Mary Uhl-Bien, Ph.D., Howard Hawks Chair in Business Ethics and Leadership & Director of the Global Leadership Institute, University of Nebraska
Dr. Uhl-Bien's research and teaching interests are in leadership and ethics, including complexity leadership theory, relational leadership and leader-member exchange theory, and followership/leading up. In addition to her conceptual work on complexity and relational leadership, some of the empirical projects she is currently involved in include investigations of Leadership and Adaptability in the Healthcare Industry (a $300,000 grant from Booz Allen Hamilton), Adaptive Leadership and Innovation: A Focus on Idea Generation and Flow (at a major financial institution in the U.S.), and Social Constructions of Followership and Leading Up.
She has published in such journals as The Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, The Leadership Quarterly, the Journal of Management, and Human Relations. She won the Best Paper Award in The Leadership Quarterly in 2001 for her article on Complex Leadership, co-authored with Russ Marion. She has been on the editorial boards of The Academy of Management Journal since 2002 and The Leadership Quarterly since 1998, and is in her second term as an associate editor of LQ. She is senior editor of the Leadership Horizons series (Information Age Publishers). Dr. Uhl-Bien served a three-year term on the executive committee of the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management, and is a founding chair of the Network of Leadership Scholars in the Academy of Management.
Dr. Uhl-Bien has been active in research, consulting and management development both nationally and internationally. Since being in Nebraska she has been speaking widely to audience related to issues of power, leadership (leading-up), communication, ethics and relationship-building. She has consulted with Disney, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, British Petroleum, and the General Accounting Office, and served as the executive consultant for State Farm Insurance Co. from 1998-2004. She trained Russian businesspeople for the American Russian Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage from 1993-1996, and worked on a USAID grant at the Magadan Pedagogical Institute in Magadan, Russia from 1995-1996. She participated in a Fulbright-Hays grant to Mexico during the summer of 2003, and was a visiting professor at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain from January-June, 2002.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1991. Prior to joining the faculty at the College of Business Administration, she was at the University of Central Florida.
