Dave Harrison is the Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair of Business Administration in the Department of Management at the McCombs School of Business. Dr. Harrison earned his PhD in social, organizational and individual differences psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His previous academic positions include 12 years at the University of Texas at Arlington, followed by nine years at Pennsylvania State University. He has also served as a visiting distinguished professor at Wharton.

Harrison studies organizational behavior—how individuals and teams think, feel and perform in an organizational context—with an emphasis on diversity. He researches both explicit, “surface-level” diversity—the demographics we are accustomed to such as age, gender, ethnic background, handicap status, sexual orientation and functional background. But Harrison also looks at how differences appear in more subtle, psychological ways—so-called “deep-level” diversity—which involves attitudes, values and knowledge. In addition, he connects diversity (and other workplace and executive decision-making issues) to the informal social networks that people create in firms -- the fabric of interpersonal connections and resources that ultimately determine what and how effectively things get done, collectively.

Harrison’s research efforts have resulted in more than 150 published articles, book chapters and papers dealing with diversity, time, executive judgment and decision making, and informal social networks.

In addition to having been a National Science Foundation Fellow, his work has won many awards, including Walter de Gruyter and Sage Best Paper awards in 1991, 1992, 1995, and 2002 from the Research Methods (RM) Division of the Academy of Management, the inaugural Carolyn Dexter International Best Paper award (in 1995) from the Academy of Management, and the inaugural Saroj Parasuraman Award (in 2008) for Outstanding Publication in Gender and Diversity in Organizations (GDO) from the Academy of Management, the 2007 Scholarly Achievement Award from the Human Resources Division of the Academy, the 2008 and 2009 Owens Scholarly Achievement Awards from the Society of Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP), the 2011 Sage Career Scholarly Contributions Award from the GDO Division of the Academy, the 2012 Sage Publications / Robert McDonald Advancement of Organizational Research Methodology Award, and the 2013 McCombs School of Business Research Excellence Award. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, and he has served as an Editor-in-Chief and on the editorial boards of most of the top journals in his field.

Harrison teaches leadership and organizational behavior to MBA students and research methods to doctoral students, receiving a number of teaching honors over his career. He has also been an external consultant to dozens of Fortune 500, governmental, armed forces, and regional organizations. Some of those include American Airlines, Anheuser-Busch, BBVA Compass Bank, Bell Helicopter Textron, Baker-Hughes, Brinks Home Security, BP, Caltex Petroleum, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Dell, Deloitte, Digital GlobalSoft, Ernst & Young, Exxon-Mobil, Federal Express, Filene Research Institute, Ford Motor Company, GE, GTE (now Verizon), Kraft Foods, Levi-Strauss, Maxus Energy, Mobil Chemical, Northrup-Grumman, PepsiCo, Phillips Petroleum, Rockwell International, and State Farm Insurance.

Ph.D, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

MA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

MS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

BS, Bowling Green State University