Michael Morris

Michael Morris is the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at CBS and also serves as Professor in the Psychology Department of Columbia University.

He teaches MBA and executive-level classes on leadership, teamwork, communication, negotiation, and decision-making. Morris teaches the core class, LEAD, that starts the MBA curriculum. He teaches the elective, Managerial Negotiations, an EMBA elective Global Negotiations, and short executive education classes on negotiation. In 2016, he was honored with the Dean's Award for Innovation in the Curriculum for creating one of the school's most popular elective courses: The Leader's Voice, a class focusing on modes of leadership communication.

Professor Morris has published over 200 articles in leading behavioral science and management journals on topics such as decision-making, social judgment, negotiation, and social networks. His early research on culture and cognition helped to spark the growth of cultural psychology and his more recent research on the triggering and learning of cultural codes has helped to shift the field to a more dynamic conception of cultural influences. His scientific papers have received international awards from scholarly societies in the fields of social psychology, judgment and decision-making, psychology in the public interest, Asian psychology, management, human resources, marketing, and others. His debut popular book Tribal (published in October 2024) argues that leaders can harness shared cultural identities to unify and mobilize groups of people to work together.

In service to the field, Morris serves as a consulting editor at Journal of International Business and at Management and Organization Review, a journal on management in Chinese societal contexts that helped to found. In the past he served as an associate editor at Psychological Review, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Trust Research, and others.

Professor Morris founded the Leadership Lab, which worked to develop richer training in social intelligence rather than just technical business skills. Before that, Morris launched the school's Behavioral Lab and Postdoctoral Fellow programs to foster behavioral science research. He has served on the university’s Institutional Review Board and co-developed its ethical policies for international research. He currently serves on the university's Committee on Global Thought and chaired the school's recent Organizational Culture Committee.

Outside of academia, Professor Morris has consulted with and conducted executive training workshops for hundreds of clients across the globe, including Fortune 100 firms, foundations, and governments. He has advised the Pentagon on frameworks for dealing cultural differences and has helped Intelligence Agencies apply knowledge of cultural differences in cybersecurity programs. He is part of a group of behavioral scientists known for advising Presidential campaigns.

Prior to joining Columbia in 2001, Professor Morris was a tenured Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Psychology Department. He served as a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995, the University of Hong Kong in 2000, Harvard Business School and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2008, and INSEAD-Europe in 2022 and INSEAD-Asia in 2023.