Foundation Award for Research

I. Focus of Research

At the heart of my research is a passion to help people work, live, and lead better amidst our rapidly changing world. I strive to do this with a mixed-methods (quantitative, qualitative) approach, seeking answers to one of the defining challenges of our time: How do we (e.g., our children, our students, our alumni, our business leaders, ourselves) continue to build resilient, satisfying, and purposeful lives in an era when work and career systems have changed so drastically that they are failing to deliver on their implicit promises of stability, opportunity, and meaning? As genAI and other post-pandemic disruptions reshape the very nature of work and careers, people are experiencing not only deep uncertainty over their futures, but also a sense of betrayal within these systems. My research sheds light on how we might navigate such changes to the underlying psychological contract of work and careers with hope, an entrepreneurial mindset, dignity, and even forgiveness to create satisfying careers and more effective yet humane workplaces. In short, my research serves as a leading voice on the Future of Work and Careers, helping clarify what mindsets and strategies help people remain employable, purposeful, socially connected, and happy in the AI-age.

II. Major Projects

2021

• Putting common career advice to the test (Harvard Business Review)

2022

• Understanding the career and job outcomes of contemporary career attitudes within the context of career environments: An integrative meta-analysis. (Journal of Organizational Behavior)

2024

• Fitting in a workgroup in unique ways: A latent profile analysis of perceived person-group fit characteristics. (Journal of Applied Psychology)

2025

• Impact, interrupted: How and when thwarted prosocial impact undermines employee performance and retention. (Academy of Management Journal)

• The manifestation of the Karen trope in the workplace: A reconsideration of stereotypes of White Women at work. (Personnel Psychology)

• We are (not) on the same team: Understanding Asian Americans’ unique navigation of workplace discrimination (Journal of Management)

2026 ongoing

• A profile analysis of career navigation strategies in the post-AI, post-COVID career environment.
• Altered psychological contract, broken promises: How the promises managers do not realize they are breaking are making their best employees quit. 

III. Future Directions of Research

• Person-group fit and the Attraction-Selection-Attrition model in graduate engineering workgroups: A mixed‑methods investigation with potential national strategic and security implications.
• Understanding the “Antiwork” phenomenon and its underlying psychological contract. 
• Understanding profiles of person-occupation fit: Are some career profiles a better fit for certain occupations? 

IV. Topics related to your research and of interest to the broad University Community, for which you are available for presentations and/or consultations.

• The future of work and careers
• Career navigation, career success
• Employee-team fit/misfit
• Workplace discrimination
• Employee burnout