Kieran S OConnor

Kieran O’Connor joined the Willamette MBA faculty fall semester 2021, where he teaches courses on leadership, organizational behavior, managerial decision making, and negotiation. Prior to his arrival, he served on the faculty at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce, where he taught management courses across undergraduate and graduate programs. He has also regularly lectured on management and organizational behavior topics at the UVA School of Nursing and the UVA Medical School and has taught leadership, organizational behavior, and negotiation in the Darden School of Business Executive MBA program.

Professor O’Connor’s research focuses on the social and cognitive psychological processes that influence decision making in organizations and judgments of others. His recent work explores authenticity in organizations: what makes some individuals and organizations signal more authenticity than others – whether they behave consistently with their own principles or conform to socially constructed categories – and how these judgments drive increases in different types of value for them. Conversely, he also explores moral judgments of organizations such as hypocrisy, including the penalties that organizations and their members face when behaving inconsistently with stated norms and moral claims. His work ties together these two related but opposing sides of organizational life – authenticity and hypocrisy – and what drives these divergent perceptions and outcomes for organizations and their members. His research has been published in leading journals such as Academy of Management Annals, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Global Environmental Change, and others. His research has been featured in Harvard Business Review and The Economist.

Professor O’Connor earned his Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is a former graduate fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.