Amy Wrzesniewski, PhD

About Amy

Professor Wrzesniewski is the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the faculty at Wharton, she was on faculty at the Yale School of Management, Yale University, and the Stern School of Business, New York University. Professor Wrzesniewski’s research interests focus on how people make meaning of their work, particularly in difficult contexts (e.g., stigmatized or declining occupations, independent work, and disrupted work). She has studied the experience of work as a job, career, or calling across a range of occupations. Her research on job crafting examines how people redraw the task, relational, and cognitive boundaries of their jobs to change both their work identity and the meaning of the work. Most recently, her work considers the relationship between the individual and the work itself, with a specific interest in how people understand and interpret the nature of their motivation. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and Research in Organizational Behavior. In 2015 and 2019 Professor Wrzesniewski won the “Inspiring Yale” Award, voted by students as the most inspiring professor at Yale’s School of Management, and won the Herbert Simon Award for research excellence in 2019.

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