Michele Williams is Assistant Professor and the John L. Miclot Fellow in Entrepreneurship at The Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, and a member of the Innovation Scholarly Interest Group at the College of Nursing. She is also a scholar with Cornell University’s the Smith Family Business Initiative at Cornell’s Johnson College of Business and with Cornell’s Institute for Healthy Futures. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior from the University of Michigan, her MA in Education from Columbia University and her BA in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining the faculty at Iowa, Professor Williams was a member of the faculty at Cornell University and the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professor Williams’ research focuses on the development of cooperative, high-performance interpersonal relationships, especially on projects involving people from multiple organizations or groups within an organization. Michele’s research concentrates on the influences of interpersonal processes, such as perspective taking and emotion, on how interpersonal trust and cooperation evolve across demographic and organizational sub-groups.
Michele also has a research interest in women in leadership and negotiation. She examines the relational and performance outcomes of gender composition in project teams and among small business owners. Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Organizational Behavior and Leadership Quarterly as well as numerous Academy of Management Proceedings and book chapters. She is on the editorial boards of Organization Science and the Journal of Business Venturing and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Trust Research.