Director of Ph.D. Program
Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology – Organizational Behavior
Jing Zhou is the Director of Ph.D. Program at Rice Business and Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management. Previously, she served as the Deputy Dean of Academic Affairs at Rice Business, Organizational Behavior Area Coordinator, Director for Asian Management Research & Education, and Director of Ph.D. Program
She has been elected to Fellow of Academy of Management, Fellow of American Psychological Association, Fellow of Association for Psychological Sciences, and Fellow of Society for I-O Psychology. A recent study ranked her among the top 1% influential researchers in business and management.
Jing has taught leading innovation, negotiation, leadership, global leadership, micro foundations of managing the global firm, and organizational behavior at undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and Ph.D. levels. Prior to joining the Jones School, she was an associate professor and Mays Faculty Fellow in the Management Department at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University. She has received awards for her excellence in teaching.
Her research interests are leading innovation; contextual and personal factors that facilitate or inhibit creativity and innovation; creativity receiving; consequences of creativity; cross-cultural differences in antecedents and consequences of creativity; and creativity in entrepreneurship. Using the interactional perspective as an overarching lens, her research uses motivational, affective, and cognitive theories for an understanding of individual and team creativity in organizations. Her systematic program of research has addressed central questions such as how organizational and contextual factors (e.g., leadership, supervisory behaviors, coworker behaviors, feedback, and human resource management practices) interact with personal factors (e.g., personality, values, goal orientation) to enhance or restrict individual and team creativity.
Her collaboration with Jennifer George has indicated that job dissatisfaction and negative mood serve to trigger creative endeavor and sustain creative effort (George & Zhou, 2002; Zhou & George, 2001). This research stream resulted in their formulating the dual-tuning theory, which posits that negative and positive mood facilitate different aspects of the creative idea generation process (George & Zhou, 2007).
Professor Zhou has broken new conceptual ground and theorized about managers’ recognition of employees’ creative ideas (Zhou & Woodman, 2003). Working with coauthors, she has formulated new theory and conducted empirical investigation on new idea perception and recognition in a programmatic manner (e.g., Zhou, Wang, Bavato, Tasselli, & Wu, 2019; Zhou, Wang, Song, & Wu, 2017). Her work also revealed conditions under which employee creativity positively or negatively affected organizational performance (Gong, Zhou, & Chang, 2013), and effects of employee creativity on firm innovation (Liu, Gong, Zhou, & Huang, 2017).
Her research has been published in top journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Personnel Psychology. Books she co-edited are Handbook of Organizational Creativity (with Chris Shalley), The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (with Chris Shalley and Mike Hitt), and Handbook of Research on Creativity and Innovation (with Bess Rouse, 2021). Professor Zhou has received research awards for her excellence in research. Her work has received a large number of citations (e.g., approximately 31,446 per Google Scholar), and has received Journal of Management’s Best Paper Award twice (2009, 2019), indicating the impact of her systematic research program.
Striving to inform management practice of research-based and scientifically-proven knowledge, she has served as a consultant to organizations on issues related to her research interests and expertise, especially on leading innovation and negotiation.
Professor Zhou’s service to profession and leadership in professional associations include:
