Meet the Dean

Dr. Kenneth S. Rhee is currently the dean of the Girard School of Business at Merrimack College. Prior to his appointment at Merrimack, he served as dean of the School of Business Leadership at Nazareth College, and associate dean of the College of Business Administration at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. He was also the program director for the Executive Leadership and Organizational Change program in the Department of Management, Haile/US Bank College of Business at Northern Kentucky University, and Chair of the Weatherhead School of Management Assessment and Development program at Case Western Reserve University.

His main areas of research are emotional intelligence, competency development, adult development and leadership.

He has worked extensively on competency assessment and development over the past thirty years with Fortune 500 organizations and non-profit and government institutions. Some of his former clients include Coca-Cola, Coopers and Lybrand, BF Goodrich, LTV Steel, Lexmark, NASA, Children’s Hospital, and others. He has also been working in emotional competency development and leadership development coaching for the past fifteen years. He has also delivered numerous emotional competency development programs and speeches to a number of organizations, including Northwest Airlines, Family Business Institute, Sea World Entertainment, Bureau of Public Debt, and Lucent Technologies.

Dr. Rhee has also presented at many international and national conferences, including the International Conference on Competency Development in Rome, Italy, the International Conference on Self-directed Learning, the Council on Adult Education and Learning Conference, the Academy of Management, the University of Wisconsin System Business Consortium, and Utah State Business in Partners.

He is the author of several articles on emotional intelligence, self-directed behavior change, and competencies including “Clustering competencies in emotional intelligence: Insights from the emotional competence inventory” with Richard Boyatzis and Dan Goleman. His paper “Educational Implications of Longitudinal Intervention on the Awareness of Self-Directed Change on Managerial Abilities” has been selected as “best paper” in the Academy of Management Proceedings. He is also published in the Journal of Management Education, International Journal of Organization and Theory, and Annual Advances of Case Research.

Dr. Rhee has his BA in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University, MS in Chemistry from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, MBA from Boston University, and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University.

Contact Dean Rhee