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Tanya Menon
Tanya Menon

MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONS
Visiting Associate Professor of Management & Organizations

Print Overview
Tanya Menon studies how national culture affects people's everyday assumptions and their patterns of decision making. She also studies how organizational cultures affect learning. This research examines how managers respond to new ideas, and particularly why they sometimes value knowledge from insiders, competitors, and consultants differently. Her articles have appeared in Organization Science, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Harvard Business Review, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Management Science, and Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes among others.

Menon earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Harvard University in 1995. Her advisor Chris Winship encouraged her to pursue a career in research, and she studied college-educated African Americans who worked in inner-city communities under his direction. This research received the Thomas Templeton Hoopes Prize as one of the best senior theses at Harvard. Menon earned a PhD in organizational behavior in 2000 from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She was also the recipient of an American Marshall Memorial Fellowship, a Kauffman Foundation Grant for research on Entrepreneurship, and a Stanford Center for Conflict and Negotiation Fellowship.

Prior to graduate school, Menon was a research assistant in INCAE Business School in Costa Rica and an intern in Morgan Stanley's London office.

Menon was the winner of the 2006 Faculty Excellence Award at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for exceptional commitment to teaching as voted by students in the Evening MBA and Weekend MBA programs, and the 2007 Phoenix Award, voted by the class of 2007 for enriching the experience of students inside and outside the classroom.
Print Vita
Education
Ph.D., 2000, Organizational Behavior, Stanford Graduate School of Business
B.A., 1995, Sociology, Harvard University, Magna cum laude

Academic Positions
Affiliated faculty member in the Social Psychology Program, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
Visiting Associate Professor, Kellogg Teams and Groups Center , Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2010-2011
Associate Professor of Behavioral Science, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, 2004-2010
Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, 2000-2004

 
Print Research
Research Interests
Culture; Teams and Groups; Organizational Learning and Knowledge Transfer

Articles
Menon, Tanya and K. W. Phillips. Forthcoming. Getting even vs. being the odd one out. Cohesion in Even- and Odd-Sized Groups. Organization Science.
Smith, Edward, Tanya Menon and Leigh Thompson. 2012. Status differences in the cognitive activation of social networks.. Organization Science. 23(1): 67-82.
Menon, Tanya and L. Thompson. 2010. Managing envy. Harvard Business Review.
Menon, Tanya, J. Sim, J. Fu, C. Y. Chiu and Y. Y. Hong. 2010. Blazing the trail versus trailing the group: Culture and perceptions of the leader’s position. Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes.
Menon, Tanya and L. Thompson. 2007. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful: Self-enhancing biases in threat appraisal. Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes.(104): 45-60.
Menon, Tanya, L. Thompson and H. Choi. 2006. Tainted Knowledge versus Tempting Knowledge: Why People Avoid Knowledge from Internal Rivals and Seek Knowledge from External Rivals. Management Science.(52): 1129-1144.
Blount, Sally and Tanya Menon. 2003. The messenger bias: A relational model of knowledge valuation. Research in Organizational Behavior .(25): 137-186.
Menon, Tanya and J. Pfeffer. 2003. Valuing Internal versus External Knowledge: Explaining the Preference for Outsiders. Management Science.(49): 497-513.
Hong, Y. Y., Grace Ip, C. Y. Chiu, M. W. Morris and Tanya Menon. 2001. Cultural Identity and Dynamic Construction of the Self: Collective Duties and Individual Rights in Chinese and American Cultures. Social Cognition.(19): 251-268.
Menon, Tanya, M. W. Morris and D. R. Ames. 2001. Culturally Conferred Conceptions of Agency: A Key to Social Perception of Persons, Groups, and Other Actors. Personality and Social Psychology Review.(5): 169-182.
Menon, Tanya and M. W. Morris. 2001. Social Structure in North American and Chinese Cultures: Reciprocal Influence between Objective and Subjective Structures. Journal of Psychology in Chinese Societies.(2): 27-50.
Chiu, C. Y., M. W. Morris, Y. Y. Hong and Tanya Menon. 2000. Motivated cultural cognition: The impact of implicit cultural theories on dispositional attribution varies as a function of need for closure. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.(78): 247-259.
Menon, Tanya, M. W. Morris, C. Y. Chiu and Y. Y. Hong. 1999. Culture and the construal of agency: Attribution to individual versus group dispositions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.(76): 701-717.
Reprinted in:
Social Cognition: Classic and Contemporary Readings, New York: Psychology Press, 2005.
Working Papers
Smith, E., Tanya Menon and L. Thompson. High and low status groups activate different network structures under job threat.
Book Chapters
Menon, Tanya and H. Y. Fu. 2005. "Culture and control: How independent and interdependent selves experience agency and constraint." In Research on Managing in Teams and Groups , edited by In E. A. Mannix, M. A. Neale, & Y. Chen , vol. 9, 21-51. Greenwich: Elsevier Science Press.
Other
Menon, Tanya and Leigh Thompson. "Managing Envy." Harvard Business Review, April.
Books
Menon, Tanya and Leigh Thompson. in progress. The money fix: Costless ways to create value at work. Harvard Business School Press.

 
Print Teaching
Teaching Interests
Power and influence; Leadership; Negotiations