He suggested to Lewin a method of training people to be democratic,[3] which would become the germ of extending autocracy-democracy studies to the field of industrial relations.
[4] These proved to be successful in increasing worker productivity while maintaining good morale, and thus small-group research in industrial settings became Bavelas's forte.
[7] In 1948, Bavelas obtained his PhD from MIT with Some Mathematical Properties of Psychological Space as his doctoral thesis[8] with Dorwin Cartwright as his adviser.
Years later, Frank Harary told Cartwright that Bavelas' PhD thesis showed an independent rediscovery of graph theory.
[3] In the late 1940s, Bavelas worked in the Industrial Relations section of MIT's Department of Economics & Social Science, then headed by Douglas McGregor.
He founded the Group Networks Laboratory at MIT in 1948,[9] which included mathematician R. Duncan Luce and social psychologist Leon Festinger.