Wendong Li

The Chinese University of Hong Kong | CUHK · Department of Management

Recent developments of behavioral genetics in organizational research and broader social sciences point to the possibility of an emerging field of organizational genomics. In this chapter, we first review theory and research looking at how genetic factors influence constructs in social sciences that are related to organizations. We include both twi...

Job attainment is an important component of socioeconomic status (SES). There is currently a paucity of genomic research on an individual’s job attainment, as well as how it is related to other SES variables and overall well-being at the whole genome level. By incorporating O*NET occupational information into the UK Biobank database, we performed G...

Twin studies document leadership role occupancy (e.g., whether one holds formal supervisory or management positions) as a heritable trait. However, previous studies have been underpowered in identifying specific genes associated with this trait, which has limited our understanding of the genetic correlations between leadership and one’s well-being....

Despite the extensive interest in open-minded discussion in organizations, inconsistencies regarding its antecedents and consequences remain. Drawing upon cooperation and competition theory, we propose a theoretical framework of open-minded discussion. On the basis of 114 primary studies (128 independent samples), a meta-analytic investigation show...

Organizational research has predominantly adopted the classic dispositional perspective to understand the importance of personality traits in shaping work outcomes. However, the burgeoning literature in personality psychology has documented that personality traits, although relatively stable, are able to develop throughout one's whole adulthood. A...

Drawing upon social comparison theory, we developed and tested a model to examine potential negative coworker reactions toward proactive employees. We theorized that a focal employee's proactive personality is positively related with his or her high relative standing in the group, which in turn exposes him or her to being the target of coworker env...

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the collective affective experiences of work teams. Affective climate (affective experiences shared by team members) has become an important factor in understanding how teams work and their results. Many efforts have been dedicated to identifying the processes through which this collective phen...

Genetic factors play a fundamental role in shaping and modulating human behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. In the era of genomics, it seems difficult to find an area in organizational psychology and organizational behavior that can avoid influences from genetic factors. In this chapter, we start with a brief discussion on why a genetics approach ma...

Previous research on dispositional optimism has predominantly concentrated on the selection effect of dispositional optimism on predicting work outcomes. Recent research, however, has started to examine the socialization effect of life experiences on fostering dispositional optimism development. Extrapolating primarily from the TESSERA framework of...

Recent leadership research has drawn greater attention to how the well-being of leaders influences leadership behaviors, follower performance and well-being, and overall leadership effectiveness. Yet, little attention has been paid to the relationship between occupying leadership positions and job incumbents’ well-being. This research addresses thi...

Recent leadership research has drawn greater attention to how the well-being of leaders influences leadership behaviors, follower performance and well-being, and overall leadership effectiveness. Yet little attention has been paid to the relationship between occupying leadership positions and job incumbents' well-being. This research addresses this...

Although the majority of previous research has focused on the negative impacts of envy, there is still limited research attention devoted to the potential positive influences of envy. After clarifying the definition of envy, this article summarizes potential antecedents of malicious and benign envy related to individual, leader, team and organizati...

Individuals vary in their tendencies in engaging proactive behavior. To explain such individual differences, scholars have focused on the role of personality traits in shaping proactive behavior. In this chapter, we first review studies examining the impact of personality traits and their joint impact with environment factors in shaping proactive b...

Behavioral genetics approaches to the study of individual differences have been widely applied in various disciplines in social sciences to investigate the "Nature versus/and Nurture" issue through disentangling influences from genetic factors (i.e., influences from nature) and environmental factors (i.e., influences from nurture). However, leaders...

Job satisfaction research has unfolded as an exemplary manifestation of the "person versus environment" debate in applied psychology. With the increasing recognition of the importance of time, it is informative to examine a question critical to the dispositional view of job satisfaction: Are genetic influences on job satisfaction stable across diff...

Work design research typically views employee work characteristics as being primarily determined by the work environment and has thus paid less attention to the possibility that the person may also influence employee work characteristics and in turn accounts for the work characteristics–well-being relationships through selection. Challenging this c...

