Rohit Piplani
Assistant Professor of Management
Dr. Rohit Piplani is an Assistant Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne.
He earned his Ph.D. in Management & Entrepreneurship from the University of Connecticut, with concentrations in organisational behaviour and social network analysis.
His research focuses on the antecedents and consequences of social networks in the workplace, and covers topics such as employee creativity and innovation, relational energy, changes in intra-organisational networks, status and team dynamics.
He adopts a social network perspective to explore the influence of relational characteristics and behaviours on individual, dyadic, and team-level outcomes. He is currently examining how employees can leverage their dormant relationships to achieve instrumental success in the workplace. In the domain of creativity and innovation, he is interested in understanding how employees and managers can leverage not only their own networks, but also those of their colleagues, to advance their innovative ideas in the workplace.
He has conducted both field and experimental research and consulted with a number of large corporations and small nonprofit organisations. His research has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, and The Leadership Quarterly. He is also the recipient of SIOP’s 2024 Mary L. Tenopyr Graduate Student Dissertation Award.
Rohit teaches Managing People, Leadership & Change, and Business Essentials on the Full-time and Part-time MBA programs at MBS. He is a member of the Academy of Management's Organizational Behavior Division and Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division.
Publications
Piplani, R.S., & Grosser, T.J. (Forthcoming). The networks of others: A model of secondhand brokerage and its effects on employee innovation. Journal of Management.
Lee, A., Newman, A., Maio, G., Piplani, R. S., & Harvey, W. (2025). Leader-Follower Value Congruence: A Systematic Review of the Literature and a Future Research Agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 36(6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2025.101922
Grosser, T. J., Sterling, C. M., & Piplani, R. S. (2024). Energized people in prominent places: Political support networks, relational energy, and employee innovation implementation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 44(8), 1145-1163. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2734
Grosser, T. J., Sterling, C. M., Piplani, R. S., Cullen-Lester, K., & Floyd, T. M. (2023). A social network perspective on workplace inclusion: The role of network closure, network centrality, and need for affiliation. Human Resource Management, 62, 477-490. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22131
Peer-Reviewed Proceedings:
Piplani, R. S., Grosser, T.J., Lopez-Kidwell, G., Dineen, B. R., & Borgatti, S. P. (2022). The effect of team co-membership change on change in interpersonal affect in the workplace. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2022.249
