Vanessa Burke, Assistant Professor

Headshot of Dr. Vanessa Burke Office: 204 Audubon Hall

Department of Psychology

Louisiana State University

Baton Rouge, LA 70803

Email: vburke4@lsu.edu

View Dr. Burke's lab webpage.

Dr. Burke will be accepting students for Fall 2026. 

Education

  • 2022, PhD, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Pennsylvania State University 
  • 2019, MS, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Pennsylvania State University
  • 2017, BS, Psychology, Bowling Green State University

Research Interests

  • Community Engagement
  • Leadership
  • Power dynamics
  • Mistreatment/harassment

Vanessa Burke's research examines the intersection between community engagement and the hierarchical nature of organizations. Her work centers on how demographic (gender, age, race) and behavioral (sexual harassment, emotional displays, leader errors) indicators of power and social status determine who has access to opportunities. Specifically, how do these power and status dynamics manifest through formal positions (leadership) and informal social dynamics (power claiming, maintenance, and loss). She is driven to critically evaluate the way individual employees interact with organizational structures, investigating mixed and evolving findings in the related literature.

Representative Publications

Burke, V., Cheung, H. K., & Finkelstein, L. (2025) “Understanding the Gender Career Gap through an Integration of Midlife Identity Negotiations: An Interdisciplinary Conceptual Framework”. Work, Aging and Retirement.

Mitchell, T. D., Haslam, S. A., Burke, V., & Steffens, N.(In Press). Human Me-sources or Human We-sources? Exploring the Capacity for How Human Resource Practices to Stimulate or Suppress Leader Narcissism. Industrial and Organizational Psychology.


Grandey, A. A., Burke, V., Zeytun, D., Frasca, T. & Matsick, J. A. (2025). “Do Hot Flashes Get the Cold Shoulder?: Menopausal Symptoms and Disclosure Influence Leader Ratings” Journal of Business and Psychology.


Cobb, H. R., & Burke, V. (2025). “Politics, policy, and pedagogy: Preparing I-O psychology students amidst ongoing policy shifts”. Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Roux*, S. M., Burke, V. (2024). Making the Abstract Concrete: A Case for Structured Abstracts in Organizational Sciences. Industrial and Organizational Psychology.


Burke, V., Grandey, A. A., Melloy, R. C., Ferris, L., & England, K. (2024) Are women penalized for showing pride at work? Gender disparities in the competence‐warmth tradeoff. Journal of Applied Social Psychology.


Kundro, T. G., Burke, V., Grandey, A. A., & Sayre, G. M. (2022). A perfect storm: Customer sexual harassment as a joint function of financial dependence and emotional labor. Journal of Applied Psychology. 


Burke, V., Grandey, A. A. (2020) “Midlife Crisis” on the Road to Successful Workforce Aging. Industrial and Organizational Psychology.  


* Denotes student author

 

LSU