Jennifer Gibbs

Jennifer Gibbs is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her PhD from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in 2002. Her research focuses on collaboration in global teams and other distributed work arrangements, as well as the affordances of new technologies such as social media for strategic communication practices. Her current projects include studies of: 1) social media and organizational knowledge sharing, 2) global virtual team collaboration, 3) social support and normative control in online communities, and 4) distraction and the role of new technologies. Her work draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods and takes a field-based, constitutive approach to understanding organizing processes and technological affordances. It places a particular focus on the dialectical tensions inherent in such processes and the productive role they play in enabling both organizational and individual stakeholders to attend to multiple diverse goals. Her work has been published in leading journals from a variety of disciplines including Administrative Science Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, Communication Research, Communication Yearbook, Computers in Human Behavior, Human Relations, The Information Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Social & Personal Relationships, Management Communication Quarterly, and Organization Science.

Professor Gibbs is currently an Editor of Communication Research and was formerly an Associate Editor for Management Communication Quarterly, as well as serving on the editorial boards of a number of other top-tier communication journals. Her research has also won major awards such as the W. Charles Redding Dissertation Award and the Human Relations Article of the Year Award, as well as top paper awards from national and international conferences. She teaches courses in Organizational Communication, Communication Technology, and Intercultural Communication at the undergraduate and graduate levels and has been gratified to receive several awards for her teaching and mentoring. She has conducted intercultural and global teams consulting and training in multinational organizations such as Xerox and Alcoa and for professional audiences. She has given many invited talks and is quoted regularly in national media outlets including ABC News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show, as well as international media sources. Before her academic career, she worked in consumer market research in Prague, Czech Republic for four years. She has also lived in Germany and Austria, and was a visiting professor at the University of Western Australia business school in 2013 while on sabbatical in Perth, Australia.