Jessica Kennedy

Lending her expertise to Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BusinessWeek, and other news outlets, Jessica Kennedy’s work on ethical behavior, hierarchies, and gender is relevant for any organization. 

Awards & Accomplishments

Kennedy has earned several research awards, including Best Article in 2016 from Business Ethics Quarterly, Owen''s Research Productivity Award in 2017, and the INFORMS/Organization Science Best Dissertation Proposal in 2011.

Leadership

Professor Kennedy serves on the Editorial Board of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the Journal of Management.

Publications

Professor Kennedy has published in outlets such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Research in Organizational Behavior, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Business Ethics Quarterly.

Teaching

At Vanderbilt, Professor Kennedy teaches Negotiation as well as Leading Teams and Organizations for the MBA program.

Research Interests

Professor Kennedy’s research lies at the intersection of three distinct yet inter-related topics: power and status hierarchies, ethical behavior, and gender. Her research has been published in top academic and practitioner journals of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Ethics. Recent studies by Kennedy have found that holding higher-ranking positions can blind people to unethical practices they are responsible for stopping, gender differences in moral identity can help to explain why and when women negotiate more ethically than men, and that political correctness norms can enable creative performance in diverse (but not homogeneous) groups.

Education

PhD, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkley, 2012 BS, summa cum laude, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2004