Jody Hoffer Gittell

Jody Hoffer Gittell, PhD, is a professor of management at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She founded the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative, bringing scholars and practitioners together to help organizations build relational coordination for high performance. She co-founded a university spin-off called Relational Coordination Analytics Inc. offering measurement and intervention support to organizations seeking to improve their performance and serves as its chief scientific officer. Gittell has developed a theory of relational coordination, proposing that highly interdependent work is most effectively coordinated by frontline workers with each other, their customers and their leaders, through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, supported by frequent, timely, accurate, problem-solving communication. Gittell’s research is published in a wide range of scientific journals, including Organization Science, Management Science, Academy of Management Review and Journal of Organizational Behavior. She has published five books, starting with The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance (2003), and most recently, Transforming Relationships for High Performance: The Power of Relational Coordination (2016). Gittell received her PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management and taught for six years at the Harvard Business School before joining Brandeis in 2001. She currently serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Endowment for Health, as Treasurer for Seacoast NAACP, and on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review.