Lisa Kwan is a third year PhD Candidate joint between Harvard Business School and the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Science. Her research interests focus on the tensions organizations face in sharing knowledge and resources across boundaries. She has projects both in the experimental lab and in the field via interviews and survey data.
Her developing expertise areas include: inter-group competition, geographically-dispersed teams, intra-group fractures, team effectiveness, information-sharing in teams, and expertise and status issues in groups. "Groups" in Lisa's world span from large organizations, companies, and governments to divisions, departments, and small teams.
Lisa has published Harvard Business School cases on managing business ties in emerging markets (published in both English and Chinese) and balancing creativity and business in high-end fashion. She has a working paper on the complexities of utilizing expertise within teams, and she recently co-wrote a book chapter on the implications of subgroups within teams, which was published in the capstone volume of the foundational series, Research on Managing Groups and Teams*.
Lisa obtained her Master of Science, with distinction, from the University of Oxford, and her Bachelor of Science from McGill University. Her undergraduate thesis was focused on motivation, resilience in the face of failure, and goal achievement for which she was awarded the Canadian Psychological Association's Award for Dissertation Excellence. She was an Oxford Clarendon International Scholar and is a recipient of the Canadian Science Achievement Gold Medal.
She gives especial thanks to her wonderful PhD adviser-mentors Richard Hackman and Jeff Polzer for their tremendous role in her development and research.
*Cases co-authored with Roy Chua; working paper co-authored with Heidi Gardner; book chapter co-authored with Jeff Polzer.