Onward!

You could say that new Dean Jennifer Chatman is an expert on all things Berkeley. After all, she grew up in Berkeley, is a dual-degree “double bear” alumna, and has been a Haas professor for 30 years. So it might surprise you to learn that her attending UC Berkeley happened almost by chance.

Chatman, whose late father, Seymour Chatman, was a Cal professor of rhetoric and film, grew up around campus and even attended Berkeley High School, but she was never encouraged to apply. “I had one single meeting with a college counselor in four years,” Chatman recalls with a laugh, and Cal was never mentioned as an option to the honors student.

Instead, she headed to UC San Diego, where a first-semester psychology class ignited her interest in the field. Already, Chatman recalls, she had gravitated toward what makes people committed to their workplace. “Why are some people so happy at work and some people so miserable?” she says. “I didn’t even know there was a field called organizational behavior.” Berkeley’s psychology program offered more breadth and a focus on research Chatman wanted to explore. So she returned to her hometown to earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology then decided to pursue her PhD in the same field. 

This time around, it was her love of running that pulled her away from the Bay Area—to the University of Colorado Boulder, where the dedicated athlete could both pursue a doctorate in psychology and further her ambitions for a professional running career, training with legendary coach Frank Shorter’s club. A torn Achilles tendon at the end of Chatman’s first semester sent the young runner back home for physical therapy, where she planned to work remotely on her first-year project for Colorado. 

While recuperating, Chatman arranged a 15-minute informational interview with two legendary Cal professors in the burgeoning field of organizational culture: Charles O’Reilly, MBA 71, PhD 75, and Barry Staw, now a Haas professor emeritus. Though maneuvering the long hallways of Barrows Hall on crutches was painstaking, Chatman says it was the best 15 minutes of her life. “What they were talking about, I thought, ‘This is me. This is exactly what I want to do,’” she says. “I had no idea that there were scholars doing this work or that it could happen in a business school setting.” She transferred to Haas and earned her PhD in 1988.

Nearly four decades later, Chatman is a globally recognized leader in the field of organizational culture and now officially leading the very institution that shaped her. On July 1, Chatman became Haas’ 16th dean, having served as interim dean since July 2024 and acting dean briefly in 2023. 

Exemplary educator

After a five-year stint as a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Chatman joined the Haas faculty in 1993 as a professor of organizational behavior. She’s earned the respect and admiration of students throughout her tenure, regularly earning the coveted “Club 6” designation for exceptional teaching evaluations. She received the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2007. 

Former student Marc Badain, MBA 01, president of pro baseball’s Athletics and former president of pro football’s Raiders, says, “There was never a time where you walked out of Jenny’s class feeling disengaged or couldn’t take something out of the lecture to help you not only with your professional life but with your personal life.” 

Chatman recently reunited with her first students when the Class of 1995 held its 30th reunion. “I was so delighted to see them! I remembered every single person and am so proud of all they have accomplished,” she says. “Many of them told me that they are retiring, and I wondered, ‘Did I miss the memo?’” 

Colleagues understand that for Chatman, that question is facetious: Her prodigious energy and the term “superwoman” come up in almost every description by those who know her best. Still an avid runner, she also swims and cycles regularly, including in century (100-mile) bike rides and relay swims across Lake Tahoe (without a wetsuit). “My daily workout is non-negotiable,” says Chatman. “Doing all of it actually makes me more productive…and happy!”

Chatman’s other superpower is support from her family. “I certainly couldn’t have maintained the focus I’ve had over the years without their love and flexibility,” Chatman says of her husband, Russell, whom she met at Berkeley High School when she was 16, and her two daughters.  

Defining the DLPs

Even for Haasies who never sat in her classroom, Chatman’s influence shaped their everyday experience at the school. As a culture expert, Chatman was deeply involved in the work to codify Haas’ Defining Leadership Principles—Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself—back in 2010, consulting closely with former Haas Dean and current Chancellor Rich Lyons, BS 82. Over time, the DLPs have been embedded into 180+ different processes and systems at Haas and have become a primary reason that 75% of students say they chose to attend, solidifying Haas’ reputation as the place to earn an MBA grounded in values. 

