Jennifer A. Chatman

Jennifer A. Chatman
University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Haas School of Business

Ph.D.

About

82
Publications
143,412
Reads
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27,477
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 2001 - June 2002
Harvard University
Position
  • Bower Fellow
July 1993 - present
University of California, Berkeley
Position
  • Professor (Full)

Publications

Publications (82)
Article
Jennifer A. Chatman describes how leaders can more precisely measure their organization’s culture to ensure that it is aligned with their strategy, facilitating its execution. She details both quantitative and qualitative approaches including the Organizational Culture Profile, natural language processing, and ethnography.
Article
How do people establish and maintain cultural fit with an organization? Prior research has offered two perspectives that have heretofore been conceptually disconnected. One focuses on personal values, whereas another emphasizes perceptions of the cultural code. We develop a theoretical account that integrates these approaches by linking them to dis...
Article
We propose that perceptions of professional women change differently than perceptions of men as they age. Drawing inspiration from intersectionality theory, we examine the interaction of age and gender, finding that professional women are seen as more agentic, but also maximally incongruent with the gender-intensified prescription of being communal...
Article
Transformational leaders challenge the status quo, provide a vision of a promising future, and motivate and inspire their followers to join in the pursuit of a better world. But many of these leaders also fit the American Psychiatric Association classification for narcissistic personality disorder. They are grandiose, entitled, self-confident, risk...
Article
Three studies examine how organizational mindset —whether a company is perceived to view talent as fixed or malleable—functions as a core belief that predicts organizational culture and employees’ trust and commitment. In Study 1, Fortune 500 company mission statements were coded for mindset language and paired with Glassdoor culture data. Workers...
Article
Full-text available
We develop a theory explaining how collectivism causes people to "blur" demographic differences, that is, to see less diversity than actually exists in a group, and reconciling contradictions in how collectivistic norms influence group performance. We draw on the perceived diversity literature, hypothesizing that collectivistic norms cause group me...
Chapter
Leadership has been a defining focus in organizational research, and yet critical questions remain about the specific mechanisms by which leaders affect strategy and performance. We argue that, in addition to factors such as their individual attributes and behaviours, leaders who create and maintain a strategically relevant organizational culture a...
Article
Although some researchers have suggested that narcissistic CEOs may have a positive influence on organizational performance (e.g., Maccoby, 2007; Patel & Cooper, 2014), a growing body of evidence suggests that organizations led by narcissistic CEOs experience considerable downsides, including evidence of increased risk taking, overpaying for acquis...
Article
In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This...
Chapter
Leadership has been a defining focus in organizational research, and yet critical questions remain about the specific mechanisms by which leaders affect strategy and performance. We argue that, in addition to factors such as their individual attributes and behaviours, leaders who create and maintain a strategically relevant organizational culture a...
Chapter
This article offers a critical review of research in organizational behavior from an interactionist perspective: we consider the reciprocal influence between personal characteristics and the organizational context. Specifically, some situations are stronger than others, some people's behavior is more consistent across situations, some people can in...
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As work organizations become increasingly gender diverse, existing theoretical models have failed to explain why such diversity can have a negative impact on idea generation. Using evidence from two group experiments, this paper tests theory on the effects of imposing a political correctness (PC) norm, one that sets clear expectations for how men a...
Article
Our symposium advances theories of gender in the workplace by examining differences between men and women in high echelon roles. Gender bias is now recognized to have both hostile and benevolent components, which muddies the water when it comes to recognizing bias as it may be masked as protective policies towards women. We focus on high echelon ro...
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Studies of organizational culture are almost always based on two assumptions: (a) Senior leaders are the prime determinant of the culture, and (b) culture is related to consequential organizational outcomes. Although intuitively reasonable and often accepted as fact, the empirical evidence for these is surprisingly thin, and the results are quite m...
Article
Interest in organizational culture burgeoned in the 1980s with claims heralding organizational culture as a driver of organizational effectiveness. In response to the exuberance, three different research streams emerged to investigate the importance of organizational culture: culture content, culture strength, and strategic fit. Each stream of rese...
Article
The relationship between organizational culture and financial performance remains elusive even though researchers have studied it for some time. Early research suggested that a strong culture that aligns members' behavior with organizational objectives boosts financial performance. A more recent view is that, because strong cultures promote adheren...
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Full-text available
This case study describes the culture change process and positive outcomes at one of Genentech's largest divisions, Immunology and Opthamology (GIO). Senior Vice President Jennifer Cook worked with her team to develop a cul-ture that would tie together four brands that previously were not in the same division. Despite various challenges along the w...
Article
Full-text available
This case study describes the culture change process and positive outcomes at one of Genentech's largest divisions, Immunology and Opthamology (GIO). Senior Vice President Jennifer Cook worked with her team to develop a culture that would tie together four brands that previously were not in the same division. Despite various challenges along the wa...
Article
Narcissism is characterized by traits such as dominance, self-confidence, a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and low empathy. There is growing evidence that individuals with these characteristics often emerge as leaders, and that narcissistic CEOs may make more impulsive and risky decisions. We suggest that these tendencies may also affect how co...
