In a forthcoming article now available, our guest today, Professor Stephen Courtright, along with co-authors tackle the question of the “beauty bias and leader emergence”. Or to put that into plain English: how important is physical attractiveness to leadership? While pop psychology might tell us one thing, what does the evidence actually tell us and why should we care?

About our guest…

Stephen Courtright is Professor of Management & Flip and Susan Flippen Endowed Chair and Founding Director of the Flippen Leadership Institute at Texas A&M University.

Stephen’s research focuses on organizational leadership, teamwork, and work-family dynamics, and has been published in a range of academic journals and has earned many international awards and been featured by outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Forbes, Fox News, and Harvard Business Review.

The article discussed is available here:

• Courtright, S. H., Thurgood, G. R., Liao, H., Morgan, T. J., & Wang, J. (2025). The Beauty Bias and Leader Emergence: A Theoretical Integration, Extension, and Meta-Analysis. Journal of management, 01492063251330199.
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01492063251330199

• You can follow Stephen’s work and that of the Flippen Leadership Institute on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-courtright-54776325/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/flippen-leadership-institute/posts/?feedView=all

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Research has consistently found that maintaining a healthy balance between work and other areas of life often requires people to establish and maintain boundaries those various areas. Yet as humans we might also be curious or indeed nosy about the people we are working with or who might be working for us – if only just to find out a little bit more about them. But what actually is nosiness and when might that be perceived to have gone too far?

To explore the question of nosiness I am delighted to be joined by Professor Richard Currie.

About our guest…

Dr. Richard Currie is an Assistant Professor of Leadership and Workplace Psychology in the School of Hospitality Administration at Boston University.

Dr. Currie’s research interests center around work-related social stressors and the implications that employees’ responses to these stressors have on critical organizational knowledge management outcomes such as knowledge sharing and counterproductive knowledge hiding behaviors.

You can find out more about Richard’s work at these links:

• Google Scholar – https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Qqxawt8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
• Boston University – https://www.bu.edu/hospitality/profile/richard-a-currie/
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/racurrie/

Some of the articles discussed in the interview include the following:

• Currie, R. A., Achyldurdyyeva, J., Guchait, P., & Lee, J. (2024). For my eyes only: The effect of supervisor nosiness on knowledge sharing behavior among restaurant workers. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 120, 103770.
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278431924000823?via%3Dihub
• Currie, R. A., & Ehrhart, M. G. (2025). Mind Your Own Business: Developing and Validating the Workplace Nosiness Scale. Journal of Business and Psychology, 1-24.
• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-025-10018-7

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Adversity is inherent within most – if not all – occupational contexts in which the performance of individuals and teams is crucial for organisational effectiveness.

With its central focus on what enables people to resist, bounce back, or recover from adverse events that threaten their functioning, viability, or development, it is unsurprising that the concept of resilience has attracted a significant focus over the past 40 years. However, the majority of this past work has focused on resilience among individuals despite the fact that in in most contexts, whether work, sport or education, people typically complete tasks within teams that work interdependently for a specified timeframe to achieve a common and valued outcome or objective.

In order to better understand the nature of team resilience, a recent paper co-authored by our guest today – Professor Daniel Gucciardi - seeks to address this gap in the literature.

About our guest…

Daniel Gucciardi is a Professor in the Curtin School of Allied Health at Curtin University in Western Australia.

Daniel’s research portfolio sits at the interface of the psychological and behavioural sciences, and utilises basic and applied research paradigms to advance knowledge and practice on the complexities of human performance and health. Daniel’s work and interests focus on human performance and health primarily within the context of stress, where he examines concepts like resilience, team dynamics, self-regulation, and behaviour change.

You can find out more about Daniel’s work via his Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ovDUT-EAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

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Humor is a phenomenon experienced by most, if not all, human beings. Throughout human history humor has played a role in communication and interactions between people, yet how often do we actually take the time to consider what is humor, and more to the point, what is humorous?

To discuss this, I am delighted to be joined on the Brain for Business podcast by Matt Nadel.

About our guest...

