Julita Haber

Julita Haber is an associate clinical professor in the Leading People and Organizations area at the Gabelli School of Business. Her research interests focus on impressions of competency, competency pressures, and emotions of (in)competency in the workplace. She studies the adverse effects of organizational pressures to appear competent at work. A City University of New York research grant recipient, Dr. Haber coined a new research term of “competency labor” in management along with publishing other studies. Dr. Haber regularly attends and presents at top scholarly management conferences. She is a recipient of two awards for best reviewer as well as the best paper award in the teaching innovation/management education track at the Southern Management Association Conference.

Dr. Haber uses innovative pedagogical methods. She developed a fitness-integrated learning (FIL) approach that engages students in physical exercise when learning in class. In the spring of 2018, her FIL class was the first of its kind on a college campus in the United States, which brought national attention to Fordham in the mainstream media.

With a goal to enhance learning, Dr. Haber helps students to cement newly learned management concepts by role-playing real-life workplace scenarios. Her “Act on Your Research” contest encourages both students and faculty to share research findings through brief story-like videos. She also actively uses virtual reality and augmented reality (AV/VR) to increase student engagement and infuse emergent technology into a classroom. As a recipient of two dean’s awards of visibility and teaching innovation, Dr. Haber also serves as the track chair for teaching innovation and management education at the Southern Management Association. 

Dr. Haber leverages her 20 years of business and management-consulting experience in her academic career. At Deloitte and PwC, her work involved operations, strategy, financial services, and information technology across the pharmaceutical, biotech, healthcare, nonprofit, insurance, banking, telecommunication, transport, distribution, and services industries in the United States and the Middle East. Her clients included Prudential, MetLife, Novartis, Macy’s, Bank Leumi, Bezek, Egged, Elite, and Staten Island Hospital, among others. She also held positions of training and development specialist and strategy manager at New York-Presbyterian Hospital for a number of years. Prior to consulting, she started her career in information services as a programmer.

After leaving her native Poland at the age of 15 to live in the United States on her own, she was determined to pursue her education. She received an undergraduate degree in computer science and minor in mathematics from New York University, followed by a master’s degree from Boston University’s campus in Israel and a doctoral degree in business administration from TUI University. Dr. Haber has lived and studied on three continents. Growing up in Europe, working in the Middle East, living in the United States, and traveling around the world to about 50 countries have enabled Dr. Haber to develop a culturally diversified perspective that heightens her students’ global exposure.

• Ph.D.: Business administration, TUI University
• Master’s: Management, Boston University/Ben Gurion University, Israel
• Bachelor’s: Computer science, Mathematics minor, New York University

• Impression management
• Competency labor
• Fear of appearing incompetent
• Emotions of (in)competency
• Competency pressures
• Impressions of competency

• Pirson, M., Piedmont, R., Town, S., Nagy, N., Haber, J., McDonald, I., Janssen, C., Teague, J., Hollwitz, J., Gurtata, J. (2021). I was transformed, but I didn’t love the process: Testing students’ learning and feedback of the new ‘humanistic’ management course. Journal of Jesuit Business Education (in print).  
• Haber, J., Fitzgerald, S., Priya, K., & Brouer, R. (2020). Perceptions of competency norms in the workplace: A scale development. Drake Management Review, 9(1). https://escholarshare.drake.edu/handle/2092/2199
• Parlamis, J., & Badaway, R., Haber, J. & Brouer, R. (2020). Exploring fear of appearing incompetent, competency pressure, tactics, and perceptions in negotiations. International Journal of Conflict Management (in press).
• Haber, J. & Tesoriero, R. (2018). Student impression management in the classroom. Global Research in Higher Education, 1(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.22158/grhe.v1n1p69
• Haber, J. & Brouer, R. (2017). Impressions of competency: Tactics and a conceptual model. Journal of Management and Business Administration. Central Europe, 25(4).
• Haber, J. & Sarkar, N. (2017). Sensitivity analysis of extra credit assignments. Universal Journal of Management, 5(6).
• Haber, J., O’Connor, G., & Sarkar, N. (2016). Make your students sweat: Fitness integrated learning in business education. Journal Applied Business and Economics, 18(2).
• Haber, J., Pollack, J., Humphrey, R. (2014). Competency labor: A conceptual framework for examining individuals’ effort and emotions in projecting an image of competence at work. In N. Ashkanasy, W. Zerbe, and C. Hartel & (Eds.), Research on Emotion in Organizations: Emotions and the Organizational Fabric, Vol. 10, Westport, CT: Quorum Books.
• Brouer, R. L., Gallagher, V. C., Badawy, R. L., & Haber, J. (2014). Political skill dimensionality and impression management choice and effective use. Journal of Business and Psychology, 29(1).