Kevin Kniffin

Biography

Kevin Kniffin leads active streams of research that focus on teamwork, leadership (and management), and interdisciplinarians. Kniffin has contributed original research to publications including American Psychologist, Academy of Management Discoveries, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. His research to study interdisciplinarians has been funded by the National Science Foundation since 2018 and his work has been featured by popular outlets including Harvard Business Review and the New York Times.

Kniffin won the Established Researcher Award in 2019 from the Institute for Research on Innovation & Science and is an editorial board member for Academy of Management Discoveries. For work that he contributed to the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2022, Kniffin won the Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in Organizational Behavior in 2023 from the Academy of Management. More recently, Poets & Quants recognized Kniffin in 2024 on its “50 Best Undergraduate Professors” roster.

In the classroom, Kniffin enjoys “meeting students where they are” by engaging students’ experiences in the pursuit of studying evidence-based principles of individual and organizational behavior. Winner of the Innovative Teacher Award from the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 2020, Kniffin employs an interdisciplinary approach to both organizational behavior and leadership and management in sports. He presented “Ten Bottom-Line Lessons from the Big Leagues” as the university’s faculty Homecoming speaker in 2016, and he speaks regularly for alumni, governmental, and business organizations.

Education

PhD Binghamton University, 2002
MA Binghamton University, 1998
BA Lehigh University, 1995

Research

• Kniffin, Kevin; Hildreth, J.A.D. "Partnering Up (and Down): Examining When and Why People Prefer Collaborating with Higher Paid Peers (and lower paid subordinates)"American Psychologist. 80.6 (2025): 896–909
• James R. Detert, James; Kniffin, Kevin; Leroy, Hannes. "Saving Management From Our Obsession With Leadership"MIT Sloan Management Review. 63.4 (2022): 1-9
• Kniffin, Kevin; Narayanan, Jayanth; Anseel, Frederik; Antonakis, John; Ashford, Susan; et al. "COVID-19 and the Workplace: Implications, Issues, and Insights for Future Research and Action"American Psychologist. 76.1 (2021): 63-77
• Kniffin, Kevin; Hanks, Andrew; Qian, Xuechao; Wang, Bo; Weinberg, Bruce. "Dissertators with Distantly Related Foci Face Divergent Near-Term Outcomes"National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research. 27825 (2020)
• Kniffin, Kevin; Detert, James; Leroy, Hannes. "On Leading and Managing: Synonyms or Separate (and Unequal)?"Academy of Management Discoveries. 6 (2020): 544-571
• Kniffin, Kevin; Hanks, Andrew. "The Trade-offs of Teamwork Among STEM Doctoral Graduates"American Psychologist. 73.4 (2018): 420-432
• Kniffin, Kevin; Reeves-Ellington, Richard; Wilson, David. "When Everyone Wins? Exploring Employee and Customer Preferences for No-Haggle Pricing"Frontiers in Psychology. (2018)
• Kniffin, Kevin; Palacio, Dylan. "Trash-Talking and Trolling"Human Nature. 29.3 (2018): 353-369
• Kniffin, Kevin; Scalise Sugiyama, M. "Toward a Natural History of Team Sports"Human Nature. 29.3 (2018): 211-218
• Kniffin, Kevin; Hanks, Andrew. "Antecedents and Near-term Consequences for Interdisciplinary Dissertators"Scientometrics. 111.3 (2017): 1225-1250

Awards

• Poets & Quants Best Undergraduate Business Professors (2024) Poets & Quants
• Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in Organizational Behavior Award (2023) Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division
• CALS Innovative Teacher Award (2020) CALS
• Established Researcher Award (2019) Institute for Research on Innovation & Science (IRIS)