Matt Nadel is a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor at St. John's University in New York studying communication in organizations. Prior to joining St John’s University, Matt worked as a CPA and auditor at a Big 4, and ran a phenomenally successful baseball blog.

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Creativity is – for a very good reason – often seen as something positive and even joyful. Yet like many things in life there is also a flipside to creativity – a dark side, if you will. To explore the concept of dark creativity I am delighted to be joined today by Dr Hansika Kapoor.

About our guest…

Hansika Kapoor is a Research Author at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala, a not-for-profit research organisation in Mumbai. Hansika’s work has been published in leading journals including Creativity Research Journal, Thinking Skills and Creativity, and Personality and Individual Differences and she regularly contributes to popular media publications, including Psychology Today, Mint, and The Wire.

You can find out more about Hansika’s research, including on the topics of creativity and dark creativity, on her website: https://www.hansikakapoor.in/

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As regular listeners will know, the Brain for Business podcast focuses primarily on research by academics and others into the brain, behavioural and organisational sciences. Key to what we do is an underlying assumption that the people we interview and the research that we discuss with them is supported by a strong degree of academic legitimacy. In other words, the research is at the very least robust and evidence-based. Yet in recent years, questions of academic legitimacy have bubbled to the surface with ever greater frequency and is the focus of a recent pre-print paper currently under review at a leading journal by our guest today, Dr Raffaele Ciriello.

About our guest...

Dr Raffaele Ciriello is a tenured Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney. Raffaele’s research explores the intersection of digital innovation, decentralized governance, and ethics, blending rigorous interdisciplinary work with qualitative and dialectical inquiry to address complex sociotechnical dilemmas.

The pre-print article referred to in the interview - Safeguarding Academic Legitimacy: Editorial Conflicts of Interest as a Principal-Agent Problem in Elite Business Journals - is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5315585

Webpages for Raffaele and his collaborator, Vitali Mindel, are available here:

• https://www.sydney.edu.au/business/about/our-people/academic-staff/raffaele-ciriello.html
• https://bit.vt.edu/faculty/directory/mindel.html

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A recent open access article in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization reported on results from research comparing the effect of (the same) opinions expressed by visibly senior, female versus male experts. Common wisdom might hold that women suffer from an “authority gap” compared to their male peers, but is that really the case?

To explore the findings of this research I am delighted to be joined by one of the authors of the study, Professor Hans Henrik Sievertsen.

About our guest…

Hans Henrik Sievertsen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Bristol, and is also a senior researcher at the Danish Center for Social Science Research and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn. Hans is an applied microeconomist, working mainly on topics related to education, health, and gender.

The articles discussed in the interview are as follows:

• "Do female experts face an authority gap? Evidence from economics"
• with Sarah Smith, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation (2025). Available to read here: https://www.hhsievertsen.net/content/papers/Sievertsen_Smith_2025.pdf
• "The gender gap in expert voice: evidence from economics"
• with Sarah Smith, Public Understanding of Science (2024). Available to read here: https://www.hhsievertsen.net/content/papers/Sievertsen_Smith_2024.pdf

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Despite the old saying that “curiosity killed the cat”… the importance of curiosity for information seeking and gathering in organisations is well established. Yet little is known about the role that CEO curiosity plays in strategic choices and decision-making. To explore this further and to discuss the findings of a recent paper in the journal Strategic Organization, I am delighted to be joined today by Professor Dr. Patricia Klarner.

About our guest...

Professor Dr. Patricia Klarner is Director of the Institute for Organization Design at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna). Prior to her current position, she worked on the faculties of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and the University of Munich (LMU).

Professor Klarner’s research focuses on corporate strategy and adaptation, corporate governance, strategic organization design, and strategic leadership. She particularly examines how organizations can remain agile and successful in times of increasingly volatile and unpredictable business environments. Her research provides insights into how organizations can balance change and stability in their organization design and how key strategic actors – top management teams and boards of directors – influence strategic adaptation and growth decisions over time.

The article discussed in the interview is open access and is available here:

CEO Curiosity and Strategic Change: The Differential Role of Curiosity Types and TMT Characteristics

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14761270251325238

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