“From Consulting to a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources.”
Sometimes, the most meaningful career changes don’t begin with a grand plan, but with a quiet question: Is this really what I want to be doing?
For Damian, that question sparked a journey that would take him from a consulting career to the halls of academia—though it wasn’t a shift he had ever imagined making. In fact, growing up in Argentina, the idea of becoming a professor—especially one focused on research—hadn’t even occurred to him.
It was only years after completing his undergraduate degree in finance and building a career at Deloitte that the possibility of research began to take shape. “I liked my job,” Damian recalls, “but I realized I wanted to think more deeply about the questions I was asking—and explore those questions with more creativity and purpose.”
He wasn’t chasing a promotion or a bigger paycheck. He wanted to learn. So he went back to school, enrolled in an online MBA program, and gave himself permission to explore. That decision changed everything.
During his MBA, Damian found himself drawn to topics like leadership, workplace relationships, and organizational behavior. To learn more, he started scheduling one-on-one meetings with professors—not to network, but to ask how they built their careers. That’s how he discovered the world of academic research.
“I thought research meant Googling something and writing a paper,” he laughs. “But once I started talking to professors and helping with a real project, I realized it was so much more than that. It was a way to ask big questions and actually contribute something new.”
Encouraged by those early experiences, Damian set a personal goal: to speak with two professors each week to learn more about academia before deciding whether to pursue a PhD. After more than 50 conversations and a virtual visit to the PhD Project Conference, he was ready to apply. He ultimately chose the Management & Entrepreneurship department’s Organizational Behavior and Human Resources program at the Kelley School of Business.
Life at Kelley: Community and Growth
From his very first year, Damian found a welcoming and supportive environment at Kelley. “The culture here is one of genuine investment in your development,” he says. “Faculty are not only accessible but truly care about helping you grow into a thoughtful and rigorous researcher.”
He also appreciated the breadth of research interests among the faculty, which allowed him to explore different areas before narrowing his focus. “Early on, I had no idea what I wanted to study specifically—I just knew I was interested in people and work. Kelley gave me the space to figure that out.”
Outside of academics, Bloomington has been an ideal home base for Damian and his family. “It’s peaceful, it’s beautiful, and it gives me the balance I need. I can take a walk in the woods or go for a bike ride and clear my head when things get overwhelming. That’s been a huge part of staying grounded during the PhD.” His wife and four children also found a supportive environment in Bloomington, where they can thrive socially, at school, engage in extracurricular activities, and as a family, practice their religion freely.
Research Focus: Navigating Multiple Leaders at Work
Damian’s research interests center on workplace relationships—especially in increasingly complex organizational structures where employees report to more than one leader at the same time. His dissertation examines what happens in these “dual-leader” relationships and how employees navigate them.
The inspiration came from his own consulting experience, where working across teams and leaders was common. But when he began looking at the academic literature, he noticed a common pattern: most theories assumed a one-leader-to-one-follower model.
His first-year summer paper tackled this head-on, examining how employees respond when one of their leaders engages in abusive behavior. Interestingly, the data revealed that those employees are likely to compensate for such demeaning experiences by increasing their performance with their other leader.
That early insight laid the foundation for a three-part dissertation, which includes:
- Chapter 1 (under review): How abusive supervision from one leader influences performance with another, across different project teams.
- Chapter 2 (job market paper): How the quality of relationships between the two leaders—and between each leader and the employee—shape employee outcomes like well-being and performance.
- Chapter 3: A new theoretical model for understanding how employees navigate dual-leader structures in modern organizations.
Damian’s work contributes to a growing recognition that leadership doesn’t always happen in a vacuum. “Organizations are more interconnected and matrixed than ever,” he says. “I want to understand how employees adapt to that complexity—and how leaders can manage it more effectively.”