Associate Professor
Dr. Jessica Methot is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Management in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University and a Distinguished Research Professor of Management at the University of Exeter Business School. She conducts research at the intersection of interpersonal workplace relationships and social network dynamics, including how formal HR practices transform informal social networks, the functional and dysfunctional consequences of workplace relationships, and their temporal and multidimensional features. Her research in these areas has been published in leading academic journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, and Journal of Organizational Behavior and has been featured in over 300 popular media outlets including Harvard Business Review, NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Nasdaq, CNN Money, USA Today, Fast Company, and NY Times Magazine.
Dr. Methot is an Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Review and former Associate Editor at Personnel Psychology and has served on the Editorial Review Boards of the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Discoveries, and Human Resource Management. She is the Graduate Director for the Rutgers IRHR PhD Program and serves as a board member for the Center for Women and Work (CWW). She is the co-president of the Social Networks Society, served for six years on the executive committee of the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management, and she is co-founder of the website WorkTies.org, a cultivated repository for academic research and news on work relationships.
Leveraging Organizational Networks
While managing human capital is a critical competency for leaders, it is no longer effective to simply manage individual employees. Leaders operating in dynamic and boundaryless environments must manage webs of connected assets in order to find, utilize, and coordinate employees’ knowledge, skills, and expertise. This “networked” approach has implications for the way individuals share knowledge, generate ideas, and collaborate. In this session, we will focus on an array of topics related to how leaders can best leverage organizational network analysis (ONA) tools to achieve strategic outcomes. Topics will include (1) identifying critical relationships that should exist to ease workflow and support strategic objectives, (2) pinpointing central players and key opinion leaders to alleviate collaborative overload and effectively distribute resources, (3) coordinating employee expertise and bridging silos, and (4) building agile and resilient organizational networks.
