I'm Georgina Randsley de Moura and I'm a
Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology.
My expertise is in leadership and leadership in groups.
I'm particularly interested in
understanding how groups respond to
different kinds of leaders. So I've got a
project at the moment. I'm trying to
understand how we recognise leadership
potential in others. Very often
leadership potential is understood as a
personality characteristic and that
people either have leadership potential
or they don't and the research we're
doing at the moment is actually
uncovering that it depends on how
the group responds to the individual, the
candidates that they're presented with,
and that leadership potential can
actually be, well the recognition of
leadership potential, can actually come
under certain biases. So it might be, in
particular we've been looking at gender,
so leadership potential isn't as well
recognised in women as it is in men and
that's one of the projects that we've
been focusing on in the lab. So what we
do is we use theory, particularly
social identity theory, as a lens to
understand the issues that organisations
and industry face. And then we work with
industry partners to collaborate on how
we should best investigate those issues.
And so we're kind of using the best
scientific rigour, but also addressing
real-time issues that organisations face.
Research culture in psychology is
very much about collaboration.
We work in teams or in labs, to make sure
that we've really got our finger on the
pulse so we know what each other are up to. We understand the latest issues that the
field is facing or that our topic, discipline or sub-discipline is facing
and that way we can get the synergies
and do the best research we
possibly can. In particular most of us
will have PhD students working in our
labs or research assistants and most of
us as well bring in undergraduate and
postgraduate students so there's a lot
of opportunity through the education
agenda as well to get involved in
research in the school and really be
involved in the things that
are going on, to understand about psychology.
