Justin Berg

Justin M. Berg is an award-winning researcher, teacher, and thought leader on the science of creativity and innovation. He studies how to successfully develop, evaluate, and implement creative ideas in and outside organizations over time. This includes research on job crafting, which is the process of employees creatively redesigning their own jobs to better suit their personalities and interests.

Justin received his Ph.D. in management from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and his B.A. in organizational studies and psychology from the University of Michigan. After spending a decade on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he realized his longtime dream of returning to the University of Michigan as a tenured professor at the Ross School of Business.

He has done research with and consulted for a variety of organizations, including Cirque du Soleil, Google, VMware, Burt’s Bees, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. His work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Organization Science. He has been invited to discuss his pioneering work on top podcasts, including Hidden Brain and Freakonomics, and his insights have been featured in TIME, BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The Atlantic, Inc., Forbes, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review. In addition, Justin has received the Best Published Paper Award from the Academy of Management OMT Division, as well as the Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students.

Prior to graduate school, Justin was an R&D Consultant for the Center for Positive Organizations at Michigan Ross. During this time, he led the invention of the Job Crafting™ Exercise (along with Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski), which is a tool that helps people creatively redesign their jobs to be more engaging and fulfilling.