Minna Paunova is Associate Professor of Global Leadership at ESCP Business School in Madrid. She studies how people collaborate across borders and how inequality enters everyday interaction at work, for example in who emerges as a leader in a team or whom colleagues choose to help.

Much of her work treats nationality as a source of status, drawing on the sociology and social psychology of status hierarchies. She has followed that question through multinational teams, intensive care units, a conductorless orchestra, and the encounters between migrants and locals at work. Her current work asks how geopolitical change reshapes the legitimacy and influence of people associated with particular countries. Her research has been featured in the Financial Times and Forbes, and she has spoken at TEDxBG, Sofia. 

She is Associate Editor of Applied Psychology and serves on the editorial board of Human Resource Management Journal. She previously served on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review and chaired the Global Committee of the Academy of Management’s OB Division. Before joining ESCP, she was tenured at Copenhagen Business School, where she also directed academic programmes. She holds a PhD in Management from IESE Business School and is an INSEAD-certified executive coach.