About

Sean Martin is the Donald and Lauren Morel Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. His award-winning research addresses questions related to leadership, organizational culture, and how societal contexts affect leaders and followers. His work has been published in top academic journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. His research has received the Wells Fargo Award for Research Excellence and has been recognized on the Responsible Research in Business Management Honor Roll. Additionally, his work has been featured in popular outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNBC, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., Time Magazine, Harvard Business Review, and the Boston Globe. Sean regularly collaborates with executives, managers, and front-line employees to teach and conduct research on topics such as principled leadership, employee voice, social class differences, organizational culture, communication, employee integration, and motivation. He has worked across diverse industries including governmental organizations, creative firms, tech and IT firms, manufacturing, insurance organizations, financial institutions, and labor services. At Darden, he teaches leadership and leadership development topics in both the residential and executive MBA programs, as well as in various executive education programs.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Knowledge management
• Demography
• Developmental psychology
• Public relations
• Epistemology
• Cognitive psychology
• Communication

Selected publications

• Managing Beyond the ‘Impostor’ Buzzword

  MIT Sloan management review · 2025-09-15

  article

  Having impostor thoughts — often called impostor syndrome or the impostor phenomenon — is simply an employee’s belief that others overestimate their abilities at work. Leaders can learn to avoid three common missteps in managing people experiencing such thoughts, as well as how to help employees cope by emphasizing impostor thoughts’ cognitive origin, their prevalence among peers, and people’s ability to self-manage those thoughts.

  PublisherDOI

• An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996

  Polish American Studies · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The historian Anna Müller has achieved something remarkable in her account of the life of Tonia Lechtman (1918–1996). She has taken the seemingly narrow story of one individual—an ordinary woman in one reading—and helped us understand how the outside world determined her life path. In so doing, Müller encourages readers to consider how our relationships with family members, friends, political parties, and the political states to which we belong as residents or citizens influence both our ideals and our actions.Born Tauba Bialer in Łódź, Lechtman came from a family whose ancestors combined a history of successful entrepreneurship and Hasidic tradition. Attracted to communism as a young teenager in Poland because of “a commitment to brotherhood, justice, and freedom” (p. 47), she immigrated to Palestine with her family in 1935. The reasons for their immigration were never clear but likely involved both the family's response to political fascism and an awareness that life in Palestine would be easier for Tonia and her brother, both inspired by communist ideals (p. 55). Not long after her family's arrival, Tonia met and married Sioma Lechtman, a Russian Jew who shared and encouraged Tonia's communism. After serving time in prison for pro-communist activities, the couple was expelled from Palestine. Tonia and Sioma then went to Paris on transit visas, hoping to eventually find their way to Spain to fight fascism. By December 1937, Sioma had left for Spain to join the International Brigades while Tonia, pregnant, remained behind in France. In July 1938, Tonia gave birth to her daughter Vera, the catalyst for Müller's work. By the outbreak of war Sioma was already imprisoned in a camp at Gurs. Tonia managed to visit, and a second child, Marcel, was born in March 1940.Tonia's search for shelter for herself and her children eventually led to Switzerland, where they lived in refugee camps and shelters. Shortly after the end of the war Tonia learned that Sioma had been killed in Auschwitz in January 1945. After years of persecution and precarity, Tonia hoped that the emerging communist rule in Poland would align with her own ideals, and so she returned there. She took up work assisting in a hospital of the Unitarian Service Committee in Upper Silesia and then worked to organize care for mothers and children in the Ministry of Industry and Trade in Warsaw. But the Stalinist government imprisoned her from 1949 to 1954 on grounds of suspicious activity. Tonia eventually left Poland for Palestine in 1971. Müller carefully describes that the decision to emigrate after the 1968 anti-Jewish campaign was not a choice for Israel over Poland but rather a response to several of the family's problems, including the failure of the Polish health care system to meet the medical needs of her grandchildren (pp. 262–71).The point of Müller's story is less the many journeys demanded by Lechtman's status as a Jew from Poland than it is the consistency of Lechtman's principles, her belief in communism as an ideology that emphasized responsibility for others regardless of ethnic or national background. Lechtman's principles justify the question mark of the title, indicating just how extraordinary she was. One of the strengths of Müller's analysis is her explanation of the connection Lechtman made between communism and motherhood. Müller shows how one woman lived her ideals, in spite of the cost those ideals sometimes imposed on her family, especially her children.Though scholarly in approach and tone, An Ordinary Life? is far from a straightforward biography. Müller describes the affinity she feels with Tonia, as she is referred to in the text, and her increasing connection to Tonia's family as she conducts her research. Müller's honesty makes this a model study for scholars who want to share fascinating lives with a larger public. The experiences described here are Tonia's, but the ability to organize and tell the story is Müller's.Perhaps the signal contribution of this work is to point out that historians’ need to tell a communal story limits us. Müller understands that the stories of individuals do not just qualify our conclusions about ethnic or national communities; rather, they expand our notions of how we might redefine those communities. An Ordinary Life? is a gentle rebuke to historians who attempt to generalize about the choices made by Jews in Poland. The story Müller tells, with the help of an unusually rich collection of family correspondence, can only reflect the life of one individual, but the context she provides reveals more complexity than even the most sophisticated scholars recognize. This text should attract a diverse group of readers—anyone interested in prewar Polish Jewish life, Palestine, communism, the Spanish Civil War, wartime France and Switzerland, the experiences of women during and after war, postwar Poland, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. Müller's lightly worn erudition illuminates the context of Tonia's life and choices, allowing the reader to see Tonia as an individual and not just as part of any kind of larger group, whether women or Jews or citizens of Poland.Explaining that many questions remain about Tonia's story, Müller writes that “what we are left with is often chaotic and at best anecdotal” (p. 111). This is certainly true on both the individual and the communal level. By writing both sensitively and authoritatively about one individual's life, Müller forces us to reconsider making firm conclusions about the complex histories we study.

