Dennis H. Jacobsen

I am an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at NYU Stern School of Business. You can reach me at dennis.jacobsen@stern.nyu.edu, find me on LinkedIn here, and view my Google Scholar page here.

I study how people build and navigate their social worlds at work—the relationships they form, the informal networks those relationships compose, and the downstream consequences these dynamics have for individuals and organizations alike.

Much of my work starts from a simple observation: the relationships we build in good faith do not always lead where we expect. Leaning on workplace friends when we feel strained, surrounding ourselves with similarly creative colleagues, or forming close bonds with competitors can all be sensible, even helpful, choices in the moment. Across multi-year field studies inside organizations and large-scale archival data, however, I argue and provide evidence that these behaviors can unintentionally place people in networks that contribute to sustaining strain, stalling creativity, and reinforcing competitive hierarchies. This work helps explain why some organizational problems resist repeated intervention.

I also study how new ways of accessing information and solving problems at work reshape who people turn to and the networks that result. I am currently partnering with organizations to understand how AI adoption is changing patterns of collaboration and communication at work, and how these shifts alter the informal networks inside organizations. The goal is to produce rigorous research and provide participating organizations with useful insight into how work is changing inside their own contexts. Organizations interested in exploring these questions are very welcome to reach out.

My review in the Academy of Management Annals synthesizes what we know about how networks form, evolve, and dissolve inside organizations, and forms the foundation for much of my research agenda. Empirically, I combine field studies inside organizations with large-scale archival data and computational methods, including novel text-based approaches for measuring relationships at scale.

Before joining NYU Stern, I received my PhD in Organizational Behavior from Yale School of Management in 2026, after spending 2019–2020 at Yale as a Fox International Fellow. I also hold an MSc and BSc in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School. Alongside my studies in Denmark, I worked in tech at Jabra, in consulting at Ramboll Management Consulting, and in transportation at DSB, Denmark’s principal railway operator.