Cristina B. Gibson is the Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Management for the Graziadio Business School at Pepperdine University.
Cristina previously held the position of the Woodside Endowed Chair in Leadership and Management at the University of Western Australia School of Business. Her expertise is at the nexus of organizational science, international management, and cross-cultural psychology.
Cristina’s research and teaching addresses the manner in which culture, organizational structures, and technology serve as key influences on shared use of information and knowledge, and she has demonstrated that such processes are critical for subsequent behavioural and organizational outcomes, including innovation and collaboration. Dispelling conventional assumptions that collaborative phenomena operate the same way across contexts, her work identifies intercultural variations, impacts of geographical dispersion, and technology factors that are important in gaining a full understanding of how to increase the effectiveness of collaborations.
Cristina strives for real world impact. For three consecutive years she has been awarded the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Distinction, indicating that she is among the top 1% in the world in terms of impact in the fields of Economic and Business based on citation counts. This award is an honour reserved for only 95 academics in this discipline across the world.
Cristina was recently selected as the recipient of the 2018 Humanitarian Award from the American Psychological Association (Division 14, Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology) based upon her application of industrial organizational psychology towards an initiative that has reached hundreds of lives in both Australia’s business and indigenous communities. To improve the impact and efficacy of corporate social programs, she pioneered an approach that involved collaboration between academia, corporations, and Jawun, a non-profit aiding indigenous organizations. She employed novel practical techniques, working inside the indigenous communities and alongside corporate volunteers, as well as implementing a longitudinal multi-method research design. This effort has provided concrete evidence of the social impact of a collaborative process for intercultural competency building and community development, involving hundreds of corporate volunteers, partnerships with major multinational corporations and has supported indigenous communities across Australia
Cristina’s other work has informed organizational policy, structure, training and development agendas improving operational efficiency, innovation, resource allocation, and well-being, in non-profits, entrepreneurial firms, and large multinationals such as IBM, HP, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Alcoa, Qantas and Westpac, across over 20 countries.
