Management & Organization Seminars

Aparna Joshi is an award-winning organizational scholar who studies the science of how human beings recognize, respond to, and then relate to one another across differences. Her research highlights how leaders can transcend differences to forge positive change in and around organizations. Over the past twenty years, Aparna’s research has focused on how social differences translate into inequality with a specific focus on gender differences across a range of professional settings such as among scientists, lawyers, engineers and chief executives. Her research aims at building actionable theoretical models that can inform practices aimed at reducing barriers and enhancing inclusion in these settings. Prior to joining Michigan Ross she was on the faculty of the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University and at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Aparna's research appears in the leading journals in the field of management including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Organization Science. Her work in the area of gender dynamics in engineering work groups also recieved a National Science Foundation grant. In 2025 she recieved the  Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) Impact Award. This honor is given annually by peers in the field to research published over the past two decades that exemplifies the rare balance of theoretical depth and practical impact, shaping the way organizations and society think about leadership.

In addition, in 2014 Aparna was awarded the prestigious Cummings Award for Early to Mid-Career Scholarly Achievement, one of the highest professional honors in the field, by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management and she was appointed a Fellow of the Academy of Management in 2019. She has also been featured on Stanford’s list of the top 2% of research scientists in the world. Her work has also received the Saroj Parasuraman Award in 2010, the Dorothy Harlow Distinguished Paper Award in 2006 and 2008, as well as the Academy of Management’s Best Dissertation Award (Gender and Diversity in Organizations division) and has also been featured in numerous media outlets.

Aparna has served on the editorial boards of top journals and as an Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Journal as well as the Administrative Science Quarterly.

Over the past two decades, Aparna has also enjoyed working with a number of doctoral students who are today faculty at top business schools all over the world.

Marlon Mooijman is the Jones School Distinguished Assistant Professor of Management (Organizational Behavior) at the Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University, and a courtesy faculty member in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology group. Before Rice, he worked at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Professor Mooijman studies trust, power, and ethics, which are topics at the heart of leadership—a good leader needs to cultivate trusting relationships, wield power wisely, and ignite people’s moral passions and steer them in the right direction. Bad leaders, in contrast, make life miserable for employees. He studies what makes people good leaders by studying how trust develops in unequal power relationships and how leaders can leverage their understanding of others' moral passions to their benefit. His work has been published in top-outlets such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Nature Human Behavior, Research in Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Professor Mooijman teaches Organizational Behavior to undergraduate students and MBA students at the Jones Graduate School of Business, as well as various PhD seminars to PhD students.

Rachel Ruttan holds a PhD in Management and Organizations from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her research interests include compassion and prosocial behavior, values, and moral judgment. Specifically, she studies lapses in interpersonal compassion, as well as the potential pitfalls of organizations' attempts to appeal to morals and values, showing when and how "doing well by doing good" can backfire. Her research has been published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Her work has been profiled in The New York Times, NPR, and The Harvard Business Review.