Jeffrey Pfeffer (born July 23, 1946, St. Louis, Missouri) is an American business theorist and the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
===Early life== Pfeffer graduated high school from the Webb School of California. He received his BS and MS degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University and his PhD from Stanford University. He began his career at the business school at the University of Illinois and then taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1973 to 1979.
Pfeffer has served on the boards of several human capital management companies including Resumix, Unicru, and Workstream. He also served on the board of publicly traded Sonosite (SONO) for ten years and on the boards of private high-technology companies Actify and Audible Magic. He is currently on the board of directors of the nonprofit, Quantum Leap Healthcare, as well as on the advisory boards of several private companies.
Pfeffer was elected a fellow of the Academy of Management more than 25 years ago, was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, won the Richard D. Irwin award for scholarly contributions to management, is in the Thinker's 50 Hall of Fame, and in 2011, was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University.
Pfeffer formalized the study of resource dependence theory in his text The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence-Perspective, which he co-authored with Jerry Salancik.
Pfeffer has done theoretical and empirical research on the subjects of human resource management, power and politics in organizations, evidence-based management, the knowing-doing gap, leadership, stratification and labor markets inside organizations, the sociology of science, how and why theories become self-fulfilling, the psychological relationship between time and money, and economic evaluation.
Pfeffer has been recognised for writing case studies, and was listed among the top 40 case authors published by The Case Centre in 2016. He was ranked 25th in 2015/16.
Pfeffer has taught both elective and core classes in human resource management and the core course in organizational behavior. When he joined the Stanford faculty, he developed an elective on power in organizations. First called Power and Politics in Organizations, some years ago the class was retitled The Paths to Power. The elective has been consistently popular, with Pfeffer teaching two sections per year and, over the years, other colleagues teaching sections as well.
Pfeffer discusses evidence-based management in the Harvard Business Review. This is a form of managing where ideas are presented to managers who in turn ask the team to show them evidence that their ideas work. This keeps managers from making decisions without having the right information to make a decision. This strategy that Pfeffer talks about can help managers learn what works and what does not work.
Pfeiffer writes an online column about twice a month for Fortune.