Victor Vroom named the inaugural BearingPoint Professor; Jonathan Feinstein appointed the John G. Searle Professor

Victor Vroom named the inaugural BearingPoint Professor

Victor H. Vroom, an authority on the psychological analysis of behavior in organizations, has been appointed the inaugural BearingPoint Professor of Management.

Vroom, who will also continue his appointment as professor of psychology, is widely recognized for his development of expectancy theory and for his work on leadership and decision making.

This new professorship at the Yale School of Management (SOM) was established through the generosity of BearingPoint, the management and technology global consulting firm.

In commenting on Vroom’s appointment, BearingPoint chief executive officer Harry L. You (GRD ’83), a member of the Yale SOM board of advisors, remarked, “We are deeply honored to have an educator of Victor Vroom’s reputation and distinction as the first incumbent of the BearingPoint Chair in Management. His scholarly accomplishments, unique vision and broad perspective on the global marketplace have already had a profound impact on some of our most talented people through his classes in the BearingPoint Leadership Program at the Yale School of Management. Professor Vroom’s insights have already enhanced our approach to solving our clients’ most pressing challenges, and so we are delighted that he has been named to the BearingPoint Chair.”

Vroom joined the Yale faculty in 1972, after appointments at Carnegie-Mellon University (1963-1972), The University of Pennsylvania (1960-1963) and the University of Michigan (1958-1959). He served as chair of Yale’s Department of Administrative Sciences and associate director of the Institution of Social and Policy Studies from 1972 to 1975. He was part of the Yale task force on management education, whose work resulted in the founding of the Yale School of Management. From 1973 until his appointment to the BearingPoint Chair, he was the John G. Searle Professor of Organization and Management and Professor of Psychology.

Early in his career Vroom developed a normative model of situational leadership with one of his students, Philip Yetton. The Vroom-Yetton model provided managers with a research-based framework for matching their decision-making processes to the challenges that they faced. Later, Vroom developed a method for assessing the “models” that managers use by studying their choices on a set of standardized cases. This method has been widely used in management and leadership development programs around the world and has contributed to a unique database for research on leadership.

In addition to writing over 100 articles, Vroom has written nine books, including Work and Motivation, which is regarded as a landmark in the field. Other books include Leadership and Decision Making (with Yetton), The New Leadership: Managing Participation in Organizations (with A. Jago) and Management and Motivation (with E. Deci).

Among his numerous professional affiliations, he is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Academy of Management and the Society of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, where he also served as president.

Vroom has also received numerous awards during the course of his scholarly career, including the Scholarly Contributions Award from the Academy of Management, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Yale SOM Alumni Association.

Born in Montreal, Canada, Vroom received a BSc and MPsSc in psychology from McGill University in 1953 and 1955, respectively. He received his PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1958. An avid sailor, he has sailed up and down the East Coast from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia on his sloop, Leadership. He is also an accomplished saxophone and clarinet player who began playing professionally with a big band at age 15. Vroom still sits in with jazz bands in the New Haven area and wherever his travels take him.


Jonathan Feinstein appointed the John G. Searle Professor

Jonathan S. Feinstein, an economist whose scholarly interests include creativity and innovation, has been appointed the John G. Searle Professor of Economics and Management.

Feinstein is the author of The Nature of Creative Development (Stanford University Press, 2006), which presents a model of the process of creative development through which individuals make creative contributions. The model is based on empirical study of many individuals across a wide range of fields — the arts, sciences, humanities, business, social sciences and public policy — including Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Matisse, Mondrian, Edison, John Maynard Keynes, Rachel Carson, Hannah Arendt and Ray Kroc, as well as contemporaries Feinstein interviewed. The book has been described by reviewers as “an important step” in understanding the creative process.

Feinstein’s work in economics focuses on detection, compliance and enforcement. His work in the area of tax compliance and auditing has set the standard for the field and transformed the way the United States Internal Revenue Service and tax authorities around the world analyze compliance data. He has published many articles in this field in leading economics journals. More recently he has begun work with the Department of Homeland Security.

Feinstein also studies aging, health and economics. He is the author of a well known review of the relationship between socioeconomic status and health published in The Milbank Quarterly.

At the Yale School of Management (SOM), Feinstein is the lead designer for the Innovator core MBA course, one of the eight Organizational Perspectives courses that are central to Yale SOM’s innovative, integrated curriculum, which was launched in the 2006-2007 academic year. He also helped design and contributed to the Careers core course for first-year MBA students, which presents an overview of the ways in which careers develop and unfold over the course of a professional life. As part of the Careers course, Feinstein has initiated a project interviewing Yale SOM alumni about their career paths, creating a video archive of professional and personal role models for current Yale SOM students.

Feinstein has been a member of the Yale SOM faculty since 1992, when he was appointed associate professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1995. He is a professor by courtesy at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and a faculty fellow of the Center for Research on Inequalities & the Life Course. He is also a founding member of the National Bureau of Economic Research program on the economics of national security. Before coming to Yale, Feinstein was assistant professor (1987-1990) and associate professor (1990-1992) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He is a graduate of Stanford University, from which he received a BA in economics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.