We are a world-class research school. Our OB faculty and PhD students conduct research published in the world’s top academic journals on a wide range of topics, including:
Micro themes – the psychological principles that govern leadership, motivation, decision-making, negotiation and creativity
Meso factors – research with a focus on teamwork, group dynamics, organisational culture and personal identity
Macro themes – examining the sociological, cultural and institutional factors that shape organisational structures and systems, inter-organisational relationships and networks.
Study in London, one of the world’s great business hubs. Our location and expertise helps you stay ahead in a rapidly-changing world.
Gain a practical understanding of what shapes the way organisations work
Benefit from the OB group’s high-impact scholarship and outstanding teaching methods
Equip yourself with a better understanding of human behaviour in organisations
Build the skills and experience to apply your knowledge in real-life situations.
Meet our faculty
Our organisational behaviour faculty are world-renowned leaders in their field.
Dan Cable is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Dan’s research and teaching focus on organizational culture, activating positive emotions, and getting employees into commitment instead of just compliance. Dan is Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Talent Award, and The Academy of Management has twice honored Dan with “Best article” awards, and The Academy of Management Perspectives ranked Dan in the “Top 25 most influential management scholars.”
Dan’s newest book is Exceptional, published September 2020. Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do appeared in 2018, and his first book was Change to Strange. He also has edited two books and published more than 50 articles in top scientific journals. His most recent research was published in the Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly. This research recently has been featured in the Economist, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, New York Times, Sloan Management Review, and Business Week.
Dan’s recent clients include Amazon, BMW, Capital One, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, DHL, EY, Estee Lauder, Facebook, HSBC, Ikea, MetLife, NBC Universal, O2, Porsche Consulting, Prudential, PwC, Rabobank, Randstad, Roche, Rolls Royce, Siemens, and Twitter.
A social psychologist by training, Professor Daniel A Effron teaches about ethics, influence, and other topics related to the science of people in organizations. Before joining London Business School, he taught negotiations at the Kellogg School of Management, and was a fellow of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
His research examines the psychology of (1) how people act in ethically questionable ways without feeling unethical, and (2) what shapes people’s judgments of others’ unethical behaviour. His current projects focus on judgments of hypocrisy, fake news, and what leads people to let leaders off the hook for dishonesty.
Professor Effron's research has appeared in top scholarly publications such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Journal of Consumer Research.
His work has been discussed in media outlets such as The New York Times, Financial Times, BBC News, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Bloomberg. Named one of the "Best 40 Business Professors Under 40" by Poets & Quants, he received teaching awards from the London Business School MBA classes of 2015 and 2020, and his doctoral work was honoured with an American Psychological Association Dissertation Award.
To learn more about Professor Effron's research, please visit www.danieleffron.com
Lynda is a Professor of Management Practice at London Business School where she directs the program ‘Human Resource Strategy in Transforming Companies’ – considered the world’s leading program on human resources. Her elective on the Future of Work is one of the school’s most popular and in 2016 she received the school’s ‘Excellence in Teaching’ award. For over ten years she has led the Future of Work Consortium which has brought executives from more than 60 companies together both virtually and on a bespoke collaborative platform.
Lynda has written extensively about the interface between people and organizations. Her books cover the link between business and HR strategy (Living Strategy), the new ways of working (The Democratic Enterprise), the rise of complex collaboration (Hot Spots and Glow) the impact of a changing world on employment and work (The Shift ) and the impact of longevity on society (The 100 Year Life – co-authored with Andrew Scott). In 2012 The Shift received the best book of the year in Japan and has been translated into more than 15 languages. In 2015 The Key won the CMI Management Book of the Year. In 2017 The 100 Year Life was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year, became the best selling book in Japan and has been translated into 15 languages.
Lynda’s work has been acknowledged globally – she has won the Tata prize in India; in the US she has been named as the annual Fellow of NAHR and won the CCL prize; whilst in Australia she has won the HR prize. She has been named by Thinkers 50 has one of the top 15 thinkers in the world.
Lynda is a Steward of the World Economic Forum and has chaired the WEF Council on Leadership. She serves as a judge on the Google.org prize, and in November 2017 was named as a council member of Prime Minister Abe’s council on social change.
Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD (2002-2017) and Harvard Business School (1989-2002) faculties.
An authority on leadership, Thinkers 50 ranks Herminia among the top management thinkers in the world. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, one of Apolitical’s 100 most influential people in gender policy, a Fellow of the British Academy, the 2018 recipient of the Academy of Management’s Scholar-Practitioner Award for her research’s contribution to management practice, and serves on the Governing Body of the London Business School.
She is the author of best-selling books including Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Herminia writes regularly in leading academic journals and business publications including the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times and speaks internationally on leadership and organisational transformation.
A native of Cuba, Herminia received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow.
Ena Inesi is Professor of Organisational Behaviour. She has been at London Business School since 2007. Ena’s education includes a BSc in Civil Engineering (magna cum laude) from Duke University and a PhD in Organisational Behavior from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Her research focuses on power and how it affects relationships and decision-making.
Ena teaches across all degree programmes at London Business School. In Executive Education, she has taught on the “Emerging Leaders” and the “Negotiation and Influence Skills for Managers” open programmes, and has taught on custom programmes for a variety of companies, including Prudential, YPO, World Economic Programme, Carlsberg and Arla.
Her work has been presented at the most respected conferences in her field, and the leading journals have published her work. The popular press has also featured her research, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate.com, and US News and World Report.
Before earning her PhD, Ena worked as a consultant at Bain and Company in Atlanta, Georgia and Rome, Italy. She was also part of the founding team of Velodea Srl – a website start-up in Milan, Italy – where she worked as a consultant and project manager.
Dr Dana Kanze holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics, magna cum laude, from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia Business School.
Her research applies behavioural insights to understand sources of labour market inequality, spanning the areas of judgement and decision making, ethics, motivation science and entrepreneurship.
Dr Kanze is a member of the Organization Science Editorial Review Board. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Science Advances, as well as in practitioner outlets such as the Harvard Business Review.
Her research has been featured by BBC Radio, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Chicago Booth Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., MIT Sloan Management Review, Pitchbook, Scientific American, TechCrunch, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wharton Magazine.
Accomplished as an ad hoc reviewer and keynote speaker, Dr Kanze started her career as an investment banker and strategic consultant for Citigroup and Winterberry Group, going on to co-found and run a venture-funded start-up before re-entering education.
Dr Selin Kesebir’s research interests include cooperation, competition, gender, inequality and cultural transmission. She teaches Executive Leadership and Negotiations in her role as Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, of London Business School. Prior to joining the School she was a Post-doctoral Research Associate at UVa’s Darden School of Business.
She completed her undergraduate studies in Economics and International Relations at Koç University in Turkey. She has an MA in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University and a PhD in social psychology from the University of Virginia.
She is an editorial board member of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and previously has been Editor in-Chief and Associate Editor of In-Mind Magazine. She has also reviewed: Basic and Applied Social Psychology, British Journal of Social Psychology, Emotion Review, European Journal of Social Psychology, Merrill Palmer Quarterly, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, L'Année Psychologique, Motivation and Emotion, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Perspectives in Psychological Science.
Gillian Ku is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. She received her PhD in Management and Organizations from the Kellogg School of Management. Prior to her doctoral studies, Gillian earned her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and worked at the Disney Corporation where she was a financial analyst for Disney’s international video distribution division.
Gillian’s internationally-recognised research is in the broad area of negotiations, decision-making, and interpersonal relationships. Specifically, her research has focused on the dynamics of emotionally-charged decision-making and she investigates the decision-making processes involved in negotiations, auction bidding, and auction fever. She also has active research projects on perspective-taking and gender differences in a variety of domains. Gillian’s research has been widely published in the premier outlets of her field, including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Research in Organizational Behavior, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Harvard Business Review. Her research has also garnered international press coverage, including reports on auction behaviour at CNN, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, BusinessWeek.com, and The Telegraph.
Gillian’s award-winning teaching focuses on negotiations, decision-making, and leading teams. She teaches on London Business School’s full-time MBA and Executive Education programmes. She has also consulted worldwide for schools (e.g. Indian School of Business and Cyprus International Institute of Management) and organisations (e.g. Diageo, Roche, Oman Oil, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation).
