The Center for Leadership and Change Management organizes several conferences throughout the year.
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The Wharton Leadership Conference brings together top executives, thought leaders, and Wharton faculty for a day of insightful conversations on leadership in a changing world. Designed for professionals across industries, the conference offers actionable takeways, cutting-edge research and unparalleled networking opportunities.
Held every year at Wharton, this year’s conference theme was “Leading in a Time of Tumult: At a time when political leadership is challenging foundational assumptions, how are leaders in business and other organizations responding?”
Read more about the speakers at the 29th Leadership Conference.
The Organizational Behavior Conference is a forum for junior faculty in organizational behavior to present cutting-edge research.
For the past 30 years, this event has served as a forum for faculty to present new work and start new collaborations. The attendees are junior faculty from around the world whom we have invited because they are conducting cutting-edge research in organizational behavior. This mini-conference is designed to be an opportunity for young scholars to engage in a dialogue that is more interactive than that typically found in large-scale conferences. Thus, this conference not only brings together young scholars doing important work in organizational behavior, but also facilitates the development of new collaborative ties and deep discussions of ongoing research. This year, we have assembled a diverse group of scholars whose work examines topics such as leadership, teams, diversity, emotions, culture, change, creativity, power, and ethics.
The Wharton OB Conference is sponsored by the Management Department, the Center for Leadership and Change Management, and the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. The Conference is led by Professors Stephanie Creary, Rachel Arnett, and Michael Parke. Samir Nurmohamed, Adam Grant, Nancy Rothbard, Drew Carton, and Amy Wrzesniewski are the senior faculty involved in the conference and 30th reunion.
The Economic Sociology Conference is the premier annual gathering for business school faculty studying financial transactions, market structures, and career trajectories. Now in its thirteenth year, the conference rotates among leading institutions; recent hosts include Yale, Emory, Duke, Rice, and the University of Michigan. Each year it brings 60 to 80 scholars together for two days of presentations and discussion and is widely regarded as the venue where long-term scholarly collaborations in the field are formed. A substantial share of the work presented examines questions central to leadership scholarship: how careers advance to senior positions, how networks and social capital shape influence and authority, how founders build and lead organizations, and how status and decision-making operate within firms. This focus aligns directly with the Leadership Center’s mission. Hosting this year strengthens Wharton’s visibility in this community and creates opportunities for leadership-focused faculty to engage with new research relevant to the Center’s priorities.
The conference is co-organized by Mae McDonnell and Tiantian Yang, with input from faculty across the Entrepreneurship (Tyler Wry, Lori Rosenkopf), Multinational (Mauro Guillén, Leo Pongeluppe), Strategy (Ronnie Lee), Human and Social Capital (Matthew Bidwell, Peter Cappelli, Lindsey Cameron), and Organizational Behavior (Damon Phillips) sectors.
The Junior Faculty Organization Theory Conference has been around for about 15 years, and is for–and is organized by–junior faculty in the Organizational Theory (OT) field (broadly construed). This is “the premier annual conference” for up-and-coming OT scholars, and has long been considered the place where long-term relationships are formed. Many of the faculty’s research centers on practices relating to people, management, and leadership.
The location of the conference is rotating. The most recent hosts were Harvard, London Business School, University of Michigan, McGill, Columbia, and Yale. The conference brings together roughly 40 to 50 junior OT scholars to present and share ideas, as well as develop relationships. The Wharton School is honored to be hosting this year and excited to help build the junior OT community.
The conference is being organized by Lindsey Cameron and Tiantian Yang with input from junior faculty in the Entrepreneurship (Danny Kim, Jax Kirtley), Multinational (Leo Pongeluppe), Strategy (Ronnie Lee), and Organizational Behavior Sectors (Stephanie Creary).
The New Directions in Leadership Research Conference is a small, annual research conference sponsored by Duke University, Erasmus University, INSEAD, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Each year the conference convenes leading and emerging scholars in the field of leadership, specifically those individuals whose research goes beyond traditional leadership research. The location of the conference rotates among the partner universities.
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