Klodiana Lanaj, Ph.D.

Martin L. Schaffel Professor of Management

Warrington College of Business

2024 Awardee

Klodiana Lanaj’s research concentrates on better understanding and facilitating leader effectiveness and well-being. She studies interventions, mindsets and behaviors that enable leaders to thrive at work and home. In related streams of research, she also examines leadership structures that facilitate team success as well as behaviors and mindsets that affect employee performance.

“In the management field — and in MBA courses in business schools — we tend to romanticize leadership,” Lanaj says. “We assume that aspiring to leadership roles is an admirable goal for most employees, often overlooking the significant costs that come with holding positions of power and leadership. At the same time, survey data consistently show that leaders are overworked and overwhelmed.”

With recent data showing that a majority of those in leadership have an interest in coaching that helps manage work stress, Lanaj has focused on better understanding the daily experiences of leaders and developing tools that help them better cope with job pressures.

In her latest work, Lanaj is investigating how the home environment and the deep connections to loved ones enriches the working lives of leaders in ways that improve their performance and that of their units.

“Little research has investigated how the home environment impacts leaders at work. I plan to make significant contributions to the field in the next few years by putting the spotlight on this context. What happens at home follows leaders at work and it’s important to understand how and why that is,” Lanaj says.

Lanaj’s research efforts have been acknowledged throughout her career. Most recently, she received the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division’s Cummings Early to Mid-Career Scholarly Achievement Award. In 2019, she earned the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Distinguished Early Career Contributions Science Award. She was also recognized by the Academy of Management Journal as its best reviewer in 2017.