Professor Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda is a Visiting Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Beppe has an impressive academic record, visiting LBS from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy where he is Professor of Organization Theory and Social Networks. He also previously served as Dean of SDA at the Bocconi School of Management.
Professor Soda’s research focusses on social and organisational network origins and dynamics and the performance consequences of the interplay between organisational formal architectures and organisational networks. Beppe also serves on the board of some of the world’s most important international higher education institutions, including the European Foundation for Management Development, EQUIS Accreditation Board, and the GMAC Board of Directors.
His writing has been published in some of the most prestigious management publications, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science and Academy of Management Journal.
Thomas Mussweiler is a professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. He is an expert on the psychological foundations of organisational behaviour. More specifically, his interests include trust and cooperation, judgment and decision making, negotiation and influence, the self, interpersonal processes and stereotyping. Much of Professor Mussweiler’s research focuses on social comparison processes – he examines how comparing with others changes people’s self-image, their motivation and performance.
Professor Mussweiler is the recipient of a series of prestigious national and international awards, including the European Young Investigator Award and the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Award, and is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences. He has published more than 70 scientific articles in a broad spectrum of the leading journals of his field, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Psychological Science, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Making.
Professor Mussweiler has extensive teaching experience at a variety of institutions. In his 20 years of teaching, he has taught decision making, negotiation, organisational behaviour and social psychology to a variety of different audiences.
O’Connor is an authority on negotiation, conflict management, and collaboration. She has studied the impact of teams at the bargaining table, how stress influences negotiators’ choice of tactics, and how reputations for toughness undermine negotiators. Her recent research investigates how men’s and women’s facial features—their attractiveness as well as the masculinity/femininity of their facial features—influence how other people treat them. Her current project centers on women’s career paths to understand how women navigate moments of decision. In particular, she is investigating the roles of fear, courage and serendipity in women’s working lives. O’Connor’s research has been honored by awards from leading academic organizations, including the Academy of Management and the International Association for Conflict Management and has been cited in a number of news outlets, including the Financial Times, Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal.
O’Connor received a B.S. from Cornell University, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in social and organizational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held faculty and visiting faculty appointments at Rice University and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
Professor Randall S. Peterson is Academic Director of the Leadership Institute and Chair of the Research Ethics Committee. Randall’s research and teaching focus on CEO personality, top management team interaction, board dynamics, leading diverse teams, conflict management, and the effects of member personality on group interaction and performance. Randall has won the Academy of Management’s ‘Best Paper’ award, as well as the ‘most influential article’ award. His research was similarly awarded ‘most influential article’ by the International Association of Conflict Management and ‘Best Paper’ published in small group research.
Randall’s newest book is ‘Disaster in the Boardroom: Six Dysfunctions Everyone Should Understand.’ His earlier book is ‘Leading and Managing in the Dynamic Organization.’ He has also published more than 50 articles in top scientific journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and the Journal of Applied Psychology, as well as top managerial journals including Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. His research has also been featured in major news outlets around the world including the BBC, Economist, Financial Times, Forbes, Board Agenda, The New Yorker, and Zawya.
Randall is also an outstanding mentor, having won the Academy of Management’s ‘Best Mentor’ award and teacher as a winner of London Business School’s ‘Excellence in Teaching” award. Randall has been invited to teach and consult across the world, for companies such as ADNOC, Alcan, AREVA, Barclays, Chevron/Texaco, Deutsche Bank, Emirates Bank, E.ON, GIB, IBM, Lufthansa, Nestlé, Price Waterhouse Coopers, and Roche.
Randall holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining London Business School, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University and Cornell University's SC Johnson Graduate School of Management. He is a former Deputy Dean (Faculty), Subject Area Chair of Organisational Behaviour, Chair of the Ph.D. Programme, and Vice President of the Campaign Committee of London Business School.
