Professor Profiles – Lachlan Whatley
MH: What work consumes your time outside of class?
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I’m totally focused on group dynamics and what happens with the two major aspects of groups: the way they’re formed/created; and then continue on to competency (effective or not). In particular, I’m interested in the experience of the individual and the various phases the individual has to go through in order to be a valuable contributor to the group dynamic process. Everything we do – live, work and play – is within groups.
At the application level, I personally focus on Family Owned Businesses. Just recently, I had a journal accept my new model for FOB succession (The Integrated, Dialectic, Knowledge Accumulation Model for FOB Succession). It’s a new model that integrates the latest thinking on group dynamics, using a dialectic framework, which enables the various stakeholders to “grow” and develop prior to taking on particular roles. Thus, improving the likelihood of successful transfers from one generation to the next; and not just in the simpler cases of parent(s) to one child, but also large family owned businesses to multiple children where some of them do work in the business while others do not.
MH: What do you love about class and what is your vision for the year?
Two things that really turn my crank in class is, first, having students really get the theory and understand the difference between a normative theory and a descriptive theory: A normative theory being theoretically what should happen and a descriptive theory being what descriptively we experience actually happening. And particularly we see this a lot in business where theoretically this should happen but descriptively this is what we experience. And what I really enjoy is students seeing those differences and seeing students binge able to talk to the theories and know the theories within a construct but then also to the point of application.
It also turns my crank when I see students who get really interested in new ideas of theory. Unfortunately we don’t get a lot of chance to see that in undergraduate programs. But there’s still the chance every now and then to find new ideas of theory particularly in the upper level courses. Depending upon the course and how it’s run we may get to the edge of the theory to discuss, “What isn’t done.” I get really excited to see students say, “That’s really cool. I think I want to study that.” They’re thinking theoretically. They’re thinking how to expand a theory. In the academy we call this “the development of the practitioner scholar,” who is a scholar who knows the scholarly materials and aids or adds to scholarly work but is also comfortable within the practical realm and I think that’s a healthy combination. So that’s what I love to see in students; to have the opportunity to work with and show students that they can make a contribution.
Michael Biornstad
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