Marta Elvira is professor in the departments of Managing People in Organizations and Strategic Management and holder of Chair of Family-Owned Business. She earned her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior & Industrial Relations at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Prior to joining IESE, Prof. Elvira served as academic dean at Lexington College. She was formerly a tenured associate professor in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine, and associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD (France). In 1999-2000, Prof. Elvira was a visiting scholar at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in the Institute for Work and Employment Research as well as at the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico). She lectures regularly in UCLA’s Leadership Suite – Executive Education programs.
Prof. Elvira brings a multi-cultural perspective to her research and teaching. She has co-edited two books: Managing Human Resources in Latin America: An Agenda for International Leaders (Routledge, 2005), Best Practices in HRM in Latin America (Routledge, 2008) and Understanding Organizations in Complex Environments (Palgrave Macmillan-IESE Collection: UK, 2012) , as well as two special issues on research in Latin America for the International Journal of Human Resources Management (December 2005) and the International Journal of Manpower (2007).
Besides human resource practices and incentives in organizations, her research interests focus on social inequality and human capital development. Her work examines the political and economic processes involved in designing organizational reward structures, and the joint effects of incentive pay and promotion systems on employee earnings and performance. Her articles have appeared in leading journals including Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Work and Occupations,Industrial Relations, Organizational Dynamics and The Journal of World Business.
In recognition of the achievements of her early academic career, she received the 2002 Ascendant Scholar Award of the Western Academy of Management. She serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Research and has been a member of the editorial board at the Academy of Management Journal, the Business Journal of Hispanic Research, and reviews for multiple research publications.
At IESE she teaches classes for the PhD and Executive MBA programs. She also has taught executive education programs and/or consulted for companies such as Airbus Military, Allergan, Banco Santander, BBVA, Cisco Systems, Citi, Endesa, IBM, Intel, PepsiCo, among others.
Prof. Elvira has received numerous teaching awards, including the Teaching Excellence Award in the MBA Program. In addition, she was voted by MBA students as an Outstanding Business Professor in the Business Week Guide to the Top 50 Business Schools (1999, 2001), and received the campus-wide UC Irvine’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2000. In the summer of 2001 she received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the University of California, Irvine, Office of Graduate Studies. She has served on numerous doctoral dissertation committees in the U.S. and Europe.
In addition, she lectures and consults internationally on leadership development, diversity and talent management. She has advised Fortune 500 companies in financial services, food & beverages, hospitality, and technology manufacturing industries on strategic compensation redesign; incentive programs; organizational structure; and identification, analysis, and resolution of multi-cultural issues.