Christopher P. Long, Ph.D., Paul F. Naughton Associate Professor of Management and Executive Director of the Executive-In-Residence Program
February 4, 2019
A week before starting his Master of Public Policy degree at Harvard University, Chris Long walked into the Registrar’s Office and had an experience that changed his life: he picked up a course catalog and saw a description for a Ph.D. program in something called organizational behavior.
“This is awesome,” he recalls thinking that day. “This is what I want to be doing.”
That path from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, from which he received his M.P.P., and designed an individualized concentration in organizational innovation and reform, led him to a Ph.D. from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. From there, he held faculty positions at Washington University and Georgetown University before assuming his current role as the Paul F. Naughton Associate Professor of Management at Tobin in 2017. The Professorship allows him to continue his award-winning research on the actions that leaders take to foster high levels of performance by addressing control, trust and fairness issues within complex and dynamic business environments.
Much of his current research is focused on what Long terms “control-trust dynamics,” which governs the relationship between a supervisor and a subordinate. The difference between Long’s focus and most scholars in the area is that Long considers these issues from the perspective of the leader, as opposed to that of the employee.
“We have to know what managers face and how they think about these issues in addition to understanding what they should do in creating empowered workforces,” he said.
Those dynamics concern the balance between control -- the manner in which standards are communicated, how people are monitored and rewarded, and how they are directed and informed -- and trust, the extent to which people are confident that their leaders will protect and promote their interests.
“It is important to be confident in and trust your leader,” Long explains. “When leaders lead in ways that effectively direct and control employees while gaining their trust both sides cooperate more and perform better overall. The challenge for leaders is that control and trust build on opposing, often conflicting psychological mechanisms, so I want to help leaders balance these dynamics.”
Beyond incorporating his findings into his Administrative and Organizational Behavior course, Long authored or co-authored several papers in top academic journals since arriving at Tobin in 2017. He recently co-authored a comprehensive review of control-trust research in the highly-cited Academy of Management Annals. He also published one of the first empirical papers on how managers attempt to balance control-trust dynamics in superior-subordinate relationships in the journal Accounting, Organizations, and Society.
In addition to his teaching and research, Long directs the Executive-in-Residence Program (EIRP), which selects 72 high-achieving Undergraduate and MBA students each year to engage in real-world business consulting with actual businesses and nonprofit organizations. He plans to increase the quality of the strategic management content the students receive, and to utilize the hybrid course model more fully. That model will direct students to study online while consulting with EIRP’s corporate clients. He also hopes to add targeted professional development opportunities for EIRP students, and to strengthen the bonds between them and the estimated 2,000 alumni of the Program.