Executive Bio
Isabel Fernandez-Mateo is the Adecco Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. A native of Spain, she obtained her PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management and has been a visiting faculty member at the University of Chicago, INSEAD, the University of New South Wales (Sydney), and Harvard Business School.
She is an expert on how relationships influence career outcomes – particularly in hiring, job transitions, and career advancement. She also studies gender diversity in the executive labor market. In her recent work, she examines the organizational and social barriers that prevent women’s access to positions of leadership.
Professor Fernandez-Mateo’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Management Science, and Organization Science. Her work has been covered by CNN Money, the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review Online, Fast Company, and Yahoo News, among others. She has won several prestigious academic awards, including the American Sociological Association’s W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship in 2013 and 2020, and the Best Published Paper in 2017 by both the Organization and Management Theory and the Organizational Behavior Divisions of the Academy of Management.
Isabel Fernandez-Mateo is a member of the Academy of Management, the American Sociological Association, and the Strategic Management Society. She is currently Department Editor of Management Science (Organizations Section) and consulting editor for Sociological Science. She has also won the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Academy of Management Review.
At London Business School, Professor Fernandez-Mateo teaches two elective courses, one on “Building your Career Strategy” and another one on "People Analytics." She teaches similar topics in Executive Education, where she focuses on how developing effective social networks contributes to both career advancement and leadership success. Some of her teaching aims particularly at women leaders. She also examines the challenges and opportunities of a data driven approach to people-related issues in organizations.