28 November 2024, the School held the 28th lecture of the 2024 Academic Excellence Lecture. The lecture invited Professor Haoying Xu, Assistant Professor of Management in the School of Business of Stevens Institute of Technology, as the sharing guest. A total of more than twenty people, including faculty members, doctoral students and undergraduate students, attended the event.
The meeting was hosted by Assistant Professor Zuo Yuhan of the Department of Organization and Human Resource Management. Before the lecture started, Professor Zuo Yuhan introduced Assistant Professor Xu Haoying's biography in details. Professor Xu Haoying is an Assistant Professor of Management in the School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, where he received his PhD in Management from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2022. His research focuses on leadership, work relationships, and work emotions. His first-authored research has appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology, and additional research has appeared in the Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Business Ethics. Other research has been published in Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, and Advances in Psychological Science, Psychological Science, Journal of Management, Management Review, and China Human Resource Development. His research has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and the Jerusalem Post.
Professor Xu Haoying's talk was entitled ‘Turning the Envious Boss into a Friend or a Foe: The Emotional and Behavioral Reactions to Being Envied by One's Supervisor and its Impact on Leader-Member Relationships’. its Impact on Leader-Member Exchange’. Research on workplace jealousy has focused on interactions between co-workers (i.e., ‘peer jealousy’), but this study extends the field by examining employees' perceptions of subordinate jealousy (i.e., “downward jealousy”). Based on the appraisal theory of emotions and in conjunction with the literature on uncertainty management, this study examines the emotional, behavioral, and relational effects of perceived downward jealousy. This study validates our model through three different types of research. The studies suggest that employees may perceive downward envy as a threat and an opportunity (i.e., relationship threat vs. opportunity assessment) to the leader-member exchange (LMX) relationship, triggering relationship anxiety and hope, respectively. These emotions drive diametrically opposed behavior: anxiety prompts avoidance, whereas hope motivates employees to exhibit proximity citizenship behavior, thus negatively and positively affecting LMX quality, respectively. Notably, employees' sense of power relative to their superiors moderated these effects: employees with a higher sense of power were able to mitigate the effects of the anxiety path, but had a limited effect on the hope path. Our findings have important implications for workplace envy theory and the study of LMX instability.
After the sharing, in response to the lecture topic of Professor Xu Haoying, the participating professors and students actively discussed the topics of research design, publication of high-level papers and business management practices, which further deepened the in-depth exchange of academic research.
The ‘Academic Excellence Lecture Theatre’ is an academic exchange platform set up by the School of Business in order to practice the mission of ‘Contributing New Knowledge in Management’, focusing on the cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development dilemmas in business administration and China's corporate management practice, and bringing together cutting-edge ideas and innovative perspectives at home and abroad, so as to contribute to the development of Chinese society and the development of China's economy. The programme brings together cutting-edge ideas and innovative perspectives from home and abroad to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.
