Silvia Castro

How far can managerial strategy reach? This paper shows that organizational interventions can shift social norms that originate outside the firm: 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, with direct consequences for employee well-being.

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

Firms know psychological safety matters for performance, but lack evidence-based tools to build it. This paper fills that gap: a randomized controlled trial across 544 teams and 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 —  with effects concentrated where they are needed most.

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

This paper provides causal evidence that the strategic design of recognition systems shapes knowledge flows and organizational performance: a cluster-randomized field experiment in two East African banks shows that making peer support observable and socially rewarded increases knowledge sharing by 21% and mentoring by 12%, generating large and persistent productivity gains among junior employees --- with effects operating through career concerns and peer reputation rather than intrinsic motivation.

When financial institutions allocate capital to SMEs, bias can distort which firms get funded. This paper identifies the mechanism: a framed field experiment with 451 loan officers shows that evaluators rate business ideas equally regardless of founder gender, but systematically underestimate female entrepreneurs' ability to implement them — a bias that team formation partially mitigates.

I am thankful to Centenary Bank and FINCA for hosting this project

Many firms promote employees into supervisory roles based on technical performance, not people management skills. This paper tests whether that gap can be closed: a cluster-randomized field experiment across 80 branches of a large commercial bank shows that a targeted supervisory training program improves leadership quality, team psychological safety, and the upward flow of critical knowledge from frontline employees to management.

Firms are adopting generative AI to boost individual productivity — but what happens to the collaborative fabric of organizations in the process? This project uses a field experiment introducing agentic AI tools across two large East African banks to study whether AI access alters the informal patterns of peer cooperation, knowledge sharing, and mentoring that underpin firm performance — and what this means for how managers lead, supervise, and build organizational capability in an AI-augmented workplace.

In many parts of the world, large manufacturing firms employ predominantly female workforces — yet workplace routines, supervisory practices, and managerial strategies are designed with no consideration of menstrual health needs. This project tests whether changing that, through a large-scale field experiment across more than 15 manufacturing firms involving over 10,000 workers and 2,000 supervisors, improves employee well-being and firm productivity.