Faculty Directory

Christina Bradley is an assistant professor in the Management and Organization Department at the Boston College Carroll School of Management. Her research focuses on unpacking the effects of emotions in workplace social interactions, with the broader aim of advancing understanding of how teams can engage with emotions to support optimal functioning and to uncover the barriers that prevent them from doing so. Specifically, she examines how different responses to others' emotions and patterns of expressing emotions affect teams, especially under challenging workplace conditions such as conflict and hierarchy.

Bradley has introduced a theoretical framework for how responses to others' emotions affect individual, relational, team, and organizational outcomes. This framework suggests that responses that explicitly acknowledge an emotion without trying to change it may be beneficial across the widest variety of contexts, yet remain underexplored and underutilized compared to responses that avoid or attempt to change the emotion. Her empirical work includes evidence that although employees are often reluctant to acknowledge their leader's emotions, doing so fosters healthier emotional dynamics and improves team performance.

Bradley's research has been published in academic journals such as Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the Academy of Management Annals. She has published articles in others outlets such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

Bradley holds a Ph.D. in management and organizations from the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business and a BS in psychology from Yale University.