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Purpose – We investigate the antibias norm, “political correctness” (PC), and explore the consequences of the PC norm for group processes and group performance. Methodology/approach – We define the term PC as it is used in public discourse and distinguish the PC norm from the related antibias norm of color blindness. Findings – We suggest that the...
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1 We thank Jeff Polzer and two semi-anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful suggestions on this chapter. The second author wrote this chapter as a Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School, and is grateful for their support.
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Norms determine regular patterns of behavior and influence members' identification with a group. They are also a proximate way to predict and understand behavior in diverse work groups but, surprisingly, have not been extensively examined in this context. After reviewing research on group norms and the psychology of prejudice, I suggest that reapin...
Article
Research has confirmed that leader behavior influences group and organizational behavior, but we know less about how senior leaders ensure that group and organizational members implement their decisions. Most organizations have multiple layers of leaders, implying that any single leader does not lead in isolation. We focused on how the consistency...
Article
Being in the numeric minority (e.g., being a solo woman in a group of men) influences how well a person performs within a work group. But being the solo member is only one way in which people can be atypical in a group; a person can also represent a social or demographic category that has not typically been associated with the task that the group i...
Article
One interesting and unequivocal theme across the chapters is that everyone in teams, not just minority members, is affected by the group's composition – whites and blacks, men and women, and those who are experienced as well as inexperienced. Further, though there is evidence that minority members may be more affected than majority members (both po...
Article
Shifts in the environment can compel health care organizations to change their strategies. However strategic change frequently fails because individuals do not adopt the behaviors necessary to successfully implement the new strategy. This study explores how three variables-agreement with new strategy, leaders' actions, and groups' general orientati...
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The article discusses service innovation in the investment banking industry. Service industry innovations differ from innovations in industries that produce physical products because they rarely have intellectual property and patent protections. However, investment banking services are typically a series of interrelated businesses such as consultin...
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Status is the prominence, respect, and influence individuals enjoy in the eyes of others. Theories of positive illusions suggest that individuals form overly positive perceptions of their status in face-to-face groups. In contrast, the authors argue that individuals' perceptions of their status are highly accurate--that is, they closely match the g...
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Like many technology organizations in the late 1990s, Cisco was booming. It grew so quickly, in fact, that it was bringing in up to 1000 new employees each month. Cisco's solution was to acquire talent by buying small firms, topping out in one year with 24 separate acquisitions. However, in 2000 the dot-com bubble burst and Cisco quickly realized t...
Article
We advocate a full-cycle approach to conducting organizational behavior research. Full-cycle research begins with the observation of naturally occurring phenomena and proceeds by traveling back and forth between observation and manipulation-based research settings, establishing the power, generality, and conceptual underpinnings of the phenomenon a...
Article
Leadership has been a central, and sometimes controversial, topic in the study of organizations. In spite of claims to the contrary, there is substantial evidence that leadership is positively related to a variety of individual and organizational outcomes. While research has confirmed that leadership-performance associations exist, less attention h...
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Full-text available
We investigated how demographic differences affected people's responses to organizational cues to cooperate with their coworkers. Officers from a large financial services firm who were more demographically different from their coworkers behaved more cooperatively when their business unit emphasized collectivistic rather than individualistic cultura...
Chapter
Why Is Organizational Culture Powerful? Culture Content and Innovation Leadership Tools to Manage and Change Organizational Culture Pitfalls Inherent in Leading through Culture The Three Cs of Culture
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Full-text available
Attitudes among 178 professional men and women working for a clothing manufacturer and retailer depended on their work groups' sex composition. Findings were consistent with status considerations: women expressed a greater likelihood of leaving homogeneous groups than did men, even though women expressed greater commitment, positive affect, and per...
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Full-text available
Organizational culture can be a powerful force that clarifies what's important and coordinates the work of employees without the costs and inefficiencies of close supervision. Culture also identifies an organization's distinctive competence to external constituencies. In order to effectively employ culture as a leadership tool, managers must recrui...
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Income is only weakly associated with both subjective well-being (SWB) and job satisfaction in the United States, a surprising finding in light of the importance placed on financial status in capitalistic societies. To explore this further, the authors examined intrinsic and extrinsic work orientations as potential moderators of the effects of fina...
Article
Social categorization processes may lead work groups to form different types of group norms. We present a model of norm formation and suggest that group norms may emerge immediately following the group's inception. Further, the content of such norms may be influenced by group members' demographic heterogeneity. We outline a profile of work group no...
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1 The second author wrote this paper while a Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School and is grateful for their support. We also thank Elizabeth Mannix, Rita McGrath, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful suggestions.
