Ulf Schaefer
Ulf joined SDA Bocconi in April 2019 as an Associate Professor of Practice in the
knowledge group "Leadership,
organisation & Human Resources". His teaching portfolio spans and connects themes of leadership,
change/transformation,
group dynamics, decision-making, and organisational ethics. Ulf is the program director of the
Emerging Leaders Program
that SDA Bocconi offers in collaboration with ESMT Berlin.
Ulf’s research interest focuses on understanding (un)ethical behavior in organisations via the lens
offered by moral
psychology. Specifically, he studies how people and groups normalize unethical behavior via moral
disengagement, that
is, via a cognitive reconstrual of morality and agency. Ulf authored “Moral Disengagement as a
social process” and “The
seven styles of influencing”, published articles in academic and managerial journals, and wrote
numerous (some
best-selling and award winning) case studies.
Before joining SDA Bocconi, Ulf was a strategy consultant at A.T. Kearney, a co-founder and
consultant of The Launch
Group, a manager at DaimlerChrysler, and director and head of strategy consulting Germany for
Sapient Corp. Between 2005
and 2019, Ulf was a program director at ESMT where he designed and implemented more than 100
executive education
leadership development interventions, working across Europe, and in Turkey, Russia, Nigeria,
Argentina, Brazil, UAE,
Qatar, Israel, Lebanon, Singapore, and China.
Ulf remains co-affiliated with ESMT as visiting lecturer and is the program director of its Leading
Change Initiative
program. Additionally, Ulf regularly teaches for HEC Paris, IAE Buenos Aires, HPI Potsdam, and
serves as a tutor for
case writing and case teaching with The Case Centre.
Ulf earned an M.A. in Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic and Theory of Science from the University of
Bonn (Germany) after
studying in Bonn and at UC Berkeley and UT Knoxville (USA). He earned an MBA from Rotterdam School
of Management,
Erasmus Universiteit (The Netherlands) after studying in Rotterdam and at Richard Ivey School of
Business, Western
University (Canada). Ulf completed his PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
investigating moral thought
and behavior in social contexts.