of poverty on other aspects of an individual's life, including health—but there is still not a lot of research on poverty in organizational studies.  Emily's current research allows her to more systematically address these casual observations.  Working with her advisor, Carrie Leana, she has become involved in an on-going field research project, designing surveys for multiple rounds of phone interviews.  The results of these interviews are used to test the model proposed in her dissertation.  Emily's dissertation research can be separated as follows: In the first paper of her dissertation, she develops a theoretical model of the effects of poverty on work outcomes.  The second paper uses a mixed method design with samples of direct care workers (DCWs) to test for individual differences ( e.g., religiosity) among the working poor.  Finally, the third paper will test the mediation hypotheses proposed in the theoretical model.

 

You can view Emily Stiehl's CV here.