PhD in Management · INSEAD
Researcher · Educator · Consultant
On the human consequences
of how we design work.
I am an organizational behavior researcher and consultant with a PhD from INSEAD (France and Singapore), where I spent seven years investigating the consequences of how modern organizations design work, structure incentives, and reward performance.
My research addresses three intersecting questions: how job design shapes motivation and well-being; how gender shapes career outcomes, particularly in global financial markets; and how culture and diversity influence how we respond to challenges and opportunities at work.
Beyond the academy, I have spent more than a decade helping individuals and organizations navigate the terrain of career development, talent management, and professional growth — from bachelor students to senior executives, and across academic and corporate landscapes.
I grew up in Romania, studied in Germany, earned my doctorate between France and Singapore, taught in the Netherlands, and have made my home in France. Along the way I became fluent in English, French, Romanian, and Spanish, added working Italian, and picked up enough German and Portuguese to get by — and to be humbled. Each language has been a way of thinking as much as a way of speaking.
Living and working across five countries has meant continually renegotiating who I am in context: the Romanian in a German university, the European on an Asian campus, the outsider who slowly becomes a colleague. That experience is not a footnote to my research on culture, identity, and diversity — it is where the questions came from.
It also shapes how I work with people. I know from the inside what it costs to build a career in a second, third, or fourth language, to read the unspoken rules of a new institution, and to hold onto a sense of self while adapting to everything around you. Much of my consulting is with people in exactly that position — students, researchers, and professionals crossing borders, disciplines, or organizations — and I bring to it both the evidence and the lived experience.
Fifteen years of organizational research, distilled into practical consulting. I work with institutions developing curriculum, organizations navigating people challenges, and individuals building careers across academic and corporate landscapes.
Development of teaching cases, course designs, and instructional materials grounded in organizational behavior research. Extensive experience creating content for MBA and undergraduate audiences at leading business schools.
Individual and organizational consulting across management, human resource management, organizational behavior, strategy, and marketing. Evidence-based approaches to practical leadership and people challenges.
Interview preparation, mock interviews, and structured coaching for academic and corporate career transitions. Experience supporting bachelor students, master students, PhD candidates, and post-doctoral researchers.
Strategic talent development in academic and corporate contexts. Managing scholarship and industry resources, identifying opportunities, and guiding candidates through competitive selection processes.
My work spans organizational behavior, job design, gender, culture, diversity, and motivation — with a particular focus on the unintended consequences of how organizations structure work.
With T. Dyakov. Over 15,000 actively-managed mutual funds across 30 countries. Job market paper.
Data collection in progress.
Secondary data analysis.
Large international tennis database.
Study designs in progress.
Lecturer and Bachelor Thesis Supervisor, School of Business and Economics. Departments of Management & Organization and Finance & Financial Sector Management. Second reader across Economics, International Business Administration, and Bedrijfskunde programs.
Teaching evaluation: 5 / 5Teaching Assistant for MBA core course in Organizational Behavior (Maddux, Swaab) — 150 MBA candidates per term across 2 sections. Discussion Facilitator for McKinsey simulation in Power & Politics. Teaching Assistant, Executive Development Program. Grader for MBA Strategy and OB courses.
Teaching Assistant across Social Structure & Social Processes (Brockmann), Happiness Research: Interdisciplinary Findings (Brockmann), and Communication & Interaction (Echterhoff). Tutoring, materials preparation, coordinating presentations, grading, and proctoring.
Teaching Interests
Expanding opportunities by opening your mind: Multicultural engagement predicts job market success through longitudinal increases in integrative complexity.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(5), 608–615.
Prototypes of discrimination: How status asymmetry and stereotype asymmetry affect judgments of racial discrimination.
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 35(6), 525–533.
The pipeline project: Pre-publication independent replications of a single laboratory's research pipeline.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Special Issue: Rigorous and Replicable Methods in Social Psychology, 66, 55–67.
Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects.
Scientific Data, 3, 160082.
Negotiation case written under the supervision of Martin Schweinsberg, Horacio Falcão, and Eric Luis Uhlmann, INSEAD. Full accompanying lecture on Mediation available.
TIME · The Atlantic · Slate · FiveThirtyEight · Ottawa Citizen · The Scientist · INSEAD Knowledge · Elite Daily · Ideas for Leaders · Association for Psychological Science · Alliance for International Exchange · Real KM
Stata · SPSS · AMOS · LISREL · SAS · Excel · Power BI · NVivo
Languages
Full professional knowledge
Working & elementary knowledge
Whether you're exploring consulting, research collaboration, or teaching opportunities — I'd be glad to hear from you.
contact@elizabivolaru.comBased in France · Available for consulting and collaboration internationally