About | Shasa Dobrow

About Shasa Dobrow

Shasa Dobrow

Associate Professor of Management, London School of Economics

Shasa joined the faculty of the London School of Economics as an assistant professor in 2012 and became an associate professor (with tenure) in 2024. She has taught organizational behavior, leadership, and management courses for undergraduate and master’s students. Prior to joining LSE, Shasa was an assistant professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business Administration (New York, NY). She earned her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior, A.M in Social Psychology, and A.B. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University.

For many years before and during her academic career, she performed as a professional bassoonist in the Rhode Island Philharmonic as well as with other orchestras in Boston and New York, including on Broadway and at Carnegie Hall. It was through this involvement in the world of classical music that she became intrigued to understand callings and, more generally, careers. She also appeared as a contestant on the TV trivia game shows Jeopardy and Cash Cab.

Shasa's Research Focuses
on People’s Careers

Using a psychological approach, Shasa seeks to understand how people experience and think about their work over the course of time—and why this matters not only for their careers but also for their lives overall. In her primary research stream, she studies how people derive meaning from their work through a sense of calling, a consuming, meaningful passion people can experience toward a domain (Dobrow & Tosti-Kharas, 2011). In her secondary research stream, she studies how people receive mentoring support in their careers from a set of interconnected developers, or a developmental network.

A theoretical and methodological theme that transcends Shasa’s two streams is their dynamic perspective—taking into account the role of time. To address this, most of her published empirical studies in these two streams utilize unique longitudinal data (the sense of calling in an ongoing 6-wave longitudinal study of musicians that she launched in 2001; and developmental networks in a 4-wave, 10-year longitudinal study of business school graduates). Her research incorporates multiple methods, including surveys, meta-analysis, laboratory and field experiments, and qualitative interviews.