Elisa Del Sordo

• About us
• Handbook of the PhD Program
• Academic Board
• Current PhD Candidates
  • A.Y. 2024/2025 (Cycle 40)
  • A.Y. 2023/2024 (Cycle 39)
  • A.Y. 2022/2023 (Cycle 38)
  • A.Y. 2021/2022 (Cycle 37)
  • A.Y. 2020/2021 (Cycle 36)
  • A.Y. 2019/2020 (Cycle 35)
• Recently Defended PhDs
  • A.Y. 2020/2021 (CYCLE 36)
  • A.Y. 2019/2020 (CYCLE 35)
  • A.Y. 2018/2019 (Cycle 34)
  • A.Y. 2017/2018 (Cycle 33)
  • A.Y. 2016/2017 (CYCLE 32)
• Research Areas
• CoDI

Elisa is a PhD Candidate in Management at LUISS University and Visiting Scholar in the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University (TCU).

Her research interests lie in the field of corporate governance and strategic management with an emphasis on strategic leadership. Her strong foundation in organizational sociology informs her research––focusing on themes such as power, fit, and deviance––and methodological choices.
She aims to address questions relevant to the role of senior executives within firms, focusing on micro-level sociopolitical processes and their impact on organizational outcomes. Much of her research examines the underlying and less evident causes of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) succession and dismissal through the use of counterfactual and configurational arguments and methods for developing theory. Supported by an Industry Research Grant, she is concurrently conducting an applied research project for an Italian company.

She is particularly interested in causation and empirical research methods, which strongly characterize her work. Relatedly, she studies and employs methods of necessity and sufficiency, specifically fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) and Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA).

As a doctoral student at LUISS, she has served as a teaching assistant for several graduate courses, including Corporate Governance, Corporate Strategy, International Business, and Behavioral Economics. She has taught her own class on Quantitative Methods for Theory Building: An Introduction to QCA and NCA at the Doctoral level, covering the theory of the method(s) and applications on R.

Research Interests

Corporate Governance; Strategic Leadership; CEO Succession; CEO Power; Top Management Misconduct; Organizational Sociology; Configurational Theory and Methods; Methodology.

Research Projects

Must CEOs perform poorly to be Dismissed? A Necessary Condition Investigation. Preparing manuscript for submission. (Del Sordo, E. & Krause, R.)

Second-Act CEOs: The (Fuzzy) Interplay of Legacy and Fit in Successor Survival. Analysis stage. (Del Sordo, E., Zattoni, A & Krause, R.)

Publications

Del Sordo, E. & Zattoni, A. (In Press). The Role of Employee Ownership, Financial Participation, and Decision-Making in Corporate Governance: A Multilevel Review and Research Agenda. Corporate Governance: An International Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12614

Teaching (Lecturer)

Quantitative Methods for Theory Building: An Introduction to QCA and NCA (PhD Workshop)

Teaching (TA)

Corporate Governance; Corporate Strategy; International Business; Behavioral Economics.

Computer Language

R, Stata, LATEX, MATLAB

Advisors

Prof. Alessandro Zattoni (Luiss), Prof. Ryan Krause (TCU)

E-mail

edelsordo@luiss.it