My research focuses on successful entrepreneurial strategies related to different stages of a venture’s lifecycle: growth, divestment and entry, in three projects.

In the first on growth, I explore the relative advantages of a growth strategy based on the creation of different organisational entities –business group growth– over traditional company growth.

The novelty of the study is the focus on the individual –entrepreneur– rather than the company as the focal unit of analysis to study business growth. In this way, I can document and study how business groups are formed and devised for business growth in entrepreneurial initiatives.

In the second project on divestment, I study the behaviour and exit decision of portfolio entrepreneurs who own more than one company. Borrowing from literature on resource redeployment and entrepreneurial experimentation, I develop a model of portfolio entrepreneurship in which the main advantage is the founder’s ability to redeploy resources from new ventures to established ones. This potential for redeployment facilitates their exit from new businesses that fail initial market tests and increases the average quality of the surviving businesses.

In the last project, I study how small start-ups can challenge bigger incumbents targeting niche market segments. By focusing on performance improvements that reduce key barriers to product consumption and diffusion in the formerly niche, new entrants can ride the exponential growth in the niche segment to ultimately become market leaders. I empirically examine this phenomenon in the US mobile dating app industry from 2008 to 2013.

The Productivity Research Network (PRN) collects firm-level data to conduct in-depth studies on productivity and related economic issues, particularly in the digital economy, which can result in concrete policy actions at the firm, industry and country levels.

Besides the challenges related to limited data quality and availability, the development of international comparative studies in the Asia-Pacific region is severely limited by the lack of cross-country harmonisation. The proposed project aims to tackle these constraints.

PRN currently comprises around 150 contributors across the region, including COLLABORATIONS WITH Singaporean institutions such Ministry of Trade and Industry AND THE Economic Development Board. PRN has organised four international workshops focusing on the recent dynamics of firm productivity, particularly in relation to innovation, advances in information technology, financial constraints and labour decisions. An outcome of these events is the creation of 10-country teams in the Asia-Pacific region, each currently generating productivity indicators using the combination of firm-level data and a common set of codes provided by the core NUS team.  With the PRN providing a data collection and sharing platform, researchers from around the world can tackle important questions regarding productivity.

Secrecy is omnipresent in social action, and happens frequently at workplace. This research proposes a reactive model of perceiving leader’s secrecy that depicts when and how perceived leader’s secrecy influences his/her image and follower’s subsequent leader-directed behaviours (leader-directed helping behaviour and leader-directed voice behaviour). We aim to make at least three contributions to the existing literature. First, we introduce a novel angle to understand and explore the effect of secrecy by integrating relational perspectives. Secrecy, as a phenomenon rooted in social interactions, not only influence secret keeper’s psychological and physiological states, but also secret perceiver’s, and eventually re-define and reconstruct their relationship. Second, we contribute to impression management literature by showing the violation of leader’s desirable image and the behavioural consequences induced by perceived secrecy. Finally, we contribute to social identity theory by exploring the moderating effect of leader member exchange social comparison, as well as investigating the contingent effect of group membership on perceived leader secrecy and follower behaviours.

The future work selves is a promising psychological resource for individuals. Embodying individuals’ hopes and aspirations with respect to their future careers, the future work selves has motivational value for employees, especially when they experience adverse work events. In this study, I examine the moderating effect of salient future work selves on job insecurity and several work-related attitudes and behaviours among mid-career individuals.

Intertemporal choices represent one of the most common and fundamental trade-offs in consumer decision-making. How do intertemporal choices for another person differ from similar choices for oneself? To examine this question, the present research introduces the first integrative self-other decision model and experimentally tests five model-derived hypotheses. This model distinguishes between the psychological processes associated with vicarious versus reactive utility and highlights the pivotal role of anticipated affective reaction in interpersonal decision-making. Seven experiments and two additional replications reveal consistent results supporting model predictions. The results show that an intertemporal choice for a specified other person tends to reveal more impatience than an otherwise identical choice for oneself, contrary to what has previously been assumed, predicted, and reported in studies using abstract and unspecified others as recipients. This “giver’s impatience” is moderated by decision characteristics, including the anticipated timing of the recipient’s affective reaction, the affective value of the choice options, and decision responsibility. This research provides critical new insights and opens new avenues for research into intertemporal choices and interpersonal decision-making.

