Ethan Burris, Ph.D.

Ethan Burris is an associate professor of Management and the Chevron Centennial Fellow at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also director of the Center for Leadership and Ethics. He earned a Ph.D. in management from Cornell University and has served as a visiting scholar at Google and Microsoft. He teaches and consults on topics relating to leadership, people analytics, talent insights, managing power and politics, building engagement in groups and teams, social enterprise and negotiations. The recipient of numerous research and teaching awards, Burris received the McCombs School Award for Research Excellence in 2017 and 2015, the Fawn and Vijay Mahajan Teaching Excellence Award for Executive Education in 2015, the Hank and Mary Harkins Foundation Award for Effective Teaching in Undergraduate Classes in 2012, the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award in 2011, the ING Professor of Excellence award in 2011, and the 2009 Trammell/CBA Foundation Teaching Award for Assistant Professors.

Burris’ current research focuses on understanding “employee voice” and getting employees to candidly speak up about problems and opportunities for improvement. In particular, he has investigated how leaders shape employees’ decisions about whether to speak up or stay silent, and how these voice behaviors influence the performance of the employees who offer their input and the leaders and organizations who receive it. His research has appeared in several top management and psychology journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and has been covered in major media outlets such as the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Houston Chronicle.

He has collected data from and served as a consultant for a variety of professional firms, ranging from several Fortune 100 technology companies, Fortune 100 financial services and insurance companies, Fortune 500 companies in the casual dining and grocery industries, hospitals, a defense contracting company, a commercial real estate firm, governmental agencies, and many retail organizations.