  PublisherDOI

• Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust

  The Polish Review · 2024-04-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Referring to the cohort of Polish Jewish historians before the Holocaust that constitute her main topic, Natalia Aleksiun writes, “When they dreamt about Poland, they were dreaming as Jews” (p. 12). Aleksiun thus summarizes the position of a remarkably productive group of scholars. At the heart of this masterful collective biography is the interplay between a historian's obligation to academic objectivity and the engagement with the larger communities to which the historians belong. In Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust, Aleksiun takes a seemingly limited topic and develops it into a thought-provoking study that forces us to confront the purpose of scholarship and questions of national identity.Aleksiun adopts a loosely chronological but more thematic approach. Readers first encounter a detailed review of nineteenth-century historiography, then learn more about the professional training of the core group of historians Aleksiun describes, including Szymon Askenazy, Mojżesz Schorr, Majer Bałaban, Ignacy Schiper, and Emanuel Ringelblum, with special attention to the “Polish orientation” (p. 64) of Galicia. She considers how these historians entered Polish academic life and how they engaged the public, both Jewish and Polish, in their work. Aleksiun concludes with an examination of the themes these historians addressed. Throughout, she explains how this group of historians both professionalized the field and used their work to help build a “decidedly Polish Jewish identity” (p. 262).Aleksiun's work focuses on how these historians joined the academic mainstream, thus marking them as part of an intellectual class relatively few attained, while also reaching out to a larger public. Her work thus bridges a class divide, making it both more comprehensive than her subject would indicate and relevant to those interested in a broader social history. The public these historians hoped to reach included academics in Poland's largest cities and the readers of the Yiddish press in small towns. They hoped for greater tolerance on the part of their academic peers while they also showed younger Jews just how connected they were to the histories of the towns in which they lived. Aleksiun sets out “to retrieve the lost contours of a Jewish communal consciousness—one forged across numerous divisions” (p. 4), and, though she cannot answer all of our questions about the issues she raises, she succeeds admirably. Her work evaluates the influence of these scholars fairly and positively. Though some of their work might not have been widely read, she also notes the number of students enrolled in their classes and the work of institutions such as YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute).More significantly, she reviews thoroughly these scholars’ participation in what we would call public history, examining their roles as writers, speakers, politicians, secondary school teachers, archivists, and curators. These scholars employed history in many different contexts—whether they were speaking in the Sejm, writing in the Jewish press, working to educate the rabbinate, or lecturing to community groups. She encourages us to consider what these historians thought about the role of Jews in Poland but also about how their audiences received what amounted to a new interpretation of Polish Jewish history, one that explained the role of Jews in these communities more clearly and completely than had previously been done. Aleksiun writes that these historians focused on three different areas: local histories, Jewish-Gentile relations, and the history of Jewish communal institutions. Though often divided ideologically themselves, these historians made a case for Jews’ “equal civic status” in Poland (p. 216). This had two effects that only seem contradictory—their work bound Jews to Poland while also outlining Jewish political, social, cultural, and economic difference. That these effects seem contradictory is only a sign of our failure to recognize the complexity of Jewish life as it is lived among others. Aleksiun's work is an eloquent response to simplistic notions of exclusive national identity, whether expressed a hundred years ago or today.Aleksiun's scholars were engaged in both an “intellectual project” and a “political mission” (p. 215) on behalf of the Jewish nation. This mission was apparent inside the classroom as well, since, like all teachers, they sought to train students to examine topics in need of further attention. Requirements sometimes included work on family genealogy or study of the Jewish communities of students’ hometowns (pp. 125, 231). Local studies, seen as building blocks in the development of an emerging historiography, were especially important. History, in both its academic and popular versions, is an example of another area of cultural life in which Jews demonstrated a level of belonging to the Polish community even as they asserted a national difference they rightfully defended.Given the circumstances of the day, it is hard to imagine these scholars could have taken any other position toward their place as Jews in Poland. We must also admit that our own personal backgrounds are never easily separated from our scholarship. Aleksiun grounds any concern about this issue in a richly detailed account of how and why these historians built a solid historiography that allowed young Jews to identify as Jews in Poland while teaching others about their neighbors. Her work offers us a model, showing us how we can and should admit how our own backgrounds affect our work. This model is based in prodigious research, in a mastery of the sources (in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and German) that very few other scholars can match. For all of Aleksiun's emphasis on the ways these scholars reached out to the public, scholarship like that on display here has its own power that should not be underestimated. While not written for a popular audience, Aleksiun's influential work will guide our thinking about the place of Jews in early twentieth century Poland. More generally, Aleksiun implicitly asks us to think about the effect of the writing of history in other contexts. Readers will end up considering how other historiographies—of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union or of slavery in the United States, for example—continue to affect our political life.One of this book's many strengths is that, in telling of the writing of history, Aleksiun reviews that history as well. This is a remarkable volume that students of the field will refer to often, both for views of the field's significant figures and for Aleksiun's straightforward portrayal of their commitment to both scholarship and community. Researchers in related fields will find Aleksiun's description of these scholars’ limited professional prospects all too familiar (p. 129). The interplay between objectivity and community also resonates both individually and institutionally, precisely because private donors and community organizations play such an important role in the creation of endowed positions, archives, libraries, and museums.Though a wide-ranging text, Conscious History inevitably leaves some issues unaddressed. For example, Aleksiun's tight focus on Jews in Poland does not leave room for even a brief discussion of the development of Jewish history as a field in other contexts, such as in the United States. In addition, and most lamentably, few sources for the study of the personal lives of these scholars remain, and so Aleksiun is not able to delve closely into their biographies. Instead, she has relied on their work to tell the story of their community in Poland, honoring their professionalism and their memory.

