Joyce K. Fletcher
Distinguished Research Scholar
Center for Gender in Organizations
School of Management
Simmons College
joyce.fletcher@simmons.edu
Website
(617) 557-4433


Related Research Interests

My research interests are in things relational. Primarily, I have used the work of Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver (Stone Center Relational Cultural theory) to apply a growth-in-connection model of human growth and development to organizational settings. In recent years the role of relationships in organizational life has gotten more and more attention and I have found myself drawn to work on relational coordination and relational leadership as well as relational models of organizational change.

The issues that continue to intrigue me in this work include:

  • The role of affect in relational interactions, i.e. what does love have to do with it?
  • The role of power, i.e. how does one establish growth-in-connection conditions in contexts of unequal power (race, gender, organizational role, etc.)
  • The role of gender at the societal level, i.e. how does the fact that things relational have traditionally been associated with the feminine and the private, family sphere of life influence the effort to bring them into the public, organizational sphere and influence the experience of men and women in enacting growth-in-connection relationships in the workplace.

Related Publications

  • The Relational Practice of Leadership (in press) Entity and Constructionist Dimensions of Relational Leadership. Edited by Sonia Ospina and Mary Uhl-bien.
  • Leadership as Relational Practice (2010). Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development. Edited by Kerry Bunker, Kathy Kram, and DT Hall. Jossey Bass, Publisher.
  • Practical Pushing: Creating Discursive Space in Organizational Narratives. (2009) with Lotte Bailyn and Stacy Blake Beard.  Critical Management Studies at Work: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Negotiating Tensions between Theory and Practice. Edited by Julie Wolfram Cox, Tony G. LeTrent-Jones, Maxim Voronov and David Weir in the series: Studies in Multidisciplinarity, Paton, McNamara and Meyer, (Eds.) Elsevier Press, Publisher.
  • Leadership, power and positive relationships at work (2007) In (Jane Dutton and Belle Rose Ragins, eds.) Exploring Positive Relationships at Work: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Press.
  • Relational perspective on mentoring. (2007) with Belle Rose Ragins. In (Kathy Kram and Belle Rose Ragins, eds.) The new handbook of mentoring. London: Sage
  • The Equity Imperative: Redesigning Work for Work-Family Integration (2005) with Lotte Bailyn. In (Ellen Ernst Kossek and Susan Lambert, eds.) Managing Work-Life Integration in Organizations: Future Directions for Research and Practice. A book in the LEA Organization and Management Series: Series in Applied Psychology.  NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Press.
  • “Gender Perspectives on Work and Personal Life”  (2005) In  ( Bianchi, S., Casper, L. , Christensen, K., and King, R. eds.) Workforce/Workplace Mismatch (2005) NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Press
  •  “Shared Leadership: Paradox and Possibility” chapter co-authored with Katrin Kaeufer in Shared Leadership: Current Thinking, Future Trends. Edited by Craig Pearce and Jay Conger. Sage 2003.