VICTOR H. VROOM

John G. Searle Professor of Organization and Management

School of Management

Yale University

Victor H. Vroom, the John G. Searle Professor of Organization and Management, is an international expert on leadership and decision making. He came to Yale in 1972 as Chairman of the Department of Administrative Sciences and Associate Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. When the School of Management was founded in 1976, Professor Vroom was named to its original board of permanent officers.

A native of Canada, Professor Vroom received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in psychology from McGill University in 1953 and 1955. After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1958, he was named Study Director at the university's Institute for Social Research. He served as Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and later as Professor of Psychology and Industrial Administration at Carnegie-Mellon's Graduate School of Administration. He continued in that role until his move to Yale.

Professor Vroom's research has focused on issues of motivation and of leadership in organizations. He is the author of nine books and over fifty articles. His 1964 book, Work and Motivation, is regarded as a landmark in that field and continues to be widely cited by scholars. In 1971 he collaborated with Professor Edward Deci in writing Motivation in Management, which sold over 100,000 copies and was totally revised in 1992.

In 1973 he began his famous work on leadership with the publication of Leadership and Decision Making, written with Phillip Yetton. The ideas in that book have stimulated more than a hundred research studies by scholars and may be found in virtually every textbook on management and leadership published in the last two decades. His latest book on leadership, The New Leadership: Managing Participation in Organizations, was coauthored with Professor Arthur G. Jago and published by Prentice Hall in 1988. It has since been translated into German, Spanish and Korean.

Professor Vroom has received awards for his research by the American Psychological Association, the McKinsey Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, and is one of a select number of behavioral scientists whose autobiographies are contained in Management Laureates. His work was also profiled in Life and Works of Management Thinkers, a book dealing with the fourteen foremost contributors to management theory during the twentieth century. In 1998 the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology honored him with its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. In addition, he has served as a consultant to many government agencies and to over 100 major corporations in the United States and abroad. He has been elected to Fellowships in the American Psychological Association, the American Psychology Society, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Academy of Management. Professor Vroom has also been elected President of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Rev. 9/98