Marta Elvira, Ph.D.
Dr. Marta Elvira is a visiting professor at IESE’s Managing People in Organizations department. She earned her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior & Industrial Relations at U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business, after obtaining her Licenciatura (B.S.) in Business and Economics at the University of Oviedo (Spain). Prior to joining IESE, she spent five years as Academic Dean at Lexington College (Chicago, USA). She has been 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 Dr. 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 has co-edited two books: Best Practices in Human Resources Management in Latin America (Routledge, 2008) and Managing Human Resources in Latin America: An Agenda for International Leaders (Routledge, 2005) as well as two special issues on research in Latin America for the International Journal of Human Resources Management (2005) and the International Journal of Manpower (2007). Besides people management systems and incentives in organizations, her research interest is on social inequality and human capital development. Her new area of interest focuses on emergent occupations in health and social care.
Dr. Elvira’s 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, and Group and Organization Management. She has also published in Spanish journals, including Universia Business Review and Revista de Empresa. Recognizing the contributions 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 Journal of Management Research and the Business Journal of Hispanic Research, besides reviewing for numerous research publications.
Dr. Elvira has received several teaching awards, including the Teaching Excellence Award in the MBA Program. She was voted by MBA students as an Outstanding Business Professor in the Business Week Guide to Top 50 Business Schools (1999, 2001), and received the campus-wide UC Irvine’s Teaching Excellence Award (2000). In the summer of 2001 she received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the research programs with UC Irvine’s Office of Graduate Studies. She has served in numerous doctoral dissertation committees in the USA 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, pharmaceutical, hospitality, and information technology industries on strategic compensation redesign; incentive programs; employee turnover; and identification, analysis, and resolution of multi-cultural issues. She also delivers executive education programs for firms such as Allergan, Cisco Systems, Citi, IBM, Intel, Marriott International, and PepsiCo. She teaches in UCLA’s Anderson School of Management’s Advanced Human Resources Executive Education program and the Latino Leadership Institute since its inception. From 2005-2008 she served on the Board of the Illinois Hotel and Lodging Association Educational Foundation.