About Shahla Ghobadi

Academic Positions

Shahla Ghobadi is Professor of Digital Organisation in the Management and Organisations Department at Leeds University Business School. 

She completed her PhD in Information Systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, following earlier studies in IT Management and Industrial Engineering. Her doctoral research examined how competition and collaboration (coopetition) among cross-functional software development teams shape knowledge sharing and project success.

Before joining the University of Leeds in 2019, Shahla taught at the University of Manchester, where she specialised in systems thinking, system dynamics, and digital transformation. She was also a Visiting Scholar at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta. 

Research

Shahla's research draws on years of industry experience, both before and after her PhD, across software entrepreneurship, automobile manufacturing, and e-Science development. She contributes theoretical frameworks that help organisations build better digital products and online communities to collaborate in promoting the social impacts of products and development processes. 

This research has explored themes including knowledge sharing and coopetition, Agile development, diversity, resourcefulness, digital activism, and the ethics of digital products and processes. Listen to Shahla explaining some of her works here. 

Shahla's research has been published, or is forthcoming, in leading journals, including the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Management Studies, British Journal of Management, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Information and Organization, Information & Management, Information Systems Frontiers, and the Journal of Systems and Software. 

She has received research funding from bodies such as the Australian School of Business (UNSW), the Australian Government's Endeavour Executive Fellowship, and the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme. In 2007, motivated by a desire to make systems thinking accessible to Persian-speaking students and practitioners, Shahla wrote the first book on System Dynamics in Farsi. The book remained in continuous publication by becoming a widely used reference in universities and professional practice.