Prof. Whillans is interested in understanding the associations between time, money, and happiness, broadly construed. For example, in one set of projects, Prof. Whillans studies how differences in time-use (e.g., chore and childcare burdens) and the willingness to negotiate for time, contributes to gender gaps in happiness and professional success. In another project, Prof. Whillans is developing methods to assess time-use and time-value through observing behavior instead of relying on self-report measures. Prof. Whillans is also conducting research in organizations and exploring how time-use predicts the self-reported happiness and productivity of employees and teams within hybrid organizations.
Ashley V. Whillans
Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration
Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration
Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research on time and happiness won the 2018 CAGS Distinguished Dissertation Award and was named the top PhD thesis in Canada across the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Her research seeks to understand the links between time, money, and happiness. She studies how individual, organizational and societal factors such as gender, workplace policies, and income inequality predict how employees value and spend their time and money at work and outside of it, with potential implications for well-being and workplace engagement.
Her research has been published in academic journals including Nature Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Psychological Science and in popular press outlets including Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
She currently serves as a Distinguished Principal Research Fellow for Human Capital with The Conference Board. Her ongoing research involves collaborating with market leading technology companies and management consulting firms to understand and improve the employee experience for knowledge workers on high-performing teams.
- Featured Work
-
Worldwide, women business owners earn less than men. Women tend to run businesses in less profitable sectors than men, but even within the same sector, women-owned businesses underperform male-owned businesses. Full-time employed women typically report higher chore and childcare demands than full-time employed men. Prof. Whillans’ latest research—conducted with 30,000 employees around the world—suggests that this gap widened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on this research, Prof. Whillans focuses on an experimentally untested explanation for these gender gaps: inequality in chore demands. In a randomized control study with 557 female business owners living in Kibera, Kenya, the largest informal settlement in East Africa, time saving services (i.e., meals and laundry) resulted in a sizeable improvement in revenues as compared to unconditional cash transfers and a control condition. Despite the persistence of inequality in chore burdens between men and women, researchers have primarily tested interventions that focus on providing cash grants. Future research will continue to explore whether time saving services can reduce gender gaps in workplace performance.
Employees frequently engage in negotiations outside of formal settings like salary negotiations, and for resources other than money. Employees must negotiate their roles, negotiate for work-life accommodations, and negotiate for resources such as the time, staff, and equipment that they need to succeed. A new area of negotiation research has started to explore informal interactions that can help employees gain opportunities, improve work output, and enhance their wellbeing. Prof. Whillans’ builds on this emerging area of research, and her recently published research, to explore how gender and workplace status shape people’s willingness to engage in an informal negotiation with implications for productivity and wellbeing: asking for extra time on work-relevant deadlines. Consistent with the idea that workplace status and gender are not synonymous, different mediational profiles emerge. Women feel less comfortable making an extension request due to the fear of burdening their managers. In contrast, lower status individuals feel more concerned about appearing incompetent. Together, this ongoing research sheds light on whether and how gender and workplace status shape people’s willingness to engage in informal negotiations that could improve work quality and work-life balance.Following from the pandemic, employees across industries are placing an increased importance on time flexibility and autonomy, and leaders are looking for ways to implement flexible work strategies that create equitable opportunities for all employees. This renewed focus on flexibility leads to the question of whether policies that existed before the pandemic are still effective today (e.g., flexible work hours), and whether policies that were deemed to be harmful in the past (e.g., telecommuting) are effective now. To address these questions, Prof. Whillans is exploring how time and autonomy-related rewards, policies, and norms predict the employee experience.
In one ongoing project, Prof. Whillans examines how one of the costs of hybrid work—increased interruptions—can be offset through the implementation of collaboration norms that legitimize focused work. Across three studies with correlational and field experimental data, Prof. Whillans finds that team-level collaboration norms reduce the felt burden of interruptions during work hours, which in turn increases perceived control over work demands and positive mood.
Lastly, Prof. Whillans is examining the role of informal conversations in predicting employees’ ability to learn, bond, and to enjoy their work. Hybrid workplaces involve more digital communication. Some research suggests that email and meetings have increased by 250% since before the pandemic, and as a result, 30% of knowledge workers are now working a “third shift” between 7pm-10pm. Despite this increase in digital communication, Prof. Whillans’ recently published research finds that informal “sensemaking” conversations often disappear in hybrid workplaces because employees are less likely to be in the office together at the same time. Junior employees used to overhear senior managers debriefing a meeting in a hallway or on the way to the airport. As teams become increasingly distributed, these ‘hallway’ conversations have lessened, possibly undermining learning, development, and team cohesion. Building on this insight, Prof. Whillans is working with a tech company to understand how knowledge workers use technology to engage in informal interactions and sensemaking on virtual and hybrid teams.
