About
Brit Middleton McClellan is a doctoral candidate in Strategic Management and Technology Entrepreneurship at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington, with a targeted graduation in 2026. She received her MBA from USC Marshall’s School of Business. Her research explores how governance dynamics, particularly board dependence, can shape strategic outcomes in high-stakes corporate events such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
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Her dissertation, "Dependence Reimagined: Extending and Enriching Conceptualizations of Dependence Between Directors and Their Firm," introduces a multidimensional framework that goes beyond traditional employment-based definitions to incorporate social and financial forms of dependence. It examines how these nuanced dependencies influence director behavior during critical events such as acquisition premium negotiations, offering a richer behavioral account of governance mechanisms.
Brit’s portfolio demonstrates a strong and growing presence in top-tier management research. She has a forthcoming publication in Organizational Dynamics (with David Sirmon and Michael Hitt) that investigates resource orchestration in M&A, and a second-round revise-and-resubmit at the Academy of Management Journal examining entrepreneurial engagement with societal grand challenges.
Her current pipeline includes two additional manuscripts: one on compensation-driven director behavior in M&A (with Sirmon and Pahnke), and another analyzing market-shaping strategies in the electric vehicle industry (with Kotha and Rindova).
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What sets Brit apart is her rich and diverse professional background in organizational leadership, business development, and strategic consulting prior to academia. She served as Vice President of People Operations for a 450-employee company, where she helped guide the firm through a successful private equity acquisition. This hands-on experience with firm-level strategic decision-making, leadership dynamics, and scaling operations gives her a unique lens into the phenomena she now studies empirically. It fuels her research intuition and allows her to engage with theoretical questions through a grounded, practitioner-informed perspective that brings both relevance and rigor to her work.
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She has presented her research at major conferences including the Academy of Management and Strategic Management Society, organized symposia and participated in doctoral workshops and consortia across conferences. Brit is building a scholarly identity that bridges academic theory and executive relevance, advancing governance, entrepreneurship, and strategic management under uncertainty.
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Her trajectory reflects a strong grounding in both qualitative and quantitative research methods and a commitment to advancing the understanding of governance and entrepreneurship under uncertainty. Brit combines theoretical ambition with empirical rigor, contributing to both scholarly conversations and practical insights in corporate strategy and innovation ecosystems.
