Research

What I'm actually studying.

I'm a PhD candidate in industrial and organizational psychology at Antioch University. My dissertation looks at entrepreneur mental health and how human connection changes wellbeing at work. These are the questions underneath it.

Michael mid-talk, gesturing to a seated audience.

Why a practitioner bothers with a doctorate.

I ran a company for a decade before I read a single peer-reviewed paper about running a company. We did a lot of things right, and I could not have told you which ones were principles and which ones were luck.

That is an uncomfortable position to coach from. If you are going to tell another owner what to do with their business and their people, you owe them better than your own anecdotes generalized into a rule.

So the research is not a credential I collect on the side. It is the quality control on everything else I sell.

The goal is not to make owners read journals. It is to make sure that what reaches them has been through one.

Areas of inquiry

Entrepreneur mental health

Why do the people we celebrate most often struggle most quietly?

Founders and owners carry a specific kind of risk. The business is not just what they do, it is frequently who they are, and the boundary between a bad quarter and a bad sense of self can get thin. There is a real literature on the prevalence of mental health conditions among entrepreneurs, and it is not comfortable reading. My interest is less in cataloguing the problem than in what actually protects people, because that is the part an owner can act on.

Human connection as the mechanism

If connection is the thing that helps, what exactly is it doing?

Connection at work gets treated as a nice-to-have, or worse, as a synonym for socializing. I am interested in it as a mechanism: what specifically changes for a person when they feel genuinely known by the people they work with, and how that shows up in their health, their judgment, and their willingness to say hard things out loud. This is the centre of my dissertation.

Psychological safety on small teams

Most of the research is about big companies. What holds at twelve people?

The best-known work on psychological safety comes from hospitals, airlines, and large technology firms. Small owner-operated businesses are a different animal. There is no HR department to escalate to, the owner is in the room for almost every conversation, and social distance between levels is close to zero. Some of the standard findings translate cleanly. Some of them do not, and the difference matters to the people I coach.

Burnout and sustainable performance

Where does the line actually sit between hard work and harm?

Burnout is one of the most used and least precise words in business. It has a clinical definition, measurable dimensions, and a research base that mostly disagrees with the way the word gets thrown around. I am interested in what the evidence says about workload, control, recognition, and community, and in what a manager can change on a Tuesday rather than in an annual engagement survey.

Culture in owner-operated versus venture-backed companies

Why does startup culture advice so often fail small businesses?

A great deal of popular management writing is drawn from venture-backed technology companies with unusual growth expectations and unusual amounts of capital. Owner-operated businesses run on different economics, different time horizons, and different definitions of success. Applying one to the other produces advice that sounds sophisticated and does not survive contact with a twenty-person company.

In progress The dissertation is still being written, so there are no published findings to report here yet. When there are, they will live on this page. If you're a researcher, an editor, or a programme director and you want to talk about any of this, email is the fastest route.

Teaching

I teach and guest lecture on management, organizational psychology, and entrepreneurship, and I'm interested in adjunct work with programmes that want a practitioner in the room alongside the theory.

What I bring to a classroom is the same thing I bring to a client: I have made the payroll, run the culture survey, had the conversation I put off for six weeks, and I can connect all of it back to what the literature actually says.

Download full CV (PDF) →

Want to talk about the research?

I'm always up for a conversation with people working on the same questions.

Get in touch

Michael R. Keeler · New York City