  PublisherDOI

• Workplace Impostor Thoughts, Impostor Feelings, and Impostorism: An Integrative, Multidisciplinary Review of Research on the Impostor Phenomenon

  Academy of Management Annals · 2024-10-09 · 21 citations

  articleSenior author

  In light of recent recognition of the timeliness, relevance, and need for more research on the impostor phenomenon, we conducted an integrative review of organizational research and the relevant work from nearby disciplines. We engaged in co-citation mapping to identify silos and fragmentation within and across disciplines, and we leveraged text analysis tools to trace the construct’s evolution. Next, we identified issues of construct clarity and surfaced foundational assumptions that, upon review of the evidence, appeared ill founded or inadequate. The challenges and assumptions we identified form the bedrock for three emergent insights. First, following from the lack of construct clarity, we suggest recentering the phenomenon’s defining cognitive feature—the belief that others overestimate one’s abilities—as an important course correction. Second, stemming from the questionable assumptions, we outline opportunities for future theoretical development and empirical exploration. Third, to inspire the next wave of research by organizational scholars, we bridge lines of inquiry at the intersection of the impostor phenomenon and the organizational domains alongside which it is often mentioned (i.e., leadership, diversity, and identity).

  PublisherDOI

• Better Together: Member Proactivity Is Better for Team Performance When Aligned with Conscientiousness

  Academy of Management Discoveries · 2023-05-09 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Proactivity, the tendency to create change in the work environment, typically improves team performance. This relationship is far from perfect, however. We explore inconsistencies in the team proactivity literature to shed light on an important question – when is member proactivity beneficial or dysfunctional for teams? First, we consider the composition of member proactivity at the team level and whether a simple ‘more is better’ heuristic neglects a more complex relationship linking member proactivity to team coordination and performance. Second, we explore whether proactivity is better when aligned with another individual difference focused on the propensity to plan and coordinate with others (i.e., conscientiousness). In two studies, we compare traditional additive and configurational compositional approaches to these two attributes with a new attribute alignment approach, allowing us to examine the co-occurrence of proactivity and conscientiousness within some team members relative to others. First, we find that team member proactivity-conscientiousness alignment (P-C alignment) predicts the performance of MBA consulting teams better than the other team composition models we considered. Then, we replicate this finding in a laboratory simulation, finding that it occurs because P-C alignment improves team coordination. Our results demonstrate that member proactivity is most effective for the team when it aligns with conscientiousness.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Upward Mobility, the Cleft Habitus, and Speaking Up: How Class Transitions Relate to Individual and Organizational Antecedents of Voice