Article
Drawing from social categorization theory, we found that greater demographic heterogeneity led to group norms emphasizing lower cooperation among student teams and officers from ten business units of a financial services firm. This effect faded over time. Perceptions of team norms among those more demographically different from their work group cha...
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This paper extends social categorization theory to understand how personality traits related to information sharing may correspond with positive perceptions of demographically different people, thereby enhancing their experience and performance in organizations. We tested our hypotheses in a sample of MBA candidates and a sample of financial servic...
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Past conflict research and theory has provided insight into the types of conflict and styles of conflict resolution in organizations and groups. A second generation of conflict research is now needed that recognizes that the type of conflict present in a group relative to the other types present (proportional conflict composition) and the amount of...
Article
Understanding the relationship between personality and behavior requires accounting for a broad set of traits within each person and the demands of a specific role or situation. To address these requirements, we assessed the relevance or ordering of traits within an individual (an idiographic approach) and compared these orderings across individual...
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Drawing from self-categorization theory, we tested hypotheses on the effects of an organization's demographic composition and cultural emphasis on work processes and outcomes. Using an organizational simulation, we found that the extent to which an organization emphasized individualistic or collectivistic values interacted with demographic composit...
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Deriving predictions from congruence theory, we explored the personal and situational sources of cooperation by contrasting behavior under conditions of personality fit and misfit with culture in an organizational simulation. We assessed MBA students' disposition to cooperate and randomly assigned them to simulated organizations that either emphasi...
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We measure the effects of motivation and ability on the early career success of a sample of Master's of Business Administration (MBA) graduates in the early years of their careers. We argue that performance is a joint effect of two important individual characteristics: general cognitive ability and motivation. General cognitive ability, which is re...
Article
Investigated the relationship between 2 industry characteristics, technology and growth, and organizational culture. This relationship was examined by comparing the cultures of organizations within and across industries. 15 firms representing 4 industries in the service sector completed the Organizational Culture Profile. Results show that stable o...
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To investigate how the fit of an employee with his or her organization as a whole is established and maintained and what the consequences are in organizations, this study tracked the early careers of 171 entry-level auditors in eight of the largest U.S. public accounting firms and assessed the congruence of their values with those of the organizati...
Article
This study investigates two questions: Are there stable dimensions of organizational culture that generalize across organizations, and are organizational cultures more similar among firms in similar industries? We find that thirteen firms representing four industries exhibit stable dimensions of organizational culture. Findings also indicate that o...
Article
Using citations which appeared in published research from 1972 to 1984 (from the Social Sciences Citation Index), the study identifies the subspecialties that constitute the foundations of current research. It focuses on two fields organizational behavior and organization theory. The matrix of raw cocitation counts was factor-analyzed using a princ...
Article
Analyzed questionnaire data from 291 professional or technical employees of 45 firms to examine (1) organizational recruitment and socialization practices and (2) organizational commitment. Rigorous recruitment and selection procedures and a strong clear organizational value system were associated with higher levels of employee commitment based on...
Article
Understanding and predicting behavior in organizations requires a consideration of person and situation factors, and how these factors interact. This paper develops and longitudinally tests a model of person-organization fit (POF). POF is defined, and antecedents (selection and socialization) and consequences (commitment, performance, and tenure) a...
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In order for researchers to understand and predict behavior, they must consider both person and situation factors and how these factors interact. Even though organization researchers have developed interactional models, many have overemphasized either person or situation components, and most have failed to consider the effects that persons have on...
Article
Introduction and Afterword - Phillip K Tompkins and Robert D McPhee Stumbling Toward Identity - W Charles Redding The Emergence of Organizational Communication as a Field of Study Vertical and Network Communication in Organizations - Rebecca Blair, Karlene H Roberts, and Pamela McKechnie The Present and the Future Communication and Organizational C...
Article
Conducted 2 studies with 82 nonfaculty university employees (mean age 31-40 yrs) and 162 graduating business students at the undergraduate and MBA level to investigate relations among the dimensions of commitment and prescribed and extrarole activities. Survey findings suggest that psychological attachment may be predicated on compliance (instrumen...
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Previous research on organizational commitment has typically not focused on the underlying dimensions of psychological attachment to the organization. Results of two studies using university employees (N = 82) and students (N = 162) suggest that psychological attachment may be predicated on compliance, identification, and internalization (e.g., Kel...
Article
Full-text available
Attitudes among 178 professional men and women working for a clothing manufac turer and retailer depended on their work groups' sex composition. Findings were consistent with status considerations: women expressed a greater likelihood of leaving homogeneous groups than did men, even though women expressed greater commit ment, positive affect, and p...

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