About

Victoria Medvec is the Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Executive Women at Kellogg, as well as the CEO of Medvec and Associates, a consulting firm focused on high stakes negotiations and strategic decisions. Dr. Medvec is a renowned expert in negotiations, executive decision making, influence, and corporate governance, and she teaches these topics to senior-level executives and Boards of Directors from companies around the world. Her clients include major corporations such as Google, IBM, Nike, Cisco, McKesson, United Airlines, and many others. She advises CEOs and their teams on critical decisions and negotiations involving mergers, acquisitions, contracts, and partnerships. Her research, published in top academic journals, has been highlighted in prominent media outlets, and she speaks nationally on women in leadership, corporate governance, and board decision making. Dr. Medvec has served on both public and private company Boards and is involved in venture funding through Ringleader Ventures. Her academic background includes a PhD in Psychology from Cornell University and a BA from Bucknell University, and she has held faculty positions at Kellogg since 1995.

Research topics

• Political Science

Selected publications

• Early career setback and future achievement in professional sports

  Scientific Reports · 2025-09-29

  articleOpen access

  A central tenet of human performance posits that past success is a key predictor of future outcomes. This principle underpins selection processes in various human endeavors, shaping opportunity, wage, and winner-take-all inequalities. Here we systematically examine the future performance of previous winners and non-winners across two sports contexts using two different empirical strategies. First, we track young athletes participating in world-class track and field competitions and compare the future performance of bronze medalists to those finishing just shy of the podium. Next, we study a novel natural experiment in tennis, where we compare future performances of 'lucky losers'-players who advanced to the main draw due to last-minute withdrawals from others-to those who just missed advancing. Our findings reveal that although past performance generally correlates with future outcomes, there appear to be notable exceptions at the margins. Interestingly, individuals initially classified as non-winners, despite being objectively outperformed, can surpass the future performance of their winning counterparts. These results not only reinforce the conventional wisdom of basing talent selection on past success but also introduce important nuances. They highlight the importance of recognizing both winning and non-winning experiences in talent scouting and assessment, with implications for nurturing diverse potential within talent pools.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Personen- und Werkregister

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  DOI

• Multiple equivalent simultaneous offers (MESOs) reduce the negotiator dilemma: How a choice of first offers increases economic and relational outcomes

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2019-05-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  The tension that negotiators face between claiming and creating value is particularly apparent when exchanging offers. We tested whether presenting a choice among first offers (Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers; MESOs) reduces this negotiator dilemma and increases economic and relational outcomes. Six experiments comparing MESOs to a single package-offer revealed three effects. First, MESOs produced stronger anchors and better outcomes for the offerer because recipients perceived MESOs as a more sincere attempt at reaching an agreement (agreement sincerity). Second, MESOs yielded greater joint outcomes because they were probabilistically more likely to include an economically attractive starting point for recipients (initial recipient-value). Third, MESOs allowed the offerer to secure a cooperative reputation and created a more cooperative negotiation climate. Negotiators who offered MESOs were able to claim and create more economic and relational value. MESOs reduced the negotiator dilemma for offerers by also reducing it for recipients. Weblinks in the appendix give access to supplementary materials, analyses, and data.

  PublisherDOI

• The illusion of transparency in performance appraisals: When and why accuracy motivation explains unintentional feedback inflation

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2017-10-14 · 44 citations

  articleOpen access

  The present research shows that managers communicate negative feedback ineffectively because they suffer from transparency illusions that cause them to overestimate how accurately employees perceive their feedback. We propose that these illusions emerge because managers are insufficiently motivated to engage in effortful thinking, which reduces the accuracy with which they communicate negative feedback to employees. Six studies (N = 1883) using actual performance appraisals within an organization and role plays with MBA students, undergraduates, and online participants show that transparency illusions are stronger when feedback is negative (Studies 1–2), that they are not driven by employee bias (Study 3), and occur because managers are insufficiently motivated to be accurate (Studies 4a–c). In addition, these studies demonstrate that transparency illusions are driven by more indirect communication by the manager and how different interventions can be used to mitigate these effects (Studies 4a–c). An internal meta-analysis including 11 studies from the file drawer (N = 1887) revealed a moderate effect size (d = 0.43) free of publication bias.

