Myeong-Gu Seo Directory Page
Myeong-Gu Seo
Professor
Ph.D. in Organizational Studies, Boston College
Myeong-Gu Seo is Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. His primary areas of research regard issues relating to work-related emotions, organizational- and institutional-change. His work, which has received funding from NSF in 2002 and 2005, has been published in several journals including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and Academy of Management Learning and Education.
Selected Publications
Parke, M. R., Seo, M., Hu, X., & Jin, S. 2022. The creative and cross-functional benefits of wearing hearts on sleeves: Authentic affect climate, information elaboration, and team creativity. Organization Science, 33: 600-623.
Parke, M., & Seo, M. 2017. The Role of Affect Climate in Organizations. Academy of Management Review, 42: 334-360.
Dong, Y., Seo, M., & Bartol, K. 2014. No Pain, No Gain: An Affect-based Model of Developmental Job Experience and the Buffering Effects of Emotional Intelligence. Academy of Management Journal, 57: 1056-1077.
Hill, N. S., Seo, M., Kang, J., & Taylor, M. S. 2012. Building Employee Commitment to Change Across Organizational Levels: The Influence of Hierarchical Distance and Direct Managers' Trasformational Leadership. Organization Science, 23: 758-777.
Seo, M., Goldfarb, B., & Barrett, L. F. 2010. Affect and the framing effect within individuals across time: Risk taking in a dynamic investment simulation.” Academy of Management Journal, 53: 411-431.
Seo, M. & Barrett, L. F. 2007. Being emotional during decision making, good or bad? An empirical investigation. Academy of Management Journal, 50: 923-940.
Seo, M., Barrett, L., & Bartunek, J. M. 2004. The role of affective experience in work motivation. Academy of Management Review, 29 (3): 423-439.
Seo, M. & Creed, W. E. D. 2002. Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change. Academy of Management Review, 27 (2): 222-247.
Honors and Awards
Top 15% Teaching Award from Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2015.
Curriculum Development Grant ($50,000) from The PricewaterhouseCoopers Foundation, 2008.
Research Grant ($273,175 / PI) from National Science Foundation, 2005.
Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant from National Science Foundation, 2002.
The Second Place Winner of INFORMS Dissertation Proposal Competition, 2002.
The Academy of Management ODC Division Best Doctoral Student Paper, 2001.
News
Three Professors Receive Awards; 26 Scholars Present Research
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – All those emotions you've been bottling up in the workplace in the interest of projecting a professional image? You…
Research
Insights
Recent Research
An Unattainable Emotional Advantage? Supervisors' Perceptual Biases in the Relationship Between Emotional Understanding Ability and Performance Ratings for Female Employees
Journal of Organizational Behavior, July 2027
Empathy is increasingly valued at workplaces as it facilitates interpersonal relationships, collaboration, and team functioning. Accordingly, organizations increasingly observe and recognize employees' emotional understanding (EU) ability—a key foundation of empathy—as an important dimension of individual merit in performance evaluations. We note that, however, supervisors' gender stereotypes may constrain whether EU ability is recognized properly, particularly for female employees. Drawing on dual-process models of social cognition, we theorized that the female empathy stereotype—the belief that women are inherently more empathetic than men—leads supervisors to attribute female employees' EU ability to gender-typical traits rather than to individual merit. As a result, the supervisors' female empathy stereotype weakens the link between observed emotional intelligence (EI) ability and job performance ratings. Across a video vignette experiment (Study 1) and a field study (Study 2), we found that the relationship between supervisors' perceptions of EU ability and their ratings of job performance was consistently weaker for female than for male employees. We conducted another vignette experiment (Study 3) to test three-way interactions with two moderators (i.e., employee gender and raters' female empathy stereotype) and found that supervisors' female empathy stereotype attenuated the relationship for female employees but not for males. Our findings extend research on gender stereotypes, empathy, and EI by demonstrating how a widely shared gender stereotype can discount female employees' valuable emotional abilities.
Hanbo Shim (TU Arlington) | Myeong-Gu Seo (UMD) | Joo Hun Han (KAIST) | Sirkwoo Jin (Merrick College)