Victor L. Marsh

Organizational theory and organizational behavior

I study how organizations keep their social commitments once the initial pressure to make them fades, and I build cross-cultural measures for the social and emotional skills that advocates need to make organizational change happen.

Curriculum Vitae Email

Google Scholar LinkedIn vicmarsh@mit.edu

Bio

I am a Visiting Scholar in the Economic Sociology Working Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and I am on the 2026–27 academic job market for a tenure-track position in management and organizations.

Before academia I spent a decade as a U.S. diplomat in Cyprus, Hong Kong and Macau, and Haiti. I also served as a crisis manager in the State Department Operations Center. Diplomacy is the practice of building durable cooperation among parties with every reason not to cooperate. My research asks the organizational version of that problem: how contested commitments survive once the conflict that produced them has passed.

I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business in 2021 and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Research

Publications and papers

Preston, M. C., Boyd, T. L., Leigh, A., Burgess, R., & Marsh, V. L. (2024). An ally by any other name: Examining the effects of racial minority leaders as allies for advancing racial justice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 181, 104321. Published.

Leigh, A., Nwadei, T., White, M., Lattimore, B., & Marsh, V. L. When Racial Violence Becomes Personal: How Racial Mega-Threats Transfer Across Racially Stigmatized Groups. Revise and resubmit, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Job-market paper

When Conflict Does Not Kill Practice: Contested Survival of D&I Programs Amidst Institutional Complexity

A ten-year, Eisenhardt-method comparative case study of eleven diversity programs across four technology firms, built on ninety-six interviews. The race-conscious programs, contested and out of step with their firms’ identity-neutral doctrine, often outlived the safer programs beside them. I call the mechanism structural nesting.

Pipeline

Marsh, V. L., Das, S., Delavallade, C., Rouanet, L., & Koroknay-Palicz, T. Assessing agentic and communal workplace skills in Africa: The ESTEEM framework. With an interdisciplinary World Bank team, I built and validated fourteen measures of workplace social, emotional, and behavioral skills across six Sub-Saharan African countries and five languages. Working paper, preprint available.

Marsh, V. L., Hekman, D. R., & Crawley, R. Employee attributions of stated and lived organizational commitment to CSR and DEI. With David Hekman and Rohan Crawley, I test whether employees read a program’s design, how tailored it is and who sponsors it, as a costlier and harder-to-fake signal of commitment than the words leaders use to describe it. In preparation.

Marsh, V. L. Recognition and the forced ranking (Foreign Service promotion evaluations), through fp21. The Foreign Service just added a forced ranking to its promotion evaluations, one that panels are told to see but not use, and I study who becomes underrecognized under the new design and whether the pattern is demographic. In progress. Archival and text analysis.

Teaching

My teaching earned the 2019 Graduate Teaching Excellence Award at CU Boulder, chosen from more than 2,700 instructors. I have mentored some twenty younger Foreign Service officers, and since 2023 I have run a mentorship program at a Title I middle school that grew from four students to sixteen.

I study the survival of mentorship programs. My research asks how organizations keep their commitments to people outside the old networks. Teaching is where I keep that commitment myself, one student at a time.

Prepared to teach: organizational behavior, organizational change, organization theory, business ethics and corporate social responsibility, negotiation, strategic management, and a business and geopolitics elective, timely now that industrial policy has put government back at the center of how firms compete.

Public writing

The Jesse Jackson Lesson for CEOs: Transparency Has Tradeoffs Leaders Can Resolve with Governance Provisionally accepted, MIT Sloan Management Review.

New State Department diversity data exposes new challenges and opportunities FP21, 2023. Also in The Foreign Service Journal.

Transforming State: Pathways to a more just, equitable, and innovative institution Truman Center for National Policy, 2021. Covered by NPR, Mother Jones, and Politico.

Contact

Emailvicmarsh@mit.edu

OfficeMIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA

ScholarshipGoogle Scholar

LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/vicmarsh