Maxim Sytch is the Jack D. Sparks – Whirlpool Corporation Research Professor of Business Administration and a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Previously, he was a lecturer in the Department of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
Poets & Quants named him one of the “40 Best Business Professors Under 40” worldwide. Maxim Sytch is an expert on leadership and organizational dynamics. His research examines how managers execute without formal authority and how they build and leverage relationships within and across organizational boundaries to improve performance. His recent work explores how companies shape their legal environments by leveraging social ties between lawyers and judges. His latest book, The Influence Economy (Oxford University Press, 2025), analyzes influence dynamics in professional services.
His research has appeared in leading outlets, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Managerial and Decision Economics, California Law Review, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Wall Street Journal. His work has been covered by the BBC, Reuters, BusinessWeek, Yahoo News, AsiaOne, The Brunei Times, Phys.org, and Human Resources Online, and his essays have appeared in HuffPost, Inc., and the Observer.
Awards and recognition include the Best Paper Award from the Organization and Management Theory Division of the Academy of Management (2010) for a study on influence dynamics in patent infringement litigation; finalist for the Best Paper Award at the Israel Strategy Conference (2012) for work on network communities and firms’ inventive productivity; finalist for the OMT Division’s Best Paper on Entrepreneurship Award (2016) for research on social structures connecting lawyers and federal judges; and finalist for the Knowledge and Innovation Best Paper Award at the Strategic Management Society Annual Conference (2019) for a paper on networks among disadvantaged inventors, which later received the 2022 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Research Award from the Ross School of Business.
In 2009–2010, he moderated an online Leadership Seminar in collaboration with The Washington Post. He served as an Associate Editor of Administrative Science Quarterly (2018–2023) and is a member of the Academy of Management, the American Sociological Association, and the Strategic Management Society. He has received Outstanding Reviewer Awards from the Academy of Management Journal and Organization Science.
Sytch won the McNeary Teaching Excellence Award, given to the top instructor in the Ross full-time MBA program, and the Ross Executive Education Teaching Impact Award for open-enrollment programs. His online specialization, Leading People and Teams (Coursera.org), is the world’s leading online leadership course, with over 700,000 students. He also advises and speaks to corporations worldwide; recent clients include Adient, Amazon, Bank of America, Bank Mandiri, BASF, Bosch, Caterpillar, Convatec, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, Epsilon, European Commission, Genus, Grainger, Google, Inforum, KPMG, Morgan Stanley, M&T Bank, Michigan Medicine, the National Football League, the National Intelligence Community, NextGen, Novartis, O-I Glass, Oracle, Principal, Qualcomm, Rio Tinto, Ronald McDonald House Charities, Saudi Telecom, Schneider Electric, SCL Health, Stellantis, Toyoda Gosei, Toyota, TriNet, TRW, UNUM, the U.S. Air Force, and Wabash.
Before entering academia, he worked in the financial sector at Merrill Lynch. He holds a Ph.D. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.