In another ongoing project, Prof. Whillans examines whether and how dispersion in hybrid organizations influences the employee experience. Prior research suggests that the geographic, spatial, and configurational dispersion of teams critically shape employee outcomes like productivity and wellbeing. Yet, most of this research was conducted prior to the pandemic, which normalized hybrid work. Thus, management research has little to say about what team dispersion looks like today in hybrid workplaces, or how dispersion influences employee outcomes. To address these questions, Prof. Whillans employs population-level archival data collected from a well-established company (N=26,133 teams). Using a machine learning approach, Prof. Whillans has created a typology of the four most common team configurations. She is tracking changes in dispersion and how these changes shape the employee experience.
- Publications
-
- Whillans, A.V., Jessie Pow, and Joe J. Gladstone. "Buying (Quality) Time Predicts Relationship Satisfaction." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (in press). View Details
- Aknin, Lara B., Elizabeth W. Dunn, and Ashley V. Whillans. "The Emotional Rewards of Prosocial Spending Are Robust and Replicable in Large Samples." Current Directions in Psychological Science 31, no. 6 (December 2022): 536–545. View Details
- Macchia, Lucia, and Ashley V. Whillans. "The Link Between Income, Income Inequality, and Prosocial Behavior Around the World: A Multiverse Approach." Social Psychology (January 10, 2022): 375–386. View Details
- Whillans, A.V., and Colin West. "Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment." Art. 719. Scientific Reports 12 (2022). View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, Joseph Sherlock, Jessica Roberts, Shibeal O'Flaherty, Lyndsay Gavin, Holly Dykstra, and Michael Daly. "Nudging the Commute: Using Behaviorally-Informed Interventions to Promote Sustainable Transportation." Behavioral Science & Policy 7, no. 2 (2021): 27–49. View Details
- Kniffin, Kevin M., Jayanth Narayanan, Frederik Anseel, John Antonakis, Susan Ashford, Arnold B. Bakker, Peter Bamberger, Hari Bapuji, Devasheesh P. Bhave, Virginia K. Choi, Stephanie Creary, Evangelia Demerouti, Francis J. Flynn, Michele J. Gelfand, Lindred Greer, Gary Johns, Selin Kesebir, Peter G. Klein, Sun Young Lee, Hakan Ozcelik, Jennifer Louise Petriglieri, Nancy Rothbard, Cort W. Rudolph, Jason D. Shaw, Nina Sirola, Connie R. Wanberg, Ashley V. Whillans, Michael P. Wilmot, and Mark van Vugt. "COVID-19 and the Workplace: Implications, Issues, and Insights for Future Research and Action." American Psychologist 76, no. 1 (January 2021): 63–77. View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., Jaewon Yoon, Aurora Turek, and Grant E. Donnelly. "Extension Request Avoidance Predicts Greater Time Stress Among Women." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 45 (November 9, 2021). View Details
- Giurge, Laura M., Ashley V. Whillans, and Ayse Yemiscigil (shared authorship). "A Multicountry Perspective on Gender Differences in Time Use During COVID-19." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 12 (March 23, 2021). View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., Leslie Perlow, and Aurora Turek. "Experimenting During the Shift to Virtual Team Work: Learnings from How Teams Adapted Their Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Information and Organization 31, no. 1 (March 2021). View Details
- Hur, Julia, Alice Lee-Yoon, and Ashley V. Whillans. "Are They Useful? The Effects of Performance Incentives on the Prioritization of Work Versus Personal Ties." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 165 (July 2021): 103–114. (Shared Authorship.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., Lara B. Aknin, Colin Ross, Lihan Chen, and Frances S. Chen. "Common Variants of the Oxytocin Receptor Gene Do Not Predict the Positive Mood Benefits of Prosocial Spending." Emotion 20, no. 5 (August 2020): 734–749. View Details
- Dunn, Elizabeth, A.V. Whillans, Michael I. Norton, and Lara B. Aknin. "Prosocial Spending and Buying Time: Money as a Tool for Increasing Subjective Well-Being." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 61 (2020): 67–126. View Details
- Kristal, Ariella S., and A.V. Whillans. "What We Can Learn from Five Naturalistic Field Experiments That Failed to Shift Commuter Behaviour." Nature Human Behaviour 4, no. 2 (February 2020): 169–176. (This article was featured on the cover as the lead article.) View Details
- Giurge, Laura, Ashley V. Whillans, and Colin West. "Why Time Poverty Matters for Individuals, Organisations, and Nations." Nature Human Behaviour 4, no. 10 (October 2020): 993–1003. (Shared Authorship.) View Details
- Whillans, A.V., Lucia Macchia, and Elizabeth Dunn. "Valuing Time Over Money Predicts Happiness After a Major Life Transition: A Preregistered Longitudinal Study of Graduating Students." Science Advances 5, no. 9 (September 2019). View Details
