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Our Current Research.

Transforming Cultural Collision into Synergy

Cultural diversity can lead to both collision and synergy of cultures within the workplace. Understanding these divergent responses in multicultural spaces is not just timely but critical, because it informs how to promote cultural diversity more optimally. One determinant we have identified is individuals’ mindsets about culture as being fixed or malleable. People with a fixed culture mindset see cultures that are different from their own as incompatible. They feel threatened by the introduction of new cultures and tend to be closed minded which results in the collision of cultures. On the other hand, people with a malleable mindset about culture see culture as compatible and are accepting of foreign ideas, which allows them to be more creative in a multicultural space and produces cultural synergy.

Related Work:

Kung, F. Y. H., Chao, M. M., Yao, D., Adair, W. L., Tasa, K., & Fu, J. H. (2018). Bridging racial divides: Social constructionist (vs. essentialist) beliefs facilitate interracial trust. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 74, 121-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.09.008

Strategies for Difficult Communication

Difficult communication can take many forms. One form we study is the delivery and receipt of negative feedback. Because negative feedback can be threatening—especially to the receiver—feedback givers often report feeling uncertain about how to deliver it effectively. Our research shows that lay people, and even experienced supervisors, systematically increase indirectness (say “your work is not good” instead of “your work is bad”) in negative, but not in positive, feedback. However, because of the indirectness, even though negative feedback receivers feel better momentarily, they are also less accurate in judging the level of positivity of the feedback — a trade-off that determines feedback effectiveness. Other forms of difficult communication we study are negotiation and coordination in teams.

Related Work:

Kung, F. Y. H., & Scholer, A. A. (2018). Message framing influences perceptions of feedback (in)directness. Social Cognition, 36, 626-670. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2018.36.6.626

Regulating Intrapersonal Conflicts and Multiple Goals

Successful pursuit of multiple goals (e.g., career, family, health goals) not only has implications for goal attainment, but also more long-term effects like productivity and well-being. However, although there has been extensive research on how people manage single goals, the way people manage multiple goals is less well understood. In particular, do individuals beliefs about how goals are organized differ, and could those beliefs affect how individuals self-regulate. Our lab takes a novel approach to study individuals’ lay theories of goal system, or goal models (i.e., beliefs about the organizing principles of relations among goals). We propose and have found that individuals differ in the extent to which they emphasize three major organizing principles when conceptualizing their goals: hierarchical, network, and sequential. Whereas a hierarchy of goals is ordered in terms of importance and tend to be more rigid, goals organized in a network focus on the connections between goals and the flexibility in self-regulation such a configuration affords. Goals organized in a sequence follow a set of stages based on progress or timing and are chronological. Our research finds support that lay goal models have meaningful implications for both performance and well-being outcomes.

Related Work:

Kung, F. Y. H., & Scholer, A. A. (2020). The pursuit of multiple goals. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12509