Jeong-Won Lee, a Ph.D. graduate in management (Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management) at the Yonsei School of Business, has displayed her research skills by publishing several articles in journals, including those rated in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), in her last semester before graduation.

Lee published in Personnel Review, which is one of the SSCI journals, before her graduation in August. The title of her paper was “Promoting Employee Job Crafting at Work: The Roles of Motivation and Team Context.” ‘Job crafting’ refers to altering the physical, relational, and cognitive boundaries of the work task in order to align one’s interests, motivations, and passion with the jobs. Although it has recently become difficult to define work tasks in a rapidly changing business environment, job crafting is becoming more important as employees tend to increasingly do what meets their needs. Although job crafting has been suggested as having a positive effect on the lives and well-being of employees as well as workplace prosperity, there still is a limited understanding about how to foster this practice.

This study explores the predictors of job crafting and the complex mechanisms involved in facilitating employees’ job crafting. The data were collected from 311 employees from 62 work teams at Korean companies, and additional data were collected from 162 individuals working in the United States. This study illustrates intrinsic motivation and team-level knowledge sharing as positively related to job crafting. Also, team trust plays a cross-level moderating role by strengthening the positive relationship between intrinsic motivation and job crafting. These findings provide theoretical and practical implications and contribute to existing job crafting literature and the role of organizations in the betterment of society.

Lee presented her paper with You-Jeong Song, who received the master’s degree in Management of Yonsei School of Business in 2018. She said, “We started this study when Song had just begun her master’s degree. Nevertheless, I felt assured because she always performed better than expected. Now that this article has been published, You-Jeong is doing her Ph.D. abroad, and I believe she will complete the course very well as an excellent researcher,” showing a strong friendship. She also thanked Professor Eun-Mi Chang, saying, “I was able to start and finish this paper thanks to Professor Eun-Mi Chang, a hidden co-author, who had started collecting data with me.”

Lee’s other article is “Managing Relational Conflict in Korean Social Enterprises: The Role of Participatory HRM Practices, Diversity Climate, and Perceived Social Impact.” It was published in Business Ethics: A European Review, which is also an SSCI journal.

This article explored how employees within social enterprises experience internal conflicts arising from the organizational pursuit of dual, competing missions (i.e., social and economic), and how social enterprises manage, and potentially overcome, these challenges.

The data were collected from the interviews of 313 employees of 104 Korean social enterprises and professionals who work in relevant organizations. Through qualitative studies, the author explored the important mechanisms of relational conflict through which participatory HRM practices and diversity climates were found to reduce conflicts and consequently affect employees’ affective commitment. The author also found that high employee perceived social impact enhances the mediating relationship between the two types of organizational efforts considered (i.e., participatory HRM practices and diversity climate) and affective commitment.

In conclusion, this study identified participatory HRM practices and enhancement of the organization’s diversity climate to be effective means for managerial efforts to minimize the impact of relational conflict, while also leading to increased organizational commitment. Furthermore, the article suggests that social enterprises will benefit directly from efforts that communicate and connect employees to the social outcomes of the organization and thereby improve employees’ perceptions that their job does in fact achieve desired social impacts.

In addition to the above articles, she has published numerous articles in local and foreign journals. Lee’s research interest is in the application of a micro view to the field of business-society relationships. She wants to explore whether a personnel management style in an organization can promote positive changes and happiness in society as well as in its members and organizations. She was able to find the research interest and naturally immerse herself because her lab students, as well as her professor, were interested in ‘warm and meaningful’ topics. She explained her driving force of research by saying, “I was able to persevere once I started, even if I had difficulties, especially thanks to Professor Eun-Mi Chang who helped me find research subjects that I can be passionate about, and thanks to the professors and colleagues who helped me with guidance and support throughout my school life.”