April 2003
Volume 16, Number 4
Michael Lynn is a social psychologist at Cornell University's school of hotel administration. His research interests have focused on tipping behaviors and customs. Lynn received his PhD in social psychology from Ohio State University in 1987. Before joining Cornell University's school of hotel administration, he held appointments as professor of marketing in the business schools at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Houston.
Iam a social psy-chologist at Cornell University's School of hotel administration. The Cornell hotel school is essentially a boutique business school with a focus on the hospitality industry. In this article, I will identify some of the ways that my job differs from the typical academic position in psychology, describe my research, and explain how I came to work in a hotel school.
MY JOB
Like most academics, my job involves teaching, research and service. However, the job differs in important ways from those in psychology departments. Among the distinctive features of the job are the following.
- I teach marketing rather than psychology courses. My courses on consumer behavior and marketing research involve a substantial overlap with material I learned as a social psychologist. However, even these courses required me to learn a lot of new material.
- As a group, my students are more extroverted, more career-focused, less intellectually curious, and less analytical than the typical psychology student. In order to reach these students, I have to emphasize established principles and their application rather than alternative theoretical perspectives and research testing those theories.
- Work dress norms require a coat and tie on teaching days and business casual on other days. Unfortunately, these norms do not include jeans!
- My research is expected to contribute to hospitality management. Thus, I do not have the same degree of freedom in choosing research topics that most psychologists do. However, my own preference for applied, phenomena driven research is more appreciated than it would have been in most psychology programs.
- I have no behavioral labs or established subject pools. On the other hand, I have better access to the hospitality industry's field settings and data sets than do most psychologists.
- I am expected to provide service to a constituency that most psychologists do not have - i.e., the hospitality industry. I serve this constituency through consulting, writing for practitioner journals, and presenting at industry conferences.
- I work with people from a wider variety of disciplines than is found in psychology departments - i.e., from accounting, communications, finance, human resources, information technology, law, management, marketing, operations management, and strategy. This makes faculty committees, lunches and parties more interesting and educational.
- My income is substantially larger than it would have been had I remained in psychology.
DETERMINANTS OF TIPPNG BEHAVIOR
The Cornell Hotel School requires faculty to publish in the journals of a basic discipline (such as economics, marketing, or psychology) as well as in hospitality management journals. Many faculty do this by pursuing two different programs of research - one for discipline journals and another for hospitality journals. Fortunately, my interests have allowed me to publish in both types of journals from a single research program. For the past twenty years, I have studied the determinants of tipping behavior and customs. Tips are voluntary payments of money given to service workers after services have been rendered. Tipping interests psychologists, because they use it as a naturalistic dependent variable in research on diffusion of responsibility, equity, reciprocity, and other psychological processes. Tipping also interests economists, because they see it as an irrational economic behavior. Finally, tipping interests hospitality managers and employees, because it is a major source of employee compensation in the industry. Thus, I have been able to publish my research on this topic in applied psychology, behavioral economics, and hospitality management journals. Interested readers can find pre-prints of some of my articles on my Web site at www.people.cornell.edu/pages/wml3.
HOW I CAME TO THE CORNELL HOTEL SCHOOL
In 1987, I graduated from Ohio State University's social psychology program with seven first authored publications. My original goal was a tenure track job in a psychology department. However, my research was not focused - my articles dealt with alcohol effects, group processes, person perception, romantic relationships, and social dilemmas - and I had difficulty finding a tenure track job. Therefore, I took a visiting position in psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. It was there that I first thought about employment outside of psychology.
While at UMC, I was offered a two-year visiting position in the business school due largely to the strong ties between the psychology and marketing departments that Richard Petty had forged there. With an undergraduate dual-major in psychology and economics, a master's thesis on tipping, and a dissertation on consumer response to product scarcity, I had always been interested in economic behavior. Therefore, I decided to accept the visiting marketing position and to reposition myself as a consumer psychologist seeking employment in a business school.
In 1990, I obtained a tenure track position in marketing at the University of Houston. In my fifth year there, I came across an ad for a consumer psychology position at Cornell's Hotel School. I applied for, and eventually accepted, this position for many reasons. First, I wanted to be in a more academically challenging university. Second, I had fallen in love with the hospitality industry while paying my way through school working as a banquet server, bartender and waiter. Third, I liked the Cornell Hotel School's applied orientation, which was even stronger than that at most business schools. Finally, I knew that my research on tipping would be more appreciated at the Cornell Hotel School and would have more visibility and impact coming from there than elsewhere.
I have now been at Cornell's Hotel School for seven years. Although it was not where I had originally planned to work, I have found it to be a very hospitable environment for an applied consumer/social psychologist like myself.