To learn more about Professor Peterson’s research, awards, and teaching, please visit: www.randallspeterson.com
Professor Aneeta Rattan’s research interests focus on mindsets and intergroup relations (stereotyping, prejudice, and inequity). In one programme of research, she studies mindsets that promote belonging, commitment, and achievement among minorities and women in the face of stereotypes and implicit bias. In another programme of research, she investigates the mindsets that help individuals, organisations, and societies foster positive interactions among diverse group members (across gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation status), even after incidents of explicit bias.
Professor Rattan’s research has been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. She has received multiple research grants from major funding agencies in the United States. Her research has also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine, and Huffington Post among others.
Niro Sivanathan is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. His research draws on social psychological and evolutionary theories to examine how our judgments, decisions and behaviours are shaped by the psychological experience of status and power within social hierarchies. In addition he also explores how our motivation to maintain the self-integrity influences decision-making.
His research has been presented at leading international conferences and published in the top international journals in the fields of Science, Management and Psychology, such as: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Psychological Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This research has also been translated to practitioner audiences at the Harvard Business Review and a TED Talk. His research has also garnered international press coverage at CNN, Financial Times, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Sunday Times and Forbes.
He teaches Negotiations, Influence, and Decision-making to a wide audience and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including being selected as one of the World's top 40 Best B-School Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants in 2016, and at LBS, the Excellence in Teaching Award, and voted the Best MBA teacher by the graduating class. He has provided advisory and executive education services for organizations such as Credit Suisse, Kearney, YPO, Merck, Central Bank of Turkey, Salesforce and LVHM.
Professor Sivanathan earned his PhD in Management & Organisations from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He also holds an MSc in Management and a BA in Psychology (Honours) from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.
The first rule of leadership and management success is always to know your strengths and weaknesses in order to know what you offer to the people you work with, and where you need to focus effort on improvement.
To achieve success in any organisation, leaders must inspire commitment from others, elicit contributions toward common goals, coordinate both within and across teams, and proactively and effectively adapt to change.
There are many books, articles & courses on managing crises. Most focus on the structures, processes that companies can instil within their corporate framework to mitigate the risk & aftermath of a potential crisis. We believe these are important aspects organizations should take into account. However, we also believe it is critical to understand how crises change the dynamic of human decision-making & communication, & the resulting behaviour of individuals who face crises. It is the human factor, on which we focus in this course, that is the single greatest variable & often hardest to manage and control during a crisis. Integrating evidence-based knowledge from marketing, organizational behaviour, & public-policy, this course will focus on three inter-related critical areas of crisis management: decision-making, communication & learning. The course will be interactive, immersing students in a crisis simulation involving actors, real time decisions, & communication to the media.
Understanding diversity and being able to address issues of bias in organizations is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ leadership skill – it is a need-to-have. Why do so many leaders get it wrong, failing to create inclusive environments for racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other underrepresented backgrounds? And why don’t organizations make more progress on diversity given how much they talk about it?
Poll after poll has confirmed that an astonishing number of workers are disengaged from their work. But more than ever before, organizations need employee engagement and creativity to win. Why is this happening? And how can we fix the problem?
This course provides training in both the theory and practice of negotiation with an emphasis on an entrepreneurial context. In this course you will acquire the conceptual skills necessary to become a sophisticated analyst and deal architect of various negotiation situations, including those faced by an entrepreneur throughout the entire business cycle of the entrepreneurial journey from capital raise to exits/IPO of the business, and all other negotiations in-between. This includes a deep understanding of the underlying structure of the negotiation, deal terms specific to the entrepreneurial space, as well as the psychology behind negotiation-based judgment and decision-making. The course is grounded in the theory and practice of negotiations, complemented by examples and speakers from the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The goal of his course it to brick-by-brick instil the comfort and confidence needed when called upon to negotiate for your business.
