Elizabeth J. McClean is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University, where she teaches core and elective MBA courses on leading teams and women’s leadership, including “Women and Leadership,” “Women Leading in Tech,” and “Leadership Insights.

She brings a practitioner’s lens to the classroom, informed by earlier roles as Assistant Director of Leadership Research and Assessment at Johnson and as a Human Capital consultant at Mercer, where she worked on reward strategies, performance management, and career paths across industries. Her teaching excellence has been recognized through multiple distinctions and prior awards at Cornell.

At the heart of McClean’s work is a commitment to elevating employee voice, ethical leadership, and gender equity in organizations, with a particular focus on how women can be heard, valued, and advanced at work. Her research examines when and how speaking up leads to better performance and leadership opportunities, including influential studies on the social consequences of voice and how agentic versus communal ideas are endorsed differently for men and women work that has appeared in leading journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organization Science, Human Resource Management, and Journal of Business Ethics, and has been featured in outlets like The New York Times and Harvard Business Review online. She is actively shaping conversations on allyship, AI and speaking up, gendered pay in tech, and humanizing human capital, supported by competitive external grants such as a major American Veterinary Medical Association award, and she frequently shares her insights with executives and practitioners at forums including the Power of Women Institute in Washington, DC, West Point, Wharton, and Cornell’s National HR in Hospitality Conference.

McClean’s path from a BS, MS, and PhD in Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell with concentrations in Human Resource Studies, Organizational Behavior, and Statistics, to faculty roles at Cornell reflects her focus towards a sustained, research-backed dedication to building workplaces where diverse voices drive strategy and performance.

Systems Thinking