Julia DiBenigno is an organizational ethnographer and field researcher. Her most recent work explores mechanisms of cooperation, change, and influence in the context of improving Army mental healthcare for active-duty U.S. soldiers. Professor DiBenigno’s prior work examined the effects of cross-cutting demographics on collaboration in hospital teams. Her research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Annals and has won multiple best paper and best dissertation awards.
In her work, Professor DiBenigno seeks to understand occupational and organizational dynamics that affect important outcomes, from whether a nurse ignores or answers a patient call for help in the night to whether a soldier suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) receives mental healthcare with the full support of his or her commander. She specializes in qualitative, ethnographic methodologies (e.g., observation and interviewing). Using these methods, Professor DiBenigno immerses herself in the social worlds of those she studies to develop novel theories by focusing on empirical puzzles discovered during fieldwork which existing organizational theory cannot explain.
Professor DiBenigno received her PhD and MS in Work and Organization Studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a consultant for Deloitte's Organization and Change practice and received a BA in psychology from Columbia College.