SHRM@QU Presents: Dr. Wendy Bedwell, President – PACE Consulting Solutions, LLC

Dr. Wendy Bedwell conducts research on team performance and training effectiveness and applies this work to help improve organizational effectiveness across work domains. She is a co-PI on a NASA grant funded project aimed at understanding how best to compose teams to help maintain performance levels when working in isolated, confined environments. She is also working with collaborators on individual and team training efforts to improve training evaluation within multiple casualty scenarios.

On February 12, 2018, Dr. Bedwell discussed her diverse career path with the students, which includes degrees in psychology, business, distance education, and I/O psychology. Dr. Bedwell explained her current work doing research for NASA in Hawaii where she is studying individuals in planetary exploration. The study involves a group of astronauts who are living and working together. Her study focuses on cohesion and applying that to extreme environments.

Dr. Bedwell discussed her surprising findings during her research that in this type of extreme environment people even if they do not have social cohesion still manage to get the work done efficiently, unlike other family businesses style work environments. Dr. Bedwell also found that unlike most work situations openness about conflict was not successful due to the 24 hour a day interaction between the astronauts.

Dr. Bedwell left students with the idea that you need to understand characteristics of every organization to be able to make initiatives successful in every organization. In conducting research, you need to do an analysis of what specific organizations need before implementing initiatives.