Jone L. Pearce is Dean's Professor of Organization and Management at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Her field is organizational behaviour, and she studies trust: which structures and policies produce and support trust, how trust is built interpersonally and how interpersonal trust affects trust in larger institutional structures. She has published research on volunteers, merit pay, international cultural differences, status, the effects of governments on management practices, and management education. Her work has appeared in 100 scholarly articles in such publications as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organization Science among others. She has edited and authored several books, including Volunteers: The Organizational Behavior of Unpaid Workers (Routledge, 1993), Organization and Management in the Embrace of Government (Erlbaum, 2001), Organizational Behavior: Real Research for Real Managers (Melvin & Leigh, 2006, 2009, and 2012), and Status in Management and Organization (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Pearce is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the International Association for Applied Psychology. Her honours include research grants from the National Science Foundation; a Fulbright Fellowship to the International Management Center, Hungary; Scholarly Contribution Awards (1998 from the Academy of Management and 1986 from the American Society for Personnel Administration); Teaching Excellence Awards; and an invitation to testify on legislation pending before the United States House of Representatives.

Professor Pearce has served on numerous editorial boards for scholarly journals, edited a book series for a university press, and been active in the Western Academy of Management (President in 1995-96), and in the Academy of Management (President in 2002-03). She was Hansen Visiting Professor at the School of Business, University of Washington in 2004-05, and Visiting Professor at the Stern School, New York University, in 2008. Pearce is a Fellow of the Sunningdale Institute (UK) and a member of the Scientific Council for Center at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), the British Research Excellence Framework, and the European Commission's Advanced Grants Programme.

She has held numerous administrative positions in the UC Irvine’s Merage School, most notably as Interim Dean from 2002 to 2004.