Gretchen Spreitzer is the Keith E. and Valerie J. Alessi Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan (RSB). She is also the co-director of the Ross Leadership Initiative. She joined the Michigan faculty in 2001 after spending nine years on the faculty at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. She was also a Visiting Professor at the Australian School of Business in Sydney in 2008.

Her research focuses on employee empowerment and leadership development, particularly within a context of organizational change and decline. Her most recent research is examining how organizations can enable thriving. This is part of a new movement in the field of organizational behavior, known as Positive Organizational Scholarship (www.bus.umich.edu/positive).

Based on extensive field research, she has authored many articles on contemporary issues in organizational behavior in leading journals such at the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. She is the co-author of five books:

• The Oxford Handbooks of Positive Organizational Scholarship (2011) with Kim Cameron.

• The Leader’s Change Handbook: An Essential Guide to Setting Direction and Taking Action (1999) with Jay Conger and Edward Lawler,

• The Future of Leadership: Speaking to the Next Generation (2001) with Warren Bennis and Thomas Cummings,

• A Company of Leaders: Five Disciplines for Unleashing the Power in Your Workforce (2001) with Robert Quinn,

• Leadership with Kimberly Perttula.

Gretchen co-directs the Center for positive organizations and teaches electives on Leading Organizational Change for MBAs and BBAs, and the Multidisciplinary Action Project (MAP) Program. She also is a core faculty member in the Leading the Positive Organization, Management of Managers, and Emerging Leaders Executive Education Programs at Michigan.

She serves on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Dynamics. She has been elected to leadership positions in several professional organizations including the Academy of Management (where she was on their Board of Governors and was division chair of the Organization Development and Change Division) and the Western Academy of Management (where she served as President). Gretchen has been awarded the Western Academy of Management’s Ascendant Scholar award for early career contributions, the JMI Distinguished Scholar Award, and the Martin Trailblazer award in conjunction with the Positive Organizational Scholarship Faculty at Michigan.

Prior to her doctoral education, Gretchen worked with the management consulting group at Price Waterhouse's Government Services Office and with Partners for Livable Places, a not-for-profit urban planning firm in Washington, D.C. She has a Bachelor of Science in Systems Analysis from Miami University (in Ohio) and completed her doctoral work at the Michigan Business School. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, who is a public policy economist, and two daughters.

Jane E. Dutton is the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan. . She does research, teaches and works with organizations on issues related to how to bring out the best in employees and in organizations. She studies and writes about how people build high quality connections, how people craft their jobs, compassion at work (http://www.thecompassionlab.com/) and how they construct self-identities that are strengthening. She is a co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations (http://www.centerforpos.org/) at the Ross School of Business.

She has won research and teaching awards and has written more than 100 research papers and monographs(http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/janedut/). She leads workshops, builds intervention tools for bringing out the best in people (http://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/tools/), teaches in executive programs on positive leadership, and loves doing research, teaching and change around the general topic of positive leadership.