Skip to main content
Chandon at work.jpg

Roderick Swaab

Professor of Organisational Behaviour

Biography

Roderick is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and the Academic Director of INSEAD's PhD programme and Academic Director, Negotiation and Conflict Management Collaborative. Roderick Swaab is directing Advanced Negotiations and Negotiation Fundamentals.

Roderick's research examines the impact of communication structures on value creation in business negotiations and conflict resolution. He also studies the emergence of hierarchies in teams and how these impact coordination, conflict, and performance. His research has produced interventions that improve negotiation, dispute resolution, and teamwork, and has been published in leading journals, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science. His research and service to the field has received awards from the Academy of Management, the International Association for Conflict Management, the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO), and was featured in outlets like the Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, Economist, Scientific American, and Forbes.

Roderick's teaching received several awards. He has won INSEAD EMBA's Best Teacher Award in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 for teaching the Negotiations Dynamics course. He also received the "Dean's Commendation for Excellence in MBA Teaching" since 2015 for teaching the OB1 core course and the Negotiations Dynamics course, and was selected as one of Singapore’s most influential business professors aged 40 and under. His co-authored case "Ricardo Semler: A revolutionary model of leadership" won the Best Case in Human Resources / Organisational Behaviour awarded by the Case Centre. Prior to joining INSEAD Roderick held a position at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University where he taught in the MBA and EMBA programs and was nominated for the Outstanding Professor of the year award.

Latest posts

Sort by

Strategy

Negotiating With a Team? Skip the Chit-Chat

R. Swaab, R. B. Lount Jr., S. Chung, J. M. Brett

Team negotiators may achieve higher joint gains when they first discuss superordinate goals that either team can’t achieve without the help of the other.

Strategy

Negotiators Should Decrease Concessions Across Rounds

K. S. Tey, R. Swaab, M. Schaerer, N. Madan

Signalling your bottom line reduces your counterparty’s ambitions.

Leadership & Organisations

How Managers Self-Sabotage When Giving Negative Feedback

M. Schaerer, R. Swaab

Communication gaps between managers and their employees widen when delivering criticism.

Strategy

Imagine Alternatives to Negotiate More Ambitiously

M. Schaerer, M. Schweinsberg, R. Swaab

Mentally simulating an attractive alternative can provide some of the advantages that real alternatives typically offer.
1 comment

Leadership & Organisations

Negotiating Deals From a Position of Powerlessness

When you are negotiating a deal it pays to have viable alternatives to fall back on – or at least that’s what most people think. New research suggests that being powerless can be liberating and help you achieve better deals.
1 comment