Ethan Bernstein (@ethanbernstein) is an associate professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School. He has spent his career researching novel talent management practices and their effect on employee behavior, collaboration, and performance. His work has been published in top journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Management Science, Academy of Management Annals, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and Harvard Business Review, and it has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NPR, TED, Inc., Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others. He is the author of the national bestseller Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. In the classroom, he teaches the second-year MBA course Managing Human Capital, the HBS Live Online Classroom course Developing Yourself as a Leader, and various executive education programs.
As workplaces evolve to meet rapidly changing needs, Professor Bernstein has studied the impact of increased workplace transparency (who gets to observe whom--the observability of employee activities, routines, behaviors, and contributions) and increased workplace connectivity (who gets to communicate with whom--the patterns of human interaction that facilitate collaboration and information exchange) on employee behavior, organizational performance, and worker satisfaction. These two trends carry both benefits and hazards for organizations and their employees, with profound implications for how today’s managers need to lead, organize, design their organizations, integrate AI into their interactions, and structure collaboration and work.
For his work on organizations and leadership, Professor Bernstein is a 2020 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize winner and a 2014 HBR McKinsey Award finalist. His research has won INGRoup’s inaugural J. Richard Hackman Award for the Dissertation That Most Significantly Advances the Study of Groups, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Outstanding Publication Award in Organizational Behavior, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Best Published Paper Award in Organization and Management Theory, the Academy of Management's 2015 Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication Award in Organizational Behavior, the Academy of Management's 2014 Best Dissertation-Based Paper Award in Organizational Behavior, the INGRoup 2014 Outstanding Paper award, the 2013 Fredric M. Jablin Doctoral Dissertation Award from the International Leadership Association, the HBS Wyss Award for Excellence in Research, and the Susan G. Cohen Doctoral Research Award.
Prior to joining the HBS faculty, Professor Bernstein spent a half-decade at The Boston Consulting Group in Toronto and Tokyo. Tapped by Elizabeth Warren in 2010 to join the implementation team at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he spent nearly two years in executive positions, including Chief Strategy Officer and Deputy Assistant Director of Mortgage Markets, at this newly established United States federal agency.
Professor Bernstein earned his doctorate in management at Harvard, where he also received a JD/MBA degree. While a doctoral student, he was a Kauffman Foundation Fellow in Law, Innovation, and Growth, and he remains a member of the New York and Massachusetts Bar Associations. He holds an AB in Economics from Amherst College, which included study at Doshisha University in Kyoto.
Professor Bernstein is an avid cyclist, skier, swimmer, reader, and “Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me!” listener. Originally from Los Angeles, he and his family now live in Newton, Massachusetts.