About

Adam M. Kleinbaum is a Professor in the Organizational Behavior area at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.  He teaches a core MBA course on leadership and organizational behavior, an elective seminar on social networks, the core organizational behavior class in the Thayer School of Engineering, and a leading change course in Dartmouth's interdisciplinary Masters in Healthcare Delivery Science program.  He also leads experiential learning expeditions to Israel, focused on technology and entrepreneurship, and to Washington, DC and Montgomery, Alabama, focused on structural racism and its implications for leadership in a diverse world. He is co-founder of the Dartmouth Interdisciplinary Network Research (DINR) Group.  He previously served as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Business School; he also received his doctoral and undergraduate degrees at Harvard.

Adam’s research examines the antecedents and evolution of social networks in organizations.  He has shown how formal and informal structures and processes, prior career history, and individual personality, and even brain structure and function shape the networks that one builds.  He also explores how the structure of a firm’s internal communication network serves to enable coordination, innovation and, ultimately, firm performance.

In a second stream of research, Adam is applying the tools of network science to study the diversity, equity and inclusion practices of organizations, exploring what kinds of informal networks create inclusive organizations.

His work has been published in Nature Communications, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, the Annual Review of Sociology, Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Connections, and the Harvard Business Review and has been covered by many media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Huffington Post, Fast Company, New York Magazine’s “Science of Us” column, and The Atlantic, and informed "The Ultimate Secrets of Rock Star Networking." His research was among those featured in 2018's "Top Ten Insights from the Science of a Meaningful Life" and was the third most-read Life and Biological Sciences paper published in Nature Communications in 2018.

In 2018, Adam received the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution for his paper "Organizational Misfits," which was judged to have had the greatest impact of any paper published by the journal five years earlier.

He is currently an Associate Editor at Administrative Science Quarterly, after having held editorial positions at Management Science and the Academy of Management Annals, and serves on the editorial boards of Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, and, previously, of the Academy of Management Journal.