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Faculty Profile

Q: Which faculty member is helping to define, and excise, workplace aggression?

A: Dr. Tara L’Heureux, a professor in the master’s program in Industrial/Organizational Psychology

A Life Committed to Caring, and to Change
Caring for others was second nature to Tara L’Heureux, who grew up in a French Canadian family in Peru, New York, just outside Montreal. She was taught that women took care of others from her mother, and from the nuns who taught in her elementary school. But to the nuns, that meant that girls worked exclusively as either teachers or nurses, if they worked outside the home at all.

“But it was the ‘70s and you had Billie Jean King and Gloria Steinem, and I knew something was happening,” L’Heureux says. “I said, ‘I’m not going to do either of those things.’”

Yet she loved teaching, and she loved having an impact. She attended the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, majoring in psychology. There, she saw her life’s work more clearly when she took an industrial/organizational psychology course. She liked using her understanding of psychology to motivate employees in the workplace.

But there she was again, potentially pleasing those nuns who had limited her to two career choices. She decided to do them one better, by earning her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and becoming a college professor. She may be doing those nuns two better, by becoming an authority on occupational health psychology, aka worker well-being.

L’Heureux teaches mainly in the industrial/organizational psychology master’s program at the University, where many of the graduate students are preparing to begin their careers. “We have to teach them how – not what - to think, and how to get from Step A to Step B,” she says. “When they leave here, they’ve had an internship, and they usually get a very good job, and within five years they are making more than many of the faculty at the University. That’s very rewarding, to watch someone go from student to professional. You can’t beat that.”

Teaching, researching and lecturing all keep L’Heureux, a wife and the mother of two boys, on the run. She was recently featured on National Public Radio as an authority on workplace bullying, a topic that has broad implications for human resource management.

“In our other courses, we deal with leadership, productivity, selection, recruiting, compensation, training, teams,” she says. “We do all that, but we don’t really talk about providing a good working environment for the employee.”

Worker wellness is a wide-open field, she says. She lists just a few of the topics that fall within the field, including stress management, work-life balance and worker mistreatment in the form of supervisor incompetence, bullying and aggression.

“The misperception is that bullies go after people who are incompetent and weak and probably should be let go anyway,” she says. “But bullies actually go after people who have the traits they don’t have, such as people who are good interpersonally, or have a particular skill or competence they don’t have. It’s all about power and control.”

If she can make a difference, it is in training her students to become human resource managers who seek to create cultural shifts in companies struggling with these issues. “I believe Human Resources can contribute to a better understanding of the problem, and be more of a part of the solution,” she says. “Bullies won’t stay in an organization long if their actions are frowned upon.”