Faculty Profile: Greta Polites

Greta Polites

"You naturally use the old system without even thinking about it. What can an organization do to try to disrupt that automatic behavior, so you stop and do things in a more productive way?"

Assistant professor of management

Old habits are hard to break.

Undaunted by the old saw, Greta Polites, an assistant professor of management, is out to help people change. As an expert in business information systems, Polites studies how inertia keeps people in a rut, rather than learning and using new technology.

For instance, companies frequently invest in new software packages that enable their employees to exchange data or create reports more easily than what was available before. Despite the upgrade, people tend to keep doing things the old way.

Sometimes this reluctance is a conscious resistance to change, but other times it's just autopilot taking over. Polites is most interested in the latter case.

"You naturally use the old system without even thinking about it," Polites said. "What can an organization do to try to disrupt that automatic behavior, so you stop and do things in a more productive way?"

Habit research has found that the best way to break a habit is to change the context in which you are tempted by your old ways. Based on that finding, "we're looking at different ways you can train people that will help them break out of their old habits," Polites said.

Polites is also toying with ideas to apply her academic research to another of her passions - collecting fossil snail shells. She owns more than 300 fossil species from the family Muricidae (more commonly known as murex shells) and maintains a Web site devoted to them.

Fossil enthusiasts, however, seem to be stuck in ways of working almost as old as their collections. From labeling specimens with handwritten tags to flying around the world to study a single specimen in person, Polites would like to use her expertise to modernize the field.

"I'd love to bring computers and paleontology together," she said.

View some of Polites' collection.