Aino Tenhiälä

Aino Tenhiälä is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at IE University. She is a licensed psychologist with a PhD in Work Psychology and Leadership. At IE, she teaches courses on leadership and organizational behavior across the Global Online MBA, International MBA, DBA, and PhD programs, where her classes emphasize case-based and experiential learning. She is the subject matter expert for the courses Self-Transformation and Leading People and Teams, both taught across IE programs. Her teaching has been recognized with multiple IE Teaching Excellence Awards and earlier with the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Award for innovative pedagogy at Aalto University.

Aino’s research focuses on two main streams:

Compensation, fairness, and effectiveness. She explores how the ways organizations design and implement pay systems ripple through different levels of society: shaping how laws promote equality, how HR and managers enact policies inside firms, and how employees respond with engagement, turnover, or entrepreneurial exits. For example, at the macro level, she studies how pro-equality laws interact with cultural norms to reduce executive gender pay gaps, showing that legal reforms can act as ethical correctives in contexts where cultural support for equality is weak. At the organizational level, she examines how the presence and composition of HR departments affect equity. Her research demonstrates that professionalized HR functions can contribute to the narrowing of the gender pay gaps by embedding fairness, accountability, and formalization into pay practices. At the managerial level, she investigates how compensation systems are interpreted and enacted by middle managers. Her findings show that managers are not passive transmitters of HR policy but active interpreters whose identification and sense of agency lead them to champion, comply with, appropriate, or resist compensation reforms. At the employee level, she analyzes how compensation structures influences mobility, retention, and entrepreneurship. Together, this stream builds a multi-level perspective on how laws, organizational structures, managerial interpretations, and individual behaviors interact to shape the fairness and effectiveness of compensation systems.

Executives, boards, and well-being. Using unique register-based data, she studies how leadership traits and backgrounds shape organizational outcomes. A central theme is the paradoxical role of CEO psychopathy: while often associated with callousness and inequality, her research shows that under certain conditions it can fuel bold, norm-defying strategies that enhance firm performance, particularly for founder CEOs. At the same time, psychopathy is linked to heightened risk-taking when firms underperform and to widening gender pay gaps in firms without strong governance checks. This stream thus illustrates how the same executive traits can be both a liability and an asset, depending on institutional, organizational, and role contexts. Beyond CEO traits, her work investigates the health of CEOs.

Her research has been published in Strategic Management Journal, Human Resource Management, Organization Studies, Human Relations, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, among others, and has received IE’s Research for Sustainable Impact Award. 

Academic Experience

• Associate Professor, Human Resources and Organizational Behavior, IE University, Spain, 2025-Present

• Assistant Professor, Human Resources and Organizational Behavior, IE University, Spain, 2017-2025

• Postdoctoral Researcher, Aalto University, Finland, 2011 - 2017

• Lecturer, Hanken School of Economics, Finland, 2009 - 2011

• Visiting Scholar, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, USA, 2008 - 2009

• Visiting Scholar, Fisher School of Business, the Ohio State University, USA, 2006 – 2007

Academic Background

• Ph.D. in Work Psychology, Aalto University, Finland 2009

• Master in Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland 2004

Professional Experience

• Before joining the academia, Prof Tenhiälä worked in headhunting, vocational guidance, and at a psychiatric clinic as a psychologist. More recently, she has consulted and collaborated with labor unions, employer organizations, firms in the service sector, manufacturing, and government about strategic reward management. She also cares deeply about contributing to entrepreneurial communities.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGs)

3- Good Health and Well-Being

5- Gender Equality

10- Reduced Inequalities