- Whillans, A.V., Elizabeth W. Dunn, Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers, and Michael I. Norton. "Buying Time Promotes Happiness." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 32 (August 8, 2017): 8523–8527. View Details
- Whillans, A.V., Scott C. Seider, Lihan Chen, Ryan J. Dwyer, Sarah Novick, Kathryn J. Gramigna, Brittany A. Mitchell, Victoria Savalei, Sally S. Dickerson, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. "Does volunteering improve well-being?" Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology 1, nos. 1-3 (2016): 35–50. View Details
- Whillans, A.V., Aaron C. Weidman, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. "Valuing Time Over Money Is Associated with Greater Happiness." Social Psychological & Personality Science 7, no. 3 (April 2016): 213–222. View Details
- Book Chapters & White Papers
-
- Lee-Yoon, Alice, and A.V. Whillans. "Making Seconds Count: When Valuing Time Promotes Subjective Well-being." Current Opinion in Psychology 26 (April 2019): 54–57. View Details
- Mogilner, Cassie, A.V. Whillans, and Michael I. Norton. "Time, Money, and Subjective Wellbeing." In Handbook of Well-Being, edited by Ed Diener, Shigehiro Oishi, and Louis Tay. Noba Scholar Handbook Series. Salt Lake City: DEF Publishers, 2018. Electronic. View Details
- De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel, and Council Members: A. Blankson, A. Clark, C. Cooper, H. James, C. Krekel, J. Lim, P. Litchfield, J. Moss, M. I. Norton, M. Rojas, G. Ward, and A.V. Whillans. "Work and Well-being: A Global Perspective." Chap. 5 in Global Happiness Policy Report, edited by Global Council for Happiness and Wellbeing, 74–127. New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2018. Electronic. View Details
- Working Papers
-
- Dykstra, Holly, Shibeal O'Flaherty, and A.V. Whillans. "The Buy-In Effect: When Increasing Initial Effort Motivates Behavioral Follow-Through." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-020, October 2023. View Details
- Johnson, Elizabeth R., and Ashley V. Whillans. "The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Satisfaction of Workers in Low-Wage Jobs." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-001, July 2022. View Details
- Cases and Teaching Materials
-
- Gulati, Ranjay, Cynthia A. Montgomery, Ashley Whillans, Allison Ciechanover, and Emily Grandjean. "WeightWatchers: Promoting Weight Health." Harvard Business School Case 424-029, March 2024. (Revised July 2024.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and Sara Coronel Rodriguez. "ghSMART & Co: Building and Scaling a Time Smart Firm." Harvard Business School Case 924-009, October 2023. (Revised April 2024.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., and Carolyn Watson. "Expanding the Culture of Learning at Kraft Heinz." Harvard Business School Case 922-036, January 2022. (Revised November 2023.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and Hawken Lord. "Ryan Serhant: Time Management for Repeatable Success (A)." Harvard Business School Case 923-048, April 2023. View Details
- Hall, Brian J., Ashley V. Whillans, Davis Heniford, Dominika Randle, and Caroline Witten. "Innovation at Moog Inc." Harvard Business School Case 922-040, March 2022. (Revised January 2023.) View Details
- Beshears, John, and Ashley Whillans. "A Behavioral Science Perspective on Motivation and Incentives." Harvard Business School Module Note 922-033, March 2022. View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and Jeff Polzer. "Applied: Using Behavioral Science to Debias Hiring." Harvard Business School Case 921-046, March 2021. (Revised September 2021.) (https://www.beapplied.com/.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and Jeff Polzer. "Applied: Using Behavioral Science to Debias Hiring (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 921-047, March 2021. View Details
- Hall, Brian, Lamar Pierce, and Ashley V. Whillans. "Maritz Automotive." Harvard Business School Case 920-052, March 2020. (Revised November 2020.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., and Lamar Pierce. "Maritz Automotive." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 921-044, January 2021. (Revised March 2022.) View Details
- Montgomery, Cynthia A., and Ashley V. Whillans. "France Télécom (A): A Challenging Restructuring." Harvard Business School Case 721-420, December 2020. (Revised June 2021.) View Details
- Montgomery, Cynthia A., and Ashley V. Whillans. "France Télécom (B): A Wave of Staff Suicides." Harvard Business School Supplement 721-421, December 2020. View Details
- Montgomery, Cynthia A., and Ashley V. Whillans. "France Télécom (C): An Unprecedented Trial." Harvard Business School Supplement 721-422, December 2020. View Details
