Cristina Gibson

Cristina B. Gibson is the Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Management in the Applied Behavioral Science group at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, Academy of International Business, American Psychological Association, and Academy of Social Science Australia.

Cristina is an expert on inclusion, technology-enabled collaboration and innovation, and corporate-community partnerships. She works at the nexus of organizational science, international management, and cross-cultural psychology. Her work gives voice to those with differing approaches, perspectives and knowledge, and provides evidence regarding practical techniques for acknowledging, celebrating and bridging differences that coincide with ethnicity, national culture, functional disciplines, and value systems.

Cristina also 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 behavioral 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 honor reserved for only 95 academics in this discipline across the world.

Cristina was recently selected as the recipient of the 2019 Medal for Scholarly Contributions by the Academy of International Business. In 2018, she received the 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 thousands of lives in both businesses and at-risk communities. To improve the impact and efficacy of corporate social programs, she pioneered an approach that involved collaboration between academia, corporations, and non-profits aiding community development. 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 development in at-risk communities.

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, Oracle, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, British Aerospace, Alcoa, Qantas and Westpac, across 30 countries.