Sherry Moss
Leading Ethically

Second job. Side hustle. Part-time gig. Whatever you call it, School of Business professor Sherry Moss says increasing numbers of people hold multiple jobs, sometimes as many as three or four jobs. And her research has found that, under the right circumstances, rather than being a drain, job juggling can be beneficial beyond the extra money.

“What our research shows is that if you have multiple jobs and you identify with them (i.e. you believe you are expressing an important part of you while working) , then you are more likely to experience positive personal, relational, and health outcomes. For example, you will be more satisfied with your work, less exhausted and you will report greater well-being and healthy romantic relationships.  But if you have one or more jobs you don’t identify with, it detracts from your personal, health and relationship outcomes,” says Moss, who joined the School of Business faculty in 2005. “So, if you have to get a second job to make ends meet, it’s good to get one that you enjoy and that lets you feel like you’re expressing yourself authentically.”

Moss personally knows something about holding multiple jobs — and flourishing while doing so. In addition to being the Benson Pruitt Professor in Business and professor of organizational studies, she is associate dean of MBA programs, and is a consultant to industry, conducting training, coaching, and advisory services for local, national and multinational businesses as well as city and county governments.

Unlike the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t count self-employment as a second job, Moss and her co-researchers consider a second job to be anything that generates income or has the promise of generating income, such as a start-up. With those parameters, they estimate as many as a third of people across the globe hold multiple jobs.

Moss’ early research on the topic, including an article titled “From Synchronizing to Harmonizing: The Process of Authenticating Multiple Work Identities” that was published in Administrative Science Quarterly, allowed her to expand beyond quantitative and experimental research into qualitative inquiry. 

“I had never actually interviewed people for my research, gotten to know them, and been immersed in their stories,” she says. “It became a real passion for me.”

Another key research area for Moss has been abusive supervision, or bullying. After publishing several articles on the topic, she received an email from the journal Nature, whose editors asked her to write a short opinion piece on the topic of abusive supervision (a.k.a. bullying) in the academic sciences.

Having had students who’d approached her over the years saying they were experiencing abusive supervision in a lab or in an academic program, Moss wrote the piece, which appeared on the journal’s first page. “All of a sudden, all these people started emailing me saying, ‘This is happening to me.’ ‘What do I do?’ ‘Can I call you?’ These emails were pages long,” she recalls. Realizing it was an area in need of exploration and intervention, she teamed up with other multidisciplinary researchers to explore the subject further, particularly in STEM fields. This collaboration has resulted in four international conferences, the most recent hosted by Wake Forest.

Going beyond identifying the problem, Moss and her colleagues are developing training programs to address and prevent abusive supervision. 

A recent related line of research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology looks at “Jekyll and Hyde” leadership, in which supervisors flip between being just and unjust. “It keeps people off kilter and emotionally exhausted,” Moss says. “If a supervisor is unjust all the time, at least you know what to expect. But when you are off kilter because your supervisor is fluctuating between being ethical and being abusive, it decreases your performance.”

Moss’ work has been published in academic journals including Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management, and Academy of Management Executive, and has been featured in the popular media, including the BBC, Harvard Business Review and NPR.

Because research articles can take years to be peer reviewed and eventually published in academic journals, Moss appreciates Wake Forest University’s teacher-scholar model and the more immediate gratification that comes from teaching working professionals in the in-person and hybrid MBA programs at the School of Business’ Winston-Salem and Charlotte campuses.

“They can take what they learn in class and do something with it the next day. And they do. Then they come back and tell me about the experience,” she says. “That’s extremely rewarding.”