"We Are GSM" - Meet Greta Hsu

Professor Greta Hsu is an expert in organizational behavior whose research explores how organizations make decisions, evolve and perform across a variety of contexts.

She began her academic journey studying high-tech startups, examining how founding conditions shape long-term growth. Her work spans diverse industries—including film, wine and cannabis—using generalizable theories to understand broad organizational dynamics and how market categories are socially constructed.

More recently, her research has focused on student diversity in higher education and the impact of test-optional admissions policies.

At UC Davis, she teaches The Individual and Group Dynamics; Managing People in High-Performance Organizations; Strategy and Structure; and People Analytics courses. She also serves as faculty chair of the university’s first STEM-designated undergraduate business major, launching in fall 2025.

Video Transcript

I started out studying high-tech startup firms and founding conditions and how those affect how those organizations grow and perform down the line.

Exploring Organizational Decisions Across Industries and Campus Diversity Trends

I've studied a variety of industries. So that includes the film industry, the wine industry, cannabis industry. Just a wide variety that I look at because we take a general theoretical lens and apply it to a wide range of contexts because we're trying to develop generalized understandings and mechanisms of how organizations make decisions, how they perform and so forth.

I can tell you about a research project that I'm just finishing up, it’s about student diversity on campuses. We're looking at colleges and universities and we're looking at how the impact of going test optional depends on the admissions criteria that the universities are adopting when they look at and try to evaluate whether a student applicant is worthy. We find the more that a university still values these hard quantitative metrics and says those are the most important, those universities don't really move the needle very much in terms of bringing in more diverse applicants. Because there's still kind of this traditional academic way of thinking about merit.

I teach an elective on managing people in high-performance organizations. We learn about how organizations go about their process of recruiting, selection, evaluating, trying to mentor people within it to become high performers. We also think about topics that are relevant to today's organizations, like managing remote workers and remote teams, or trying to use social networks in a way that can help you as a management tool.

Launching UC Davis’s First STEM-Designated Undergraduate Business Major

I'm the faculty chair of the Business Major Program Committee, which is our new undergraduate business major. It's starting up. We've never had a business major at UC Davis before. Some of the other UCs have. And what we find is there's a huge demand among high schoolers when they're looking at what majors they want to go in.

Business is one of those most common ones that they are interested in. Ours is interesting in that it is joint with faculty from managerial economics and economics. And then we have the faculty at the business school. It is a STEM-designated business major, which I think is a pretty attractive aspect for students and for recruiters. And we're bringing in our inaugural class in fall 2025. We're pretty excited.

Hiking in the Golden State

So, I have two kids and most of my time is spent shuttling them around at this point. When I do have time, I like to go for hikes with my dog in the hills outside of our house. So, one of the fantastic things about living in California is that there's lots of time that you can go out for great hikes and lots of places that we can venture into nearby.

We Are GSM.