Huisi (Jessica) Li, Ph.D.

huisili@uw.edu

Click here for my CV.

I am an Assistant Professor in Management and Organization at the University of Washington in Seattle (since June 2023). I previously worked at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

My work is motivated by a desire to help teams and organizations fully utilize their diverse talents. To this end, I study (a) social hierarchy (“How do power and status impact individual behaviors and team dynamics?”) and (b) employee turnover (“How can companies retain talent across a diverse and dynamic workforce?”).

• My first stream of research reveals the corruptive effect of lacking power (e.g., increasing self-promotional lying, covert competition, and justification of a flawed system), which complements decades of research that has predominantly depicted how power corrupts.
• My second stream of research bridges power and status theories with teams and diversity research, given that hierarchy is an inherent and important feature of teams, especially diverse teams. For example, my research reveals the effect of linguistic diversity on status dynamics in teams, the moderating effect of status hierarchy on how power hierarchy impacts team performance, etc.
• My third and last stream of research predicts employee turnover, with a special focus on team-level factors (such as leader departure and team performance trajectory).

My research has been published in leading journals such as Organization Science, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Research in Organizational Behavior.

I serve as a reviewer on the editorial board of Organization Science and Management and Organization Review, and a Representative-at-large of the Conflict Management (CM) Division of the Academy of Management.

I enjoy employing multiple methodologies, such as field surveys, experiments, archival data, and qualitative methods, to demonstrate the robustness of my findings and to strengthen inferences of both internal and external validity.

I have conducted research in collaboration with a variety of organizations, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Darden, and TikTok.

I earned my Ph.D. in Management and Organizations from the Johnson Management School at Cornell University, my M.S. in Human Resource Studies from Cornell, M.A. in Education from Stanford University, M.S. in Psychology from Peking University, and B.S. in Psychology from Jilin University.