The Power of a Simple Idea
Jody Hoffer Gittell
Jody Hoffer Gittell is a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She founded and leads the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative (RCRC), whose mission is to foster widespread development and adoption of relational coordination theory, evidence, and tools. Gittell also co-founded Relational Coordination Analytics Inc., which offers measurement, evaluation, and visualization of relational coordination networks to organizations. She received her PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and taught at the Harvard Business School before joining the faculty at Brandeis. She serves on the board of the Endowment for Health, and the Academy of Management Review. She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with her husband Ross and their daughters Rose and Grace.
Gittell 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, and supported by frequent, timely, accurate, and problem-solving communication. Research shows that relational coordination is associated with a wide range of positive performance outcomes, and that organizations support or undermine it through the design of their work systems. This work began in the airline industry and is now practiced and studied in a variety of industries including healthcare, education, and banking, and in many countries including the United States, Denmark, Canada, Scotland, and Pakistan.
rcrc.brandeis.edu
rcanalytic.com
twitter
Selected Publications:
Transforming Relationships for High Performance: The Power of Relational Coordination