Nancy R. Katz

Adjunct Professor in the Brandeis International Business School

Departments/Programs

International Business School

Degrees

Harvard University, Ph.D.
Harvard University, A.B.

Expertise

Work teams; social capital and the network structure of teams; knowledge-sharing; balancing cooperation and competition; reward systems; distributive justice

Profile

Nancy Katz is a social psychologist who focuses on high performance work teams. She addresses questions like: What can a leader do to enhance the odds that his/her team will succeed? What key conditions must a leader must put in place before, during and after the team's work? When a team runs astray, what interventions are most likely to put the team back on track?

For 10 years, Katz was a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she instructed and advised graduate students and executives. She designed and taught some of the highest-rated and most popular courses at HKS, including "Leading Teams," "Managing People: Self, Relationships, and Teams," and "Social Psychology for Managers and Policy Analysts." In 2008, Katz received the Manuel Carballo Teaching Prize. She also taught many government managers from around the world in HKS Executive Education programs. Katz designed and co-chaired "Driving Organizational Performance," an executive education program based in Washington, D.C. for senior federal officials. Katz has also taught in executive education at the Hartog School of Government and Policy at Tel Aviv University.

Consulting:

Katz was invited by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to provide on recommendations on how to redesign work systems to enhance collaboration and information-sharing across organizational boundaries.

Katz briefed the U.S. Comptroller General and the Chief of the Federal Aviation Administration on rewards and motivation in the public sector.


Degrees:
B.A. in psychology, Harvard/Radcliffe College, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Harvard University/Harvard Business School

Courses Taught

BUS

120a

Organizational Behavior in Business

Awards and Honors

Manuel Carballo Teaching Prize (2008)

Scholarship

J. Richard Hackman, Nancy Katz. "Group behavior and performance." Handbook of Social Psychology., 2010

David Lazer, Brian Rubineau, Carol Chetkovich, Nancy Katz, Michael Neblo. "The co-evolution of networks and attitudes." Political Communication (2004).

Leslie Perlow, Jody Hoffer Gittell, Nancy Katz. "Contextualizing patterns of group interaction." Organization Science (2004).

Nancy Katz, David Lazer, Holly Arrow, Noshir Contractor. "Network theory and small groups." Small Group Research (2004).

Noshir Contractor, Nancy Katz, David Lazer, Holly Arrow. "The network perspective on small groups: Theory and research." Theories of Groups: Interdisciplinary Persepctives. Ed. Poole and Hollingshead., 2004

Michael Beer, Nancy Katz. "Do incentives work? The perceptions of senior executives from thirty countries." Human Resource Planning (2003).

Nancy Katz. "Getting the most out of your team." Harvard Business Review (2001).

Nancy Katz. "Sports teams as a model for workplace teams." Academy of Management Executive (2001).

Fred Gordon, Kathryn Welch, Gregory Offringa, Nancy Katz. "The complexity of social outcomes from cooperative, competitive, and individualistic reward systems." Social Justice Research (2000).