October 27, 2021

3:00 - 4:00 p.m. ET

Open to Consortium members

Anyone interested in attending who have yet to join the Consortium, please contact cpo-consortium@umich.edu for more information.


Naomi Rothman
Associate Professor of Management
Lehigh University

About the Session

Emotional ambivalence – the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions about a person, situation, object, event or idea – is a common emotional reaction to situations that involve change, complexity, and contradiction, such as the global pandemic. Traditionally, research on ambivalence (in both psychology and management) has overwhelmingly focused on the negative consequences of experiencing ambivalence. Professor Naomi Rothman’s work over the past 15 years has questioned this assumption and aimed to rebalance the conversation on emotional ambivalence by demonstrating its benefits for decision-making, relationships, leadership, and even negotiation outcomes.

In this session, Naomi will share how we can shift people’s reaction to ambivalence through building more cooperative and interdependent organizational environments, as well as how feeling emotional ambivalence brings valuable benefits such as seeing increases in creativity, cognitive flexibility, adaptability, and receptivity to others’ advice and feedback.

About Rothman

Naomi Rothman earned a doctorate in organizational behavior at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a bachelor’s in sociology at the University of California at Davis. Before joining Lehigh’s faculty, Rothman was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her research examines the unexpected ways that people (e.g., leaders) make higher quality decisions and influence others to do so through their use of emotions and power; specifically how the experience and expression of complex emotions (e.g., emotional ambivalence) and complex states of power (e.g., power with perspective-taking) drive effective decision making.

She has published in Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Annals, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Cognition and Emotion, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Negotiation and Conflict Management, and in edited books, including Research on Managing Groups and Teams, and Voice and Silence in Organizations.

Interested in attending this webinar and not yet a Consortium member? Contact us to learn more at cpo-consortium@umich.edu.