- Whillans, Ashley. "France Télécom (A), (B), and (C)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 722-438, March 2022. (Revised April 2022.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., and Shibeal O'Flaherty. "The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being (A)." Harvard Business School Case 921-020, October 2020. (Revised March 2022.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., and Shibeal O'Flaherty. "The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 921-022, October 2020. (Revised March 2022.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V. "The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being (A) and (B)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 921-021, January 2021. (Revised March 2022.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and John Beshears. "Social Salary Setting at Spiber." Harvard Business School Case 920-050, March 2020. (Revised June 2020.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and John Beshears. "Social Salary Setting at Spiber." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 921-014, November 2020. (Revised March 2022.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and Liz Goldenberg. "To Prioritize Money or Time? The P-Mot Exercise (Student)." Harvard Business School Exercise 921-012, August 2020. (Revised October 2020.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley, and Liz Goldenberg. "To Prioritize Money or Time? The P-Mot Exercise (Instructor)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 921-013, August 2020. (Revised October 2020.) View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V., Esel Çekin, and Alpana Thapar. "Ureed.com: The Marketplace for Language." Harvard Business School Case 920-038, January 2020. View Details
- Whillans, Ashley V. "Ureed.com: The Marketplace for Language." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 921-028, January 2021. (Revised March 2022.) View Details
- Editorials
-
- Croft, Jazz, Acacia Parks, and Ashley Whillans. "Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes." Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (October 18, 2024). View Details
- Howe, Lauren C., Lindsay B. Howe, and Ashley V. Whillans. "The Secret Tax on Women’s Time." Time 201, nos. 5-6 (February 13, 2023): 29. View Details
- Whillans, A.V., Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski. "Is Agenda Theater Ruining Your Meetings?" Harvard Business Review (website) (October 14, 2022). View Details
- Whillans, A.V., Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski. "The Psychology Behind Meeting Overload." Harvard Business Review (website) (November 12, 2021). View Details
- Whillans, A.V., and Grant Donnelly. "How Men and Women Treat Deadlines in the Workplace Differently." Wall Street Journal (October 30, 2021). View Details
- Stein, Daniel, Nick Hobson, Jon M. Jachimowicz, and Ashley Whillans. "How Companies Can Improve Employee Engagement Right Now." Harvard Business Review (website) (October 13, 2021). View Details
- Whillans, A.V., and Charlotte Lockhart. "A Guide to Implementing the 4-Day Workweek." Harvard Business Review (website) (September 28, 2021). View Details
- O'Flaherty, Shibeal, Michael Sanders, and A.V. Whillans. "Research: A Little Recognition Can Provide a Big Morale Boost." Harvard Business Review (website) (March 29, 2021). View Details
- Howe, Lauren C., A.V. Whillans, and Jochen I. Menges. "How to (Actually) Save Time When You're Working Remotely." Harvard Business Review (website) (August 24, 2020). View Details
- Yoon, Jaewon, Hayley Blunden, Ariella S. Kristal, and A.V. Whillans. "Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback." Harvard Business Review (website) (September 20, 2019). View Details
- Whillans, A.V. "Big Ideas Feature: Time for Happiness: Why the Pursuit of Money Isn't Bringing You Joy—and What Will." Special Issue on HBR Big Idea: Time Poor and Unhappy. Harvard Business Review (website) (January 29, 2019). View Details
- Practitioner Papers
-
- Guzek, John, and Ashley Whillans. "Overcoming Barriers to Employee Ownership: Insights From Small and Medium-Sized Businesses." Compensation & Benefits Review 57, no. 1 (January 2025): 64–81. View Details
- Aknin, Lara B., and Ashley V. Whillans. "Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy." Social Issues and Policy Review 15 (2021): 3–34. View Details
- Landry, Anais Thibault, and A.V. Whillans. "The Power of Workplace Rewards: Using Self-Determination Theory to Understand Why Reward Satisfaction Matters for Workers Around the World." Compensation & Benefits Review 50, no. 3 (June 2018): 123–148. View Details
- Thibault-Landry, Anais, Allan Schweyer, and Ashley V. Whillans. "Winning the War for Talent: Modern Motivational Methods for Attracting and Retaining Employees." Compensation & Benefits Review 49, no. 4 (September 2017): 230–246. View Details
- Research Summary
-
