Jody Hoffer Gittell

Jody Hoffer Gittell is an Associate Professor of Managememt at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, and Acting Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center. Her research explores how coordination by front-line workers contributes to quality and efficiency outcomes in service settings, with a particular focus on the airline and health care industries. She has developed a theory of relational coordination, proposing that highly interdependent work is most effectively coordinated through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, and demonstrating how organizations can support the development of relational coordination through the design of relational work systems. Dr. Gittell is the author of dozens of articles and chapters, as well as books titled The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance, and Up In the Air: How the Airlines Can Improve Performance by Engaging Their Employees. Her newest book, High Performance Healthcare: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve Quality, Efficiency and Resilience, presents her findings from ten years of research in the healthcare industry. Dr. Gittell has won the Best Book Award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Best Paper award from the Human Resource Division of the Academy of Management, the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award for Best Paper of the Year in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and an Honorable Mention for the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award for Best Paper on Organizational Change. Before joining the faculty at Brandeis University, Dr. Gittell received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and served as Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School.