Employee creativity is the source of new products, services, or processes and crucial to a firm’s survival and success. Social factors play an important role in creativity. The first social factor is power. Power is ubiquitous in and an essential feature of organizations. Through a series of four field studies, we found that power is a double-edged sword – ... Read More

Employee creativity is vital for organizational success, so sustaining it during a crisis—such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic—is essential. In a study with important implications for how organizations should react to crises to maintain employee creativity, HKUST researcher Yaping Gong and two colleagues show that an employee’s mindset and goal orientation ... Read More

A more diverse workforce can provide an organization with a broader talent base and a wider range of knowledge and perspectives. Recent trends of increasing globalization, migration, and aging have enhanced workplace diversity in terms of age, gender, and region of origin to an unprecedented degree. Thus, argue HKUST researcher Yaping Gong and colleagues, it ... Read More

Despite the world’s aging population, there is limited understanding of the relationship between age diversity and organizational performance. As a result, researchers are increasingly interested in the impact of age composition within the workplace. In a timely study, Yaping Gong of HKUST and colleagues set out to explore the impact of age on corporate ... Read More

Employees may advance their career by achieving internal job changes (i.e., changes in jobs within an organization) and external job changes (i.e., changes in jobs across organizational boundaries), and both changes may render different implications for the organization and the employee. To fill the gap in prior careers research, this study examines the ... Read More

The diversity of social ties and its influence on creativity has long been a key focal area for scholars. Social ties are simply interpersonal connections that provide access to resources, while creativity can be described as the formulation of new or useful ideas. Previous studies on social ties and its association with creativity have largely taken an ... Read More

A firm’s ability to respond quickly to changes in customer demand, competition and emerging market threats and opportunities is essential to its success. Scholars have argued that flexible human resources (HR) policies may be instrumental in fostering this capacity and thus improving firm performance. But the theory underpinning this work has been ... Read More

The simple assumption about feedback is that it should let employees know where they stand on job performance, yet researchers have had difficulty proving this happens in practice. One recent study, however, has been able to demonstrate how feedback can play this goal by focusing on the varieties and nuances of feedback. The study, by Yaping Gong, Mo Wang ... Read More

Functional diversity in work teams should in theory lead to greater innovation as members bring different kinds of experiences to the table, such as marketing, engineering and R&D. But research on the diversity-innovation relationship has been mixed. Some have found team diversity to have a positive impact, others have found a negative or null effect. One ... Read More