Emilio J. Castilla

About

Emilio J. Castilla is the NTU Professor of Management and a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is currently the co-director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research. Castilla joined the MIT Sloan faculty in 2005, after serving as a faculty member in the Management Department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research primarily focuses on the sociological aspects of work and employment, examining how social and organizational processes influence key organizational and employment outcomes over time. He studies recruitment, hiring, development, and job mobility of employees within and across organizations and locations, as well as the impact of teamwork and social relations on performance and innovation. Castilla has published extensively in top academic journals and edited volumes, and has authored a book on longitudinal methods in social science research. His teaching interests include Strategic Human Resource Management, Strategies for People Analytics, Leading Effective Organizations, Talent Management, Career Management, and Organizational Behavior, and he has taught in various degree programs at MIT Sloan, the Wharton School, and other international universities.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Public relations
• Psychology
• Law
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Demography
• Economics

Selected publications

• Accounting for the Gap: A Firm Study Manipulating Organizational Accountability and Transparency in Pay Decisions

  Organization Science · 2015-02-12 · 239 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Great progress has been made in documenting how employer practices may shape workplace inequality. Less research attention, however, has been given to investigating which organizational strategies are effective at addressing gender and racial inequality in labor markets. Using a unique field study design, this article identifies and tests, for the first time, whether accountability and transparency in pay decisions—two popular organizational initiatives discussed among scholars and practitioners…

  PublisherDOI

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

  Organization Science · 2020 · 56 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, we develop a process model that specifies how managers come to understand and approach the evaluation of merit in the workplace. Interviews from a diverse sample of managers and from managers at a U.S. technology company, along with supplemental qualitative online review data, reveal that managers are not blank slates: we find that individuals’ understandings of merit are shaped by their (positive and negative) experiences of being evaluated as employees prior to promotion to ma…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Gendering of Job Postings in the Online Recruitment Process

  Management Science · 2023 · 49 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Gender segregation remains a significant problem in many occupations and organizations. To solve this problem, many U.S. employers now seek to craft gender-neutral job postings. In this article, we investigate whether such employer recruitment efforts are successful in encouraging women and men to apply equally for jobs. Specifically, we move beyond the well-studied effects of the gender typing of occupations, organizations, and industries to study the extent to which the recruiting language use…

  PublisherDOI

• How Much Is That Network Worth? Social Capital in Employee Referral Networks

  2017-07-12 · 43 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  The notion of social capital has been applied to disparate phenomena ranging from job search to economic development. In this chapter, the authors argue that a common organizational practice—hiring new workers via employee referrals—provides key insights into the notion of social capital. They examine social-capital investments and returns from the perspective of the employer. The authors also argue that employers who use such hiring methods are quintessential "social capitalists," vie…

  PublisherDOI

• Best in Class: The Returns on Application Endorsements in Higher Education

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2018-03-05 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  While scholars have shown that well-connected applicants are advantaged in selection processes, less understood is whether such applicants produce important returns to the organization when key decision makers favor them. We begin to address this gap by investigating whether and why application endorsements―an informal practice whereby certain individuals (i.e., endorsers) advocate for particular applicants―affect organizational selection during the screening of applicants. Through the analysis…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ben A. Rissing

  12 shared

• Jordi Caïs

  Universitat de Barcelona

  3 shared

• Hye Jin Rho

  3 shared

• Julie Shah

  2 shared

• Francesco Sguera

  Universidade Católica Portuguesa

  2 shared

• Ethan Poskanzer

  University of Colorado System

  2 shared

• George Lan

  2 shared

• Stephen Benard

  Indiana University Bloomington

  2 shared

Labs

• MIT Sloan ManagementPI

Awards & honors

• Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize (2017)
• Thinkers50 2025 Talent Award Shortlist

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Erin Kellyh-49
• Deborah L. Anconah-29
• Jackson G. Luh-29