Chatman says the DLPs are more critical than ever to the school’s continued success. “Given all that’s going on right now—questions about the worth of universities, education, research, science, and analytics—we need to lean in even further to these principles.”

Take Students Always. “Having a learning mindset is vitally important. Information is tainted right now, and reality is difficult to discern,” she says. “So it’s going to be even more incumbent on people to work harder to find truth.” 

Another angle, she says, is that federal policy has scorned research. “We need to work harder to ensure that people understand why the research we’re doing is so vital and important—and how it helps people lead healthier, more prosperous lives,” she says. Chatman is committed to connecting the DLPs with on-the-ground strategies and tactics during her tenure. “I keep telling people, ‘The DLPs are back, baby!’” 

Industry influencer

The focus on rigorous and quantitative research that drew Chatman to Haas for her PhD has proven to be an area in which she shines—starting with a breakthrough assessment approach to organizational culture she co-developed in 1991 with Professor O’Reilly and Santa Clara University Professor Dave Caldwell. The Organizational Culture Profile, or OCP, remains the most robust and reliable measure of organizational culture to date, and its widespread use continues to give business leaders a means to quantify both their culture’s strategic relevance and the fit between individuals and organizations. 

Chatman’s former student Jennifer Cook, MBA 98, an executive in the global biotech and pharmaceutical industry, first used the OCP while at Genentech in 2000, leading the market planning team, a group she says felt subordinate to the marketing team. “Undertaking the OCP, we identified a shared and aligned view of the values, behaviors, and mindsets we needed to be successful,” Cook says. “We then built those systematically and became a separate, objective voice for senior management.”

The OCP performed so well that Cook has returned to it five separate times in various healthcare leadership roles over the past three decades. “It’s a framework that gives you the roadmap of, ‘Here’s where we are, and here’s where we need to be,’” she says. “The OCP is a catalyst for change.”

Chatman’s influence, after decades of regular consulting engagements for major corporations like Adobe, Goldman Sachs, Maersk, Pixar, and WD-40, is felt throughout the corporate world. 

Badain brought Chatman on as a consultant when he was working with the Raiders. “Jenny’s impact is still referenced by Raiders’ leadership all the time,” he says. “Her messages resonate immediately, and people retain her lessons and deliverables.” He’s asked her to conduct a similar cultural assessment with the Athletics. 

Chatman’s indirect influence on industry also carries forth through her former students. Mike Smith, MBA 98, joined Stitch Fix as COO in 2012, when there were just four employees. He used Chatman’s culture lessons to help the company scale up. “We did a core values exercise that became the values of the company for the nine years I was there,” he says. During that time, the team Smith managed grew to 9,000. 

Now, as co-founder and general partner at venture capital firm Footwork, Smith says assessing the culture of the startups in which his firm invests is critical. “Before we write a check, we ask them, ‘Do you have core values and principles of the company? How do they show up every day?’” he says. “It’s that important to us.”

Rigorous standards 

Chatman’s most highly cited research examines how factors like social norms, demographic composition, and industry characteristics influence how well an organization functions. 

She’s found, for example, that not only are narcissistic leaders less collaborative and ethical but over time, the organizations they lead begin to absorb and mimic those patterns. And an organizational reduction in collaboration and integrity has lasting, measurable, and negative bottom-line impact on firms.

Her research has also shown that, contrary to popular belief, promoting a collective mindset is not the best way to manage diverse work groups. In fact, diverse teams that are overly cooperative can mistakenly blur key distinctions among people—at their peril.

In a study of Himalayan climbing expeditions, she found that emphasizing collectivism can cause groups to ignore not only disruptive attributes (like nationality, which isn’t related to climbing skill) but also important differences among members (such as expertise scaling the Himalayas). Among climbing groups with differently skilled members, more people died on expeditions when the group emphasized collectivism because it caused them to ignore the diversity of climbing experience. The paper won the Academy of Management OB Division’s best publication of 2020, an annual award recognizing the most significant contribution to the advancement of the field of organizational behavior.

