Wendy K. Smith

Wendy K. Smith is an American business professor. She is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware. A fellow of the Academy of Management, her research on paradox theory examines how leaders manage interdependent, seemingly contradictory tensions, and demonstrates that a “both/and” mindset leads to improved business performance in complex organizational environments.

Education Smith earned her undergraduate degree from Yale University in political psychology in 1996. In 2004, she earned an M.A. in psychology from Harvard University and a Ph.D in organizational behavior from the Harvard Business School in 2006.

Career Smith was hired at the University of Delaware in 2006. She co-founded and is the faculty director of the university's Women’s Leadership Initiative. Her research focuses on strategic paradoxes encountered by leaders and provides frameworks for more effective responses to contradictory, interdependent tensions. She notes that these tensions cannot be resolved through trade-offs or linear decision-making, but instead requires a “both/and” mindset that accepts contradiction and gains insight from it, thus enabling organizations to leverage them more creatively and productively.

From 2019-2025, Smith received the Highly Cited Researchers award for being among the top 0.1% most-cited researchers in academic journals indexed by Web of Science. She, along with Lewis, was selected for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award in 2023, and they made the Thinkers50 Ranked list in 2025.

In 2022, Smith was elected Fellow of the Academy of Management.

Selected publications

Personal life Smith is married to Michael A. Posner, who is a professor of Statistics and Data Science at Villanova University. They have three children.