Lisa Cohen is currently serving on the OOW Section Council. Cohen is an associate professor of organizational behavior at Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. She was previously a faculty member at the London Business School, the Yale School of Management and the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine. Prior to her academic career, Cohen was Principal Consultant at Terranova Consulting Group/Right Management Consultants, a human resource and management consulting firm. She earned her MBA from Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and her PhD from the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Cohen’s current research focuses on questions about how tasks are bundled into jobs and jobs bundled into organizations: how and why do jobs and organizations look the way they do, how do they change, and how do they influence organizational success? Most recently she has examined these issues in startups. Her most recent paper, forthcoming in Academy of Management Journal, looks at the fit between top management jobs and experience and how these interact with firm development in technology startups. She has additional projects examining hiring and unusualness in the top management structure of startups. She has published in Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Organization Science.
Below, Cohen discusses her research motivations, career trajectory and future research.