Freshman class

Organizational charting

Mary Ann Glynn, professor of organization studies

Ph.D. Columbia University

Specialization: leadership and organizational behavior

Representative presentation: "Being Martha Stewart: Risk and Resilience in Organizational Identity," University of Michigan Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizational Studies

My research focuses on understanding organizational change, creativity, and innovation. In studying historical crises, I was struck by the ways in which attributes and behaviors that we normally think of as pertaining to individual people—identity, learning, cognition—can be applied to organizations. For example, a contemporary view of the 1929 market crash was that it was caused by fraud and manipulation. Congress passed new laws to prevent such abuses, although there was little evidence that they were responsible for the crash. In retrospect it appears that government and business institutions were reacting to what they had learned from the stock market crash of the 1890s.

This perspective is particularly valuable in the context of training business leaders. As research director and a fellow of the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, my goal is to sensitize students so they will learn to ask, "What are the historical and social contexts in which this organization is operating?" I hope this approach will give leaders a deeper understanding of the problems and forces they confront, enabling them to be more successful in developing appropriate solutions.