Dr. Payal Sharma is a qualitative researcher and organizational psychologist. She has been studying and teaching about leadership and power dynamics for over a decade. More recently, she is exploring masculinity in organizations. Her work focuses on settings including professional sports, the hip hop and rap music industry, and the military. Her research has been published in Group and Organization Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management Inquiry, Leadership Quarterly, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Organizational Dynamics.

She is an award-winning educator and regularly delivers keynotes and workshops to executive audiences from a range of sectors and industries. Through her courses and speaking engagements, Dr. Sharma offers evidence-based toolkits about leadership development and power and politics in organizations. In doing so, she helps people understand where they have control.

Before UNLV, Dr. Sharma was a visiting faculty member at the Wharton School of Business and tenure-track faculty member at Rutgers Business School, Newark and New Brunswick. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of Maryland, College Park; a Master's degree in higher education administration from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; a Master's degree in organizational management from The George Washington University; and bachelor degrees in anthropology and history from the University of California, San Diego.