Leslie A. DeChurch is an academic and expert in organizational leadership and teamwork. She is Chair and Professor of Communication Studies (School of Communication) and holds courtesy appointments in Management & Organizations (Kellogg School of Management) and the Department of Psychology (Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences) at Northwestern University. Her research examines the leadership and teamwork that make extraordinary success possible, from the Italian Renaissance to space exploration to human-AI partnerships.
DeChurch leads the ATLAS lab: Advancing Teams, Leaders, and Systems. ATLAS conducts laboratory and online experiments, meta-analytic integrations, and field studies of teams and leaders to understand their core organizing processes. DeChurch is Director of the immersive undergraduate program Leading a Renaissance, Then and Now, convened in Florence, Italy each summer.
Prof. DeChurch was awarded an NSF CAREER to explore Leadership for Virtual Organizational Effectiveness and her research program on teamwork and leadership has been continuously funded by agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes for Health (NIH), National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA), and Army Research Office (ARO).
She is co-editor of Multiteam Systems: An Organization Form for Dynamic and Complex Environments and recently served on the National Research Council Committee on The Context of Military Environments. She has contributed to several National Research Council Committees on teamwork issues ranging from measurement to innovation. Her work has appeared in top outlets including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), Academy of Management Review (AMR), Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), and Journal of Management (JoM).
Professor DeChurch holds a PhD in Organizational Psychology and is Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the Society of Industrial & Organizational Psychology (SIOP). She is Past-President of INGRoup, the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research.
Is the future of work…in outer space? I/O Shaken & Stirred (2018): https://youtu.be/0L1v0gy8qxA
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- Slightly jet-lagged in Moscow to kick off our NASA US- Russia collaboration led by Suzanne Bell (DePaul)
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- Exploring Lisbon, Portugal with the EAWOP SGM on New Directions Team Cognition
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- Working with the Tata Institute for Social Sciences in Mumbai, India
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- In Marseille, France working with Project Moonwalk collaborators Noshir Contractor and Diego Urbina
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- Lunching with the kids in Cortona, Italy
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- With collaborators Suzanne Bell (DePaul) and Noshir Contractor (Northwestern) preparing to collect data in NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA)
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- At the Palazzo Vecchio directing NU in Florence, Italy
