DENNIS HELDING JACOBSEN

I am an incoming Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at NYU Stern School of Business, completing my PhD in Organizational Behavior from Yale School of Management this spring.

My research examines how we construct our social worlds at work through the relationships we form and the networks those relationships compose, and the widespread consequences these dynamics have. A core theme in my work is how the ordinary—well intended, often sensible and even locally adaptive—relational behaviors people engage in can unintentionally situate them in networks that sustain costly outcomes for both the individuals involved and the organizations they belong to.

My dissertation traces this dynamic across three studies. The behaviors at its center—leaning on friends in times of strain, forming relationships with similarly creative peers, and building close bonds with colleagues you must also compete against—are easy to overlook precisely because they look like relationships working as they should, and often are. Yet across these studies, I argue and provide evidence that such behaviors create what I call relational 'lock-in' effects that contribute to the persistence of strain, the stagnation of creativity, and the reinforcement of competitive hierarchies.

My published review in the Academy of Management Annals provides the conceptual foundation for this program, synthesizing what we know (and do not yet know) about how, when, and why workplace networks change over time. Empirically, I combine multi-year longitudinal field studies conducted in close collaboration with organizations across diverse contexts with large-scale archival data and computational methods, including longitudinal network models and novel text-based methods for measuring relationships at scale.

Before Yale, I earned BSc and MSc degrees in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School. In parallel, I gained industry experience across tech (Jabra), consulting (Ramboll Management Consulting), and transportation (DSB, Denmark's principal railway operator).