Denise Rousseau

A comprehensive treatment of EBM is available through Barends and Rousseau (2018), the Center for Evidence-Based Management website, and free on-line courses developed at Carnegie Mellon.

In 2007, she founded the Evidence-Based Management Collaborative to promote the development and dissemination of Evidence-based Management teaching and practice. Operating as the Center for Evidence-Based Management (Eric Barends, Managing Director), this Collaborative helps educators and practitioners make better use of evidence from science, data, stakeholders and experience in organizational decisions.  Rousseau serves as CEBMa’s Academic Chair. Barends and Rousseau are co-convenors of the Business and Management Group of the Campbell Library of Systematic Reviews.

Rousseau’s research identified the often hidden but widespread phenomenon of idiosyncratic deals, whereby individual employees bargain for employment arrangements different from their peers. Early research on the psychological contract identified an anomaly, the repeated observation that people working for the same firm and same boss can have distinctly different psychological contracts. After considering alternative explanations, this observation lead to recognition that individual workers influence the terms of their own employment arrangements. These influences take the form of bargaining and self-initiated changes. Her 2005 book I-deals: Idiosyncratic Deals Employees Bargain for Themselves also won the George Terry Book Award for best book in management from the Academy of Management.

Benefiting both employer and employee: I-deals serve the interests of both employers and employees. I-deals are distinct from other forms of person-specific employment arrangements in that the negotiation is based on the value of the individual worker to the employer (Rousseau, 2005). An organization attracts, motivates, and retains the services of a valued contributor at the same time he or she receives desired resources from that organization.

Rousseau’s 1995 book Psychological Contract in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements won the George Terry Book Award for best book in management from the Academy of Management.

Denise Rousseau (born 20 October 1951) is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds an H.J. Heinz III Chair in Organizational Behavior and Public Policy, Heinz College and jointly Tepper School of Business.