JP Stephens

‘Tune in. Don’t tune out,” John Paul (J.P.) Stephens urges in LSE Business Review article

June 29, 2020


Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) Research Advisory Board member John Paul (J.P.) Stephens writes about global fragmentation in the LSE Business Review article “How the show goes on in time of injustice, violence, and pandemic.”

Stephens urges people feeling blame, anxiety, and fear amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and protests against police brutality and racism to: “Tune in. Don’t tune out.”

“We seem to be locked into an ‘us vs. them’ dynamic along so many dimensions of our current existence, entrenched in sacrificing collective interests for individual ones,” Stephens writes.

He taps his ethnographic research on coordination in a large community choir to explain how aesthetics, emotions and attention can help individuals recalibrate their actions to create harmony amongst the collective.

“Paying attention to both our local and global concerns simultaneously can help change our perception and the motivation to collaborate effectively,” Stephens writes.

Stephens is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. His research focuses on the experience of work relationships and the coordination that these relationships enable.