About

Jillian Chown is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. Her research focuses on how organizations govern expert work when professional discretion is high and direct control is limited. She studies how organizations shape the actions of experts not through command but by structuring the conditions under which discretion is exercised, including incentives, peer influence, task design, role boundaries, and physical space. Her empirical work is primarily set in healthcare, where governance challenges are acute and stakes are immediate. Professor Chown employs multi-method approaches, ranging from large-scale econometric analyses to field-based ethnographic studies, and develops new theoretical concepts that integrate micro-, meso-, and macro-level analysis. Her research has been published in several reputable journals and has received recognition such as the ASQ Best Dissertation Paper Award (Runner-Up). She teaches Leading Strategic Change in Kellogg's MBA program and has professional experience as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company. She holds a PhD in Strategic Management and an MBA from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, as well as a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Business
• Law
• History
• Knowledge management
• Geology
• Engineering
• Biology
• Economics
• Psychology
• Process management
• Social psychology
• Public relations
• Microeconomics
• Management
• Data science
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Sexual Misconduct in the Workplace: Organizational Consequences and the Role of Toxic Culture

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Despite increased attention following the #MeToo movement, sexual misconduct remains a persistent challenge in contemporary organizations. While important existing research has documented its impact on survivors, this symposium examines broader organizational implications and cultural dynamics that perpetuate misconduct. Through five presentations, we demonstrate how inadequate addressing of sexual misconduct affects firm value, performance, and talent acquisition, while exploring the reproduction of toxic workplace cultures. The first three presentations examine market reactions to punitive damages insurance, spillover effects on unit-level performance and innovation, and gendered responses to organizational policies among prospective employees. The final two presentations investigate cultural mechanisms, analyzing how hyper-competitive norms persist despite their negative effects on performance and well-being, and how organizational narratives shape silence culture around sexual harassment. Together, these papers challenge the prevalent organizational approach of containment over prevention, demonstrating its strategic limitations and cultural implications. Using diverse methodological approaches—from archival analyses, multi-methods, and synthetic control methods to survey experiments—this symposium advances our understanding of sexual misconduct beyond interpersonal dynamics to demonstrate its broader organizational consequences. Our findings suggest that addressing sexual misconduct effectively is not just an ethical imperative but a strategic necessity for organizational success and workplace equality. Value Implications of Insuring Against Punishment: Evidence from Court Precedents Author: Spencer Barnes; The University of Texas at El Paso Author: Marina Gertsberg; University of Melbourne Sexual Misconduct: Organizational Outcomes and Spillovers Author: Manuela Collis; University of Toronto Training vs termination:How men and women interpret org. strategies in response to sexual harassment Author: Elizabeth Lauren Campbell; University of California San Diego Author: Sae-Seul Park; Not Associated Norms at Work: Well-being, Performance and Hyper-Competition in Academia Author: Maria Guadalupe; INSEAD Author: Daisy Pollenne; INSEAD Sexual Harassment Stories and Silence Author: Olle Folke; Uppsala University Author: Andreas Kotsadam; - Author: Mette Løvgren; OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University Author: Johanna Rickne; Stockholm University

  PublisherDOI

• Peer Influence in the Workplace: The Moderating Role of Task Structures Within Organizations

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2025-03-16 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Peer influence is crucial in shaping work practices within organizations, yet the impact of formal organizational structures on this influence remains underexplored. We argue that task structures, which capture how tasks are allocated and configured within organizations, significantly affect peer interactions and influence. Specifically, we examine how two features of task structures—task variety and task similarity with peers—moderate peer influence in a highly consequential setting: physicians’ decisions to perform a birth via caesarean section (C-section) versus vaginal delivery. Using data on nearly 5 million births performed by more than 16,500 physicians across 915 hospitals in Brazil, we find that working alongside peers whose practice style (enduring preference) favors C-sections leads the focal physician to perform more C-sections, even after controlling for features of the mother and the pregnancy. This influence is significantly stronger for physicians with higher task variety and with higher task similarity with peers. Through post-hoc analyses, we provide evidence that the observed behaviors are consistent with a mechanism of information sharing between physicians. This study contributes to our understanding of peer influence in the workplace by showing how the task structure within organizations can either amplify or diminish peer influence. This awareness is particularly crucial for health care organizations in which such dynamics can have life-changing consequences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond Occupations, Organizations, & Actions: New Meso-Level Mechanisms of Work-Related Segregation

