Charles Street Chats: Q&A with Kevin Wynne
Behind the Chat
Order: Americano
Location: Olivia Coffee Roastery
Distance from campus: 0.1 mile
Dr. Kevin Wynne brings his passion for research with him into his classrooms as an associate professor at The University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business. His main interest lies in the intersection of trying to understand people and particularly how they think, feel and act in the workplace. Wynne holds degrees in psychology, human resource management, and industrial and organizational psychology. His academic background paired with work in talent development, consultancy and researcher allow him to bring an important perspective to UBalt. Today, he teaches courses on organizational behavior, human resource management, leadership and artificial intelligence in business.
Q: You have a diverse career background. What made you decide to lean into teaching?
A: I pursued a research degree because I love the idea of coming up with new questions and trying to answer them. That led me down the path of first working in industry and consulting. Those opportunities sort of led me away from doing what I really wanted to do as a Ph.D. student. I had always envisioned myself on a college campus doing research. I was very lucky and came across an opportunity at the Air Force Research Laboratory, which is a full-time research position. It was fantastic, but after a little while, I noticed that there was something really important missing: being in a vibrant academic environment where you’re surrounded by learners. Also, I missed having the opportunity to advise students, helping them overcome challenges they might be experiencing in the workplace and helping them to make important career decisions. That really pushed me to look for a home on an academic campus. Now I’m very happy that I have just about everything that I’m looking for in a career, that is, mainly conducting research around topics that I find interesting and I think are really important topics for society, and also teaching students and helping them to understand themselves, to grow and develop, and to understand how they can become great leaders, especially in our great city of Baltimore.
Q: What are some of the universal lessons you can share from your research into the intersection of age, gender and work-life balance?
A: We all have these different roles we play in life. We have a role as an employee, we have a role outside of work, sometimes that means as a family member, in our social lives, and maybe even as a student. Now, oftentimes, these roles clash and conflicts take apart one role and don’t leave enough time for the other roles that are important in our life. We want to try to understand a little bit better this idea of work-life balance, and how that might change over the course of a life. The conventional wisdom is that earlier in our careers, like right after college, we tend to have a little more balance. It’s a little bit less demanding part of our career. Most people have not started families at that point yet, so we tend to have a bit higher work-life balance early on. Then work-life balance tends to diminish over time, especially in the late 20s through about the late 40s. We see this dip in work-life balance because our careers ramp up, we gain more responsibilities, maybe we have supervisory roles, and then at home, too, for those who choose to start families. The later years in life, as we get closer to retirement, we see more balance. What that means is a U-shaped curve over time: more balance early on, less in the middle stages, and then balance rebounds at the end. That’s the conventional wisdom. We wanted to really put a rigorous test on that assumption, and what we found is a very different story. For men, we still see that U-shaped curve where they’re enjoying the benefits of retirement and the empty nest, if you will. For women, we don’t we don’t see the same thing. What we see is a dip in the middle years just like for many men workers, but we don’t see that rebounding. One reason probably has to do with elder care. Recent research has shown us that women tend to take on a disproportionate share of elder care responsibilities.
WATCH: Kevin Wynne imagines the role of AI in the workplace
Q: What tell us about human AI teaming, including what it is, and why it’s so important looking ahead?
A: We have a lot of great engineers, computer scientists and physicists that are doing really amazing things. If you think about the advancement of technology right now, it’s incredible: self-driving cars, the technology that helps us to have safe flights, all these sorts of things are out there. The consensus among experts is this technology is not going to replace people in their work, but rather, over time, the expectation is that we’ll be working more and more with technology, regardless of whatever industry or job you’re in. We know far less about the human side of the human-AI partnership, so my research is focused on trying to understand human workers’ perceptions of their non-human work partners, especially in terms of AI teaming. What do people think of the technology that they’re paired with? Do they trust it? Distrust it? What are the factors that can lead a human worker to trust a little bit more? How do we avoid over trust, and basically saying, take my hands off the wheel, literally or figuratively? So, it’s really trying to find the factors that help us achieve the right balance.
Q: If time and money weren’t not an issue, and you have the ability to chase after like one research topic or one question, what would you really want to know about AI and the future of business?
A: A lot of the research that I’ve looked at so far is really considering one human worker at a time partnering with one technology. That might not be the typical case, in the future, you might have an existing human-human worker team, and an AI teammate being introduced that team. So now that changes the dynamic, right? It’s not just how I’m going to use it, it’s how we collectively think of the technology and how we’re going to use it. For example, does the introduction of an AI teammate undermine our relationship with each other? Because that could be a possibility. It’s such an exciting topic, one that’s really important, and I think one that’s captured a lot of attention in media. It has huge implications for the future of work, and it’s one that students are really interested in.
What Charms Us
We end all of our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here’s Kevin’s answer.
I love so much about Baltimore. Living in Baltimore for about six years or so, I’ve really adopted it as my home. I earned my doctoral degree from Wayne State, which is in Detroit. And during my time there, I’ve come to love that city, warts and all. And I see a lot of parallels between Detroit and Baltimore. There’s so much more good than bad. I see resilience. I see communities across the city that care a lot about the future and success of their city. And it’s even better that we’re at The University of Baltimore. We are the University of Baltimore for Baltimore. We have a number of students who are from here, care deeply about the city and once they leave the University, they continue to care deeply about doing great things from the city, and they do.