Victor L. Marsh

Organizational theory, organizational behavior, and business ethics

I study whether people and organizations keep the commitments they make, and why some commitments endure long after the events that produced them. A second line of my work builds cross-cultural measures of the social and emotional skills people need to carry change through.

Curriculum Vitae Email

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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. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, my work on Capitol Hill was to keep a genuine but fading commitment alive long enough to rebuild. That is the question my research carries into organizations: major events produce intense commitments, and I study which ones endure once the event 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. (new)Accepted, 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 mentorship and apprenticeship programs — seven race-conscious, four identity-neutral — across four technology firms, built on ninety-six interviews. The seven, 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., Crawley, R., & Hekman, D. R. Employee Attributions of Stated and Lived Organizational Commitment to CSR and DEI: Rhetoric, Program Design, and Effort. With Rohan Crawley and David Hekman, 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.

My research grows out of my teaching. A classroom problem at CU Boulder, helping students build the self-management skills the business curriculum assumes, became the program behind my measures of social and emotional skill. The classroom is where my questions start, and it is where I want to be.

Ten years of ethical judgment under real stakes, as a diplomat and a crisis manager, is what I bring to a business-ethics classroom.

Prepared to teach: business ethics and corporate social responsibility, organizational behavior, organizational change, organization theory, 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