  PublisherDOI

• Transparency Illusions in Performance Appraisals: How Egocentric Bias Explains Feedback Inflation

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article provides an answer to the question of why negative feedback in organizational settings is often perceived more positively than intended. Past research has primarily focused on empathic buffering and conflict avoidance to explain why feedback inflation occurs. We argue that these accounts are incomplete and propose that there is a disconnect between the message the evaluator intends to send and the message received by the person being evaluated. This disconnect occurs because the sender suffers from a widespread egocentric bias, the illusion of transparency, which suggests that people insufficiently adjust from their internal experiences and thus believe that their feelings, thoughts, and behavior are as apparent to others as they are to them. We test our theory in the context of performance appraisals using a manager-employee paradigm. Across four studies employing different scenarios, performance measures, and samples, we demonstrate that managers consistently suffered from illusory feelings of transparency and underestimated how positively employees understood their negative feedback. We rule out the possibility that employees misinterpreted the negative feedback and show that managers predicted more accurately how the employee would interpret the feedback as it became more positive. Finally, we propose a theoretically motivated intervention: managers no longer suffered from illusory feelings of transparency when they were asked to consider arguments at odds with their egocentric views, because doing so reduced their self-focus. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for delivering performance feedback in organizations, the illusion of transparency, and social cognition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When bringing negotiators face-to-face shrinks the pie

  PsycEXTRA Dataset · 2014-01-01

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Some counterfactual determinants of satisfaction and regret.

  2014-01-14 · 22 citations

  articleSenior author

  Most people are familiar with the parable of the man who was upset because he had no shoes-until he met a man with no feet. The tale is of particular interest to psychologists because it offers a fundamentally psychological message: A person's material conditions matter less than how those conditions are phenomenologically experienced.

  PublisherDOI

• The Communication Orientation Model

  Personality and Social Psychology Review · 2011-08-16 · 98 citations

  review

  Two quantitative meta-analyses examined how the presence of visual channels, vocal channels, and synchronicity influences the quality of outcomes in negotiations and group decision making. A qualitative review of the literature found that the effects of communication channels vary widely and that existing theories do not sufficiently account for these contradictory findings. To parsimoniously encompass the full range of existing data, the authors created the communication orientation model, which proposes that the impact of communication channels is shaped by communicators' orientations to cooperate or not. Two meta-analyses-conducted separately for negotiations and decision making-provide strong support for this model. Overall, the presence of communication channels (a) increased the achievement of high-quality outcomes for communicators with a neutral orientation, (b) did not affect the outcomes for communicators with a cooperative orientation, but (c) hurt communicators' outcomes with a noncooperative orientation. Tests of cross-cultural differences in each meta-analysis further supported the model: for those with a neutral orientation, the beneficial effects of communication channels were weaker within East Asian cultures (i.e., Interdependent and therefore more predisposed towards cooperation) than within Western cultures (i.e., Independent).

  PublisherDOI

• The reality and myth of sacred issues in ideologically-based negotiations.

  2009-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• The Reality and Myth of Sacred Issues in Negotiations

  Negotiation and Conflict Management Research · 2009-07-09 · 13 citations

  article

  Abstract This article investigates the role of sacred issues in a dyadic negotiation set in an environmental context. As predicted, a focus on sacred issues negatively impacts the negotiation, producing more impasses, lower joint outcomes, and more negative perceptions of one’s opponent; however, this is only true when both parties perceive that they have a strong alternative to a negotiated agreement. When negotiation parties perceive that they have weak alternatives, sacred issues did not have any effect on negotiation outcomes or opponent perceptions. These results suggest that the negative effects of sacred issues are driven in part by whether negotiators have recourse; in other words, exercising one’s principles and values may depend on whether people can afford to do so. We conclude by suggesting that the impact of certain sacred issues may be contextually dependent and that the term “pseudo‐sacred” may actually be a more accurate label for certain contexts.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Thomas Gilovich

  Cornell University

  26 shared

• Roderick I. Swaab

  9 shared

• Kenneth Savitsky

  9 shared

• Kathleen L. McGinn

  Harvard University Press

  8 shared

• Adam D. Galinsky

  8 shared

• Mary C. Kern

  Baruch College

  6 shared

• Margaret G. Meloy

  Pennsylvania State University

  6 shared

• Gail Berger

  6 shared

Labs

• Center for Executive WomenPI

Awards & honors

• Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award (2017-2018)
• Outstanding Professor of the Year Finalist
• Kellogg Alumni Professor of the Year Award (2012)
• Chairs' Core Course Teaching Award (2010-2011, 2003-2004, 20…
• Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award (2000-2001, 1999-2000, 1996-19…