Montana State business professor Virginia Bratton to kick off Provost’s Distinguished Lecturer Series

BOZEMAN - When considering what drives her research interests, Virginia Bratton remembers being a young child and observing interactions between other people and her mother, an immigrant from Korea who raised her family in the rural Montana town of Plentywood.

"I've always been interested in political influence and how to influence others. I think it's because I watched my mother get things done as a person of color who spoke English as a second language with an accent," Bratton said. "Sometimes she was discounted and not perceived as having a lot of power. I could see how she maneuvered that, and I learned from her."

Now at Montana State University, Bratton, a professor of business management in the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship, is still driven by the question of how people wield influence over others. Her experience as a biracial woman in the traditionally male-dominated fields of business and academia informs her research, which focuses on influence and ethics in relationship to business.

Bratton will present on her research experiences in a lecture, "Beyond Profit: Ethics, Influence, and the People-Centered Organization," on Tuesday, Oct. 21, as part of MSU's annual Provost's Distinguished Lecturer Series. The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Museum of the Rockies' Hager Auditorium and be followed by a reception. All events in the series are free and open to the public.

The dimensions of Bratton's interests are expansive. She has been at MSU since 2007, previously worked as a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia and has had a lifelong interest in music performance as a trombone player. Still, she said all her work comes back to a common theme.

"I care about fairness. I care about ethics and I care about influence as a tool to achieve positive outcomes," Bratton said. "All of my work lies in one of those areas or an intersection of them."

Bratton began her MSU research career with a study on academic honesty, homing in on the dynamics of personality and peer influence. The study instructed a group of students to complete an in-person exam without flipping to a back page with key information about the readings in question. But she planted a student who looked at the forbidden page, obviously cheating, and then watched other students who were originally following the rules begin to cheat, as well.

Her interest in ethics and academic honesty led to a collaboration with Connie Strittmatter, faculty member at Renne Library from 2007 to 2013. Their work culminated in two papers and a book published in 2016, and Bratton credited the research for helping her become a tenured professor.

With colleagues Amber Raile and Graham Austin, Bratton has also researched how to discuss equal pay for women and men with corporate leaders.

"When people hear 'equal pay,' they shut down. I don't know if they hear an accusation, or if they hear a term that they associate with something political. Business leaders don't want to talk to us. But then we realized there's something interesting there - maybe we should research what to call it instead," Bratton said.

Ultimately, Bratton, Raile and Austin found that calling equal pay "strategic compensation" results in more buy-in and openness from business leaders. The research was published in 2023 in the journal Business and Politics, and they have presented the findings at the 2016 Montana Equal Pay Summit, in a virtual workshop hosted by the San Francisco District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and at several conferences.

Bratton has continued to focus on ethical questions related to gender dynamics. With several colleagues in Jabs, she recently researched masculinity contest culture, which is found in work environments where people are consciously or subconsciously pressured to conform to stereotypical male gender roles, such as dominance and competition, often at the expense of collaboration, individual and organizational well-being.

That research is ongoing, along with another study of moral disengagement, which occurs when humans rationalize unethical behavior by separating their morals and values from their actions. Bratton is investigating the effects of employees' moral disengagement on their health and whether disengagement is a predictor of staff turnover.

Bratton said she has held the ethical principles that drive her research all her life.

"In undergrad, I remember having to write a paper on religious ethics. We read this book called 'The Good Society,' and I had to talk about what my core values were. I didn't realize until I found the paper on an old disk recently - they remain the same as what I wrote many years ago. It was like, 'wow, I'm still guided by those same things,'" she said.

The Provost's Distinguished Lecturer Series recognizes outstanding MSU faculty for their creative scholarship and leadership. More information and the full lineup for the 2025-26 series can be found at montana.edu/news/24752/montana-state-announces-13th-annual-provost-s-distinguished-lecturer-series.