Ashley Hardin is currently an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Washington University’s Olin Business School, where she investigates interpersonal processes in organizations.

Her core research agenda centers around personal knowledge (i.e., information about the nonwork lives of colleagues) within organizations, advancing our theoretical understanding of how individuals manage their work-life boundaries and how those choices impact interpersonal relationships within the workplace. Although her research agenda preceded the pandemic, its importance has been magnified with work-life boundaries becoming increasingly blurred due to the rise of working from home and the increased difficulty in cultivating close colleague connections due to greater social distancing. Her interest in this aspect of organizational life has led to a portfolio of work designed to answer four particular questions: how individuals learn about colleagues’ lives outside of work; how this knowledge alters relationships at work; what the individual, team, and organizational consequences are of the resulting interpersonal dynamics; and finally how the organizational context influences these processes.