By Nathaniel Luce
Dean M. Eric Johnson announced the appointment of María del Carmen Triana as the Cal Turner Chair in Moral Leadership.
Cal Turner, Jr., established this chair in 1999 in affiliation with the Cal Turner Center for Moral Leadership. This Center of Excellence seeks to foster an environment conducive to faculty research and teaching in areas associated with moral leadership; to develop students’ ability to provide moral leadership within their chosen professions as well as within the broader community; and to provide a resource to professionals in the community.
María Triana
Professor Triana joined Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management in 2020 as Professor of Management. She earned her PhD in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources from Texas A&M University in 2008. Upon graduation, she was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Management and Human Resources at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was awarded tenure there in 2014 and was the Kuechenmeister-Bascom Associate Professor in Business before she joined Owen.
Professor Triana’s research focuses on 2 related areas: 1) racial and gender diversity in teams and 2) discrimination, particularly the effects of gender-based, race-based, and family-responsibility-based discrimination. These topics are particularly relevant and important for expanding Owen’s research base. Professor Triana’s research on diversity examines the effects of diversity across multiple levels of analysis in small operational teams, top management teams, and strategic leadership teams. A recurring point of focus is the potential mechanisms and contexts that shape the relationship between diversity and firm-level outcomes such as performance, innovation, and firm failure. She utilizes a variety of research methods including field surveys, archival data collection, experiments, psychometric scale development, and meta-analyses. Professor Triana’s research on discrimination draws on relative deprivation theory to examine gender discrimination, race discrimination, and the newer construct of family responsibility discrimination.
Professor Triana has made strong service contributions to her academic disciple. She is currently serving as an Associate Editor at Human Resource Management Journal, a Financial Times Top 50 journal and has served on numerous editorial review boards including Personnel Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management Studies, and the Journal of Business and Psychology. Finally, she has been actively engaged with The Ph.D. Project. The Ph.D. Project is a national organization focused on increasing workplace diversity by increasing the diversity of business school faculty who encourage, mentor, support, and enhance the preparation of tomorrow’s leaders. As part of these efforts, Professor Triana was invited to join the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2017. This year, Professor Triana led Owen’s Diversity and Inclusion programming for orientation.
