JODY HOFFER GITTELL IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT and MBA Program Director at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, where she teaches human resource management, operations management, and organizational theory. She serves as co-chair of the Health Care Industry Council, a multi-stakeholder organization dedicated to linking high quality research to policy and practice.

Dr. Gittell's research explores how coordination by front-line workers contributes to quality and efficiency outcomes in service settings, with a particular focus on the airline and healthcare industries. She has developed a theory of relational coordination, proposing that work is most effectively coordinated through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, and demonstrating how organizations can build relational coordination through the design of high performance work systems.

Dr. Gittell is the author of dozens of articles and chapters, as well as books titled The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance, and Up In the Air: How the Airlines Can Improve Performance by Engaging Their Employees. Her newest book, High Performance Healthcare: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve Quality, Efficiency and Resilience, presents her findings from ten years of research in the healthcare industry.

Dr. Gittell has won the Best Book Award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Best Paper award from the Human Resource Division of the Academy of Management, the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award for Best Paper of the Year in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and an Honorable Mention for the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award for Best Paper on Organizational Change. Before joining the faculty at Brandeis University, Dr. Gittell received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and taught at the Harvard Business School.