Tatiana Kostova

Background

Tatiana Kostova is the Buck Mickel Chair and a professor of international business at the University of South Carolina''s Darla Moore School of Business. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Prior to coming to the United States, Kostova was on the faculty of the Department of Management at the University of Economics in Varna, Bulgaria, and was the associate director of the Graduate School of Management at the university. From 1988 to 1989 she was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Kostova completed her Ph.D. degree in 1996. Her dissertation, "Success of the transnational transfer of organizational practices within multinational companies," was awarded the Barry Richman Best Dissertation Award of the International Management Division of the Academy of Management and the Richard Farmer Best Dissertation Award of the Academy of International Business. 

Kostova has taught international management in the International MBA and Professional MBA programs at the Moore School, the International MBA European Program jointly run by the Moore School and Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Vienna, Austria), and the Executive International MBA program jointly run with Tech de Monterey, Guadalajara, Mexico. She also teaches in the Faculty Development in International Business Program at the Moore School, where she helps colleagues from other business schools develop their international management courses. She is a regular guest professor in the summer program of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is actively involved in the executive programs offered by the Daniel-Mickel Center at USC and some other schools.

Kostova has published articles in the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Group and Organization Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management, Journal of World Business, Management International Review, Journal of International Management and others. In 2007, she was recognized as the “Rising Star” in economics and business by Incites for the high impact of her publications. She has served as a department editor and member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Business Studies, the leading academic journal in international business in the world. She is also on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of World Business, Multinational Business Review, Journal of Management Studies and Journal of Asian Pacific Business and is a reviewer for Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of International Management, Organization Science and others. She is vice president of the Academy of International Business and chair of the International Management Division of the Academy of Management.

Research

Her areas of specialization include international management, macro-organizational behavior and organization theory. More specifically, she studies institutional and cultural embeddedness of multinational corporations (MNC), cross-border transfer of management practices within MNCs, knowledge management, organizational legitimacy and social capital as a source of competitive advantage in MNCs. She has also done research on organization-based self-esteem, psychological ownership, dual identification and extra-role behavior in organizations. Her research projects have been funded by the University of Minnesota, University of South Carolina, CIBER, Riegel and Emory Foundation and the Carnegie Bosch Institute.

Education

• Ph.D., University of Minnesota 
• M.S., Kiev State University, Ukraine