SPEAKER: 李文东教授 香港中文大学

TIME/DATE: 2025.10.30   10：00

CLASSROOM: A502

ABSTRACT

Personality traits—relatively stable patterns of behaviors, thoughts and feelings that distinguish one person from another—play a crucial role in shaping human attitudes, behavior, and well-being. Yet, organizational research has been heavily influenced by the five-factor model that treats personality traits solely as endogenous dispositions not directly influenced by the environment. In light of the paradigm shift in personality science that focuses on both the stability and malleability of personality traits, this classic dispositional perspective of personality has hindered the development of organizational personality research.

In this talk, I will share our on-gong research that meta-analyzes reciprocal relationships between big five personality traits and income with a continuous time approach using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (K = 11, N ≈ 134,000). We found positive socialization effects of income on subsequent changes of conscientiousness and emotional stability, and the effect on extraversion was negative. The selection effect of conscientiousness and emotional stability on subsequent income changes was positive, and the effect was negative for extraversion, suggesting reciprocal relationships between the three personality traits and income. The magnitude of the effects varied over time in an inverted-U-shaped fashion. Our research showcases the importance and promise of taking a dynamic perspective in organizational personality research.

GUEST BIO

Wen-Dong Li

Department of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Wen-Dong Li is a tenured associate professor at the Department of Management, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining CUHK, he worked as an assistant professor at Kansas State University. His research and teaching interests focus on leadership, proactivity, work design, individual differences, and recently change-related issues in AI and gig work in organizational research.

His work has been published in leading management and general science journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and has also been covered in media outlets such as the Economist, USA Today, LA Times, and South China Morning Post. His research has won several awards including the Hogan Award for Personality and Work Performance from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, International HRM Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management, and the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research (chosen by over 70 scholars from the world who evaluate over 5,000 articles published in over 60 scholarly English-language journals). He is an associate editor for Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, a senior editor for Management and Organizational Review, and Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and a contributing editor for Journal of Applied Psychology. He is also an editor for an upcoming special issue at Journal of Organizational Behavior and Board Member of Reviewing Editors for PNAS Nexus.