Elizabeth Baily Wolf

Elizabeth Baily Wolf is an Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.

Professor Wolf’s research focuses on how people subjectively evaluate their own and others’ performance, competence, and potential (i.e., form self-assessments and metaperceptions). She is particularly interested in how emotion, nonverbal behavior, gender, and national culture influence these processes.

Subjective evaluations play a crucial role in organisational life. Individual’s evaluations of themselves shape their aspirations, persistence, and decision-making; and individual’s evaluations of others decide outcomes such as hiring, role assignments, job security, and promotions. Because subjective evaluations have important downstream effects, inaccurate evaluations lead to a variety of costly consequences for organisations. For example, performers may fail to develop valuable skills, top performers may opt out of organisations, or evaluators may misassign tasks or roles among performers.

The goal of Professor Wolf’s work is to make organisations more effective by helping individuals evaluate themselves and others more accurately. Two important barriers to accurate evaluation and self-assessment are 1) miscommunications about emotion and 2) stereotyping and prejudice. Her research seeks to understand how to minimise the undermining effects of these two barriers.

Her research has been published in leading academic journals, such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and was featured in various media, including Bloomberg, Forbes, and NPR.

Before coming to INSEAD, Professor Wolf completed her PhD in Organisational Behavior at Harvard Business School. Her dissertation examined how evaluators’ emotional expressions convey performance feedback to those whom they evaluate. She received her BA summa cum laude from the Connecticut College where she double-majored in Psychology and Hispanic Studies and received her CISLA certificate in International Studies. Born to a British father and an American mother, Professor Wolf grew up in the United States. She has spent time living in Spain and Germany.

RESEARCH AREAS

Social Perception, Emotion, Nonverbal Behaviour, Stereotyping, Prejudice, Gender, Performance Feedback, Self-assessment, Evaluative Concerns, Cross-cultural Psychology, Social Hierarchy

TEACHING AREAS

Negotiation, Social Psychology, Organisational Behaviour