Topics:

• High Performance Healthcare from Better Relationships
• Patient Safety Lessons from the Airlines
• Relational Coordination

 

About Jody Hoffer Gittell: 

Jody Hoffer Gittell is a Professor of Management at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Dr. Gittell is a leading expert on relational coordination and organizational performance. She founded the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative in 2011, bringing scholars and practitioners together to help organizations build relational coordination for high performance. She co-founded a university spinoff called Relational Coordination Analytics Inc. in 2013, offering measurement and intervention support to organizations seeking to improve their performance, and currently serves as its Chief Scientific Officer.

 

Gittell’s research explores how workers, leaders and customers contribute to quality and efficiency outcomes through their coordination with each other. She has developed a theory of relational coordination, proposing that highly interdependent work is most effectively coordinated through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, supporting sufficiently frequent, timely, accurate, problem-solving communication. Research demonstrates that relational coordination is associated with a wide range of performance outcomes, and that organizations can support it through the design of their work systems.

 

Gittell’s newest book, Transforming Relationships for High Performance (Stanford University Press, forthcoming) offers a dynamic multi-interventional model of change. In The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance (McGraw-Hill), and in High Performance Healthcare: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve Quality, Efficiency and Resilience (McGraw-Hill) she describes how relational coordination works in airlines and the healthcare sector.

 

Gittell has published her research in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Management Science, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management Studies, Human Resource Management, Human Resource Management Journal, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Industrial and Labor Relations Review and Harvard Business Review. .

 

Gittell has won a Best Book Award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Best Paper award from the Human Resource Division of the Academy of Management, the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award for Best Paper of the Year in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and an Honorable Mention for the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award for Best Paper on Organizational Change.

 

Gittell received her PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management, her MA from The New School and her BA from Reed College, and taught for six years at the Harvard Business School before joining the faculty of Brandeis University. She has served as Chair of the Board for Families First Health and Support Center, as MBA Program Director at the Brandeis Heller School, and as Acting Director of the MIT Leadership Center. She now serves on the boards of the Labor and Employment Relations Association and the Endowment for Health, and on the editorial board for the Academy of Management Review.