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On the high school football field, Chunghyun Oh learned how good leadership can make a big difference. Not everyone leads the same way, and for some, it’s not a skill that comes naturally.

“We all know our leaders are everywhere around us, but distinguishing between good and bad leaders and understanding what sets them apart remains a challenge,” Oh said. “I’ve met a lot of great coaches. Some may be very authoritative, but effective in their own ways, while some others prioritize individualized consideration, but they’re not always achieving the desired result.”

Oh is a second-year doctoral student at the ������Ƶ School of Management. Originally from South Korea, Oh first came to North America for his primary school education and lived with a foster family. During his high school career, he discovered his passion for football which he later pursued at the Florida Institute of Technology.

As a student-athlete, he was introduced to many of the leadership styles he now studies and learned that coaching requires direct mentorship and collaboration.

“The defensive coordinator in my high school was one of the most conservative, authoritative coaches I’ve ever met, and very directive — this old-school football coach, the typical stereotype, when in a team setting,” Oh said. “But behind the scenes, He’s also one of the most thoughtful and considerate people I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t have noticed his other side of leadership behaviors unless I interacted with him on a one-to-one basis. Otherwise, it’s hard to determine if you’re a good leader or if I’m a good follower.”

While playing football, Oh also earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting in 2016. Then, he hung up his helmet and moved on to earn his master’s degree from Babson College in Massachusetts. Like all South Koreans, he next completed a term of military service, which looked a bit different for him than most: instead of a frontline soldier, Oh served for 21 months rather than the standard 18 in a government-based position, as a metro subway employee.

For Oh, “leaders” have played pivotal roles throughout his life — many members of his family are influential in their companies, including his father, brothers and grandparents. Combined with his first-hand knowledge from the military, academic and athletic worlds, he’s seen many of the practices he studies in direct action.

In the long run, Oh recalls that his path to the field felt obvious.

Oh also studied organizational behavior during his time in South Korea, and he noticed that many papers on the topic of leadership came from ������Ƶ. He decided to study under the most preeminent scholars in the field, and reached out directly to the team of the Bernard M. & Ruth R. Bass Center for Leadership Studies, hoping that he may be invited to apply. His interest served him well — some of the very people he saw as inspirations are now his coworkers.

“The mentorship that I’m receiving in this program is unheard of. They don’t treat me solely as a student; they value my opinions,” Oh said. “With that mentorship, I’ve been highly effective with my research.”

Oh’s research experience has led him to several realizations. For one, he feels the concept of “synergy,” the intangible connection between parties that leads to high performance, needs to have a better definition to truly understand the concept of leadership.

“How do leaders contribute to and foster synergistic interactions with their followers? We often use the term synergy, but we don’t really know its true nature. All we know is that synergy can generate something greater than the mere sum of its parts,” Oh said. “In recent literature, the term synergy is thrown out. There is a common misconception that one leader exhibits certain behaviors, and synergy magically materializes, but it doesn’t operate quite that way.”

Oh mainly conducts his research by completing hands-on interviews with members of teams that have been marked as high-performing — or vice versa — by their human resources department. These teams are generally in high-stress environments, such as venture capital, law firms or engineering companies. He also observes them directly in their group setting to get a feel for the leader and follower interaction process and whether the leaders who established synergy with their teams were truly experiencing it.

“There are common themes and patterns that consistently emerge across different high-performing teams. By identifying those patterns, it allows us to develop different strategies rooted in scientific evidence for transforming low-performing teams into high-performing ones,” Oh said.

Oh and his contemporaries have also studied drivers of creativity and task performance in the workplace. By looking at the shared managerial coaching perception between leaders and followers, Oh tries to establish whether agreement in those perceptions positively affects their skill levels.

“People automatically presume that a ‘good’ leader is the central driver of the entire corporate organization. But it’s not that — leadership, by definition is not complete without followers,” Oh said. “Specific behaviors can contribute to becoming a good and influential leader, but it’s also the followers that make the entire equation complete. We must always focus on how both leaders and followers co-construct and mutually influence the leadership itself.”

Oh’s main goal in his own career and through his research is to emulate those who came before him: leading others to become the best versions of themselves.

“I aspire to continue my career as a researcher after I graduate. Whatever insights I uncover, I aim to apply them to real-world practitioners. I intend to collaborate and work closely with organizations and convey the significance of our work through analytical rigor, supported with robust scientific evidence. I want to do it for the rest of my life — to disseminate the research that matters to organizations and to future leaders.”