Ashley V. Whillans

Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research on time and happiness won the 2018 CAGS Distinguished Dissertation Award and was named the top PhD thesis in Canada across the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Her research seeks to understand the links between time, money, and happiness. She studies how individual, organizational and societal factors such as gender, workplace policies, and income inequality predict how employees value and spend their time and money at work and outside of it, with potential implications for well-being and workplace engagement.

Her research has been published in academic journals including Nature Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Psychological Science and in popular press outlets including Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.

She currently serves as a Distinguished Principal Research Fellow for Human Capital with The Conference Board. Her ongoing research involves collaborating with market leading technology companies and management consulting firms to understand and improve the employee experience for knowledge workers on high-performing teams.