Bob McKersie

By — on / Affiliated Faculty, PON Faculty

Professor Emeritus of Management at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bob McKersie is an expert on industrial and labor relations with a focus on bargaining. Coauthor of Strategic Negotiations (Harvard Business School Press, 1995), he researches strategies that are being pursued by different industries to bring about effective and sustained organizational change. He is also coauthor of The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (Basic Books, 1986) and Pay, Productivity, and Collective Bargaining (Macmillan, 1983). His pioneering study of labor negotiations, with Richard Walton in the early 1960s, formulated the concepts of distributive and integrative bargaining that have served as analytical tools for understanding the bargaining process more generally. For almost 15 years, he has offered, with Joel Cutcher Gershenfeld and Nancy Peace, a two-day seminar for practitioners on effective labor negotiations.

Education

S.B., University of Pennsylvania

M.B.A., Harvard University

D.B.A., Harvard University

Research interests

Interest-based negotiations, industrial relations, organizational change

Select publications

  • With Robert B. McKersie. Transforming Workplaces: An Interview. IRC Press, 1996.
  • Pathways to Change: Case Studies of Strategic Negotiations. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1995.
  • The Transformation of American Industrial Relations. ILR Press, 1994.
  • Strategic Negotiations: A Theory of Change in Labor-Management Relations. Harvard Business School Press, 1994.
  • A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An Analysis of a Social Interaction System. ILR Press, 1991.

 

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