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Donald Pendagast

A full-time MBA student at UConn concentrating in Business Analytics working on research in organizational design, self-management, workplace autonomy, and innovation.

📍 Hartford, CT

ERGs and the Paradox of Awareness

As a graduate student, I spent time researching diversity groups within schools of business—specifically those serving individuals who identified within the LGBTQ+ community. My goal was designing and starting a group within my own MBA program. The particular aspect I wanted to better understand was the purpose of established

What inspires you?

From time to time, either as an ice breaker or some kind of prompt, I hear the question “what inspires you?” Typically, what follows is a who’s-who of famous quotations or figures and what irks me is that so infrequently are they demonstrated to be sources of inspiration. Usually,

What can I do: the paradox of awareness

A simple and often asked question leads to new frustrations and the coining of a term describing a phenomenon often felt by minorities.

Thoughts become dreams

Grosser: So, what are your goals? What do you hope to accomplish through this independent study? Me: I'd love to get published in the Administrative Science Quarterly. Grosser: Good. Do you have four years? I will never forget this initial meeting we had at Tissane’s. I am

Compromise is not a remedy for human rights

From Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner in their op-ed with the New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/opinion/gay-rights-religious-liberty.html?referringSource=articleShare] : > Both sides, then, have unfinished agendas. L.G.B.T. advocates want broader civil rights protections than the Supreme Court’s relatively narrow

Initial Research into Organizational Democracy

This paper reviews existing literature on organizational theory and design, specifically organizational democracy, to develop an emergent theory showing how firms who adopt structurally anchored organizational design are more likely to empower employees, leading to improved overall firm performance.

Week 5: Hierarchy and Status

Readings this week involve hierarchy and status, as the title suggests. The review piece from Magee and Galinsky (2008) establishes a framework of hierarchy where both status and power are independent, distinct elements. Meanwhile, Anderson, Srivastava, Beer, Spataro, and Chatman (2006) conducted an empirical study focused purely on “status hierarchies”

Week #4: Perspectives on Design from Strategy Scholars

Central to this article is the question: "How do environmental turbulence and complexity affect the appropriate formal design of organizations?" The authors claim that informal designs — networks for hierarchies, social relations for formalized coordination, and clustering around process or capability over functions, products, or regions — have had the

Organizational Theories

As I begin to study organizational theory and design, I join the decades long conversation through the papers and works of many scholars. This aims to be a placeholder for the collection of various theories and concepts I discover along the way. Organizational design is largely concerned with how we