  Academy of Management Journal · 2022-01-30 · 35 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This research explores the relationship between upward mobility and voice. We build hypotheses and find evidence that rather than being imprinted with a lower sense of efficacy, the upwardly mobile possess a high internal sense of efficacy and are likely to speak up. However, this positive pathway to voice for the upwardly mobile is offset by managers being more inclined to solicit voice from those who come from, and have remained in, higher social class positions. We test our hypotheses in three studies: a field survey, a preregistered analysis of an archival dataset, and a preregistered experiment. This work provides evidence that the internal self-views long associated with those from lower social class backgrounds may not adequately describe the upwardly mobile. Contrary to having a persistent low sense of their abilities, we find that the upwardly mobile espouse high efficacy and do speak up but that managers appear less likely to provide them with equal opportunities for voice, instead seeking it from employees from more elite backgrounds. This work also extends theories of employee voice by showing how managers' decisions about whose input to solicit are influenced by employees' socially significant characteristics in ways that could lead to systematic disadvantages.

  PublisherDOI

• Keeping Teams Together: How Ethical Leadership Moderates the Effects of Performance on Team Efficacy and Social Integration

  Journal of Business Ethics · 2021 · 65 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  PublisherDOI

• The Kosher Capones: A History of Chicago’s Jewish Gangsters. Joe Kraus

  MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States · 2021-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Joe Kraus’s history of Jewish gangsters in Chicago details a small part of the complex world of organized crime. The Kosher Capones: A History of Chicago’s Jewish Gangsters is aptly titled even though none of the figures Kraus discusses approached the reputation of the notorious Al Capone. The title also signals the tone of the work, which both recalls the nostalgia so often associated with organized crime and signals the author’s objective, academic approach. Kraus’s careful reading of primary and secondary sources, combined with his lucid prose, results in an engaging study that convinces the readers that we would all do well to pay greater attention to crime, its origins, and consequences. Kraus came to his topic via his own family history; his mother asked him to look into the murder of her father and the history of his grandfather’s brothers. Although Kraus’s thorough research relied heavily on the local...

  PublisherDOI

• Talking shop: An exploration of how talking about work affects our initial interactions

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Social Science
  PublisherDOI

• The Social Dynamics of Social Identity Transitions

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2020-07-29

  article

  The purpose of this symposium is to explore the social dynamics of social identity transitions. To this end, the symposium will include the presentation of four papers which illustrate how social mobility (Martin and Beetz), shifts in social expectations (Knowlton), and observer judgement (Levitt, Murphy, and Pratt) influence people’s work- related social identity transitions. Research on people’s efforts to revise, repair, reconstruct, reinforce, or navigate work-related identities, known as “identity work” (Brown, 2015), has typically focused on situations in which individuals move across static role/job boundaries, such as from one professional role into another (e.g. Pratt, Rockmann, and Kaufmann, 2006), or how individuals manage static occupations that, by their nature, induce intrapsychic tension regarding identity (e.g. Kreiner, Hollensbe, & Sheep, 2006). Social identity transitions can be highly socially dynamic, however, with people often engaging in identity work due to changes in other individuals, institutions, and/or broad social forces (Brown, 2015; Petriglieri, 2011; Petriglieri et al., 2019). In a world that is ever more socially connected, interdependent, and transparent, the potential for social actors or forces to spur individual-level identity work by affecting a social group’s boundaries or meaning is high. By featuring work that provides insight into the social dynamics of social identity transitions, this symposium draws attention to a topic that is key to understanding the inner experiences of much of the present and future workforce. Social Class Transition and Employee Voice Presenter: Sean Martin; U. of Virginia Cashing in or Selling Out? Identity Co-Optation and Authenticity in Craft Industries Presenter: Keith Norman Leavitt; Oregon State U. Presenter: Chad Benjamin Murphy; Oregon State U. Who Can Be an Entrepreneur? Entrepreneurial Support Organizations & Entrepreneur Identity Presenter: Karren Kimberly Knowlton; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Presenter: Banu Ozkazanc-Pan; Brown U. Presenter: Susan Clark Muntean; U. of North Carolina, Asheville My Class has Changed but My Upbringing Has Not: Identity Navigation & Upward Class Mobility Presenter: Arianna M. Beetz; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James R. Detert

  University of Virginia

  5 shared

• Louise Milne

  University of St Andrews

  4 shared

• Stéphane Côté

  University of Toronto

  4 shared

• Kyle J. Emich

  University of Delaware

  3 shared

• Peter Belmi

  University of Virginia

  3 shared

• Elizabeth McClean

  Cornell University

  3 shared

• David A. Harrison

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2 shared

• Spencer Harrison

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Wells Fargo Award for Research Excellence
• Responsible Research in Business Management Honor Roll