Biography

Zoe Kinias is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and the Academic Director of INSEAD’s Gender Initiative. She is also a member of the INSEAD Randomized Control Trials Lab.

After ten years teaching MBAs, first at the Kellogg School of Management and then at INSEAD, Zoe now teaches primarily in executive programmes. Her teaching topics focus on leadership development, social issues at the intersection of business and society, and psychological research in applied/business contexts. She has taught the core Organisational Behaviour PhD course at INSEAD since 2011. Zoe Kinias is directing the INSEAD Gender Diversity Programme.

Zoe has two broad research goals: to understand how individuals, particularly those who are chronically or contextually vulnerable, can become more resilient, and to understand the consequences of diversity for emotions, cognitions, and performance. Her resiliency research stream investigates the factors that facilitate effective decision-making, performance, and wellbeing. This work focuses on interventions that attenuate biases, reduce negative emotion, and improve individual and group outcomes. Her diversity research stream seeks to understand how social identities—in particular gender, ethnicity, and cultural background—influence people’s cognitive processes, emotional states, and evaluations.

In the past few years Zoe has increasingly focused on the overlap between these two research streams, examining global women’s experiences of identity threat and how these can be mitigated by cost-effective and powerful interventions. She uses experimental and quasi-experimental (gender, ethnicity, and national culture cannot be randomly assigned) methods in the laboratory and field to increase internal validity and draw strong causal inferences, as well as archival, survey, and qualitative methods to strengthen ecological validity. One paper from this diversity and resiliency stream was awarded the Academy of Management’s Faculty Transnational Research Award (2015).

Zoe’s work has been published in leading management and psychology journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Psychological Science.

Publications

Case Websites

Personal Website