Working on sensitive social issues requires some clear-eyed diplomacy. I used to be a diplomat - I still am.

Welcome

Welcome to my personal website!

This site showcases a bit of information about me, Dr. Vic Marsh, a visiting scholar at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Institutional + Diversity (DEI) Research

My ultimate goal: causal analysis at the program & leader levels. We need to know whether skilled executive leaders de-segregate workplaces (JP Ferguson) or if certain programs remain effective despite fluctuating executive support (Kalev & Dobbin). This causal analysis matters for theory and practice: giving the public the wrong answer might set up change agents for failure and leave scholars chasing correlations that are phantoms.

Institutional + Social Issues in Management (SIM) Research

My ultimate goal is to use multi-level models that connect the skills of issue managers to the choices firms make and link the choices firms make to firm reputation outcomes. We need to know if board oversight structures (Rasche) versus lower-level org chart structure choices (Dobbin) matter most in predicting a firm's reputation.

Publication Plan

Paper #1: Leader Communication Skills Matter - No Matter the Race

One especially tough context for organizational change is efforts to reduce race segregation at work (it has returned); these efforts are known as workforce diversity practices. Diversity goals face headwinds: political backlash and economic downturns. While prior research said that Hispanic, Black, and Asian executives should avoid championing diversity, I helped discover a communication skill that reduces the backlash (OBHDP). This is already published.

Next Paper: Measures for Workplace Social Skills

My first publication focused on how executives from minority backgrounds can communicate more successfully during times of controversy. That got me started on an extensive investigation to validate measures of social, emotional, and behavioral skills (SEBs) for grownups - as we already have great measures for school children (Soto et al). Building upon my background in international diplomacy, I collaborated with The World Bank Group and WellSpring, a donor-advised fund, to validate 14 workplace social skill measures in 5 countries with over 10,000 participants. These new measurement scales show psychology at its best: internationalized and validated across all economic strata. We have self-reports and subjective judgment tasks, as well as entrepreneurs and wage workers - all African. We are finalizing a submission to JAP.

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My Story


I am a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. I completed a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021 and a postdoc at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. There, I published micro work in OBHDP on the communications tactics that help both white and ethnic minority managers promote diversity programs while reducing backlash - resolving a controversy on whether or not white managers are best positioned to promote de-segregation of the managerial rank at firms.

Beforehand, I spent years inside the federal government’s bureaucracy as a United States diplomat, and am now an institutional scholar studying where bureaucracies come from: organizational design decisions. My dissertation is on the topic of innovation in diversity practices: why some firms adopt turnkey diversity programs while others engage in experimentation and tailoring to fit their unique needs. In comparative case studies of entrepreneurial tech firms in Silicon Valley that had similar HR structures, similar CEO political leanings, and similar “inclusion-before-diversity” diversity strategies, my work found what behaviors led to the innovative approach versus the copy-and-paste approach. Before academia, I was a U.S. diplomat posted to Cyprus, Hong Kong & Macau, an emergency task force after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the Secretary of State’s headquarters team. I hold a BA from Stanford with a minor in economics and honors in international security studies and a master’s degree in the same field from Princeton.

About Me

PhD in Organizational Behavior

Was United States Diplomat

Longitudinal Work Found How DEI Mentorship Programs Survive Economic Austerity

Dissertation on Innovation in Diversity Practice

Teaching Experience

Business ethics undergraduate students at my final lecture, Spring 2019, Section 08

Recognition

Teaching Excellence Award, Business Ethics, University of Colorado Boulder (Spring 2019)

  • “…the most competitive process we've had in years” ~ United Government of Graduate Students

Strengths

Substantive Knowledge, Effective “Made It Stick” Explanations, and Positive Attitude

“Vic Marsh is an amazing professor who truly cares about his students and their understanding of the course material. Vic is the type of professor who will go the extra mile to reach out to his students to offer the assurance that he is on their side to accomplish their goals within the course but also making sure that the content sticks. For a course I saw myself struggling in Vic made the most out of it for myself as a student!”

  • “…you brought a great amount of positive energy that most professors do not have and I learned a lot this semester! I'm so glad that you found your way from really cool international work to Boulder and I think that you have such a great ability to teach while also tying in real-world information!”

  • “Professor Marsh is one of the most devoted and knowledgeable teachers I have had at CU. I have never had a teacher in my life with such enthusiasm to teach what he is extremely knowledgeable of. Professor Marsh makes what is somewhat bland and dry material into something memorable and easy-to-learn. Thank you for being such a great teacher and person in general, you are what every professor should model themselves after. You are the man Professor Marsh!”