Skip to main content

Alan Witt

Professor, Hobby School of Public Affairs
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies  
Professor, Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Professor, Department of Management, C.T. Bauer College of Business


Expertise: Organizational science, including strategy-culture alignment, customer service, social and political skill, work performance (e.g., adaptive performance, core task performance, and counterproductive behavior), leadership development, personality, personnel selection, organizational politics, situational awareness, healthy workplaces/place rights, and the work-family interface.

Career Highlights:

Alan Witt brings years of first-hand experience working for both private sector firms and public-sector organizations to his role as an educator and researcher in academia. A White House intern at the age of 21, his experience spans work for multinational firms, privately-owned family companies, the Department of Defense, civilian federal agencies, and local and state public sector organizations.

Alan’s research focuses on strategy-cultural alignment and how leaders can shape the work culture so that employee values, priorities, and behavioral norms enable successful implementation of the organization’s strategy. In 2017, he was one of two UH faculty listed among the top two percent of most cited scholars in industrial and organizational psychology textbooks. In 2020, Alan was one of 132 UH faculty listed among the most cited scholars in the world. He was named a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2005.

Alan received a B.A. in Public Policy and Sociology (Tulane University), a B.S. in Psychology (Tulane University), an M.S. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology (Illinois Institute of Technology), and a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology (Tulane University).