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Despite commendable progress, work-related segregation along different dimensions such as sex, race, and status remains a persistent feature of modern societies, shaping opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for workers across different social categories. While much existing research has documented patterns of segregation through the lenses of occupations and organizations, work on task and job title segregation show that these established frameworks may obscure crucial meso-level mechanisms that create and maintain inequalities. These mechanisms serve as subtle and fundamental drivers of workplace inequality by channeling people into disparate career trajectories with unequal rewards, responsibilities, and advancement prospects, even in the absence of explicit discrimination. Novel empirical and theoretical approaches would help construct a more comprehensive understanding of the causes, manifestations, and effects of segregations relating to work. This symposium tries to achieve this by bringing together four papers that illuminate new mechanisms through which segregation emerges and persists. Moving beyond past analyses of work-related segregation at the occupational, organizational, and action levels, these papers demonstrate how transcending formal occupational categories and focusing on meso-level factors—tasks, mobility patterns, and networks—reveals previously hidden dimensions of segregation and inequality. Together, these papers offer new analytical tools for understanding how workplace segregation persists through multilevel pathways despite decades of effort to reduce it. Job Title Segregation by Gender and by Race Author: Ananda Martin-Caughey; Brown University Four lenses for understanding tasks in and around organizations Author: Jillian Chown; Author: Callen Anthony; New York University Author: Lisa Ellen Cohen; Author: Nathan Wilmers; Author: Theodore DeWitt; University of Massachusetts Boston Situating contexts, perception of gendered tasks, and organization of work Author: Yan Echo Zhou; Stanford Graduate School of Business When Work Disconnects: The Segregation of Occupational Exposure in Everyday Mobility Networks Author: Siwei Cheng; New York University Author: Wenhao Jiang; New York University

  PublisherDOI

• Impact of microgeography on communication dynamics in a healthcare environment

  BMJ Leader · 2025-01-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: For growing healthcare organisations, anchored resources-assets that are not easily movable-may complicate expansion and distort workflow patterns. We examine work patterns at a radiation oncology department of a major Canadian hospital. As this department doubled its size, healthcare providers remained bound to treatment planning rooms and radiation machines at the original site. This study examines workplace communication and interactions before and after the expansion. METHODS: We conducted regression analyses using a unique dataset merging email communications, badge swipes, office locations and organisation charts for individuals that routinely use the treatment planning room (n=232). We use a difference-in-differences framework to compare individuals' behaviours before and after the expansion. Our dependent variables were how often individuals accessed the treatment planning room and email volumes between two individuals. FINDINGS: We find an overall decrease in the use of the treatment planning room, though the effect was larger for those that moved away from it. Further, we find an increase in email communication for dyads of individuals separated in the move, but only if they belonged to different departments. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Our research points to complex interdependencies among healthcare providers, shedding light on how hospital expansion may have unintended consequences. Healthcare leaders should acknowledge that interaction patterns will be affected when healthcare providers are separated from each other or from anchored resources. Shifting to remote interactions may be adequate in some instances; in others, it may negatively affect work outcomes as well as the engagement and satisfaction of providers and patients.

  PublisherDOI

• Addressing Gender Inequality in Organizations: New Insights on the Impact of Employer Practices

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Employer practices powerfully shape gender inequality in organizations by allocating opportunities and specifying how work should be accomplished. In this symposium, we bring together scholars who share a concern about understanding how employer practices can be a source of change for reducing gender inequality in organizations. The five papers in this symposium each shed light on how particular employer practices—remote training, sorting of employees into career paths, assignment of work tasks, tenure extensions, and work-life policies—affect women’s wage and career outcomes. Our discussant, Lauren Rivera, a leading scholar in the study of workplace inequality, will close our symposium by synthesizing the presented papers and facilitating a discussion with the audience regarding the future directions for this important topic. Through this symposium, we aim to generate new insights about how scholars can continue to study and improve the research on employer practices and gender inequality in organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• The Routinization of Expertise: The Entry of Less-Credentialed Workers into Organizations

