Jacob Levitt

Doctoral Student

Contact Information

Primary Email:
levittja@wharton.upenn.edu
Office Phone:
215-898-1232
Office Fax Phone:
215-898-0401

office Address:
3024 SH-DH
3620 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: Hierarchy and emotions at work, leadership and leader emotions, group and team dynamics

Overview

Jacob S. Levitt is a PhD candidate and Winkleman fellow in the Management Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

His research explores how hierarchy shapes team emotional dynamics, with a focus on leader emotions, team emotions, and emotional culture. His work has been published in leading management journals such as Organization Science. He earned his undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to starting the PhD he lived in Washington, DC and worked for Capital One focusing on data analytics and machine learning.

He will be on the job market in the fall of 2024.

Research

Leader emotions and team emotional dynamics can facilitate effectiveness and well-being or impede it. With my work, I aim to help teams and organizations better understand how to manage the dual challenges of hierarchy and emotions in teams and organizations over time. I use a range of methodologies from team field experiments and longitudinal field surveys to lab and online experiments.

Jacob Levitt, Constantinos Coutifaris, Paul Green, Sigal Barsade (2024), Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance, Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17390 Abstract
Leader emotional expressions have profound implications for team members. Research has established that how frequently leaders express positive and negative emotional expressions shapes team member performance through conveying critical social-functional information about team member social worth. Yet, this social-functional approach to emotions has not fully considered how the timing of leader emotional expressions during a team’s lifecycle can also shape the information conveyed to individual team members about their social worth. In this paper, we integrate the social-functional approach to emotions with imprinting theory to propose that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions has performance implications for individual team members through two distinct facets of social worth: respect and status. Specifically, our imprinting framework explains how positive leader emotional expressions during the early team phase have the most beneficial performance implications through imprinting respect in individual team members. We then propose that these positive implications are amplified by more frequent than average negative leader emotional expressions during the midpoint phase. When filtered through earlier positive expressions, negative emotional expressions during the midpoint phase may signal opportunities for respect and status gains rather than respect and status losses. We find general support for our model in a pre-registered four-wave longitudinal archival study of consulting teams at a leading professional services company and a four-wave longitudinal field study at a NCAA Division 1 sports program. Our work highlights that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions is an important performance predictor through social worth.

Description
The most important takeaway of our research is that the timing and ordering of leader emotional expressions across the early and midpoint phases of team life have important relationships with team member performance. During the early team phase leaders should focus on positive emotional expressions to make team members feel respected, which will have beneficial implications for team member performance. In contrast, during the midpoint team phase, after expressing positive emotions early on, leaders should express more frequent negative emotions than average to motivate team members to pursue new opportunities for status gains, which will have even more beneficial implications for team member performance.

Teaching

Past Courses

MGMT1010 - Intro To Management
We all spend much of our lives in organizations. Most of us are born in organizations, educated in organizations, and work in organizations. Organizations emerge because individuals can't (or don't want to) accomplish their goals alone. Management is the art and science of helping individuals achieve their goals together. Managers in an organization determine where their organization is going and how it gets there. More formally, managers formulate strategies and implement those strategies. This course provides a framework for understanding the opportunities and challenges involved in formulating and implementing strategies by taking a "system" view of organizations,which means that we examine multiple aspects of how managers address their environments, strategy, structure, culture, tasks, people, and outputs, and how managerial decisions made in these various domains interrelate. The course will help you to understand and analyze how managers can formulate and implement strategies effectively. It will be particularly valuable if you are interested in management consulting, investment analysis, or entrepreneurship - but it will help you to better understand and be a more effective contributor to any organizations you join, whether they are large, established firms or startups. This course must be taken for a grade.
PSYC0001 - Intro to Psychology
This course provides an introduction to the basic topics of psychology including our three major areas of distribution: the biological basis of behavior, the cognitive basis of behavior, and individual and group bases of behavior. Topics include, but are not limited to, neuropsychology, learning, cognition, development, disorder, personality, and social psychology.

Activity

Latest Research

Jacob Levitt, Constantinos Coutifaris, Paul Green, Sigal Barsade (2024), Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance, Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17390

All Research