Professor Laura Kray recalls working with Chatman on a 2022 study to quantify how the experiences of male and female faculty might differ in the classroom as they age, using longitudinal data over 15 years of teaching evaluations as starting points. Even as the initial analysis showed clear differences between how middle-aged men and women are perceived, Chatman wanted to see if these findings could be replicated in another context and if a causal relationship could be discerned, Kray says. The research team layered in analysis of cross-evaluation data from executive MBA students as well as lab experiments. “Jenny wanted to get to the bottom of it quantitatively and with as much rigor as possible,” Kray says.

Professor Sameer Srivastava also appreciates Chatman’s diligence in research collaborations. He co-founded the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation with her, and the two co-host The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer podcast. “Jenny sets a high bar,” he says. “It’s energizing to collaborate with her because she has a strong point of view, but she’s not rigid about it.”

In 2023, Chatman received the lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division for work that has changed the field. The academy called her “the ultimate exemplar of a completely involved modern OB researcher, educator, and contributor to the larger world of work and working.”

Priorities as dean

Chatman has long been a leader at Haas, previously serving as associate dean of academic affairs and associate dean of learning strategies. In her roles, she has ensured the school’s strong financial footing and helped significantly increase the size and diversity of the faculty. She also worked to enhance the student experience in the school’s six degree programs, helping to launch the Flex cohort in the No. 1 ranked Evening & Weekend MBA program, the dual MBA/MCS degree in business and climate solutions with UC Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources, and the four-year Spieker Undergraduate Business Program. She also helped kick off the school’s newest alumni chapter in Austin, Texas, this past spring.

While Chatman is prepared to hit the ground running now that she’s officially dean, she’s seeking community feedback this fall. “I didn’t conduct a listening tour as an interim dean,” she says, “and it’s important to hear from all our different constituents.”

Chatman is particularly eager to tap into the collective wisdom of faculty across the many disciplines and research domains at Haas and has increased faculty presence on her management team. “My colleagues are brilliant; they offer deep insights and help me understand Haas’ opportunities from multiple vantage points,” she says. “I’m eager to surface and leverage the full range of faculty expertise across fields because they set Haas apart.”

To date, there are three primary areas where Chatman intends to focus.

“My first obligation is to create financial stability so that we can maintain our focus on what’s next,” she says. “A lack of financial prosperity is enormously distracting for organizations. Without it, you can’t think about doing anything new or being nimble or agile.” Among other strategies, Chatman is exploring ways to advance Haas initiatives, philanthropy, and research efforts and is committed to increasing alumni engagement with the school. She’s also seeking to boost revenue from Berkeley Executive Education, a program close to her heart. She’s created numerous BEE programs, including the new Berkeley Transformative Chief Human Resources Officer Leadership Program (with former Google exec Laszlo Bock and Srivastava), the CEO Program, and the Leading Strategy Execution through Culture Program.

The second priority is capitalizing on substantive opportunities, starting with AI. “We’re fast-tracking an AI certificate for our students,” Chatman says. “There’s a multitude of related initiatives on the research, staff, and student sides—AI has implications for all of those, including how we benefit operationally and organizationally from using it.” She sees other key opportunities in the fields of sustainability, entrepreneurship, and health.

Finally, Chatman will work to reinforce Haas’ reputation of excellence. She’s determined to ensure that Berkeley Haas doesn’t fly under the radar, as it long ago did for her. 

“I’ve always thought of Haas as being somewhat of a hidden treasure. We are more excellent than what the world knows us to be,” says Chatman, who’s already leading a community-wide effort to strengthen and amplify Haas’ strategic narrative. “If someday I can say that Haas’ treasure is on full display—to students, alumni, faculty, staff, the rest of campus, prospective students, the business community, and the policy world—then I will consider my work as dean to be successful.”