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  articleSenior author

  Organizations are increasingly relying on less-credentialed workers to carry out work that has traditionally been performed by experts, such as lawyers, accountants, or physicians. This causes a restructuring of work within the organization, which has implications for experts’ behavior and performance. In this study, we propose that the use of less-credentialed workers prompts experts to focus on performing tasks that differentiate themselves from the other workers. The experts’ increased specialization stimulates the repeated use and provision of these differentiated tasks, even for clients who may benefit from simpler tasks and services. We suggest that this indicates the routinization of their expertise. Furthermore, we expect that the mismatch between experts’ specialization and clients’ needs will reduce worker performance and service quality. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we examine these propositions by exploring the introduction of obstetric nurses in hospitals in Brazil and its impact on the behavior and performance of obstetricians-gynecologists. We find that obstetricians-gynecologists are more likely to perform a caesarian section following the introduction of obstetric nurses in a hospital, resulting in worse care for low-risk births. This study highlights how the use of less-credentialed workers can increase experts’ specialization while reducing experts’ performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnographic Tales and Tools: Resistance, Risks, and Rewards in Fieldwork

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Ethnography has long been recognized as a prominent methodological and analytical approach to studying work and organizations (Van Maanen, 1988). In the last decades, rapidly changing workplaces have led researchers to draw increasingly on in-depth fieldwork to develop thick descriptions and generate novel understandings of organizations (e.g., Frost et al., 1991; Geertz, 1973: 310). As management scholars embrace this “ethnographic turn” in the study of organizations (Rouleau, de Rond, & Musca, 2014), we suggest taking a step back to reflect on the lived experience, merits and challenges associated with ethnography. Specifically, the panel will share their experiences with resistance, risks and rewards inherent to ethnography and reflect on what they and others can learn from these experiences.

  PublisherDOI

• The Dynamics of Organizational Change: Understanding Change Across Levels and Time in Organizations

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  This symposium examines the organizing processes that occur across stages of time and levels of authority in organizations undergoing change initiatives. Papers in the symposium address research questions related to how employee involvement, long reorganization periods, and contradictory change goals influence work relationships and employee attitudes. By focusing on how workers in organizations experience and react to organizational change, especially the relational aspect of these experiences and reactions that evolve over the course of the change period, the four papers in this proposed symposium highlight a dynamism of change processes that is often overlooked in studies of organizational change. These include considerations of how organizational leaders design change to enable participation from frontline team members; why such design efforts for employee involvement in continuous improvement can fail; and how long-lasting and overlapping changes can complicate simultaneous interventions aimed at increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the organization.

  PublisherDOI

• How Vicarious Learning Shapes Firms’ Relationship Networks with Third-Party Experts

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In some markets, firms can compete by forming relationships with experts outside the boundary of the firm—what we call third-party experts—who can serve to both legitimate the firm and influence demand for its products. Developing and maintaining relationships with these third-party experts is, however, a complicated endeavor and how they go about doing so is a core strategic decision for firms in these markets. Taking a network perspective (where we consider firms to have networks of relationships with third-party experts), and focusing on both tie formation and dissolution, we find that firms learn vicariously from their close competitors when determining whether to grow (or shrink) their relationship networks and which particular experts they should target. Furthermore, firms’ network-altering behaviors differ depending on whether a firms’ attention and resources are directed to relationships or are pulled toward an alternative strategic focus. Firms whose attention is focused elsewhere engage in less tie formation and tie dissolution but end up more reliant on what they learn vicariously from their competitors. This study contributes by highlighting how firms approach building relationships with third-party experts, by providing a dynamic perspective to firms’ strategic network building behaviors, and by generating further insight into the role that managerial attention and resource allocating play in shaping firm behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• So Much Work to Do: New Approaches to Studying Work Tasks

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06

  article

  In this symposium, we ask how to bring the study of work tasks more centrally to organizational research. We invite junior scholars to present novel approaches to studying and theorizing the role of work tasks in organizations. Presenters will cover both the nuts-and-bolts of identifying and working with task data, and the broader implications for our thinking, research questions and theorizing that come from focusing on tasks.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Vanessa Conzon

  Boston College

  4 shared

• Julia DiBenigno

  Yale University

  4 shared

• Michel Anteby

  Boston University

  4 shared

• Beth A. Bechky

  University of California, Davis

  3 shared

• Sunkee Lee

  Carnegie Mellon University

  3 shared

• Callen Anthony

  3 shared

• Christopher C. Liu

  University of Oregon

  3 shared

• Dylan Boynton

  Michigan State University

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• ASQ Best Dissertation Paper Award (Runner-Up)
• Best Symposium Award (organizer): “So Much Work to Do: New A…
• SMS Best Proposal Award for Creativity in Research (Finalist…
• SMS Best Conference Paper (Nominee)
• SMS Research Methods Best Paper Award (Nominee)