Custodia Cabanas
Professor Custodia Cabanas has served as Professor of Organizational Behaviour at IE Business School since 1989 and has headed the School’s Department of Organizational Behaviour, People Management and Leadership since 2010. As well as coordinating the content of leadership development programmes at IE Business School and IE University, she is the Director of IE Executive Education’s Transformation with Purpose Fellowship. She has also served as Associate Researcher at Insead Business School, publishing annual studies on innovation in strategic communication in organizations.
As an expert in leadership and work team management, Professor Cabanas has conducted extensive research in the field, working in collaboration with professors from Insead and Wharton. After developing a special focus on strategic communication, she launched and continues to head Spain’s first observatory in the field. Since 2010 she has chaired the judges’ panel for the Prizes for Innovation in Communication awarded by said observatory.
She teaches regularly on IE Business School’s International MBA, Global MBA, Global Executive MBA, and Executive MBA programmes, and has taught executives at Fudan University, UCLA, MSB (Mediterranean School of Business) in Tunis, and Oxford University’s Nuffield College, as well as teaching leadership in IE Business School’s Senior Management Programme and Advanced Management Programme. She also regularly forms part of teams delivering customized programmes run by IE University’s Executive Education Unit at leading organizations in the banking, sports, national security, and pharmaceutical sectors.
Professor Cabanas has authored multiple case studies and research articles in fields that include change management and vision creation (Repsol case study), or interpersonal communication and the role of feed-back, published in journals like Harvard Deusto Business Review, Universia Business Review, Communication Director, Insights, and Thrive Global. She has worked in close collaboration with Wharton on case studies in leadership and crisis management, including the Fontaneda case study, used by business schools across Europe and the U.S., while her multimedia case study Rosa Vañó and Castillo de Canena gained first prize in the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) case study competition in 2016, going on to form part of the Harvard Business Publishing catalogue.
Since 2015 she has worked regularly with and served on the advisory board of Atrevia, a leading Spanish consulting firm in the field of strategic communication and public relations.
Professor Cabanas earned her PhD in Management and Organizations from IE University. She also holds an MBA from IE Business School, and a Law degree from Madrid’s Complutense University.
