Lessons in resiliency
Professor Ivonne Chirino-Klevans’ indomitable spirit shapes her courses in leadership and decision-making — and her athletic drive.
Organizational Behavior
Our strategic priority is scholarly range. We believe groundbreaking work emerges through conversations among scholars with different perspectives. Organizational behavior (OB) is an integrative field rooted in multiple academic disciplines – psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology – with a variety of overlapping methodological paradigms.
Our collective faculty profile reflects a diverse set of perspectives, methods and training. We use methods that include experimental, field, archival, statistical modeling, qualitative and ethnographic. Our levels of analysis include within-person, individuals, teams, organizations and multi-disciplinary. Our training includes OB, I/O psychology, anthropology and social psychology.
Our faculty members: View our OB faculty members’ bios here.
Our PhD Program: Our PhD Program in Organizational Behavior prepares doctoral students to conduct high-impact research on a broad range of topics critical to businesses and managers. Our students are passionate, creative and ambitious learners who work to become top-notch educators and researchers. Together, we value collegiality, mentorship and quality research.
Our research: Our faculty and PhD students explore a broad range of research questions including team adaptation, stereotyping, social inequality, immigration, fairness, morality, intersectionality, cross-cultural research, gender equity, social advocacy and allyship, social roles and identity management, emotions, sleep deprivation, power, human energy, leadership, stress and workplace safety. Our Center for Decision Research serves as a premier hub for experimental work in team science, social psychology and organizational behavior.
Our teaching: We prioritize representation in our teaching. We continuously update exercises, redesign our materials and search for new readings to better reflect social changes, the demographic makeup of the workforce, and challenges organizations and individuals face at work related to identity and social inequality. Recent updates include course design, such as considering neurodiversity; topic choice, such as core and elective classes that tie discussions to current examples; and case and class example selection, such as ensuring a representative range of protagonists.
Our service: We prioritize service to our community. Some of our PhD students have been/are members of the PhD Project and the Management Doctoral Student Association: Angelica Leigh (PhD ’20), president 2018-2019; Ayana Younge (PhD ’20), president 2019-2020; and members Ricky Burgess (PhD ’23) and Herrison Chicas (PhD ’24). Some of our faculty are active with the Tenure Project. Our faculty actively supports student clubs, identity groups and women’s advancement initiatives through organizations like Carolina Women in Business, special events and pro-bono teaching. We present on workforce demographics to the UNC Kenan-Flagler community and beyond, mentor veterans and current service members, and provide guidance to McNair Scholars, Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity members and Kenan Scholars. We also are committed to advising students on honors theses and supporting all students in their academic pursuits.
