Sigal Barsade, whose studies of organizational culture charted the internal dynamics of the American workplace, and who advised countless companies on how to embrace and nurture their employees’ emotional well-being, died on Feb. 6 at her home in Wynnewood, PA. She was 56.

Dr. Barsade, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, was a pioneer in what organizational psychologists call the affective revolution: the study of how emotions, not just behavior and decision-making, shape a workplace culture and, in turn, how they affect an organization’s performance.

“One thing we now know…is that emotions are not noise — rather they are data. They reveal not just how people feel, but also what they think and how they will behave,” she told MIT Sloan Management Review in 2020.”