Early Influences

In my first year of college, I met someone that gave a small speech on poverty. He was very passionate and persuasive about his ideas. Later, he became my friend and he told me his story. He was from a poor family and was attending college on a scholarship. He wanted to make a difference in the lives of the poor people of his village. His ideas fascinated me and developed in me a desire to obtain an understanding of the real-life applications of economics.

The first practical and analytical class I experienced in economics, agricultural economics, sparked a desire to further understand how economics plays a part in the dynamics of phenomenon such as famine in many third world countries. In this class I encountered a book called Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, by Dr. Amartya Sen. Dr. Sen carefully unfolds the underlying issues surrounding famine in India, Bangladesh and other Saharan countries. Coming from that region, I have been in close proximity with poverty and starvation, but Sen gave me economic insight on that which is common to life in that region. He challenges the common view that a shortage of food is the most important (sometimes the only) explanations for famine. Reading his book allowed me a new insight into the occurrence of poverty, and fueled a true desire to study economics.

I have always been interested in the analytical and mathematical areas of economics. Courses like econometrics and mathematical economics served to increase my interest and gave me a through understanding of the connection between the theoretical and quantitative approaches to economics.

I have earned my first bachelors degree in Economics (minor in Finance) from Western Illinois University. After that I had pursued a second bachelor's degree in actuarial science at the University of Central Oklahoma. Along with my actuarial mathematics classes, I have also taken one and half year of calculus, matrix algebra, numerical analysis, two courses on both statistical methods and mathematical statistics. All these classes encouraged and confirmed my growing interest in quantitative analysis and financial mathematics. Therefore, my initial goal for pursuing a doctoral degree was to do research on an area of economics and finance.

Later Influences

I started my career working for different pension and actuarial consulting firms, where I worked as a pension consultant and analyst to multi-million dollar clients concerning managing defined benefit pension plans for their employees. I was also responsible for identifying major Internal Control procedures, helping management to develop effective knowledge management strategy by documenting and defining major workflow through flow charts (process map) and automating pension calculation process for Fortune 500 companies, increasing efficiency and quality and reducing cost.

Later I held a position as financial analyst. My job responsibility included analyze budget and variance; created weekly, monthly and quarterly financial status, labor, material, inventory and AR reports for upper management. I also participated in various lean and Kaizen events to improve process and quality for the finance department.

On April 2004, I decided to pursue a MBA degree with the Ellis College of New York Institute of Technology. I finished the program on April 2006, with concentration on the accounting information system. During the program I have taken classes like, corporate finance, advanced information systems risks and controls, advanced assurance topics, data mining, professional audit, financial accounting along with required business classes for the MBA program.

Currently I am working as a Business Analyst, where I am responsible for creating and maintaining corporate dashboards and other reporting for executives.

Although my background is in finance, economics and actuarial science, I have been working mostly with financial and business information system. My primary responsibilities are developing and improving financial and business reporting systems. I am also involved in identifying and developing several performance measurement tools and metrics. This also made me interested on organizational performance and efficiency enhancement tools such as six sigma, balanced scorecard and Kaizen. So, by the time I started my Ph.D. program at Touro my goals have changed significantly – now I intended to pursue research on the area of employee performance enhancement and measurement, to identify any new dimension of one of the existing tools or develop a new tool.

Evolution of Goals during Ph.D Program

I was fortunate to have the same professor for the first two of my organizational behavior classes (ORG 601 and 602). So, I was able to achieve continuous learning experience. Considering the fact that we had to learn and decipher some highly complex concepts and theories, I have thoroughly enjoyed both of these classes. During these classes I was also introduced to a relatively new school of thought of organizational behavior, known as positive organizational behavior.

The Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) movement sprung from the crises faced by the traditional discipline of organizational behavior. Many leading scholars have suggested that the discipline is lacking relevance and meaning (Wright, 2003). Today, an organization’s employees are viewed as a source of competitive advantage (Larson, 2004). Therefore, along with other capital investments, organizations are also interested in investing in employee capital. The three well known employee capitals are human capital (what I know), social capital (who I know) and psychological capital or PsyCap (who I am) (Larson, 2004). Goldsmith and Veum (1997) first discussed PsyCap as a measure of self-esteem, the condition of which influences employee productivity and ultimately overall organizational performance. In their recent book, Luthans, Youssef and Avolio (2007) also identified several other constructs of PsyCap - self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resiliency.

Influenced by the researches on PsyCap and potential for this field, I have decided to pursue my research on Positive Psychological Capital.