Most managers want to listen, treat people fairly, and support equity — and fall short anyway. I study why, and what organizations can change so good intentions actually land.
I'm an organizational behavior scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School, where I study why good intentions so often fail to become good outcomes.
Before academia I spent four years in the Israeli Air Force and three practicing law in Israel. I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, was a postdoctoral scholar at New York University's Stern School of Business, and joined the faculty in 2018. My work appears in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP), and Personnel Psychology, and has been covered by Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, TIME, and the Wall Street Journal. I'm an Associate Editor at OBHDP.
Why managers resist learning from the people around them, and why employees stay silent even when they have something worth saying.
Explore this stream →Why fair intentions don't produce fair outcomes, and why efforts to advance equity fall short even among people committed to change.
Explore this stream →Most managers know they should ask for input. They still fail to ask, or brush off the answer when it arrives. Speaking up and staying silent turn out to be separate behaviors with separate causes — which is why so many "open door" fixes quietly fail.
Anseel & Sherf · 2025 · Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior
A widely repeated rule — make feedback highly specific — can actually hurt someone just starting to learn. The review sorts a sprawling literature into the situations where each rule works and where it backfires.
Sherf, Croitoru & McElroy · 2024 · Personnel Psychology
A meta-analysis of nearly 400 samples shows feedback-, information-, and advice-seeking share one motivational structure — which is why the levers that boost direct asking barely touch quiet observation.
Hussain, Tangirala & Sherf · 2023 · Academy of Management Journal
Mixed-gender coalitions advocate for gender equity more effectively than single-gender ones. Women advocating alone can be waved off as self-interested; men advocating alone lack lived credibility. Together they carry both.
Sherf, Parke & Isaakyan · 2021 · Academy of Management Journal
Speaking up is driven by the pull toward improving things; staying silent by the push to protect yourself. Because the roots differ, a suggestion box that gets people talking does almost nothing to reduce silence — and the concerns people swallow are the ones most tied to burnout.
Sherf & Morrison · 2020 · Journal of Applied Psychology
Confidence makes managers seek less feedback, because they figure they already know enough to be useful. The fix is small: when they take the other person's perspective, confidence flips from a barrier into an asset.
Fairness reliably predicts how employees feel and behave, yet employees still report unfair treatment all the time. Even managers who want to be fair get crowded out by workload — and fairness is a judgment, so the same act reads as fair or unfair depending on who's watching and how they read the motive behind it.
Tedder-King, Prengler & Sherf · 2025 · Journal of Applied Psychology
Support that signals goodwill without dismantling the actual mechanism of disadvantage can backfire; only support that changes the mechanism improves the careers it means to help.
★ 2026 Saroj Parasuraman AwardLee, Badura, Baker & Sherf · 2024 · Journal of Applied Psychology
A framework for impunity at work — the personal and situational senses of being beyond consequence that precede misconduct, where they come from, and what they predict.
Tedder-King & Sherf · 2024 · Academy of Management Journal
Whether adjusting evaluations to account for structural sexism seems fair depends on whether the observer believes structure — not individual merit — explains the gap. Frame the barrier as an objective feature of the environment, and resistance drops.
★ 2025 Saroj Parasuraman AwardTo, Sherf & Kouchaki · 2023 · Academy of Management Journal
The people with the most power to fix inequity are the least likely to notice it — but only in their own organization. Managers see bias elsewhere just fine; identifying with their own firm quietly edits it out at home.
Li, Sherf & Tangirala · 2023 · Organization Science
For teams adapting to change, merit-based rewards help early and equal-split rewards help later — the fairness principle that best supports the team shifts as it moves through recovery.
Where my work has been translated for a wider audience.
I teach two subjects: how to lead and manage teams, and how to think critically and creatively.
The interpersonal processes and structural features that shape how teams perform — how groups make decisions, handle conflict, and distribute influence, and what leaders and members can do to work with them well. The premise is that managing teams is a skill you build through practice, not a talent you're born with.
Creativity as a process you can learn and improve, not a trait reserved for a few. Drawing on cognitive and organizational psychology, it builds the habits to recognize when a problem needs creative thinking, to change how you approach it, and to foster creativity in a group — complementing analytical and domain expertise rather than replacing it.
★ Weatherspoon Award for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching, 2025 · MBA All-Star Teaching Award, 2022
