Dr. Michele Williams

Professor Michele Williams, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, is passionate about research. Her research on trust and collaboration has gained international recognition.

The research and work of Dr. Williams (University of Michigan, Ph.D.) focuses on Trust and Relationships at work and Women in Leadership & Entrepreneurship. She addresses two challenges that organizations face:

Trust and Relationships — Building, maintaining, and repairing trust in team-based relationships and across demographic and organizational boundaries; Sustaining high-performing, cross-boundary relationships.

Women in Leadership & Entrepreneurship — Social construction of gender within firms and across established and entrepreneurial ventures; Factors affecting women as team members, boundary spanners, and business owners.

Michele, Associate Professor and the Henry B. Tippie Research Fellow in Entrepreneurship is also a scholar with Cornell University’s Smith Family Business Initiative at The Johnson College of Business. Previously, she was a member of the faculty at Cornell University and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

She has authored papers and case studies, published in notable academic journals, and speaks at academic and professional conferences on her topics of research. She is co-author of The Four Capabilities Leadership Assessment—an online 360° assessment used by organizations to enhance the leadership potential of managers, and the Innovativeness Across Academia and Practice for Healthcare Progress Scale (IA-APHPS). She is a co-founder of the National Consortium for Innovativeness in Health Care.

Dr. Williams earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology at Johns Hopkins University, her Master of Arts degree in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.