Research on the work-home interface has provided insightful knowledge on the consequences work-family conflict and work-family enrichment that has served as the basis for the development of a wide range of family-focused work policies and practices that have been adopted in many organisations. However, research has largely ignored the work-home interface of employees who are single and childless. This is an unfortunate omission, because there is a worldwide increase in one-person households. Although the Singaporean government stresses the importance of family as a cornerstone of Singapore society, families here are also getting smaller and an increasing number of Singapore residents stay single and childless. To illustrate, the proportion of single and childless Singaporeans in their mid and late twenties rose from 51.7 per cent in 2000 to 71.7 per cent in 2017. Given the prevalence and (mainly negative) consequences of work-home interference and the change of family structures and living arrangements, it is important to explore the role of family structure in the work-home interface. The current study aims to develop and test a theoretical model that explores processes that may explain differences in the home-work interface that affects single and childless and married employees (with or without children).

Due to their authority and strategic position at work, leaders are considered important sources of influence to employees’ work-life and their performance (Farh, Lanaj, & Ilies, 2017). Accordingly, over the past several decades, scholars have investigated the role of leadership and the effects of leaders’ behaviours, particularly on follower’s affective well-being, attitudes, motivation, and performance-related outcomes. Leaders’ emotions play important roles in the quality of leadership as well as followers’ wellbeing and performance (Humphrey, Pollack, & Hawver, 2008). Leaders use emotion to inspire their followers, show appropriate response in a given situation, or respond followers’ work-related outcomes (e.g., feedback; Bass, 1990; Gardner, Fischer, & Hunt, 2009; Lewis, 2000). Thus, previous research examined the effects of leaders’ emotion on their leadership behaviours (Barnes, Guarana, Nauman, & Kong, 2016), followers’ affective well-being (Bono & Ilies, 2006; Sy, Cote, & Saavedra, 2005) as well as performance (Damen, Van Knippenberg, & Van Knippenberg, 2008; Van Kleef et al., 2009).

Despite enriched findings on the effects of leaders’ emotion, we have less knowledge about why and how leaders’ emotion matters in the organisation. Therefore, I contend that leaders’ emotional experiences and displays are essential determinants of their leadership quality, as well as their followers’ work-related outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the diverse forms of leaders’ emotional experiences and their impacts on their management styles, as well as followers.

To examine our hypotheses, I conduct a series of dyadic (leader-member) experienced sampling methods (ESM) to collect the data for five consecutive working days.

Intuitively, the culture value of collectivism (rather than individualism) should be beneficial for team cooperation and, as a result, team successes. This is because collectivists prioritise collective interests over self-interests (Triandis, 1989). Indeed, research suggests that collectivism is one of the strongest predictors of team successes (Dierdorff, Bell, & Belohlav, 2011). In this research, I suggest that collectivism impairs rather than benefits team cooperation in hyper-speed decision contexts. The core characteristic of hyper-speed decision contexts is that crucial decisions which determine the successes or failures of teams are made instantaneously (e.g., tenths of a second).

A preliminary archival analysis of 99 years’ of data across 84 nations in 3 major team sports (football, volleyball, and basketball) found that higher levels of individualism at the national level are positively associated with performance in team sports. This finding is robust in both female and male sports, and after controlling multiple country-level indicators. This project will likely make a significant impact in the areas of cross-cultural management, cultural psychology, and sports psychology.

Work experiences that are believed to be most conducive to learning and development are challenging job experiences. Challenging job experiences also affect individuals’ affective states and well-being. They may, for instance, elicit eagerness and enthusiasm and foster individuals’ health and well-being. They may also elicit feelings of threat and anxiety and result in emotional exhaustion and burnout. Thus, job challenge is an important work characteristic that may contribute to learning and effective job performance and that may also affect individuals’ well-being and mental health. The literature on job challenge distinguishes two types of challenging job experiences: qualitative challenge and quantitative challenge. Qualitative challenges (e.g., unfamiliar responsibilities, creating change, managing boundaries, dealing with diversity, and level of responsibility) are related to the content of work and enrich jobs. Quantitative challenges are related to increased load of work and intensify work. Although there is abundant empirical evidence showing that both types of challenge predict a broad range of outcomes, they represent different phenomena that may have different consequences. The aim of this research is to develop and test a theoretical model that explores the differential processes through which qualitative and quantitative job challenge affect career and well-being related outcomes for both young and older employees.

In this project, we study the disguised pollution of industrial firms in China. We find that sulfur dioxide (SO2) readings increase by 15.9 per cent in monitoring stations four hours after sunset, relative to four hours before, in high factory density areas, controlling for station-day and city-hour fixed effects. We also find significantly increased readings for PM2.5 and PM10 in these areas after sunset. Next, using daily hospital visits data, we document that such disguised pollution behaviour has unforeseen health consequences: cumulative exposure to SO2 above 40 ?g/m3 for three days increases hospital visits on the entire population’s respiratory diseases by 15.6 per cent. Inspections by the Ministry of Environmental Protection can only temporarily reduce pollution and hospital visits, and local economic growth pressure is likely to encourage disguised pollution.