Engaged with field work in East Africa, South Asia, and in several large hybrid organizations in the United States, Professor Whillans places a focus on exploring questions with strong theoretical motivation in the social psychological literature and relevant implications for policymakers and managers. Her current research spans three primary interests. First, time demands: how does unpaid labor—such as the long hours spent on chores and childcare—shape the wellbeing and productivity of working women and men—particularly those living in developing markets who are struggling to make ends meet. Second, time negotiations: what factors shape employees’ willingness to access the resources needed to experience wellbeing and succeed in their jobs, such as asking for more time on adjustable deadlines. Third, time-use in hybrid organizations: how can employees and teams structure their time within and across days to predict wellbeing and productivity, and what interventions can be successfully applied to improve the employee experience for knowledge workers employed in time-demanding jobs.
Currently, Professor Whillans is working in the Thar Desert region of India to estimate the impact of a novel time-saving technology—rainwater collection technology (i.e., tankaas)—on the wellbeing and earnings of individual family members within 200 households. This project asks a critical policy question by testing whether and how time-saving technology increases the wellbeing of individuals and families living in an arid agricultural region. This project was motivated by an initial project in Nairobi, Kenya—the largest informal settlement in East Africa—which documented a positive impact of time-saving services (laundry and meals) on the wellbeing of working mothers, and the self-reported earnings of small business owners.
A related project, also set in Nairobi, Kenya, develops a novel behavioral measure of the value of time. This measure is collected daily through behavioral sensing methods and captures changes in opportunity cost within and across people. In doing so, this measure is able to reveal respondents’ economic situations and well-being across time. A pilot project of 500 individuals from the same region using this measure has documented meaningful patterns. For example, women have a higher value of time than men at most hours of the day (contrary to what value of time inferred from labor market wages would suggest), and this difference is especially large in the evening, corresponding to greater housework for women. This measure can also capture the impact of societal events. For example, the national election period is marked by a significantly lower value of time across the board, and especially for women. This result can be explained by an uptick in protests and violence which often disrupts work and makes it especially unsafe for women to be outside, which predicts an increase in idle periods and lower productivity.
In a second stream of research, Professor Whillans and colleagues explore factors that predict whether employees are willing to ask for the resources that they need to succeed in their jobs. This project was motivated by Prof. Whillans’ earlier work showing that women do not ask for time on adjustable deadlines as frequently as men, undermining task performance and wellbeing. In this current investigation, Prof. Whillans is exploring factors like on-the-job experience, social norms, and workplace policies in predicting whether people are comfortable negotiating for time.
In a third stream of research that involves two well-established companies in the United States, Professor Whillans is conducting large-scale descriptive research to explore the relationship between time-use and the employee experience within hybrid organizations. First, cutting-edge machine learning is being used to understand how dispersion patterns have changed in the year following the pandemic, and how changes in where team members are located relative to their peers predicts various aspects of the employee experience. Second, daily-diary research with thousands of employees in a hybrid organization seeks to understand how daily shifts in employee work location (e.g., home vs. office) and location relative to one’s team predicts employees’ experience of wellbeing, stress, connection, and productivity. Finally, a field experiment with two-hundred teams tests whether collaboration norms can reduce the perceived burden of interruptions for hybrid workers and causally improve the employee experience. - Awards & Honors
-
Winner of the 2022 SAGE Emerging Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).Named a HGHI Burke Global Health Faculty Fellow in 2019.Winner of the 2018 CAGS-ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award presented by the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies.Received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Dissertation Award from the International Positive Psychology Association.
- Areas of Interest