DrVirginia R. Stewart

Dr. Stewart has an enduring interest in the well-being of groups and teams operating in organizational settings. She seeks to answer questions about the origins and development of team accountability over time and its relationship with trust, team commitment, identification, and other related emergent phenomenon. Her theory of relational team accountability brings together elements of moral philosophy and emergent team states from the organizational behavior literatures. Dr. Stewart has published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Small Group Research, Human Resource Management, Organizational Psychology Review, and Journal of Positive Psychology. She is currently a primary investigator in a large scale multidisciplinary field project to better understand how to effectively introduce artificial intelligence (AI) into Irish manufacturing teams in a way that supports shared accountability and prioritizes human collaboration, learning, and wellbeing. Her collaborators include Dr. Orla Byrne, post doc Victoria McGovern, industry experts at Digital Manufacturing Ireland, and engineering academics at the I-Form Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.

Dr. Stewart also maintains a longstanding interest in effectively resolving interpersonal conflict in the workplace. Her ongoing research with Dr. Linda Dowling-Hetherington documents the impact of AI on learning to negotiate to resolve differences. Specifically they are measuring how learners respond to negotiating with bots, to include affective, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes. This project is funded by the prestigious Negotiations and Teams Resources Institute (NTR) and aims to support the effective development of vital conflict resolution skills.