Why this elective? As described in the school's Elective Portfolio Review (2012), "recruiters are increasingly demanding that students are equipped with a broader set of 'softer' skills which will allow them to be more effective in the workplace. Currently, such skills are not formally delivered as part of the elective portfolio." Building and maintaining effective relationships is at the core of career and business success. This elective has been developed to give you an opportunity to refine your relationship building and management skills and to ensure that you are well equipped to meet the inter-personal challenges that often become increasingly complex and demanding the more senior you get. The objective of this course is thus to help you develop your ability to build more effective professional relationships. This involves a set of skills that are evidence-based and can be learnt through practice. Given that this course is about building relationships, being a passive observer wi
Drawing on the Leadership Institute’s substantial research and practitioner work in this area, this elective offers an introduction to corporate governance combined with the topic of board effectiveness. Students will be exposed to blend of taught and experiential inputs on governance and the often neglected board dynamics, providing an opportunity to learn as well as build their capability to work as an effective board contributor, adviser or stakeholder. They will also have the opportunity to reflect on how the data generated by their leadership assessment stream can be used to inform a development plan to move them towards being "board ready" and/or increasing their effectiveness if they already are a member of a board.
The purpose of this course is to help you develop skills and knowledge critical for leading groups of people effectively in organisations. Through assessment tools, exercises, films, cases, role-plays, and other assignments, you will gain a stronger understanding of what it takes to excel in leadership positions. This course builds from the premise that leadership skills complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in other London Business School courses. Because most candidates seek or encounter leadership responsibilities, this course is relevant for every student pursuing a managerial career.
This is a class on helping you change things. How can you stop procrastinating on important tasks? How can you convince your technical salespeople to sell business solutions not hardware? How do you get people to start buying their meat from local and humane farms? On the one hand, these are very different changes on different levels of analysis: individual, organizational, and societal. On the other hand, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?
We negotiate every day. We negotiate with potential employers, co-workers, roommates, landlords, parents, bosses, merchants, service providers, spouses, and even our children. Although people negotiate all the time, most know very little about the strategy and psychology behind effective negotiations. The course will highlight the components of an effective negotiation and teach students to analyze their own behavior in negotiations. The course will be largely experiential, providing students the opportunity to develop their skills by participating in negotiations and integrating their experiences with the principles presented in the readings and course discussions.
Power is one of the most fundamental concepts in the social sciences. Throughout history, people have been fascinated by power. From philosophers, to politicians, to even comic book writers, people have observed that regardless of whether you have a desire or disdain for it, power plays a pivotal role in societies and organizations. The purpose of this course is to help you (i) understand, (ii) analyze, and (iii) harness power. Both anecdotal evidence and decades of research have shown that power can dramatically impact the way we think, feel and behave—in ways we do not expect. The skills you will learn in the course through conceptual models, tactical approaches, and simulation exercises will allow you to lead effectively regardless of where you are in your career trajectory.
We stand in the midst of one of the greatest revolutions in organisations and work the world has ever seen. The forces that are shaping our work, our organisations and institutions are becoming ever more apparent as their velocity increases. The trajectory of these forces is unknowable - with future scenarios ranging from the most optimistic to the downright bleak. In this elective we explore these key themes. First, how the context of work and organisations will be shaped by the forces of globalisation, technology, demography, societal changes and resource constraints over the coming decades and the opportunities and challenges this creates. Then we consider the impact this will have on organisations and ecosystems of knowledge and talent, and the role of the company in the community and in society. Finally, we take a closer look at what this means for leadership and for you as you develop your own ideas about how best to prepare for the future.
The course is aimed at students who want to reflect on how to live more fulfilling personal and professional lives. . Wisdom is an expertise in dealing with difficult questions of life and adaptation to its complex requirements. Wisdom takes a long-term perspective and underpins individual and societal happiness. Wisdom and happiness are founded on a healthy relationship with reality, with oneself, and with other people. This course will address how to grow in wisdom and happiness, drawing on diverse disciplines and traditions, including psychology, systems theory, philosophy, and the humanities.
"Attending the Accelerated Development Programme is a unique opportunity for participants to learn not only from our world-class faculty but from their fellow participants. Consequently, the way the programme is designed encourages you to get to know as many people as possible and to form a life-long network of culturally diverse peers".
"Organisations thrive when there is a strong alignment between their business goals and their people strategy. This programme will help you identify the steps and form the action plan that will take your organisation to where you want to be in the future."
"Thinking strategically, developing leadership skills and managing globally are the keys to achieving and maintaining competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving marketplace".
Professor Madan Pillutla explains how to improve good judgement in making financial choices and the importance of removing bias from investment decisions
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