SIOP Graduate Student Scholarship Award Winner: Meet Monique Domingo

Liberty J. Munson

As part of our ongoing series to provide visibility into what it takes to earn a SIOP award or grant, we highlight a diverse class of award winners in each edition of TIP. We hope that this insight encourages you to consider applying for a SIOP award or grant because you are probably doing something amazing that can and should be recognized by your peers in I-O psychology!

This quarter, we are highlighting one of SIOP’s Graduate Student Award winners, Monique Domingo.

Share a little bit about who you are and what you do.

My name is Monique Domingo. I earned my PhD in Business Management at the University of Connecticut, and I recently began my new role as an assistant professor of Management at Louisiana State University. My research broadly focuses on leadership and teams, but I am primarily interested in how leadership behaviors can influence team and organizational effectiveness, especially in reaction and response to critical and disruptive events. 

Describe the research/work that you did that resulted in this award. What led to your idea?

After learning about leadership in hospital or military settings, I grew curious about how high-stake events, like a crisis, pose unique demands on leaders to minimize negative consequences and overcome various threats. During such events, leaders are often expected to prevent or encourage behaviors that are useful despite limited and/or rapidly changing information and resources. Yet, there is limited research explaining how leaders behave in a crisis and whether those behaviors are effective.

As COVID-19 emerged, I envisioned how different state governors appeared to implement different behaviors to influence their constituents in an attempt to influence crisis consequences. Thus, I designed a multistage, mixed-method research study to explore what leaders said and did during the crisis and how it might have influenced their collective followers’ emotions, subsequent behaviors, and health consequences.

What do you think was key to you winning this award?

I think there are 3 key factors that contributed to winning this award, the (a) theory, (b) dataset, and (c) analysis. First, I proposed the exploration of multiple leadership responsibilities during a real-world crisis; contrary to prior research that looked at one leadership dimension at a time, my research revealed that there are multiple leadership dimensions that can co-occur during a crisis event. Second, the 2.9 million words from U.S. governor briefings and the 2,088 state-level repeated unobtrusive observations enabled me to not only identify what leaders say and do in a crisis, but it also enabled me to examine their effects on collective followers’ reactions, behaviors, and crisis consequences in real time. Third, while prior research infers that all contextual factors of a crisis remain constant, the multistage, mixed- method research design enabled me to account for the dynamic nature of leadership that results from rapidly changing information during a long-duration crisis event. 

[Author note: This is so cool! I love how you saw an opportunity and leveraged real actions taken by leaders during the pandemic to study leadership under crisis.]

What do you see as the lasting/unique contribution of this work to our discipline? How can it be used to drive changes in organizations, the employee experience, and so on?

Broadly speaking, I hope that this work underscores how important it is for leaders to be more thoughtful about their communications and actions toward their collective followers during a crisis. Both may differentially impact their collective followers’ reactions and behaviors, which in turn may drive serious crisis consequences.

What’s a fun fact about yourself (something that people may not know)?

I am passionate about mixed-martial arts and train seriously under the Jeet Kune Do philosophy.

About the author:

Liberty Munson is currently the director of Psychometrics of the Microsoft Worldwide Learning programs in the Worldwide Learning organization. She is responsible for ensuring the validity and reliability of Microsoft’s certification programs. Her passion is for finding innovative solutions to business challenges that balance the science of assessment design and development with the realities of budget, time, and schedule constraints. Most recently, she has been presenting on the future of testing and how technology can change the way we assess skills.

Liberty loves to bake, hike, backpack, and camp with her husband, Scott, and miniature schnauzer, Apex. If she’s not at work, you’ll find her enjoying the great outdoors or in her kitchen tweaking some recipe just to see what happens.

Her advice to someone new to I-O psychology?

Statistics, statistics, statistics—knowing data analytic techniques will open A LOT of doors in this field and beyond!