This study examined how a dopamine genetic marker, DRD4 7 Repeat allele, interacted with early life environmental factors (i.e., family socioeconomic status, and neighborhood poverty) to influence job change frequency in adulthood using a national representative sample from the United States. The dopamine gene played a moderating role in the relati...

Articles on the genetics of complex human behaviors and psychological traits provided in past volumes of journals published by Annual Reviews tended to adopt a pathological perspective and focused heavily on the disorders of human affect and behaviors. In our review, we expand our focus to the more general, nonclinical population, and in particular...

Job satisfaction research has unfolded as an exemplary manifestation of the "person versus environment" debate in applied psychology. With the increasing recognition of the importance of time, it is informative to examine a question critical to the dispositional view of job satisfaction: Are genetic influences on job satisfaction stable across diff...

Increasing levels of financial inequality prompt questions about the relationship between income and well-being. Using a twins sample from the Survey of Midlife Development in the United States and controlling for personality as core self-evaluations, we found that men, but not women, had higher subjective financial well-being when they had higher...

Previous proactivity research has predominantly assumed that proactive personality generates positive environmental changes in the workplace. Grounded in recent research on personality development from a broad interactionist theoretical approach, the present article investigates whether work characteristics, including job demands, job control, soci...

A core goal of work design research is to understand how important work characteristics affect individual and organizational outcomes. In this chapter, we consider this goal through the lens of time. Time is a fundamental issue for understanding the consequences of work design, yet it is arguably even more important in a world where technology is t...

Drawing upon the job demand–control model, we examine two pathways—job demands and job control—through which occupying leadership positions is related to leaders’ well-being including both psychological well-being (i.e., anxiety and subjective well-being) and physiological well-being (i.e., chronic diseases and stress hormones of cortisol and corti...

Using data collected from 107 pairs of identical and 89 pairs of fraternal female twins, this study examined the genetic and environmental associations between transformational leadership and leadership role occupancy. Results show that 78% of the covariance between the two leadership variables was attributable to overlapping genetic factors, while...

Previous behavioral genetic studies have found that job satisfaction is partially heritable. We went a step further to examine particular genetic markers that may be associated with job satisfaction. Using an oversample from the National Adolescent Longitudinal Study (Add Health Study), we found 2 genetic markers, dopamine receptor gene DRD4 VNTR a...

We examined the influence of general mental ability, self-esteem and family socioeconomic status on leadership role occupancy and leader advancement (defined as the increase in supervisory scope via the number of employees supervised), as well as the moderating role of gender in these relationships. Using a nationally representative sample from the...

The effects of organizational culture on job incumbents' ratings of work-related personality requirements were investigated. Data collected from 270 customer service representatives working within 37 mobile phone service companies in China demonstrated significant between-organization differences and sufficient within-organization agreement on two...

The construct of job performance has been one of the important topics in job performance research. The present study investigated the construct of job performance among Chinese military soldiers using both qualitative and quantitative methods. First, after interviewing 95 officers and soldiers, we categorized and conceptualized eight sets of typica...

In this study, we surveyed 272 post-holders from four different occupations, namely, public servants in charge of HR administration, software engineers, web editors, and newspaper advertisement salesperson. We found that the three job attitude variables of job satisfaction, affective commitment and job involvement all have significant effects upon...

Three Occupational Information Network (O*NET) instruments (Generalized Work Activities, Basic and Cross-Functional Skills, Work Styles) were administered to 1,007 job incumbents, from 369 organizations, performing 1 of 3 jobs (first-line supervisor, office clerk, computer programmer) in New Zealand, China, and Hong Kong. Data from these countries...

This study investigated the feature of Chinese peoples’ perception of SARS by surveying a stratified sample of 4231 people from 17 cities in China, and primarily proposed a risk perception centered predictive model of psychological behavior in crisis. The results indicated that, negative SARS-related information, especially information of personal...