Ethan S. Bernstein
Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration
Ethan Bernstein (@ethanbernstein) is an associate professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches the second-year MBA course Managing Human Capital, the HBS Live Online Classroom course Developing Yourself as a Leader, and various executive education programs. He previously taught the first-year MBA course Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD), Innovation and Leadership Through the Fusion of Digital and Analog (an MBA immersive field course in Tokyo), and a PhD course on the craft of field research.
As workplaces evolve to meet rapidly changing needs, Professor Bernstein studies the impact of increased workplace transparency (who gets to observe whom--the observability of employee activities, routines, behaviors, and contributions) and increased workplace connectivity (who gets to communicate with whom--the patterns of human interaction that facilitate collaboration and information exchange) on employee behavior, organizational performance, and worker satisfaction. These two trends carry both benefits and hazards for organizations and their employees, with profound implications for how today’s managers need to lead, organize, design their organizations, and structure collaboration and work.
Professor Bernstein’s research has been published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Annals, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Harvard Business Review, Research in Organizational Change and Development, and People + Strategy, and it has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NPR, Inc., Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, Esquire, Nikkei Business, Nikkei Shimbun, Le Monde, Maeil Business (Korea), and TEDxBoston, among other outlets.
For his work on organizations and leadership, Professor Bernstein is a 2020 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize winner and a 2014 HBR McKinsey Award finalist. His research has won INGRoup’s inaugural J. Richard Hackman Award for the Dissertation That Most Significantly Advances the Study of Groups, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Outstanding Publication Award in Organizational Behavior, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Best Published Paper Award in Organization and Management Theory, the Academy of Management's 2015 Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication Award in Organizational Behavior, the Academy of Management's 2014 Best Dissertation-Based Paper Award in Organizational Behavior, the INGRoup 2014 Outstanding Paper award, the 2013 Fredric M. Jablin Doctoral Dissertation Award from the International Leadership Association, the HBS Wyss Award for Excellence in Research, and the Susan G. Cohen Doctoral Research Award.
Prior to joining the HBS faculty, Professor Bernstein spent a half-decade at The Boston Consulting Group in Toronto and Tokyo. Tapped by Elizabeth Warren in 2010 to join the implementation team at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he spent nearly two years in executive positions, including Chief Strategy Officer and Deputy Assistant Director of Mortgage Markets, at this newly established United States federal agency.
Professor Bernstein earned his doctorate in management at Harvard, where he also received a JD/MBA degree. While a doctoral student, he was a Kauffman Foundation Fellow in Law, Innovation, and Growth, and he remains a member of the New York and Massachusetts Bar Associations. He holds an AB in Economics from Amherst College, which included study at Doshisha University in Kyoto.
Professor Bernstein is an avid cyclist, skier, swimmer, reader, and “Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me!” listener. Originally from Los Angeles, he and his family now live in Newton, Massachusetts.