Name Deborah Gruenfeld Role Professor | Spouse James A. Phills | |
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Education New York University (1985), Cornell University (1983) | ||
Deborah H. Gruenfeld is an American social psychologist whose work examines the way people are transformed by the organizations and social structures in which they work. She is the author of numerous papers on the psychology of power and group behavior. She is the Moghadam Family Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Codirector of the Executive Program for Women Leaders at the same institution.
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Work
Gruenfeld was a graduate student of Robert S. Wyer and the late Joseph E. McGrath at the University of Illinois. Her doctoral research on status and integrative complexity in decision-making groups, in part examining U.S. Supreme Court decisions, were awarded prizes by the American Psychological Association and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Her analysis of U.S. Supreme Court decisions took into consideration both the justices' status in their group as well as their ideological preferences, demonstrating that as justices gained power on the court or entered into majority coalitions their written opinions tended to become less complex and nuanced.
Theory of Power
Together with Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, and Cameron Anderson also at Berkeley, Gruenfeld has developed a theory of power that aims to present an integrative account of the effects of power on human behaviour, suggesting that the acquisition of power has a disinhibiting effect regarding the social consequences of exercising it.
Lawsuit
In 2015, Poets & Quants, a blog that covers MBA programs around the world, made public a wrongful termination suit filed by Gruenfeld's estranged husband, James A. Phills, who had been another professor at the business school; Phills alleged his firing was driven by the affair that Gruenfeld was having with the dean of the business school, Garth Saloner, apparently with the knowledge of the Stanford's Provost, John Etchemendy. According to Vanity Fair's David Margolick, the litigation was "mutually assured destruction" for everyone involved, and with respect to Gruenfeld, he wrote: "How does it look for someone who built her career analyzing the abusiveness (she dubbed it “disinhibition”) of the powerful, and who, until a month before she became romantically entangled with the dean, was the G.S.B.’s sexual-harassment adviser, and who, as co-director of Stanford’s Executive Program for Women Leaders, counsels high-powered women on how to overcome gender stereotypes, to wind up secretly sleeping with her boss?" The matter led to resignation of Saloner in 2015 and was covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg,