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Biography

Veronique Tran is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at ESCP Europe, Paris Campus. She is a graduate of the University of Lausanne in Political Science. She earned her Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) with the Geneva Emotion Research Group directed by Prof. Klaus Scherer. Her primary research focus was to examine the interaction of emotions with decision-making processes in management teams. During her post-doctoral studies in the Industrial/Organizational area of the Department of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University, she had the opportunity to research creativity and innovation processes and how they unfold across levels of organizations. While her research interests continue to include topics such as emotional climate and team dynamics, she has developed research interests in the area of emotion socialization and emotion regulation. After spending 6 months sabbatical at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (Geneva, Switzerland), this line of research led her to direct her research efforts towards the role of emotion in the luxury industry, with investigations bridging neuroscience and management.

Veronique Tran teaches Organizational Behavior at the Masters and Executive MBA level, and research methods at the PhD and Masters level. She supervises Masters theses and professional theses. She was Visiting Professor at the University NOVA of Lisbon (Portugal) and taught in their MBA program from 2002 to 2006. She has an extensive experience in executive education and international management development, with emphasis on topics such as personality, group decision-making, leadership, teamwork, and emotional competence. She worked with companies such as Caterpillar, Henkel, IBM, Heineken, Unilever, in Europe and Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong-Kong), and more recently in China. She performs personal coaching using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) – certified since 1995, as well as executive coaching based on 360° feedback (certification earned in 2000 at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland).

Veronique Tran is member of the Academy of Management (AOM), the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology (EAWOP), the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE), and EMONET – Emotions in Organizational settings. She is an ad-hoc reviewer for Academy of Management (AoM), Ibero-American Academy of Management (and its related journal Management Research), Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), EMONET (Emotions in Organizations Network), Human Performance, European Management Journal, and Group and Organizations Management. She received the Best Reviewer Award for the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management in 2007 and 2008.

See Véronique Tran's video on emotional intelligence and emotional competence.

Current research

I started my academic endeavors with an interest in emotional climate and learning organizations (see Tran, 1998), then migrated towards emotions and decision-making processes in management teams, and one of my present objectives is to return to the studying of emotional climate, related to innovation processes. The common point between these steps is that I have always been interested in multilevel research. There is actually a striking amount of similarities between research on innovation and decision-making processes. The core processes of innovation, i.e. problem identification, idea generation, idea evaluation, and implementation, present great similarities with processes described by group decision-making literature, i.e. problem identification, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, and implementation of decision. Other team issues such as conflict, minority dissent, team cohesion, shared mental models, participation, team members’ characteristics, skills, and abilities, trust, and what is called group affect are inherent parts of the innovation literature. As scholars converged on definitions of creativity versus innovation, most processes addressed are similar across domains. Thus, there is a logical thread between my doctoral work, my research interests, and my current research project on creativity and innovation.

My doctoral research focused on the relationship between discrete emotions and team decision-making. Using data from 20 simulated companies run by a total of 106 managers attending executive education programs, my research examined to what extent four classes of emotions (achievement, approach, resignation, and antagonistic) were related to team decision-making processes (alternative generation and alternative evaluation), and team cohesion. I used a measurement tool, the Emotion Wheel, developed by Klaus Scherer and the Geneva Emotion Research Group, which includes the above-mentioned classes of emotion. Based on this work, I remain very committed to research on discrete emotions and their effects on decision-making in particular and organizational behaviors in general: there is still a lot of room for investigation, as the current literature has been focusing on affect and mood and not so much emotion.

Over the past two years, I intensified my efforts to understand the impact of emotion in organizational settings by researching the concept of emotion socialization and emotion regulation. Emotion socialization is the activity of learning about the feeling rules linked to one’s job on the one hand, and to the organizational culture on the other hand. Emotion regulation in an organizational context is a synonym of emotion management, that is, modulating, and shaping one’s emotions to adapt to circumstances and interactions with different players in the organization. These themes are complementary and enable me to bridge the latest research in psychology and organizational behavior.

In the coming years, I will further the bridging by linking neuroscience and management to investigate the role of emotion in various decision-making processes in the luxury industry (consumer decision-making but also managerial decision-making at each step of the business system, from conception to final sale).

Working papers:

• TRAN V., & FISK, G. (2010). Target-Receiver Emotion Fit:  Implications for Front-Line Service Interactions

• MIKOLAJCZAK, M., TRAN, V., BROTHERIDGE, C.M., & GROSS, J. J. (2010). Regulating emotions while laboring emotions: Towards a new framework.

• TRAN, V., & ROSELLO, J. (2010). Assessing the climate for creativity: An example in a French hi-tech organization.

• TRAN, V., & K.R. SCHERER. The Emotion Wheel: Validation of an instrument measuring emotions in applied settings.

• TRAN, V., & PRALONG, J. (2009). Emotion socialization: A new twist on fit.

• TRAN, V. Seeking customer service desperately: The other side of emotion regulation.

• TRAN, V., & MIKOLAJCZAK, M. Understanding emotion regulation and emotional socialization of newcomers in organization: Two faces of the same coin?

See Véronique Tran's video on emotional intelligence and emotional competence.

Publications