Emilio J. Castilla

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About🔗

Academic Groups

Work and Organization Studies

Academic Area

Behavioral and Policy Sciences

Centers & Initiatives

Good Companies, Good Jobs

Emilio J. Castilla is the NTU Professor of Management and a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Castilla is currently the head of the Work and Organization Studies Group. He joined the MIT Sloan faculty in 2005, after being a faculty member in the Management Department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Institute for Work and Employment Research at MIT, as well as a Research Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, and at the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.

His research primarily focuses on the sociological aspects of work and employment. Castilla is particularly interested in studying how social and organizational processes influence key organizational and employment processes and outcomes over time. He tackles his research questions by examining different empirical settings with longitudinal datasets, both at the individual and company levels. His focus is on the recruitment, hiring, development, and job mobility of employees within and across organizations and locations, as well as on the impact of teamwork and social relations on performance and innovation. His work has been published in top academic journals and edited volumes, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, American Journal of Sociology, and American Sociological Review. He has also written a book on the use of longitudinal methods in social science research (Elsevier/Academic Press).

Castilla has taught in various degree programs at MIT Sloan, the Wharton School, and a number of other international universities. His teaching interests include Strategic Human Resource Management, Strategies for People Analytics, Leading Effective Organizations, Talent Management, Career Management, and Organizational Behavior. In addition to teaching full-time MBA and executive courses, he has taught several PhD-level courses.

Honors🔗

Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize awarded to Emilio J. Castilla

Emilio J. Castilla has received the 2017 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the most outstanding MIT Sloan Management Review article on planned change and organizational development published in the period from fall 2015 through summer 2016. Castilla’s winning paper is entitled “Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace.” The prize was established in 1984 by MIT Sloan faculty in honor of Professor Richard Beckhard, a faculty member for over two decades, who was a founder and an architect of the field of organizational development. The MIT Sloan judges thought Castilla’s article was “well aligned with the thinking of Richard Beckhard, who knew that organizational change was often more complicated than it seemed … Castilla’s call for continuous monitoring and evaluation of the outcomes is very much in line with what Dick would have recommended.” The award was announced in an MIT Sloan Management Review blog post and in the fall 2017 issue.

Publications🔗

"The Production of Merit: How Managers Understand and Apply Merit in the Workplace."

Castilla, Emilio J. and Aruna Ranganathan. Organization Science Vol. 31, No. 4 (2020): 909–935.

"Best in Class? The Returns on Endorsement in Business School Admissions."

Castilla, Emilio J., and Ben A. Rissing. Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. 64, No. 1 (2019): 230-270.

"Meritocracy."

Castilla, Emilio J. In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior, edited by Fathali M. Moghaddam, 479-482. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2017.