Gianpiero Petriglieri is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and an expert on leadership and learning in the workplace. He holds the INSEAD Alumni professorship in leadership and development.
His award-winning research and teaching focus on what it means, and what it takes, to become a leader. He is particularly interested in the development and practice of leadership in the age of “nomadic professionalism,” an age in which people have deep bonds to work but loose affiliations to organisations, and authenticity and mobility have replaced loyalty and advancement as hallmarks of virtue and success. Leaders, in this age, are expected be grounded as well as flexible, sustainable as well as effective, purposeful as well as portable. It is a lot to handle at once.
The intent of Gianpiero’s work is to humanise leadership, that is, to help leaders recognise and work with those tensions, and foster more integration and less fragmentation, more pluralism and less polarisation, within and around them. This work has earned him a spot among the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world.
Building on his research, Gianpiero has refined a unique approach to developing the art of leading. This approach helps people and groups clarify their leadership intent, commit to it, and forge relationships that sustain it. Gianpiero works with multinationals in a variety of industries to bring this approach to life in bespoke leadership development initiatives, usually tied to a strategic effort to transform the organisation. Besides various INSEAD awards, these initiatives have received industry-wide prizes for excellence and innovation in executive development.
An insightful and engaging speaker, Gianpiero presents widely at management conferences and corporate gatherings on the meaning and value of humanising leadership in the workplace and beyond. At INSEAD, he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive programme for emerging leaders, and chairs the initiative for Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence.
Gianpiero’s research has appeared in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Discoveries, Academy Management of Learning & Education, Organization Studies, Human Relations, and Organisation Theory. He also writes essays regularly for the Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. His work has been featured in a range of media including the BBC, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, New York Times, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Le Figaro, and El Pais.
In the INSEAD MBA, Gianpiero teaches the core course “Ethics: Lead for good,” for which he has received the Aspen Institute’s “Ideas worth Teaching“ award. Prior to that, he taught the “Leading People and Groups” core course for five years. He has received the MBA students’ Outstanding Teacher Award for both courses, and earned numerous Dean’s Commendations for Teaching Excellence in MBA and Executive Education. He has also earned the Dominique Hèau Award for Inspiring Educational Excellence, a recognition for faculty whose body of work has strengthened INSEAD’s institutional fabric and community.
A Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist by training, Gianpiero has worked as an executive coach, practiced as a psychotherapist, and served on the staff of group relations conferences in Europe and the United States. He has chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on new models of leadership, and has held Visiting Professor positions at the Harvard Business School, and at Copenhagen Business School.