Biography

Michael Morris is a Chaired Professor in the Management Division 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. In 2016, he was honored with the Dean's Award for Innovation in the Curriculum for creating two of the school's most popular elective courses: The Leader's Voice and the Patagonia Leadership Expedition.

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 served on a National Academy of Science advisory panel on negotiating cultural differences in military missions and National Science Foundation workshop on reforming interrogation practices.  He held a critcal role as a member of the "Dream Team" of social scientists who advised the Obama campaigns and is working on a book on the role of cultural backgrounds and loyalties in leadership, The Tribes Inside Us (Penguin Random House, 2018).

In his research career, Professor Morris has published over 200 articles in the leading psychology and management journals on topics such as individual decision-making, interpersonal influence, and social networks. His early research on culture and cognition played a key role in the blossoming of the field of cultural psychology. 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. He is a founding editor of the journal Management and Organization Review, which advances research in non-Western settings, and an associate editor at several other journals.

Professor Morris founded CBS's Leadership Lab, which has designed evidence-based leadership development activities--curricular and extracurricular--including the executive coaching program, the peer advisor program, and action learning ventures. 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. 

Prior to joining the 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 and at the University of Hong Kong in 2000 and at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2008.