Silvia Castro

Why is peer support under supplied in organizations? This paper shows that helping is valuable but often invisible. When firms do not observe or recognize it, employees provide less of it. Using a cluster-randomized field experiment in two banks, we show that making peer support visible and rewarded leads to lasting productivity gains. 

How far can managerial strategy reach? This paper shows that its reach extends beyond the organizational chart. Structured group discussions among employees reduce stigma on menstrual health — a norm imposed by society, not management — and drive adoption of health technologies introduced by the firm.

See the coverage of this project in VoxDev, in The Decision Lab, or in LMU pressroom.

 Can a simple change in how managers run meetings shift the culture of their teams? Yes — and at scale. A randomized controlled trial across  4,300 employees at a global pharmaceutical firm shows that structured changes to manager-employee one-to-one meetings improve team psychological safety, innovation climate, and leadership quality.

See the coverage of the project at the MIT Sloan Review here. 

Can firms use the infrastructure they already have to shift norms they did not create? This project shows that they can, but only within limits. Daily audio broadcasts to over 4,000 workers in a Bangladeshi garment factory reduced menstrual stigma and taboos for both women and men. Norms shifted beyond the factory into workers' households.  Not all norms proved to be malleable to the same degree: communication taboos shifted, while norms rooted in beliefs about impurity resisted change, revealing the limits of managerial strategy.

Why does the same business idea get funded differently depending on who presents it? Not because of the idea, because of beliefs about who can execute it. In a study with 451 loan officers, evaluators rated the same business ideas equally, no matter the founder's gender. However, they penalised female entrepreneurs based on beliefs about the challenges they face. Team formation neutralizes this penalty. This shows that an organisational structure can act as a way to reduce bias.

What happens to critical information when supervisors lack the skills to receive it? This paper shows that it stays at the bottom of the organizational chart. A cluster-randomized field experiment in a large commercial bank shows that training supervisors in supportive leadership improves supervisory quality and team psychological safety. It also changes not how much employees speak up, but what they say. More critical, decision-relevant feedback flows upward in the organization.

Firms are adopting generative AI to improve individual productivity, but what happens to the social fabric of organizations in the process? This project studies how peer cooperation, knowledge sharing, and mentoring change once agentic AI enters an organization.

When AI tools change how employees perform, do supervisors update how they assess potential? This project uses a field experiment in a large firm to study whether GenAI shifts supervisors' reliance from performance metrics and whether this affects identification of talent.

Companies invest heavily in programmes to support their workers’ health and well-being. Whether those programmes work often comes down to the person workers deal with every day: their direct supervisor. This project studies how front-line managers shape the success of workplace programmes on topics that workers find hard to talk about at work. It uses field experiments with garment factories in Bangladesh, focusing on menstrual health. The goal is to help firms understand when managers open the door to sensitive conversations, and when they keep it shut.

Can you change organizational culture if you only intervene at one level? Culture change is hard — especially when it requires coordinated effort across hierarchical levels. This project uses a large-scale RCT spanning the full hierarchy of a US pharmaceutical firm to study exactly this.