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Faculty

Kathleen L. McGinn
Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration
WSA Faculty Advisor

Kathleen L. McGinn is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is currently the course head for the HBS MBA required curriculum course on Negotiations in Organizations and Markets. McGinn also teaches courses on negotiations, power and influence, and interpersonal decision making to MBAs and Executives at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation. Before coming to Harvard, Professor McGinn taught at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management and Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Professor McGinn studies interpersonal relationships and their role in negotiations, decisions and conflict within and between organizations. She is currently studying the role interpersonal ties play in two very different settings. With Hannah Riley Bowles of the Kennedy School of Government, Professor McGinn is exploring the ways in which women in leadership positions in corporate, entrepreneurial, and public sector organizations negotiate for and claim authority. She is also investigating how new technology is affecting the employment relationship between Pacific Maritime companies and the Pacific longshoremen on west coast U.S. ports.

McGinn publishes her research in academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Games and Economic Behavior, as well as in book chapters and practitioner outlets. Professor McGinn received her Ph.D. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Her doctoral dissertation, The Ties That Provide: Workplace Interactions and the Allocation of Scarce Resources, won the 1991 State Farm Dissertation Award.

Professor McGinn works with numerous firms and not-for-profit organizations in the areas of negotiation, decision making, and employment relations. Prior to her academic career, Professor McGinn was a general manager and labor relations manager in private industry and the public sector. Though her roots are in the northwest, she currently lives in Newton, MA with her husband, Jeff Polzer, and her daughter, Taryn.

* Professor McGinn published under the name of Kathleen L. Valley from 1992-2002.