Seminar – Fear and courage in organisations

Jim Detert, University of Virginia

While fear and courage are acknowledged as relevant to many constructs of interest to organisational researchers – such as voice and silence, innovation, and psychological safety – relatively little organisational research directly explores either of these topics, or how the two are related. The same is true in how leadership is generally taught – namely, without explicit attention to the role of fear in people’s willingness or ability to engage in many important workplace behaviours. In this talk, I will briefly share how I arrived at my current focus in both research and teaching activities on the role of fear, and then describe some related in-progress studies and developmental approaches.

Speaker bio

Jim Detert is the John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration in the Leadership and Organizational Behavior area at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration and a Professor of Public Policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

Jim’s research focuses on workplace courage, voice and silence, ethical decision-making and behaviour, and other leadership-related topics. This research (and related consulting experience) has been conducted across a variety of global high-technology and service-oriented industries as well as public sector institutions. His research has been published in the top management journals (ASQ, AMJ, AMR, Org. Sci., JAP, Annals, etc) has won several academic best paper awards, and is regularly featured in various online and print media outlets. Jim is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review, and the author of the book Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work, published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Jim has also written many teaching cases and other curriculum materials and designed leadership and ethics classes taught to thousands of students of all ages around the world in degree and non-degree formats. He has received numerous awards for his teaching and curriculum development in both MBA and Executive MBA settings at Cornell and the University of Virginia.

Jim received his MA in sociology and PhD in organisational behaviour from Harvard University. He also holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota and a BBA from the University of Wisconsin.

For more information, please contact Luke Slater.