Rate My Professor Ray Reagans

Ray Reagans is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management and Professor of Organization Studies in the Work and Organization Studies Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He currently serves as Associate Dean for Community Engagement. Reagans holds a BA in sociology and economics from Brown University and a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. His academic career at MIT Sloan encompasses teaching and research in management, with a focus on organizational behavior and social structures within teams and networks.

Reagans' research addresses interconnected questions on how demographic characteristics including age, gender, and race influence the development of interpersonal relationships; how demographic diversity shapes a team's social capital, its performance, and capacity for learning; and how individuals' social networks enable knowledge transfer and sharing. More recent investigations examine the impact of organizational climate and culture on the retention and performance of women and racial minorities. His scholarship has appeared in leading journals, with key publications such as 'Network Structure and Knowledge Transfer: The Effects of Cohesion and Range' with Bill McEvily (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2003), 'Managing Knowledge in Organizations: An Integrative Framework and Review of Emerging Themes' with Linda Argote and Bill McEvily (Management Science, 2003), 'How to Make the Team: Social Networks vs. Demography as Criteria for Designing Effective Projects in a Contract R&D Firm' with Ezra Zuckerman Sivan and Bill McEvily (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2004), 'Networks, Diversity, and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Units' with Ezra Zuckerman Sivan (Organization Science, 2001), 'Preferences, Identity and Competition: Predicting Tie Strength from Demographic Data' (Management Science, 2005), 'Knowledge Utilization, Coordination, and Team Performance' with Ella Miron-Spektor and Linda Argote (Organization Science, 2016), 'Shared Language in the Team Network-Performance Association' with Hagay Volvovsky and Ronald S. Burt (Collective Intelligence, 2023), and 'Mutual Learning in Networks: Building Theory by Piecing Together Puzzling Facts' (Research in Organizational Behavior, 2022). Reagans earned induction as a 2022 Academy of Management Fellow for contributions to the science and practice of management and co-won a 2022 MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Award for innovative teaching methods.